- President Trump's Approval Rating Overseas
President Trump’s Approval Rating Overseas
Tyler Durden
Tue, 07/28/2020 – 02:45A new Gallup poll has found that views of U.S. leadership remain negative internationally.
As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, across 135 countries and territories, the median approval rating for US. leadership is 33 percent with views worst in Europe. Gallup also found that views of U.S. leadership in Asia remain near lows not seen since the George W. Bush administration.
This infographic provides an overview of President Trump’s approval rating in several key countries.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Trump has proven popular among Israelis after he moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and 64 percent of people polled there approve of his leadership. In Germany, however, a mere 12 percent of Gallup’s respondents said they approve of the American president’s leadership.
But the Russians really don’t like him… which is odd given that he is supposedly “Putin’s Puppet”.
- Turkey On The Warpath
Turkey On The Warpath
Tyler Durden
Tue, 07/28/2020 – 02:00Authored by Uzay Bulut via The Gatestone Institute,
Turkey is currently involved in quite a few international military conflicts — both against its own neighbors such as Greece, Armenia, Iraq, Syria and Cyprus, and against other nations such as Libya and Yemen. These actions by Turkey suggest that Turkey’s foreign policy is increasingly destabilizing not only several nations, but the region as well.
In addition, the Erdogan regime has been militarily targeting Syria and Iraq, sending its Syrian mercenaries to Libya to seize Libyan oil and continuing, as usual, to bully Greece. Turkey’s regime is also now provoking ongoing violence between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Since July 12, Azerbaijan has launched a series of cross-border attacks against Armenia’s northern Tavush region in skirmishes that have resulted in the deaths of at least four Armenian soldiers and 12 Azerbaijani ones. After Azerbaijan threatened to launch missile attacks on Armenia’s Metsamor nuclear plant on July 16, Turkey offered military assistance to Azerbaijan.
“Our armed unmanned aerial vehicles, ammunition and missiles with our experience, technology and capabilities are at Azerbaijan’s service,” said İsmail Demir, the head of Presidency of Defense Industries, an affiliate of the Turkish Presidency.
One of Turkey’s main targets also seems to be Greece. The Turkish military is targeting Greek territorial waters yet again. The Greek newspaper Kathimerini reported:
“There have been concerns over a possible Turkish intervention in the East Med in a bid to prevent an agreement on the delineation of an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) between Greece and Egypt which is currently being discussed between officials of the two countries.”
Turkey’s choice of names for its gas exploration ships are also a giveaway. The name of the main ship that Turkey is using for seismic “surveys” of the Greek continental shelf is Oruç Reis, (1474-1518), an admiral of the Ottoman Empire who often raided the coasts of Italy and the islands of the Mediterranean that were still controlled by Christian powers. Other exploration and drilling vessels Turkey uses or is planning to use in Greece’s territorial waters are named after Ottoman sultans who targeted Cyprus and Greece in bloody military invasions. These include the drilling ship Fatih “the conqueror” or Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II, who invaded Constantinople in 1453; the drilling ship Yavuz, “the resolute”, or Sultan Selim I, who headed the Ottoman Empire during the invasion of Cyprus in 1571; and Kanuni, “the lawgiver” or Sultan Suleiman, who invaded parts of eastern Europe as well as the Greek island of Rhodes.
Turkey’s move in the Eastern Mediterranean came in early July, shortly after the country had turned Hagia Sophia, once the world’s greatest Greek Cathedral, into a mosque. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan then linked Hagia Sophia’s conversion to a pledge to “liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque” in Jerusalem.
On July 21, the tensions arose again following Turkey’s announcement that it plans to conduct seismic research in parts of the Greek continental shelf in an area of sea between Cyprus and Crete in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean.
“Turkey’s plan is seen in Athens as a dangerous escalation in the Eastern Mediterranean, prompting Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to warn that European Union sanctions could follow if Ankara continues to challenge Greek sovereignty,” Kathimerini reported on July 21.
Here is a short list of other countries where Turkey is also militarily involved:
In Libya, Turkey has been increasingly involved in the country’s civil war. Associated Press reported on July 18:
“Turkey sent between 3,500 and 3,800 paid Syrian fighters to Libya over the first three months of the year, the U.S. Defense Department’s inspector general concluded in a new report, its first to detail Turkish deployments that helped change the course of Libya’s war.
“The report comes as the conflict in oil-rich Libya has escalated into a regional proxy war fueled by foreign powers pouring weapons and mercenaries into the country.”
Libya has been in turmoil since 2011, when an armed revolt during the “Arab Spring” led to the ouster and murder of dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Political power in the country, the current population of which is around 6.5 million, has been split between two rival governments. The UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA), has been led by Prime Minister Fayez al Sarraj. Its rival, the Libyan National Army (LNA), has been led by Libyan military officer, Khalifa Haftar.
Backed by Turkey, the GNA said on July 18 that it would recapture Sirte, a gateway to Libya’s main oil terminals, as well as an LNA airbase at Jufra.
Egypt, which backs the LNA, announced, however, that if the GNA and Turkish forces tried to seize Sirte, it would send troops into Libya. On July 20, the Egyptian parliament gave approval to a possible deployment of troops beyond its borders “to defend Egyptian national security against criminal armed militias and foreign terrorist elements.”
Yemen is another country on which Turkey has apparently set its sights. In a recent video, Turkey-backed Syrian mercenaries fighting on behalf of the GNA in Libya, and aided by local Islamist groups, are seen saying, “We are just getting started. The target is going to be Gaza.” They also state that they want to take on Egyptian President Sisi and to go to Yemen.
“Turkey’s growing presence in Yemen,” The Arab Weekly reported on May 9, “especially in the restive southern region, is fuelling concern across the region over security in the Gulf of Aden and the Bab al-Mandeb.
“These concerns are further heightened by reports indicating that Turkey’s agenda in Yemen is being financed and supported by Qatar via some Yemeni political and tribal figures affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.”
In Syria, Turkey-backed jihadists continue occupying the northern parts of the country. On July 21, Erdogan announced that Turkey’s military presence in Syria would continue. “Nowadays they are holding an election, a so-called election,” Erdogan said of a parliamentary election on July 19 in Syria’s government-controlled regions, after nearly a decade of civil war. “Until the Syrian people are free, peaceful and safe, we will remain in this country.”
Additionally, Turkey’s incursion into the Syrian city of Afrin, created a particularly grim situation for the local Yazidi population:
“As a result of the Turkish incursion to Afrin,” the Yazda organization reported on May 29, “thousands of Yazidis have fled from 22 villages they inhabited prior to the conflict into other parts of Syria, or have migrated to Lebanon, Europe, or the Kurdistan Region of Iraq… “
“Due to their religious identity, Yazidis in Afrin are suffering from targeted harassment and persecution by Turkish-backed militant groups. Crimes committed against Yazidis include forced conversion to Islam, rape of women and girls, humiliation and torture, arbitrary incarceration, and forced displacement. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) in its 2020 annual report confirmed that Yazidis and Christians face persecution and marginalization in Afrin.
“Additionally, nearly 80 percent of Yazidi religious sites in Syria have been looted, desecrated, or destroyed, and Yazidi cemeteries have been defiled and bulldozed.”
In Iraq, Turkey has been carrying out military operations for years. The last one was started in mid-June. Turkey’s Defense Ministry announced on June 17 that the country had “launched a military operation against the PKK” (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) in northern Iraq after carrying out a series of airstrikes. Turkey has named its assaults “Operation Claw-Eagle” and “Operation Claw-Tiger”.
The Yazidi, Assyrian Christian and Kurdish civilians have been terrorized by the bombings. At least five civilians have been killed in the air raids, according to media reports. Human Rights Watch has also issued a report, noting that a Turkish airstrike in Iraq “disregards civilian loss.”
Given Turkey’s military aggression in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Armenia, among others, and its continued occupation of northern Cyprus, further aggression, especially against Greece, would not be unrealistic. Turkey’s desire to invade Greece is not exactly a secret. Since at least 2018, both the Turkish government and opposition parties have openly been calling for capturing the Greek islands in the Aegean, which they falsely claim belong to Turkey.
If such an attack took place, would the West abandon Greece?
- Watch: Israel Reinforces Troops Near Golan Heights Fearing Hezbollah Retaliation To Strikes On Syria
Watch: Israel Reinforces Troops Near Golan Heights Fearing Hezbollah Retaliation To Strikes On Syria
Tyler Durden
Tue, 07/28/2020 – 01:00Submitted by South Front,
The Middle East is rapidly moving towards a new round of confrontation between the US-Israeli bloc and Iranian-led Shiite forces…
On July 26, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) deployed M109 Doher howitzers near the separation line with Lebanon. The deployment of howitzers became the latest in a series of broad measures employed by the IDF near Lebanon recently. Earlier, the 13th “Gideon” Infantry Battalion of the IDF’s elite 1st “Golani” Brigade reinforced troops near the border. The number Israeli Hermes 450 drone reconnaissance flights also significantly increased over southern Lebanon. Additional IDF units were also deployed in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. On top of this, the IDF announced that it will hold the Lebanese government responsible “for all actions emanating from Lebanon”.
These measures followed the July 20 Israeli strike on Syria, which resulted in the death of a member of Lebanese Hezbollah. Over the past years, Hezbollah has been one of the main supporters of Syrian Army operations against ISIS and al-Qaeda. Tel Aviv increases its strikes on what it calls Hezbollah and Iranian-affiliated targets in Syria every time when the Syrian Army launches active actions against terrorists and seems to be very concerned by the possibility of a Hezbollah response to the July 20 attack.
If Israel is really set to conduct strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon to the retaliatory action by Hezbollah, this scenario could easily evolve into a wider border confrontation between Hezbollah and the IDF.
At the same time, tensions between local resistance groups and the US-led coalition grew in Iraq. On July 24, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, Ashab al-Kahf, announced that its forces had shot down an unmanned aerial vehicle of the US military over the province of Saladin. The group claimed that the UAV was downed by some ‘new weapon’ and released a photo showing the launch of what appears to be an anti-aircraft missile, likely a man-portable air-defense system.
On the same day, four unguided rockets struck the Pasmaya military camp, which is located 60km south of Baghdad. One of the rockets hit a garage for armoured vehicles, while another one targeted the barracks of the security unit. Two other rockets landed in an empty area. Despite causing some material damage, the rocket attack did not result in any casualties. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
The Pasmaya military camp is known to be hosting troops of the U.S.-led coalition and is used for training of Iraqi troops. On July 25, the coalition withdrew its forces from the camp and handed it over to the Iraqi military. According to the official statement, the coalition trained 50,000 personnel and invested $5 million into the creation of training infrastructure there.
Earlier in 2020, the US-led coalition withdrew its forces from several smaller military camps across the country. Some sources tried to present this as a withdrawal from Iraq due to the increasing attacks on coalition forces by anti-US Shiite paramilitary groups. These attacks increased significantly after the assassination of Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units Deputy Commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and Iranian Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani in a US drone strike on Baghdad International Airport on January 3, 2020. The attack put the region on the brink of the US-Iranian war and caused a public outcry against the US military presence in Iraq. However, in fact, the US has not been withdrawing its troops from the country, but rather redeploying them to larger bases. The US military even brought Patriot surface-to-air missile systems to provide additional protection to its forces. It also continues isolated attacks on positions of the Popular Mobilization Units, an official branch of the Iraqi Armed Forces that Washington describes as terrorist groups and Iranian proxies.
On July 26, several large explosions rocked the al-Saqer military camp near the district of Dora south of Baghdad. The Al-Saqer military camp hosts forces of the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) as well as the Iraqi Federal Police. Large quantities of ammunition, which were stored in the camp, exploded. Iraqi Security Media said the ammunition exploded as result of “high heat” and “poor storage”. Nevertheless, sources affiliated with the PMU rejected these speculations. Local sources claimed that the explosions were caused by US drone strikes. An MQ-1 Predator combat drone was spotted over the al-Saqer military camp just after the incident. This was the second situation of this kind that happened in al-Saqer. In 2019, a US drone strike hit a weapon depot at the camp.
The current situation sets almost no prospects for a de-escalation in Iraq. The main goal of attacks by local Shiite groups is to force the US to withdraw troops from the country. At the same time, the US is not planning to withdraw its forces and uses these attacks to justify the increase of its campaign against pro-Iranian forces in the Middle East.
- "It Reeks Of Orwell" – The COVID Coup (& How To Unlock Ourselves)
“It Reeks Of Orwell” – The COVID Coup (& How To Unlock Ourselves)
Tyler Durden
Tue, 07/28/2020 – 00:05Authored by Angelo Codevilla via AmericanMind.org,
Panicked by fears manufactured by the ruling class, the American people assented to being put essentially under house arrest until further notice, effectively suspending the habits, preferences, and liberties that had defined our way of life. Most Americans have suffered economic damage. Many who do not enjoy protected status have had careers ended and been reduced to penury. Social strains and suicides multiplied. Forcibly deferring all manner of medical care is sure to impose needless suffering and death. In sum, the lockdowns’ medical and economic dysfunctions make for multiples of the deaths and miseries of the COVID-19 virus itself.
Bad judgments and usurpations—the scam, not the germs—define this disaster’s dimensions. The COVID-19’s devastating effect on the U.S. body politic is analogous to what diseases do to persons whom age (senectus ipsa est morbus) and various debilities and corruptions had already placed on death’s slippery slope.
Outside of the few who have gained (and are still gaining) power and wealth from the panic, Americans are asking what it will take to end this outrage—not to modify it with any “new normal” decided by who knows whom, on who knows what authority. Since no one in authority is leading those who want to end it, Americans also wonder who may lead that cause. What follows suggests answers.
What history will record as the great COVID scam of 2020 is based on 1) a set of untruths and baseless assertions—often outright lies—about the novel coronavirus and its effects; 2) the production and maintenance of physical fear through a near-monopoly of communications to forestall challenges to the U.S.. ruling class, led by the Democratic Party, 3) defaulted opposition on the part of most Republicans, thus confirming their status as the ruling class’s junior partner. No default has been greater than that of America’s Christian churches—supposedly society’s guardians of truth.
Truth
Since obfuscation, pretense, and lies concerning the COVID-19 are the effective agents of the panic and of the seizure of arbitrary power, truth and clarity about it are the foundational requirements for escaping its effects. Here is a dose.
From early March 2020 on, the best-known authorities on epidemics—the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control—presented the COVID-19 respiratory disease to the Western world as a danger equivalent to the plague. But China’s experience, which its government obfuscated, had already shown that the COVID-19 virus is much less like the plague and more like the flu. All that has happened since followed from falsifying this basic truth.
Our “best and brightest,” at first having minimized fears of person-to person contagion during January and February, during which the disease spread from China to the West, then declared that the virus is unusually contagious, and posited—on zero factual basis—that it would kill up to one in twenty persons it infected—5% infection/fatality rate (IFR). Based on that imagined fatality rate, they adopted mathematical models from Britain and the University of Washington that predicted that up to two million Americans would die of it.
The U.S. Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) modeled the authoritative predictions on which the U.S. lockdowns were based. Its model also predicted COVID deaths for un-locked-down Sweden. On May 3 it wrote that, as of May 14, Sweden would suffer up to 2800 daily deaths. The actual number was below 40. Whether magnifying this falsehood was reckless or willful, it amounted to shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater. What justifies listening to, and paying, people who do that kind of science?
Establishing any infectious disease’s true lethality is characteristically straightforward: test a large sample of the population proportionately representative of location, age, sex, race, socioeconomic categories. Follow up with the subjects a month later to add up the rate of infections and learn the results thereof. Period. Today, we still lack this definitive, direct knowledge of COVID’s true lethality because bureaucrats have prevented widespread testing for the purpose of firmly establishing the one figure that matters most. That is because that figure’s absence allows them to continue fearmongering.
In May the Centers for Disease Control, by then discredited professionally (though not, alas, in the mass media), was forced to conclude that the lethality rate, far from being circa 5% was 0.26%. Double a typical flu. The CDC was able to keep the estimate that high only by factoring in an unrealistically low figure for asymptomatic infections—never mind inflated figures for deaths. But the U.S. government, instead of amending its recommendations in the face of reality, tried to hide reality by playing a shell game with the definition and number of COVID “cases.”
During March and April, the authorities had defined as “cases” people sick enough to be hospitalized, who also tested positive. Whoever divided the number of reported deaths (a number inflated by a CDC directive to count deaths due to other causes as being due to COVID) by the number of cases thus defined, was predictably scared and willing to heed “the best advice”—namely societal lockdowns—on how to stay safe. That turned out to be ruinous in and of itself. At the time, they defined the number of these “cases” as the “curve” which we were supposed to sacrifice so much to “flatten,” lest the wave of hospitalizations overwhelm our health care system. Because their premises were wrong, that wave never came.
Instead, in May, as various non-official surveys were published showing that the majority of those who tested positive for COVID either barely knew that they had been infected or had not known at all, these very authorities doubled down their dishonesty. They began labeling mere infections as “cases.” They divorced reporting of these “cases” from reporting of the number of deaths, and warned the inattentive public about “spiking COVID cases” as if infection carried a serious risk. They also promoted widespread testing of wholly asymptomatic persons for current and past infections, the results of which tests were sure to produce a surging number of new “cases” thus defined.
And they toyed with reporting deaths by attributing to COVID any that “involved” or looked as if they might have involved it. They then included pneumonia, influenza, and COVID into the category PIC. That is how the death figure came to exceed 100,000. But if the CDC had used the same criterion that it did with the SARS virus, namely “severe acute respiratory distress syndrome,” the figure by the end of June would have been some 16,000.
Such naked ploys could succeed only because the media colluded in them. The New York Times’ May 27 lead story ominously blared: “California is the fourth state with more than 100,000 known cases.” Meanwhile, the number of deaths attributed to COVID continued dropping from ever-lower bases. By the July 1, even using the CDC’s inflated figures for COVID-responsible deaths, COVID-19’s Infection Fatality Rate for people under 70 was 0.04%. But rather than ask how clarion calls of danger comport with decreasing reports of deaths that may somehow be associated with it, the ruling class agitated to reverse returning to normal life. Be afraid, be very afraid. Heads the House wins, tails you lose.
Irrefutable if indirect indication that COVID is no plague also comes from comparison between the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 during any given period with the number of deaths due to all causes for the same period—despite official inflation in the number of deaths attributed to the virus.
The Imperial College, London’s tally for Great Britain, broken down by age of death, shows that the chances of dying from COVID-19 infection roughly track the chances of death from all causes at any given age, except for the very young. For men, the chances of death co-incident with the virus don’t exceed 1%, or the average death rate, until age 70. For women, they don’t exceed the average death rate until close to age 90. In Spain, the death rate for infected persons over 90 years old was 10%.
The measure of “excess deaths” tells a similar story. During the six-week peak of the COVID event in 2020, deaths in the U.S. exceeded deaths during the same period in the previous year by 82,000. Considering that, concurrently, the 2020 flu season was one of the worst on record (typically the flu is responsible for some 50,000 deaths during the season) and given the CDC-mandated conflation of COVID numbers with others, the COVID-19 pandemic in and of itself did not amount to much—except in New York City, for reasons only partly known. By the week of June 20, 2020 the CDC was reporting ZERO excess deaths—meaning that the figure for weekly deaths was within the long-term normal curve for that time of the year.
Not incidentally, in 1957 some 116,000 Americans (out of a population two thirds of today’s size) died of the flu. Ten years later, the toll was 100,000 and in 2019 it was 61,000. By June 2020 the (inflated) toll from COVID-19 stood at 100,000.
In short, COVID-19 is not America’s plague. It did not shake America. The ruling class shook it. They have not done it ignorantly or by mistake. They have done it to extort the general public’s compliance with their agendas. Their claim to speak on behalf of “science” is an attempt to avoid being held accountable for the enormous harm they are doing. They continue doing it because they want to hang on to the power the panic has brought them.
BTW: Whenever you hear someone claiming to speak on science’s behalf, referring to authorities rather than to facts and logic, you may be sure that person is a fraud.
Falsehood
Falsehood extorted shutdowns, which caused deaths and ruined lives.
“Lockdowns” of the general population had to be based on the premise that everyone is, if not equally vulnerable, then equally responsible, and hence that everyone must stay cooped up to contribute to everyone else’s safety. But because every word of that is contrary to reality, false, a lie, applying the lockdowns’ force to society has caused needless deaths and suffering.
Prefatory to considering the lockdowns’ specific effects, we must be clear about what separation of infected or possibly infected persons from presumably un-infected ones can and cannot do. This has been known to whomever wished to know it since the Middle Ages, and repeated even in the humble 1956 study guide for the Boy Scout Public Health merit badge: protecting the un-infected from infection by limiting their contact with those who may be infected depends on knowing that the people to be protected really are un-infected.
Medieval Venetians, to make sure that no one coming from places infected by the plague would bring it into the city, prevented debarking from ships coming from such places for forty days (quarantine). By the same token, quickly finding the few infected among the many un-infected, and removing them even faster along with those with whom they had been in contact (known these days as contact tracing), is effective only to the extent of the bulk of the population’s near-virginity.
But, once an infectious disease has spread within a population, quarantines and associated measures are a waste at best. Personal hygiene and minimizing contact (what we now call social distancing) retain all their natural importance for reducing any given individual’s chances of infection to some extent—perhaps even delaying chances of exposure until the disease has run its course. But, once a contagion is rooted in a population, these measures make no difference to general public health. The disease running its course means, in part, that enough people have been infected and hence will have developed immunity, that they can no longer transmit it to others (herd immunity).
That is how human communities have lived with and through history’s countless epidemics. We have seen this once again in how COVID-19 affected Sweden and U.S. states (e.g. South Dakota and Arkansas) that never did shut down. When COVID-19 hit Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel said that, regardless of what anyone did, some 70% of Germans would eventually become infected. And that would be that.
Isolation makes the biggest of differences, however, to sub-categories of the population that may be especially vulnerable to the disease. The Bubonic Plague was an equal-opportunity killer, as was Smallpox. COVID-19, however, seems to discriminate a lot. Yes, all diseases are most noxious to those already most debilitated. But this one seems to have done so more than most.
In Italy, 99.1% of those who died with or of COVID-19 also suffered from other diseases. But this virus obviously has a special predilection for those with type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, compromised lungs, and most of all for the very old—to the point that a study by Germany’s Ministry of the Interior asked whether it made any sense to ascribe to any cause the deaths of persons whose bodies were in the process of shutting down anyhow. By contrast, COVID-19’s effect on ordinary healthy persons is considerably milder than those of ordinary respiratory diseases. What sense, then, could general isolation ever have made in the context of COVID-19?
It made some sense in the context of the U.S. ruling class’s (tragically wrong) assumptions/pretenses/convictions (take your pick) that the COVID-19 is so infectious as well as plague-like in its lethal danger to the general population, that a wave of desperately ill and dying patients would submerge American hospitals unless its natural course were slowed. Hence all medical decks had to be cleared of all other activities, emergency hospitals had to be constructed in the parks, and the Navy’s hospital ships had to be brought in.
As we have seen, there was never the slightest evidence that the COVID-19 virus could produce mass casualties. From the first, all evidence pointed in the opposite direction. Even in New York, where Governor Cuomo hyperventilated panic, the hospitals in the park and the Navy’s hospital ship were virtually empty.
But the ruling class’s attachment to its assumptions/pretenses/convictions overrode the obvious truth that the elderly and infirm should have special isolation from contact with persons possibly infected with the virus and that the rest of the population should go about its business.
The U.S. authorities, the “experts,” the ruling class, chose to do precisely the opposite. They “locked down” a general population that is at virtually no risk, thereby delaying the virus’s spread to people it could not harm and whose infection would build herd immunity. Keeping millions of people indoors also worsened their health. Keeping people from interacting and working normally wrecked economic and social life.
Worst of all, these authorities, these experts, transferred elderly persons known to be infected with the virus into nursing homes. In Michigan, the authorities even assigned to a nursing home an aide known to be infected with the virus. As a result, the as-yet fully uncounted deaths in these facilities, which house about 1.3 million people (about 0.39% of the population) come to about half of the total U.S. death toll. That is what happened, and it is perverse. It deserves punishment.
Doubly so because of the cruelty with which it was done. As known virus carriers and unscreened persons were moved in, as the contagion raged, the debilitated, powerless inmates were prohibited visits from their families. These, being nearly all uninfected, would have posed no danger. Had the families been allowed to visit, they might have become aware of what was happening. As it was, they were powerless to save these innocents who, without advocates, were effectively condemned. One New York nurse was fired for objecting. Triply perverse, because some of the officials responsible—e.g. Pennsylvania’s Secretary of health—knew what they were doing enough to pull their own relatives out of danger.
Others, e.g. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who sent 4,500 COVID-infected patients from hospitals to nursing homes and blew off his responsibility for over 5,000 deaths with the words “people die,” later deflected responsibility onto what legitimately may be deemed to be national policy. He cited guidance from the Centers for Disease Control: “’Nursing homes should admit any individuals from hospitals where COVID is present.” Both the lockdown for ordinary people and the transfer of COVID carriers to nursing homes, said Cuomo, followed CDC recommendations. Cuomo did not resist the recommendation. He was occupied trying to score political points on Donald Trump.
In May Dr. Anthony Fauci, the federal COVID team’s most influential MD, explained the counterproductive national lockdown of healthy people on national television. Earlier, he had said lockdowns were needed to preclude the overcrowding of hospitals. That having proved to be his gross professional error as an epidemiologist, he now said that extending the lockdowns was necessary to prevent so many apparently healthy young people from eventually infecting the old and infirm.
But there is zero evidence that apparently healthy (i.e. asymptomatic though infected) people infect others with the COVID-19. The evidence is that only symptomatic people (ones with coughs and sniffles) do, and that not through casual contact. Moreover, if separating known spreaders had been Fauci’s intention all along, why had the CDC ordered known COVID carriers to be shifted to nursing homes? At the very least, the man who drove the COVID team did it in a reckless manner that killed people. He too had other things on his mind—political ones.
Similarly, Governors from New York to Michigan and Illinois, to California, Oregon, and Washington have ordered citizens to stay indoors—which always was and once again proved to be the ideal environment for the transmission of respiratory viruses. Illinois’s governor criminalized more than two people in any boat. Californians have been arrested for walking on the beach, and New York City’s mayor threatened to pull swimmers out of the sea. All in the name of Science. Online searches find no science that shows viruses thriving in fresh air and sunshine, never mind in salt water. The mayor of Los Angeles ordered residents to wear masks at all times outdoors, though there is no evidence that this virus transmits through casual proximity anywhere, but especially outdoors.
In July, Anthony Fauci said that masks are necessary. But in March the same Fauci had said they did more harm than good—equally without the slightest scientific proof. Surreally, the L.A. Health Department specified that persons should wash their hands after putting on unwashed face coverings, and refrain from touching their faces—except to put on the face coverings that were supposed to make their hands dirty to begin with! Science, anybody? Fauci also guided governors to permit people to congregate by the hundreds at Walmart and Costco, but to forbid them to do so in churches. This fount of Science also gave his imprimatur to sex among strangers but advised Christians to refrain from Communion. Too intimate. What level of partisan credulity does it take to believe any of that?
One may also ask what level of partisan credulity it takes to take seriously such personages as the governors of New York, Michigan, and California and the mayors of Chicago and Los Angeles, who personally flout the regulations they try to impose on others. Restrictions for thee but not for me!
The answer really does lie in the depth of political party/class solidarity. The governors and officials who imposed, maintain, and rationalize the lockdowns are all but one (Ohio’s) Democrats. Their counter-factual assumptions/pretenses/convictions, their misrepresentations, their falsehoods and outright lies, are all about their social class’s effort to secure their privileges against an increasingly recalcitrant general population.
Politics
We begin by focusing on how seamlessly the Western world’s ruling class has translated the COVID-19 event into yet another of its weapons in the fight it has been waging this century against voters’ growing disaffection. Support for the lockdowns has become as integral to the American Establishment Left, i.e., to the Democratic Party, as belief in abortion, global warming, open borders, and censorship of whatever they choose to call “hate speech.” To understand this, one must realize that the ruling class’s campaign regarding public health, global warming, race, the rights of women, homosexuals, micro-aggressions, the Palestinians, etc. etc. have far less to do with any of these matters than with seizing ever more power for itself.
Intersectionality
We note that the language, the attitudes, by which the ruling class have hyped COVID’s health challenge have been integrated into the identities of its constituency’s manifold components so as to add force to the longstanding demands of each. How readily—how naturally—activists for Black Lives Matter, Feminism, Global Warming, etc. have adopted support of all manner of socioeconomic restrictions on the pretend-basis of saving lives from the COVID as if it were their own cause, is yet another practical manifestation of the latter-day Left’s theory of “intersectionality.” As the activists of Black Lives Matter burn down buildings, they also wear masks supposedly to show their commitment to social responsibility for public health. Nor incidentally, they also tout their commitment to LGBTQ sexuality, for abortion, and against the nuclear family. The same may be noted about every component’s support of every other.
By the same token, every one of the ruling class’s constituencies, the disparity of their foci notwithstanding, has adopted as its own the demand that voting in American elections must henceforth be “from home,” with ballots collected or “harvested” by third parties. That would shift electoral power from those who vote to those who process and count the votes—i.e. to themselves. Hence it would set the entire ruling class free from the voters.
Each sub-constituency translates the accusation into its own idiom. In America, accusations of racism are the lowest (alas the most common) form of political pandering and intimidation. Securing over 90% of the black vote being the sine qua non of the Democrat Party’s electoral successes, no one was surprised when the New York Times, followed by the rest of the major media, noted that, the COVID-19 having struck African Americans proportionately harder than other races, proves American society treats them despicably and must submit to reform.
Yet at the Times, CNN, etc. they know that this is a lie and that, regardless of race, adverse outcomes of COVID-19 infections go along with obesity, type 2 diabetes, etc. And they know as well as anyone precisely to what extent African Americans exhibit these very conditions proportionately more than other races, and that these conditions have more to do with calories today than with slavery two centuries ago.
The COVID event has also made the face mask into a physical badge of tribal identity, common to all the sub-constituencies. Wearing the mask is now about publicly distinguishing the virtuous and deploring the deplorables. North Carolina’s Democrat Governor Roy Cooper said that “A face covering signifies strength and compassion for others” and “wearing one shows that you care about other people’s health.” On the same day, New York’s Andrew Cuomo put it this way: “Wearing a mask is now cool, I believe it’s cool…. Wearing a mask is officially cool.”
Anthony Fauci, who in March had told 60 minutes “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” in May gave his scientific judgment that masks are “a symbol for people to see that that’s the kind of thing you should be doing,” while admitting that they are “not 100% effective.” He could hardly have done otherwise since the New England Journal of Medicine had said: “wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers [the wearer] little, if any, protection from infection,” and is irrelevant to others in casual contact. Such a symbol of intersectional identity has it become that, as rioters were burning Minneapolis, its Democrat mayor urged the rioters whom he let burn parts of his city to make sure they wore masks while doing so.
In sum, the lockdowns have been perpetuated and prolonged by people who care more about your compliance than your health.
Regime of Fear
They are about increasing the Democratic Party’s chances in the 2020 election.
The 2016 U.S. election confronted the U.S. ruling class with the possibility that the presidency’s enormous powers might be used to dismantle its network of prestige and privileges. The public is just beginning to understand the extent to which all manner of bureaucrats and allies used their powers to try defeating the challenge of 2016, and then instituted the socio-political equivalent of basketball’s “full court press,” treating anything and everything about the Trump administration as illegitimate, running official investigations not to gather information but as pretexts for feeding slander to their media associates. They tried to catch Trump in perjury traps. They toyed with the idea of leading him into statements that might be construed as bases for removal from office. But the U.S. economy boomed. Trump’s ratings rose. As 2020 dawned and Trump seemed a cinch for re-election, the Democratic Party et al. were grasping at straws for ways of getting at him.
By the time COVID came over the horizon, thought of using it had already crossed ruling class’s minds. No conspiracy was necessary or possible. The existing party sentiment and like-mindedness were enough to produce the unanimity and uniformity with which the ruling class has used the COVID-19 event to produce, stoke, and maintain fear, to energize its constituencies’ agendas in pursuit its power.
In January 2017 Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaking at Georgetown University, said he had no doubt that the Trump administration would face a “surprise outbreak” of “infectious diseases.” A few days earlier, The Atlantic published an article titled “How a Pandemic Might Play Out Under Trump,” which wished out loud that Trump’s handling of such an event would undermine his presidency. Yet earlier, NYU professor Arthur Caplan had published an article along the same lines: “The End of Civilization and the Real Donald Trump.” In short, weaponizing a public health event had crossed eager minds.
The prospect of locking down the country, ostensibly to save it from COVID-19, offered a near monopoly of communications. Trump’s rallies were shut down. Above all, churches were shut down, as well as the countless meetings of clubs, businesses, friends, etc. that are the lifeblood of what one might call the country class. Nor may people congregate as they wish for political purposes: the strictures that North Carolina’s Democrat governor put on the Republican National Convention made it impossible to hold it in that state.
Without face-to-face contact, television became the chief means by which communication took place—but it was one-way communication, whose programming and corporate advertising—immediately—began telling the people the joys of obedience: “we are all in this together,” “ Alone, together.”
It reeks of Orwell. The companies whose advertising pays for this are household names: Adidas, Amazon, Airbnb, American Express, Bank of America, BMW, Burger King, Citigroup, Coca Cola, DHL, Disney, eBay, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, IBM, Mastercard, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Sony, Starbucks, Twitter, Verizon, Walmart, Warner Brothers and YouTube. The ruling class.
Driven by the politics of partisan identity, the ruling class used the COVID-19 event to collapse American life.
A glance is enough to reveal the perverse enormity of what it caused.
Because the lockdowns closed most restaurants and hotels, where about half of the nation’s calories were consumed, demand for food shifted in ways that made it impossible for distribution networks and processing plants to adjust seamlessly—especially as the government limited their operation and paid workers to call in sick. Millions of gallons of milk have been poured down drains, millions of chickens, billions of eggs and tens of thousands of hogs and cattle have been destroyed, acres of vegetables and tons of fruit disked under. Vineyards have been ripped out. This scrambled allocation and waste of food resulted in shortages. Prices in the markets rose. In some places, meat and eggs were rationed. Persons deprived of work have less money with which to pay these prices, and struggle to feed their families. This reduced countless self-supporting citizens to supplicants at food banks.
Who could produce surplus and scarcity simultaneously except sorcerers’ apprentices wielding government power? That’s expertise for you. By intentionally reducing the supply of food available to the population, the U.S. government joined the rare ranks of such as Stalin’s Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba.
But no sane person had ever imagined the near-shutdown of a whole nation’s entire medical care except for one disease. The U.S. government did that, on the advice of its very best experts. Between mid-March to July hospitals stood nearly empty, having cleared the decks for the (ignorantly) expected COVID flood. Patients having been discouraged or forbidden to come in for other reasons, doctors and nurses were idled. Not a few were furloughed. Emergency rooms were closed to most of their customers—the poorer people who routinely get routine care there. Private clinics and practices—where most Americans get most medical care—practically shut down. Many will never reopen. Forget about dentistry. This has meant that most Americans have been left essentially without medical care for about a third of a year.
Tests missed, conditions not diagnosed, treatments forgone or delayed. Human bodies’ troubles not having taken a corresponding holiday, it is impossible to estimate how much suffering and death this lack of medical care has caused and will yet cause—all while the U.S. government was making it happen. Officials who claim to be smarter than we ordered it—for our own good, they claim.
More than forty million Americans have filed claims for unemployment assistance since the shutdowns began. To this number one must add the as-yet unknown tens of millions owners of small businesses which were forced to close or radically to reduce activity. Add to that the uncountable millions not directly affected—farmers, professionals—whose products and activities the shutdowns de-valued. Imagine the millions of careers wrecked, the shattering of dreams that had been realized by lifetimes of work, and you search for words to describe it: Catastrophe? Tragedy? Man-made, for sure.
The experts who made this happen stigmatized, tried to silence, and effectively criminalized dissent as dangerous to health and, of course, as racist. But there is zero evidence that all or any of the above measures increased anybody’s life expectancy, and plenty to the contrary. They wronged America. But why? and cui bono?
Power
All of the above served the ruling class’s overarching interest in its own power. Are there any categories of people who benefited from the shutdowns? Government gained. We know of no employee of federal, state or local government who was furloughed or had his or her pay reduced. On the contrary, all got additional power. The federal government created trillions of dollars, the distribution of which is enriching the usual suspects involved in administration. The teachers’ unions gained the power to extort concessions as a price for reopening schools. Among them, restrictions on or elimination of charter schools.
And as independent businesses were throttled, big ones grew. The biggest, Amazon, was the biggest winner. The news media, unrestricted and at the service of the powerful, themselves exercised unprecedented power. The social media platforms seconded the coup by censoring dissent from the “line” of their own most aggressive bureaucrats and officials. Try getting figures for COVID deaths and how they are counted from Google. YouTube deleted a video gone viral of two medical doctors who pointed out the truth about the COVID-19’s true lethality as dangerous disinformation, and Twitter appended a note to President Trump’s objection to voting by mail for facilitating fraud, accusing it of falsehood.
Prohibitions such as of playing in the park or swimming in the sea are mere devices to train the public to accept unlimited bureaucratic discretion. You may congregate at Costco, but not at church. Failure to obey regulations will land ordinary citizens in jail, while the jails release robbers and child molesters. You may not exceed limits on occupancy or fail to wear a mask. You may not even sing in church. But if you and friends loot and burn the neighborhood store, the police will just stand by. Yet all Democrat governors celebrated and some joined masses of “protests”—forget about masks and social distancing. They did this not for anybody’s health but to to secure another few percentage points of the black vote for their party and to leverage their seizure of power over police forces.
We are supposed to believe that all this is dictated by “Science.” In June, 1,200 “health experts” signed a letter approving the BLM protests because, it said, “white supremacy is a lethal public health issue.” But it cautioned that “this should not be confused with a permissive stance on…protests against stay-home orders.” In short, Coronavirus restrictions, like the rest of political correctness’s commandments, are pure political weaponry—nothing short of an inversion of the American people’s priorities, accomplished by nobody’s vote. Ruling class presumption. In short, we are living through a coup d’état.
Declaring emergencies to excuse taking “full powers” is the oldest of ploys. Does anybody remember the Reichstag fire? The prospect of similar things happening in America had been rising along with the ruling class and the administrative state. The authorities’ seizure of arbitrary power in the name of expertise is the deadliest strike at our way of life. Suspending law and rights, issuing arbitrary rules of behavior, has been mostly the doing of Democrat-controlled state and local government. But the lead came from the Democrat-controlled Federal bureaucracy, empowered by a president elected as a Republican, and with the silent complaisance of perhaps a majority of Republican politicians.
The ruling class’s gains of power and money have been at the country class’s expense, and have depended on suppressing truth.
An egregious example of forcible official lying is the ruling class’s political campaign against the drug Hydroxychloroquine. President Trump had pointed to the truth that this standard treatment for malaria for more than a half century is effective against the early and mid-stages of the COVID disease. This fact had been discovered accidentally and confirmed by studies and practices in France, Spain, India, and South Korea. In April, U.S. doctors started prescribing it widely, reported good results, and took it themselves prophylactically. The ruling class found this intolerable because it contradicted its narrative that nothing could prevent the sky from falling, but above all because its success might cast a favorable light on Trump. Hence it set about canceling truth about drugs from public consciousness and substituting its own narrative.
The ruling class machine began by labeling reports of the drug’s success as “anecdotal.” Then, the Veterans Administration gave the drug in small doses to some 380 elderly patients dying with/of the COVID. Every major media outlet touted their deaths as proof of its ineffectiveness and danger. On May 22, the Lancet, arguably the most authoritative medical journal, published what it called an analysis of the world’s biggest medical data base showing, definitively it claimed, that Hydroxychloroquine is ineffective, counterproductive, and dangerous. The Yale School of Medicine officially concluded that the drug is bad stuff, despite a study to the contrary by its own professor of epidemiology, Harvey Risch. The great Anthony Fauci who, when pressed hard, had said that he would take the drug were he to be sick of the COVID, then backed the political narrative by quipping that, as of now there is no treatment for COVID illness. The U.S. food and Drug Administration stopped clinical trials, pharmacy boards refused orders from physicians and retailers, and hospitals around the country required their physicians to stop treating their patients with it.
It turns out, however, that the Lancet study’s database was part of a fly-by-night, strictly political operation, and that its details are literally incredible—e.g., the number of reported Hydroxy deaths for one Australian hospital exceeded the number of total deaths for the entire country. In short, the report was another professionally unsustainable hit job. The New York Times reported that “More than 100 scientists and clinicians have questioned the authenticity” of the database as well as the study’s integrity. The Lancet withdrew it in shame.
But it was too late. Fauci and the medical establishment did not apologize. For the media and for headline-readers, the case was closed. The lie stood. Then, on July 1, Michigan’s Henry Ford health system published a peer-reviewed study that shows Hydroxychloroquine significantly cut death rates even in mid-to-late COVID cases. Again, the ruling class machine ignored the truth. Again: all mainstream news about the COVID affair is related to health only incidentally. Be very afraid.
Nor has the COVID affair to do with any emergency—except possibly the 2020 election. Democrat politicians and the stream of public service TV advertising have left no doubt that the ruling class’s objective is to establish “a new normal” by extending into the indefinite future the powers by which bureaucracies have eclipsed America’s laws and way of life.
But, as the Authorities toyed too openly with the truth, they impeached themselves and lost authority. Fewer and fewer believe what they hear from on high. As Russians under Communism learned, the truth is usually the opposite. Whenever the government reported bountiful harvests, they stocked up on potatoes.
Default, and Consequences
Fairness requires noting that, regardless of whatever America’s ruling Left has done, whatever its hopes, plans, or coordination, what actually happened to the United States of America consequent to COVID could not have happened had President Donald Trump, much of the Republican Party, and America’s religious establishment not concurred in its happening.
This is another way of saying that the ruling class rules by size and seduction, as well as by intimidation. It did not rush into imposing the shutdowns, or even into making too big a deal of COVID. Its parts and personages did not fully commit themselves until after they had convinced president Trump to give them the preclusion of opposition without which inflicting so much pain on so many would have exposed them to official and popular retribution.
President Donald Trump, having cut travel from China on January 31 and from Europe on March 12 had maintained his grip on public opinion while pointing to the evidence that that COVID is not catastrophic. He sustained accusations of xenophobia. But, as the virus took root in America, the opposition shifted to blaming him for doing nothing in the face of a plague. Countering that would have required standing on the truth, attacking the central falsehood that the COVID is a plague, and its purveyors as liars. Since the experts had been wrong again and again, this was doable.
But on March 15, Trump asked the country to shut down for fifteen days to slow the spread of the disease—to flatten the curve. Then, on March 31 the New York Times crowed victoriously that the previous week, President Trump had been stampeded to abandon his goal of restoring normal life by Easter: “The numbers the health officials showed President Trump were overwhelming. With the peak of the coronavirus pandemic still weeks away, he was told, hundreds of thousands of Americans could face death if the country reopened too soon.” Also, poll questions that framed the choice just so had helped produce another set of numbers. Said the Times: he was told that “voters overwhelmingly preferred to keep containment measures in place over sending people back to work prematurely.” Trump let himself be scared into sheltering politically under what he supposed would be the protective professional wings of Dr. Anthony Fauci and the CDC.
Trump believed that Fauci would cooperate in a plan for reopening, and counted on the Democratic Party sharing credit for providing near a trillion dollars in relief to the people who the lockdowns were depriving of livelihood.
But, once Trump let go of the truth, he ceded control and entered a political blind alley. Trump was giving the de facto alliance between the Democratic Party, Fauci et al., the press, and a host of profiteers public credit even as they discredited him in every way possible. They had him where they wanted him. As the lockdowns throttled America, they used the political leverage to raise demands. They aimed at his political demise as well as at economic, social, and political transformation.
The guidelines for “Opening Up America Again” that Trump unveiled on April 17 resulted from that imbalance of political credit and leverage. Far from returning the country to what it had been, the “data-driven” process they outlined, written by Fauci’s CDC, would make sure that state and local officials so inclined now have top-level, pseudo-legal cover for keeping or reimposing whatever arbitrary restrictions on opponents they think they can get away with, with whatever data they can manipulate to that purpose.
The Guidelines “advise” (that means “mandate” for officials who so choose) opening only to a percentage of capacity, and with restrictions—e.g. no singing in church,—that counter their reason for being. But churches and small business cannot survive at less than at full capacity. Schools set up other than for maximum concentration on the stuff to be learned are counterproductive. In short, the guidelines give federal sanction to choking America’s “main street” sector.
The guidelines’ arguably most dangerous legacy may be their recommendation/requirement that governments certify persons’ safe status for work and public interaction by tracking and isolating persons infected with the virus—or said to be. This involves hiring hundreds of thousands of persons to enforce compliance with decreed regulations on personal behavior—effectively a “lifestyle police,” empowered at the very least to declare anyone the equivalent of “medically untouchable.”
The governors of Michigan and California (there is no dissent among Democratic Party officials) have already defined “racism” as a major health hazard. Is there any doubt that these police will be less concerned with health as ordinary people understand it than with enforcing their chiefs’ will on political opponents? Thus, without law or trial, anyone could be separated peremptorily from job, business, or family, pending redress in the courts—which most people cannot afford.
Were this practice adopted nationally, it really would be the centerpiece of a “new normal.” By May, New York’s mayor had already deputized hundreds of (arguably former) gang members and criminals, paying them to circulate among the general population to “encourage”—dare we say, intimidate?—citizens to follow the Mayor’s orders. He also offered rewards for reports on neighbors’ violations of those orders. This is the beginning of explicitly partisan policing more as in China than in the America in which we grew up. Not incidentally the World health Organization—an extension of China’s government, formally recommended that nations “observe active surveillance and tracing of their populations.” Presumably, when the next virus comes along, the ruling class’ arbitrary powers will ratchet up yet another notch.
Sadly Anthony Fauci, whose reputation could not withstand any sort of scrutiny, retains the capacity to mislead because no one with a major national audience has publicly scrutinized it.
All of this, one must keep in mind, is so because President Trump’s complaisance with the ruling class’s falsehoods about the virus precluded high-level affirmation of the truths that negate the COVID Coup lies and pretenses. That he gave that complaisance contre coeur is beside the point. When pressed, Trump stuck by the falsehoods, as he did on April 22, after Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, who had opposed the lockdowns, announced that he was lifting them in his state. Trump chastised him publicly in the strongest terms, prompting the media into an orgy of accusations that Kemp was turning Georgia into a death camp. As it happened, Georgia got healthy. But that did not matter.
The biggest and most significant default however, has been that of America’s Christian churches—all of them—from their hierarchs to their priests, pastors, and ministers. Their complaisance with the lockdowns set aside a truth far more important to human dignity than anything having to do with any physical ailment—the one truth that puts all human power in proper perspective, the truth on which our civilization itself rests: that no human power can manufacture true and false, right and wrong, any more than we can make ourselves, and that, therefore, we are obliged to “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.”
Jewish congregations have been similarly craven.
The churches’ agreement to suspend public worship and the distribution of sacraments also contradicted their duty. Until 2020, Christian clergy felt obliged not just to offer public worship to whomever, but also to search out the sick, to offer sacraments to the dying, especially in places where victims of plagues lay between life and death—regardless of consequences. Because surrendering to secular dictates concerning how congregants should behave, even in church cannot be justified in Christian terms it would not have crossed previous generations of churchmen’s minds.
Had this generation of church leaders simply practiced their faith, even by merely keeping silent about the ruling class’s claims about the COVID-19 rather than ignorantly, submissively endorsing them, they would have preserved their intellectual and moral credit to help the general population to deal with the growing realization that they had been duped. Instead, they chose to be complicit with tinpot Caesars. Hence, as Americans face the bitter fact that we have been hurt worse than for nought, the churches have largely disqualified themselves as arbiters of truth.
Truth and clarity about what history will record as the 2020 COVID coup is the necessary condition for the American people to overcome its effects. Overcoming those effects must begin with discrediting those pretenses and the reputations of those who made them.
Who Will Lead Us?
Uncompromised leadership is in short supply because few prominent persons have resisted ruling-class pressure to join its COVID narrative. But so anxious are Americans for truth about what happened, what is happening; so substantively thin are the lies on which the scam has been based, and so abundant are the resources for establishing the truth; so hungry are Americans for examples of successes in countering the scam, that a few courageous leaders in key places may suffice.
The following outlines how the U.S. Senate can function as a truth commission concerning the COVID coup’s several aspects, and how state governors so inclined can provide practical leadership to motivate, guide, and legitimize life independent of our dysfunctional ruling class.
With regard to the latter, we note that the manner in which states and localities run by Democrats have managed the COVID event differs from that of places otherwise governed as if they were from regimes, countries, even civilizations, alien to one another. This is yet more evidence that American society has largely broken into incompatible pieces, and that avoidance of civil war may hinge on mutual tolerance of parting ways. More on that below.
Truth Commission
In the past, as the misbehavior of important persons confused and divided Americans, wise senators summoned to public hearings those involved in the controversies, put them under oath and hence possible penalty for perjury, and established the often-uncomfortable truth on which the country came together. In 1948 Senator Richard Nixon’s (R-CA) hearings showed beyond doubt how deeply Soviet intelligence had penetrated our government. Between 1951 and 1957, Senator Estes Kefauver (D-TN) exposed and hence dismantled the mafia’s control of the U.S. labor movement. In 1974 Senator Sam Ervin’s (D-NC) hearings left no doubt about President Nixon’s role in the Watergate coverup. Today, the COVID scam being based on lies and misrepresentations by countless important persons, rigorous public testimony under oath can expose them and those who spread them.
Because of jurisdictions and/or of particularly able chairmen, the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Oversight, on Health, Education and Labor, on Finance, and on the Judiciary, each can shine their particular lights on specific aspects of the problem.
Senator Ron Johnson’s (R-WI) Committee on Government Affairs, with oversight over the Centers For Disease Control, can set the record straight about how its relationship with China’s laboratories, with the World Health Organization and with the Chinese government itself has shaped how the U.S. government has dealt COVID. The CDC having grasped enormous powers over American life, the Committee can inquire about the level of expertise it has brought to its task. What, if anything, justifies its claim to scientific management? The Committee can also audit how the CDC’s expenditure of funds and efforts among a variety of political, non-health topics affected its readiness to deal with the recurrence of viruses from exotic places.
Its subcommittee on Oversight and Emergency Management, under Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), himself a physician, is well placed to expose who knew what about the COVID-19 virus, when they knew it, who told the public what, and on what basis. The public has noted with dismay the discrepancy and contradictions about COVID-19 from supposedly medical experts, most prominently by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
At different times, these experts told us that the virus posed very little danger, and that it was a mortal threat to us all, that masks were useless, and then essential. On the basis of their many statements, hundreds of millions of American lives were wrecked, and millions continue to languish under “guidelines” that make no sense on their face. Expert questioning under oath in front of the cameras can let the American people judge for themselves what sense they make. The experts will have to reveal what medical expertise might have led them to stigmatize young people relatively unaffected by the COVID for going to the beach while not objecting as greater numbers of higher-risk black Americans rioted in the streets.
The jurisdiction of Senator Charles Grassley’s Finance Committee (R-IA) includes unemployment compensation, social services, and Medicare/Medicaid. The COVID event having caused some forty million persons to file for unemployment, having placed unusual burdens on all manner of government services, and having roiled food markets in ways harmful to health as well as suggestive of possible price fixing, this Committee is well placed to unravel the causal threads between the strictures that governments have placed on the population and the troubles that ensued. Grassley, one of the Senate’s better investigators, can showcase categories and individuals hurt by the lockdowns and call governors to square the harm they caused with the benefits they claim they achieved. Who lost my job? Who destroyed my business? where do I go to rebuild what I lost? These are some of the questions that the committee can put to officials on the American people’s behalf. Grassley and ranking Democrat Ron Wyden (D-OR) can also bring to bear their staff’s expertise regarding nursing homes to probe how government policy brought about the holocaust that the COVID-19 wrought in them.
Parents all over America wonder about the basis on which the 2019-20 school year was cut in half and the bases on which the 20-21 year was compromised. Senator Rand Paul’s Subcommittee on Children and Families can put such questions authoritatively to the officials who made that call, confront the projected risks with reality, and weigh them against the results of lost education and social disruption.
Americans ask by what right governors and mayors essentially put people under house arrest without due process, and had them arrested for such activities as playing in the park or paddling in the sea; by what right they shut down religious services, etc. What else may government do in violation of the Bill of Rights? Under the U.S. Constitution, what limits are there on a citizen’s obligations and rights? These are some of the questions with which Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) can confront federal, state, and local officials summoned before Senate Judiciary’s Subcommittee on the Constitution. Cruz would also summon officials of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and ask why they have not treated state and local officials’ denial of the free exercise of religion and of freedom of assembly as violations of the First Amendment. What is their understanding of civil rights?
The American people have an interest in knowing how the mentality of current officials is changing the practical meaning of the Constitution’s words. Cruz might well ask, government officials having changed the meaning of the basic bargain between people and government, what remains of the people’s obligation to obey the government?
Exemplary Leadership
Publicly contrasting the thoughts, deeds, and consequences of the officials and professionals who made the COVID event such a tragedy with those of the officials and professionals who led in opposite directions would not be the least of the beneficent results from serious hearings. Most Americans don’t know, but should, that several U.S. States never did shut down, while others reduced activities far less than the likes of California and New York. Like Sweden’s government, these states’ officials never saw reason to believe that the COVID was the plague and believed that individual persons’ exercise of responsibility for themselves is the surest guarantee of safety for all.
But the differences in what happened in California and Florida, in New Jersey and South Dakota do not speak for themselves. That is why the public would benefit by seeing these states’ governors defending their widely different perspectives on the COVID, and their results.
Perspective
It should be clear that the COVID event in America is only tangentially about health. It is essentially a political campaign based on the pretense of health. Mere perusal of news from abroad is enough to see that this is true as well throughout the Western world. Throughout, the campaign by governments and associated elites has essentially smothered social and economic activity. Not least—and by no means incidentally—it has smothered the overt political opposition which had increasingly beleaguered said governments and elites throughout the Western world.
Through the previous decade, the various failures and inadequacies of these governments and elites, of “Davos Man,” had become the prime subject of public discourse. At the very least, the COVID campaign changed the subject to physical safety and economic survival. Davos Man tightened control by using the state’s coercive power more forcefully than in wartime, covering its class by claiming to speak for “science” in a manner that precludes counterargument.
In America as elsewhere, there was no doubt about which sectors of society were on what side, who were the campaign’s protagonists, winners, and losers. The governments, their bureaucracies, the major legacy political parties, the celebrities and the media, Davos Man, were on one side. On the other were middle class people and their “populist” representatives. As the northern hemisphere’s summertime was banishing the latest respiratory virus, Davos Man strove to make as many restrictions as possible part of a “new normal.”
In Europe as in America, the COVID affair was but the latest round in which the very same protagonists had faced off. There as here, the language and attitudes with which Davos Man denigrated its supposed inferiors in the COVID affair fit seamlessly into previous patterns of the larger, long-term struggle.
Had there been any doubt that the COVID-19 virus was more an occasion than a cause, it vanished at the end of May as, on both sides of the Atlantic, Davos Man switched to berating ordinary people and their civilization and ginned up yet another campaign to beat back challenges to its power.
- "Capitalism Always Finds A Way" – How Texas Strip Clubs Are Surviving The Pandemic
“Capitalism Always Finds A Way” – How Texas Strip Clubs Are Surviving The Pandemic
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/27/2020 – 23:45Scott Gottlieb said over the weekend that encouraging signs that the outbreak may have “peaked” are beginning to emerge in some parts of the Sun Belt – though the US is still far from done with this yet, and Americans should take caution. A few hours later, Texas health officials reported the state’s lowest daily tally of new coronavirus cases in two weeks (as deaths in the state topped 5,000).
It seems Gov Abbott’s belated decision to close bars, restaurants and other businesses for in-person service is having some kind of impact. Meanwhile, COVID-19 is no longer the state’s only immediate problem.
All the while, as volatile oil prices have whiplashed the state’s economy, heaping more pain on the state’s labor market, a group of strip club owners won a victory in Texas’s conservative courts allowing them to reopen as “restaurants with entertainment”, hosting what amounts to outdoor adult entertainment, mostly held in large tents set up outside.
Houston-based Vivid Gentleman’s Club became the first “drive-thru strip club” in the state when it reopened just last week. A reporter from the Houston Chronicle described “black metal barricades separate the dancers from the cars, and dollar bills litter the asphalt between the white siding of the tent walls. The purplish-blue lighting casts a familiar (to club-goers) ambience over the scene, but obvious reminders of the pandemic remain; some of the performers are in face masks.”
Like with strip clubs allowed to reopen in other states, performers kept their masks on while removing their clothes.
While restaurants are now allowed to operate at 50% capacity and bars are still currently shut down across Texas, strip clubs, which fall in a grey area, were forced to adapt.
Cars pull up under a white tent, order food, and while they wait, they can watch the girls – both masked and unmasked – dance. However, the experience comes with a limit that most customers probably find unappealing: There’s a two-song limit per customer.
Stories about these ‘drive thru’ clubs are starting to circulate on social media, inspiring a flood of commentary, with tweets ranging from humorous, to incredulous, to sarcastic.
Texas shut down strip clubs so the strip clubs started selling “food with live entertainment” in tents to get the restaurant classification and stay open, god bless america
— Nick (@NickatFP) July 27, 2020
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Hold on now they’re saying the breakfast menu is limited
— Nick (@NickatFP) July 27, 2020
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Even the replies to @NickatFP’s tweet were of an unusually high quality.
Capitalism always finds a way.
— Cate Long (@cate_long) July 27, 2020
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Keeping it classy in Texas $RICK
— Tow Master $MLR (@Alex__Pitti) July 27, 2020
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Gun show loophole is undefeated
— Adam Singer (@AdamSinger) July 27, 2020
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A “friend” tells me the wings are good tho
— Wandering Sam (@tbonesam99) July 27, 2020
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Sounds like a certain car company
— Tow Master $MLR (@Alex__Pitti) July 27, 2020
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Not all heroes wear capes.
A lot of them wear g-strings or less
— TS (@tweetstar10) July 27, 2020
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They’re serving breasts…and wings?
Breasts and wings
— Stocks, Guns, Cars & Babes (@SGCBTweets) July 27, 2020
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Is it any wonder Elon Musk and Joe Rogan are reportedly ditching California for the Lone Star State?
- US Military Flies Record Number Of Planes Near China’s Coast In July
US Military Flies Record Number Of Planes Near China’s Coast In July
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/27/2020 – 23:25Authored by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com,
As part of Washington’s increased military presence in Indo-Pacific, the month of July has seen a record number of aerial surveillance flights by US military aircraft in the South China Sea and near China’s coast. A Beijing-based think tank counted over 50 sorties by US military aircraft in the region in the first three weeks of July.
“At the moment the US military is sending three to five reconnaissance aircraft each day to the South China Sea,” the South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative (SCSPI) said. While July saw record numbers, the increased flights started earlier this year with “much higher frequency, closer distance and more variety of missions,” SCSPI said.
US Air Force file image: B-52 Bombers and fighter escort over South China Sea. The closest flight to China’s coast happened in May, when a US Navy plane almost flew within the 12 nautical mile zone of China’s Hainan Island. SCSPI statistics show that flights by US planes within 50 to 60 nautical miles of the Chinese Mainland were “frequent.”
With US-China relations rapidly deteriorating in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the South China Sea has seen massive US military exercises. Twice this month, two aircraft carrier strike groups led drills in the contested waters.
The Trump administration also formally rejected most of Beijing’s claims to the South China Sea, ratcheting up tensions even more.
Via Business Insider: The overlapping maritime claims in the South China Sea. In 2001, a US reconnaissance plane collided with a Chinese military aircraft 59 nautical miles off the coast of Hainan Island. The collision killed the Chinese pilot and forced the US plane to land on Hainan.
The ramping up of US flights in the region increases the risk of accidents like the 2001 incident, and souring US-China relations makes solving future incidents diplomatically less likely.
- More Explosive Leaks From OPCW Show Trump Bombed Syria On False Grounds
More Explosive Leaks From OPCW Show Trump Bombed Syria On False Grounds
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/27/2020 – 23:05As the ongoing increased sanctions regimen on Syria demonstrates, Washington’s pursuit of regime change against Assad is not over, despite Damascus clearly having won the war, and with the US having wisely ditched talk of some kind of overt major Iraq-style military intervention (as was the case under Obama in August 2013).
While mainstream media has largely “moved on” from coverage of Syria (so much for feigned humanitarian “concern” for millions of Syrians suffering under severe American-led sanctions!), some analysts like independent journalist Aaron Maté have been detailing damning leaks from the chemical weapons watchdog Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
“A series of leaked documents from the OPCW raise the possibility that the Trump administration bombed Syria on false grounds and pressured officials at the world’s top chemical weapons watchdog to cover it up,” Maté’s latest report in The Nation begins.
Guided-missile destroyer USS Porter during the first strikes on Syria in 2017 from the Mediterranean Sea, Us “Two OPCW officials, highly regarded scientists with more than 25 years of combined experience at the organization, challenged the whitewash from inside. Yet unlike many whistle-blowers of the Trump era, they have found no champion, or even an audience, within establishment circles in the United States,” the report continues.
Recall that President Trump bombed Syria on two occasions. On the last occasion, in April 2018, Damascus was pummeled with a series of major tomahawk missile strikes ostensibly in response to claims by the primarily Saudi-backed jihadist group Jaysh al-Islam that the Syrian Army had carried out a chemical weapons attack on civilians. It was the all too familiar pattern which went back to 2013: “rebels” on the brink of being wiped out make a last ditch unverified claim in order to draw Western military support, then the mainstream media runs with it because it already fits the narrative of the “monster” Assad, and then right away it’s American and allied “bombs away” with no questions asked.
But Maté now documents an avalanche of leaks and internal dissent within the global chemical weapons watchdog group OPCW to say the US once again attacked a Middle East country based on lies (and just like in neighboring Iraq, don’t forget that some 1,000 or more American troops occupy the oil-rich northeast section of Syria).
My bad: Western state-funded Bellingcat “gathered evidence… long before the OPCW.”
Ignore then those “truthers/and or propagandists” who for some silly reason listen to actual OPCW scientists w/ actual credentials & who actually conducted the OPCW’s investigation in Syria. https://t.co/zjtDShQ2eL
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) July 25, 2020
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Maté’s report finds that “Since May 2019, internal OPCW documents, including a trove published by WikiLeaks, reveal that the Douma investigators’ initial report reached different conclusions than their organization’s published version. They were overruled by senior officials who kept evidence from the public.”
The Nation report outlines leaks’ key revelations as follows:
- Senior OPCW officials reedited the Douma investigators’ initial report to produce a version that sharply deviated from the original. Key facts were removed or misrepresented and conclusions were rewritten to support the allegation that a chlorine gas attack had occurred in Douma. Yet the team’s initial report did not conclude that a chemical attack occurred, and left open the possibility that victims were killed in a “non-chemical related” incident.
- Four experts from a OPCW and NATO-member state conducted a toxicology review at the OPCW team’s request. They concluded that observed symptoms of the civilians in Douma, particularly the rapid onset of excessive frothing, as well as the concentration of victims filmed in the apartment building so close to fresh air, “were inconsistent with exposure to chlorine, and no other obvious candidate chemical causing the symptoms could be identified.”
- Chemical tests of the samples collected in Douma showed that chlorine compounds were, in most cases, detected at what amounted to trace quantities in the parts-per-billion range. Yet this finding was not disclosed publicly. Furthermore, it later emerged that the chemicals themselves did not stand out as unique: According to the author of the initial report, the OPCW’s top expert in chemical weapons chemistry, they could have resulted from contact with household products such as bleach or come from chlorinated water or wood preservatives.
- The author of the initial report protested the revisions in an e-mail expressing his “gravest concern.” The altered version “misrepresents the facts,” he wrote, thereby “undermining its credibility.”
- Following the e-mail of protest over the manipulation of the team’s findings, the OPCW published a watered-down interim report in July 2018. Around that time, OPCW executives decreed that the probe would be handled by a so-called “core team,” which excluded all of the Douma investigators who had traveled to Syria, except for one paramedic. It was this core team—not the inspectors who had been deployed to Douma and signed off on the original document—that produced the final report of March 2019.
- After the e-mail of protest, and just days before the interim report was published on July 6, a US government delegation met with members of the investigation team to try to convince them that the Syrian government had committed a chemical attack with chlorine. According to veteran reporter Jonathan Steele, who interviewed one of the whistle-blowers, the Douma team saw the meeting as “unacceptable pressure and a violation of the OPCW’s declared principles of independence and impartiality.” Interference by state parties is explicitly prohibited under the Chemical Weapons Convention.
- The inference drawn from the OPCW’s final report—widely disseminated, including by the Trump administration—was that gas cylinders found in Douma likely came from Syrian military aircraft. An unpublished engineering study reached the opposite conclusion. The study evaluated competing hypotheses: Either the cylinders were dropped from the sky or they were manually placed. There is “a higher probability,” it concluded, “that both cylinders were manually placed…rather than being delivered from aircraft.” At “Location 4,” where a cylinder was found on a bed, the study determined that the cylinder was too large to have penetrated the hole in the roof above; at the other site, “Location 2,” the observed damage to the cylinder and to the roof it allegedly penetrated were incompatible with an aircraft bombing. Ballistics experts also said it was more likely that the crater had been made by an explosion, probably from an artillery round, a rocket, or a mortar. With both cylinders, the study concluded, “the alternative hypothesis”—that the cylinders were manually placed and that the craters were caused by other means—”produced the only plausible explanation for observations at the scene.”
Of course, the media is seeking for these revelations to be memory-holed right way.
New WikiLeaks Bombshell: 20 Inspectors Dissent From Syria Chemical Attack Narrative https://t.co/vrQaBZIT7T
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 15, 2019
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They are being conveniently ignored, and not just ignored, but covered up.
* * *
Read the full in-depth investigative report at The Nation.
- How A Society Unravels
How A Society Unravels
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/27/2020 – 22:45Submitted by Ritesh Jain via World Out Of Whack
In an interview with Edward Griffith in 1984, former KGB operative Yuri Bezmenov outlined the playbook of the Soviet Union and the staged manner in which a communist apparatus takes over a country.
The ideal recruit for the KGB were rich filmmakers, academicians and cynically egocentric people. These people held the most potential what is required to destabilize a country are narcissistic, greedy and morally devoid people. He cites that KGB recruited Professors and civil right defenders to subvert and destabilize the country. He repeats again when these useful idiots serve their purpose they are to be killed or exiled. His disaffection with the KGB began after he understood what was to happen to the Pro Soviet Indian Journalists, but when he tried to get the message across, they did not believe him.
The ultimate objective of KGB was Ideological subversion which was supposed to be carried out by changing perception of reality, and not be bothered by what is true or false. But rather be driven by self-interest.
He lists down four phases as to how it happens:
Phase 1 – Demoralization
This is a process which can take about 15-30 years to perform . During this stage, the moral fibre and integrity of the country is put into question, thereby creating doubt in the minds of the people. To do so, manipulation of the media and academia is required to influence young people. As the younger generation embraces new values, such as Marxism and Leninism in newer and trendy Garbs , the older generation slowly loses control simply through attrition.
Phase 2 – Destabilization
The intent is to create a massive government permeating society and becoming intrusive in the lives of its citizens. This can take from two to five years to perform, again with the active support of academia pushing youth in this direction. Here, entitlements and benefits are promised to the populace to encourage their support. Basically, they are bribing the people to accept their programs.
Phase 3 – Crisis
This is a major step lasting up to six weeks and involves a revolutionary change of power. This is where an alarming event upsets and divides the country thereby creating panic among the citizens.
Phase 4 – Normalization
The final stage is where the populace finally acquiesces and begins to assimilate communism. This can take up to two decades to complete.
The List of Rules he cites for Revolution are:
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Corrupt the young, get them interested in sex, take them away from religion. Make them superficial and snobbish in their understanding of the world.
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Divide the people into hostile groups by constantly harping on controversial issues of less importance to create and compound a divide.
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Destroy people’s faith in their national leaders by holding the latter up for contempt and ridicule.
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Always preach democracy, but seize power as fast and as ruthlessly as possible.
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Encourage government extravagances, destroy its credit system, which will produce years of inflation with rising prices and general discontent.
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Incite unnecessary strikes in vital industries, encourage civil disorders and foster a lenient and soft attitude on the part of the government towards such disorders.
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Breakdown the old moral virtues of honesty, sobriety, self-restraint, faith.
The Main point he makes it all starts by the act of trying to legislate equality rather than understanding the fundamental that not all are born equal. Once this process starts there has to be a third party who has to legislate this equality and that usually is the government. Once you create an atmosphere of information where people who are deemed unequal have to be made equal by law is where you lay the foundation of discontent. These negative feedback loops are taken advantage of by politicians and this ultimately leads to critical mass of discontent. Once a society is this fragile it takes one catalyst to spark the flame which starts engulfing the system.
This video was shot in 1984 but you can correlate to whats happening in western society today. The prophetic words about the moral decay of the society are so evident in US where riots have broken out on street, the educated majority has gone silent and hooligans getting free handouts have taken over. The free money is the opium of the people and Leninist Marxist ideology will be having the last laugh.
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- ESPN Has Nearly $1 Billion In Ad Revenue Hanging In The Balance Of College Football Season
ESPN Has Nearly $1 Billion In Ad Revenue Hanging In The Balance Of College Football Season
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/27/2020 – 22:25Disney’s ESPN has almost $1 billion in ads hinging on whether or not college football season is going to happen this year. The only question now is whether or not the season is going to take place.
ESPN owns two conference networks and has deals to televise every major bowl game. The network also owns many postseason games and commercial rights like sponsorships and naming rights, according to Sportico. ESPN’s networks televised 282 games and sold $792.5 million in ads – more than double the $314.8 million that the network’s NFL package generated. And that doesn’t even count the network’s digital service, ESPN+.
In other words, college football is the network’s major business. And the disruption of the season – which looks more and more to be a foregone conclusion – could create a very real top line problem for the network. The Big Ten and Pac 12 have already canceled some early season games and the NCAA’s board of governors will continue meeting to determine the fate of the rest of the season.
Ads that ran during bowl games last year averaged about $30,000 for a 30 second spot. For the semifinal and national title game, those numbers rose to $560,000 and $1 million. The national title game last year drew in 27.3 million viewers.
Dan Cohen, who leads Octagon’s media rights consulting division, said: “ESPN’s business in college sports, and primarily college football, is an actual ecosystem. And a lot of their business is organic, as opposed to inorganic. Buying rights to Major League Baseball, then selling ads and securing affiliate deals off that content is inorganic, it’s a transactional piece of business. When you own bowl games, and when you own networks, that becomes a business unit in and of itself.”
The network does have some security, however, due to its long-term sponsorship deals with names like Allstate and Dr. Pepper. Smaller advertisers, however, could come calling for refunds. The network’s affiliate fees will also help offset some of the turmoil. Sportico writes:
“Each month, the network receives $9.06 for every household that subscribes to its linear TV feed, a premium rate—the industry average is around 40¢ per sub per month—that this year will pump some $8.8 billion into ESPN’s coffers. That’s just for keeping its signal turned on, and the loss of marquee programming won’t put ESPN in default with the operators.”
One media consultant commented: “The cable guys may be justified in not wanting to pay those fees [if there’s no football]. But they don’t have much recourse one way or the other. The force majeure language in most affiliate contracts says the programmer has up to a year to deliver the goods.”
The report says it is “unclear” how far along the network is in selling ads for the upcoming season.
Cohen concluded by noting that ESPN does have some leverage from having all of its eggs in one basket:
“From an economic perspective, you take a bigger hit because you have a bigger piece of the pie, but it also might be easier to manage because you have more control and more flexibility. Let’s say it’s a bowl game that ESPN owns. If they need to create new sponsorship assets that are digital or virtual in nature, they don’t need to work with another entity to figure that out. If they want to re-price or discount ad rates or entitlements, they can make that decision themselves; they don’t need to work with another broadcaster or property owner.”
- One Professor's Reaction To Loyola Students Petitioning To Fire Him
One Professor’s Reaction To Loyola Students Petitioning To Fire Him
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/27/2020 – 22:05Submitted by Walter E. Block, Ph.D., Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics at Loyola University in New Orleans
My Reaction to Loyola Students Petitioning to Fire Me
I was horrified to learn that a large group of Loyola students wished me to be fired from my tenured position as Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics. They set up a petition to this effect claiming I was a racist, a sexist and an anti-disablist.
“Morality” is too loose a term to condemn slavery. It is akin to giving a surgeon a bludgeon instead of a scalpel. It is immoral to gossip, to disrespect your parents, to tell white lies, to be lazy, to drink too much, etc. This does not even begin to get to the core of why slavery is an egregious evil. It is akin to damning with faint praise, saying that Martin Luther King, Adolf Hitler, John F. Kennedy, were “pretty good” public speakers, only in the opposite direction. Slavery is an abomination because it violates rights; this “curious institution” is incompatible with the non-aggression principle of libertarianism; yet it also violates morality, but that is a relative minor transgression. Imagine wanting me to be fired because I oppose slavery for this “wrong” reason.
A racist is someone who hates and reviles the targeted race (black people in this case), wishes them ill, does everything he can to undermine them, impoverish them, initiate violence against them. I have a long paper trail, and numerous public speeches, which attests to the very opposite. For example, I favor reparations for slavery!
Other attempts of mine to improve the lot of African-Americans is to legalize all victimless crimes, particularly for addictive drugs, since a lot of black on black murder emanates from this source (this would also free a disproportionate number of young black males now improperly imprisoned); to abolish our pernicious welfare system, which has broken up the black family (something slavery was unable to do), and to eliminate the minimum wage law, which is responsible for a disproportionate unemployment rate particularly for, again, young black males.
What about my support for paying men more than women? Sexism was another charge made against me by these students. This too, sounds exquisitely offensive to modern ears. However, it is black letter economic law that wages tend to equal marginal revenue product, or, productivity for short. Winfrey, Gates and Milken earn so much money because they raise the profit levels of their employers by gargantuan amounts. Ordinary doctors, lawyers, college professors register middle class salaries since our productivity is more moderate. The pay scales of people who push brooms, are even lower, based, again, on their ability to enhance the bottom line.
A century ago, men on average were paid more than women because most jobs required upper body strength. Physical labor was required to saw down trees, dig holes for building’s foundations, etc., and, on average, men are stronger than women. But nowadays, thanks to mechanization, there are very few jobs to which this applies. Women can operate buzz saws, steam-shovels and bulldozers just as well as men. Why, then, the persistence of a wage gap of some 25%? It is due not to discrimination, but to marital asymmetry. Wives do the lion’s share of household tasks: cooking, cleaning, shopping, child-care, etc. Whenever you do more of any one thing, you tend to do other things less well. Females specialize in jobs in the home, and thus do more poorly than would otherwise be the case in the labor market.
Evidence? First, while there is a rough 25% salary gap between all men and all women, the divergence between the ever marrieds (married, widowed, divorced, separated) is much higher, some 60%. The discrepancy between males and females who have never been touched by the institution of marriage? Zero! Second, if men and women really had equal productivities at work, any pay-gap would engender gigantic profit opportunities for employers to fire males and hire females. But higher profits are not garnered in industries that employ more members of the distaff side.
Happily, I am unlikely to be fired as a result of these efforts of Loyola students. For one thing, I have tenure. For another, their petition has garnered far fewer signatures than one inaugurated in support of me, calling for a raise in my salary. Also, the President and Provost of Loyola University, while not agreeing with my viewpoints on these matters, have come out in favor of ideological diversity and academic freedom.
- Gold Futures Hit $2000 After US Mint Reduces Bullion Coin Supplies
Gold Futures Hit $2000 After US Mint Reduces Bullion Coin Supplies
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/27/2020 – 21:46Gold and Silver futures prices have extended their gains after hours, with the barbarous relic hitting $2000…
…and silver topping $26.
This move came after Bloomberg reported that, according to documents reporters had seen, the U.S. Mint has reduced the volume of gold and silver coins it’s distributing to authorized purchasers as the coronavirus pandemic slows production.
As we previously noted, sales of silver and gold coins had been surging until the pandemic hit and shutdown production.
The Mint’s West Point complex in New York is taking measures to prevent the virus from spreading among its employees, and that will probably slow coin production there for the next 12 to 18 months.
The facility is no longer able to produce gold and silver coins at the same time, forcing it to choose one metal over the other, according to the document, which was presented to companies authorized to buy coins from the Mint last week.
Bloomberg reports that a spokesman for the Mint didn’t immediately have comment.
“The pandemic created a whole new set of challenges for us to manage,” the Mint said in the document.
“We believe that this environment is going to continue to lead to some degree of reduced capacity as West Point struggles to balance employee safety against market demand.”
Ahead of this unexpected interruption in supply, the premium for physical gold was already high …
…and we suspect this will send it soaring back near those $100 levels seen at the last Mint production halt.
- Putin Hails Russian Navy On Cusp Of Achieving Hypersonic Nuclear Strike Weapons
Putin Hails Russian Navy On Cusp Of Achieving Hypersonic Nuclear Strike Weapons
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/27/2020 – 21:25It’s been a while since Russian President Vladimir Putin touted the country’s experimental hypersonic weapons, especially following last year’s (Aug. 2019) major radiation emitting explosion at a military testing ground in Russia’s far northern Arkhangelsk region, believed to have been a failed hypersonic missile test, which killed multiple scientists and technicians.
But according to new statements of his addressing an annual naval parade in St. Petersburg, the Russian military is far past merely the realm of the “experimental,” but is on the cusp of deploying hypersonic nuclear strike weapons.
Putin with Admiral Nikolai Yevmenov, left), Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy, via TASS. “The widespread deployment of advanced digital technologies that have no equals in the world, including hypersonic strike systems and underwater drones, will give the fleet unique advantages and increased combat capabilities,” Putin said on Sunday, according to Reuters. He claimed that the whole world is “chasing after Russia” in this crucial area of cutting edge defense technology.
The Pentagon, which has its own program which is at an unknown stage of development, has had current and former generals dub missiles flying at hypersonic speeds essentially “indefensible” — though the US program is aimed in part at achieving precisely defensive capability against them.
Reuters describes of the as yet to be deployed (to our knowledge) Russian hypersonic arsenal:
The weapons, some of which have yet to be deployed, include the Poseidon underwater nuclear drone, designed to be carried by submarines, and the Tsirkon (Zircon) hypersonic cruise missile, which can be deployed on surface ships.
The combination of speed, manoeuvrability and altitude of hypersonic missiles, capable of travelling at more than five times the speed of sound, makes them difficult to track and intercept.
Elsewhere the Russian defense ministry was widely cited as a saying its first nuclear submarine capable of launching the Poseidon nuclear drone had entered the testing phase. “Work is being successfully completed to create modern weapons systems for the Navy,” a Kremlin statement said.
Aboard the Raptor patrol boat before the Navy Day parade in Saint Petersburg, via Reuters. However, Western analysts have typically considered such statements to be far out front of actual successful testing. But Russian media has detailed that “The tests of Russia’s ship-based Zircon missile – one of several hypersonic weapons introduced by the country’s military – are successfully nearing completion,” citing the Defense Ministry, which has “confirmed the unique tactical and technical characteristics of this missile, as well as its ability to travel at hypersonic speeds.” The Zircon is said to be capable of reaching Mach 9 at an operational range of 1,000km.
Putin also touted that the navy will receive at least 40 new ships this year, without giving further details on types and sizes.
MiG-31 with hypersonic rocket, via Sputnik The speech comes days after last week the Russian president held a phone call with Trump over New START, which is set to expire next year. Both sides have expressed a strong desire to avoid an arms race, especially involving nuclear arms.
New START, which is the landmark nuclear arms reduction treaty signed by the two superpowers in 1991 and took effect in 1994, specifically is set to expire in February 2021, which would be a mere weeks after the next presidential inauguration.
- Why Marxist Organizations Like BLM Seek To Dismantle The "Western Nuclear Family"
Why Marxist Organizations Like BLM Seek To Dismantle The “Western Nuclear Family”
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/27/2020 – 21:05Authored by Bradley Thomas via The Mises Institute,
One of the most oft-cited and criticized goals of the Black Lives Matter organization is its stated desire to abolish the family as we know it. Specifically, BLM’s official website states:
We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.
This idea isn’t unique to BLM, of course. “Disrupting” the “nuclear family” is a commonly stated goal among Maxist organizations. Given that BLM’s founders have specifically claimed to be “trained Marxists,” we should not be surprised that the organization’s leadership has embraced a Marxian view of the family.
But where does this hostility toward the family originate? Partly, it comes from the theories of Marx and Engels themselves, and their views that an earlier, matriarchal version of the family rejected private property as an organizing principle of society. It was only later that this older tribal model of the family gave way to the modern “patriarchal” family, which promotes and sustains private property.
Clearly, in the Marxian view, this “new” type of family must be opposed, since the destruction of this family model will make it easier to abolish private property as well.
Early Family Units in Tribal Life
Frederick Engels’s 1884 book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State provides a historical perspective of the Marxian view of the development of the modern Western family unit and its relation to property rights. (Engels, of course, was the longtime benefactor of and collaborator with Marx.)
In reconstructing the origins of the family within a Marxian framework, Engels traces back to the “savage” primeval stage of humanity that, according to his research, revealed a condition in which “unrestricted sexual intercourse existed within a tribe, so that every woman belonged to every man, and vice versa.”
Under such conditions, Engels explained, “it is uncertain who is the father of the child, but certain, who is its mother.” Only female lineage could be acknowledged. “[B]eing the only well known parents of younger generations,” Engels explained, women as mothers “received a high tribute of respect and deference, amounting to a complete women’s rule [gynaicocracy].”
Furthermore, Engels wrote, tribes were subdivided into smaller groups called “gentes,” a primitive form of an extended family of sorts.
These gens were consanguineous (i.e., included people descended from the same ancestor) on the mother’s side, within which intermarrying was strictly forbidden. “The men of certain ‘gens,’ therefore, could choose their wives within the tribe, and did so as a rule, but had to choose them outside of their ‘gens,’” Engels explained. And “marriage” at this stage was a “communal” affair, meaning that multiple partnerships between men and women was closer to the rule than the exception.
Because mothers were the only parents who could be determined with certainty, and the smaller gentes were arranged around the mother’s relatives, early family units were very maternal in nature and maternal law regarding rights and duties for childrearing and inheritance were the custom.
Transition to the “Pairing Family”
This was the state of affairs for thousands of years, according to Engels. Over time, however, there emerged what Engels referred to as the “pairing family,” in which “A man had his principal wife…among many women, and he was to her the principal husband among others.” This was in no small part due to the “gentes” within tribes developing more and more classes of relatives not allowed to marry one another. Due to these increasing restrictions, group marriage became increasingly impossible and ever more replaced by the pairing family structure.
Under this structure, however, the role of mothers was still dominant. Quoting Arthur Wright, a missionary among the Seneca Iroquois tribe, Engels notes, “The female part generally ruled the house….The women were the dominating power in the clans [gentes] and everywhere else.”
The fact that women all belonged to the same gens, while husbands came from separate gentes “was the cause and foundation of the general and widespread supremacy of women in primeval times,” Engels wrote.
“In the ancient communistic household comprising many married couples and their children, the administration of the household entrusted to women was just as much a public function, a socially necessary industry, as the procuring of food by men,” he added.
As society evolved, as Engels described it, from “savagery” to “barbarism,” an important evolution was man’s development of weapons and knowledge that enabled them to better domesticate and breed animals.
Cattle and livestock became a source of wealth, a store of milk and meat. “But who was the owner of this new wealth?” asked Engels. “Doubtless it was originally the gens,” he answered, referring to a collective, or group ownership over the sources of wealth. “However, private ownership of flocks must have had an early beginning.”
“Procuring the means of existence had always been the man’s business. The tools of production were manufactured and owned by him. The herds were the new tools of production, and their taming and tending was his work. Hence he owned the cattle and the commodities and slaves obtained in exchange for them,” Engels explained. This transition marked an early passage from “collective” property to “private” ownership over property—particularly property in productive resources.
Such a transformation, Engels noted, “brought about a revolution in the family.”
Part of that revolution involved a shift in the power dynamics of the household.
“All the surplus now resulting from production fell to the share of the man. The woman shared in its fruition, but she could not claim its ownership,” wrote Engels.
The domestic status of the woman in the house, which had previously involved control and distribution of the means of sustenance, had been reversed.
“Man’s advent to practical supremacy in the household marked the removal to his universal supremacy,” and further ushered in “the gradual transition from the pairing family to the monogamic family” (what we would consider the nuclear family).
With the superior status acquired, Engels wrote, men were able to overthrow the maternal right to inheritance, a move he described as “the historic defeat of the female sex.”
The family unit’s transition to a male-centered patriarchy was complete, according to Engels. Much of the blame for this can be attributed to the emergence of private property and men’s claim over it.
How to Overcome the Patriarchy?
In the Marxian view, therefore, the modern nuclear family runs counter to the ancient “communistic” household Engels had earlier described. It is patriarchal and centered on private property.
“In the great majority of cases the man has to earn a living and to support his family, at least among the possessing classes. He thereby obtains a superior position that has no need of any legal special privilege. In the family, he is the bourgeois, the woman represents the proletariat.” The family unit, rather than the collective tribe, had become the “industrial unit of society.”
The overthrow of this patriarchic dominance can only come, according to Engels, by abolishing private property in the means of production—which he and those steeped in Marxist ideology blame for the patriarchy.
“The impending [communist] revolution will reduce this whole care of inheritance to a minimum by changing at least the overwhelming part of permanent and inheritable wealth – the means of production – into social property,” he concluded.
What would this new social arrangement look like, according to Engels?
The care and education of children becomes a public matter. Society cares equally well for all children, legal or illegal. This removes the care about the “consequences” which now forms the essential social factor – moral and economic – hindering a girl to surrender unconditionally to the beloved man.
In this we see early echoes of the modern left’s current refrain attacking “patriarchy” and the nuclear family as essentially capitalist and private property–based institutions.
In this, BLM is no different from other Marxist groups. The organization’s goals extend far beyond police abuse and police brutality. The ultimate goal is the abolition of a society based upon private property in the means of production.
- Mind-Bending Medicine: An Overview Of Psychedelic Substances
Mind-Bending Medicine: An Overview Of Psychedelic Substances
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/27/2020 – 20:45Fueled by a slew of new research, psychedelics may hold the key to treating a multitude of debilitating disorders such as addiction, PTSD, and depression.
But as an industry that has laid dormant for decades, Visual Capitalist’s Katie Jones explains below that it will need to shed its negative connotations that have limited its potential and undermined new discoveries for so long.
The infographic below showcases data from The Report on Psychedelics which explains seven of the most common psychedelic substances and examines the many mind-bending ways they could radically transform mental health as we know it.
Resurrecting a Stigmatized Industry
Although evidence of humans using psychedelics as medicine dates back thousands of years, it was not until the 1940s that psychiatrists became advocates of their therapeutic potential.
Unfortunately, recreational psychedelics became a symbol of the 1960’s counterculture movement, which contaminated the industry’s reputation. The U.S. responded by introducing the Controlled Substances Analogue Enforcement Act, deeming these drugs illegal and stymying research studies in the process.
Following some new discoveries in the early ‘90s however, psychedelics moved from the hands of festival-goers back to the labs of scientists. Since then, certain substances such as psilocybin have been granted breakthrough therapy status for treating depression by the U.S. FDA.
With these recent developments, new companies and investment opportunities are beginning to emerge in the psychedelics space. But these complex drugs are not always easy to understand—so let’s dive in.
What are Psychedelics?
Psychedelics are psychoactive substances that can alter perception, mood, and cognitive processes. There are two broad classifications of psychedelics that relate to chemical structure.
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Entheogenic Plants: Plants or fungi that produce chemical substances that can cause hallucinations
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Synthetic Drugs: Drugs created in laboratory setting to mimic the effects of entheogenic plants
Here are seven of the most common psychedelic substances explained:
With sound scientific evidence and standards coming into place, it’s no surprise that investors—from bestselling author Tim Ferris to several established cannabis companies—are supporting the born-again industry.
Given the industry’s foothold in recreational use, a therapeutic comeback may be a tough pill for many to swallow. However, it is possible that we are on the precipice of not only a psychedelic revolution but more importantly, a mental health one.
“Psychedelics, used responsibly and with proper caution, would be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology and medicine or the telescope is for astronomy.”
– Stanislav Grot
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- Portland: The Pentagon Should Step-Up Or Pipe-Down
Portland: The Pentagon Should Step-Up Or Pipe-Down
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/27/2020 – 20:25Authored by James Durso, op-ed via The Hill,
Some military figures apparently have qualms about the U.S. Border Patrol, a federal law enforcement agency, wearing “their” uniforms in the defense of the federal courthouse in Portland, Ore.
After President Donald Trump’s highly publicized walk from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church, two senior officials — the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – were scandalized to find they were in the vicinity of politics.
The secretary and the chairman retreated across the Potomac faster than General Robert E. Lee after the Battle of Antietam. Secretary Mark Esper distanced himself from the photo-op and the president’s suggestion the military be used to restore order under the authority of the Insurrection Act. The Chairman, Gen. Mark Milley, also apologized, and said he hoped to learn from the situation, as he and the secretary were apparently alarmed that the American people may have glimpsed a camouflage military uniform in the nation’s capital even as rioters were poised to attack federal buildings.
Since then, the Border Patrol deployed its Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC), similar to a SWAT team, to protect the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in Portland, Ore., from rioters. The BORTAC officers wear a camouflage uniform, known as Operational Camouflage Pattern, similar to that worn by the U.S. armed forces.
The Border Patrol officers sallied from the courthouse with non-lethal weapons – tear gas, pepperballs, and “impact weapons” (rubber bullets) – to repel and apprehend rioters who tried to set fire to the courthouse. Five of the officers were injured and three may have suffered permanent eye injury from lasers wielded by the rioters.
No sooner had the (tear gas) clouds parted than we were subjected to a lot of “concerns” and furrowing of brow by the Secretary of Defense and military figures worried that federal officers trying to keep a courthouse from being burned down might be confused with their troops.
The military should be so lucky.
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), a former U.S. Marine, said the Border Patrol officers “…obviously have no understanding of our military’s most basic values — to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Tell it to the blinded officers.
Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling criticized the wearing of camouflage by the Border Patrol and proudly recounted that when he was leading the effort to rebuild Iraq’s police force, he equipped them in uniforms dissimilar to those worn by Iraq’s military. The Iraqi Police definitely looked like regular cops, but that didn’t stop it from being infiltrated by militia groups and earning a well-deserved reputation for corruption and brutality.
Retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré decried the Border Patrol for wearing “the cloth of our nation” and followed up with “Get the hell out of our uniforms.
Really, “the cloth of our nation?”
Starting in 2001, the military services cycled through camouflage patters with monotonous regularity until Congress told them to stop. The most notorious was the Universal Camouflage Pattern which cost $5 billion and failed to conceal soldiers. But it was good news for Army surplus stores everywhere.
And these critics don’t understand the Border Patrol officers typically operate in the chaparral environment on the Southwest border where camouflage is a must. BORTAC has also deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan — these guys aren’t “Officer Friendly” coaching police athletic league baseball.
Ironically, the military’s disquiet with the Border Patrol may reflect its uneasiness with its own operations on the Southwest border in support of civil agencies attempting to stem narcotics, human trafficking and illegal immigration. The U.S. military feels Southwest border operations pose an “unacceptable risk” to combat readiness, according to then U.S. Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Robert Neller. Thus, America may have the only military that thinks defending the border is someone else’s job.
Or maybe they’re feeling competitive – because the Border Patrol unit that also deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan is doing work the military doesn’t want to do on the Southwest border and is now doing work it doesn’t want to do in Portland.
The Pentagon is the beneficiary of a DOD budget of $740 billion, plus about $20 billion in Department of Energy funds for nuclear weapons, a big chunk of the intelligence community budget of about $80 billion, and $250 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs. The military is into the American taxpayer for over a trillion dollars a year, so it would be great if it could bestir itself, worry less about another agency’s fashion choices, and voice some support for those defending a federal courthouse — a symbol of equal justice under law.
- Companies In The Super-Saturated Chinese EV Market Are Going Public To Avoid Going Bankrupt
Companies In The Super-Saturated Chinese EV Market Are Going Public To Avoid Going Bankrupt
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/27/2020 – 20:05The competition in the EV market – especially in China – is starting to become super-saturated. But rather than actually allow the market to consolidate and eliminate some of the smaller players, Chinese EV companies are taking another route to stave off going under: going public.
After all, what better way to put a company that’s not meant to survive on life support than to sell shares of it to a public that doesn’t know how to read financial statements?
Hozon New Energy Automobile is the latest name to launch an IPO, Bloomberg points out in a recent article, saying it wants to list in Shanghai next year. WM Motor Technology Co. is also considering a listing, potentially this year. They will join names like Nio, Tesla and Li Auto in competing in the world’s largest auto market.
Hozon is trying to capitalize on lower priced vehicles, offering an electric SUV for less than $10,000. The company has already shipped more than 16,000 vehicles. WM Motor is seeking a valuation of about $4.3 billion and is backed by names like Baidu and Tencent. Li Auto is seeking an IPO in the U.S. that could raise up to $1 billion.
And it has been the public market performance of names like Tesla and Nio that has paved the way for smaller names to go public. Both stocks have more than tripled this year.
Robert Cowell, an analyst at Shanghai-based private-equity firm 86Research Ltd. told Bloomberg: “The strength in Tesla and NIO shares is creating a window for new EV startups to list. The current conditions provide an attractive opportunity to raise funds, which can help some of these smaller startups sustain the investments necessary to compete effectively.”
This has given hope to the dozen or so EV names that have been able to raise money in China. They have emerged from a group of nearly 100 EV startups, all helped along by the government’s promise of subsidies for the industry. But its likely that out of the dozen that will make it to the public markets, not even all of those candidates will be successful.
Charley Xu, managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group in Shanghai concluded: “This industry by nature requires huge investment in product development and manufacturing. Financing from the public market can further boost its development.”
- This Is Bigger Than COVID But Few People Are Paying Attention
This Is Bigger Than COVID But Few People Are Paying Attention
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/27/2020 – 19:45Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
Most people realize that 2020 has thrust two game-changing trends upon us that will change the world for years to come.
The first is Covid.
In less than six months, this virus has created extreme global hysteria and economic devastation.
Countless businesses have gone bust or are teetering on the edge. Tens of millions of jobs have been lost.
Government debt around the world has exploded higher. And their heavy-handed abuse of power has been astonishing… often incomprehensible.
Politicians and public health officials have suspended many of our most fundamental freedoms, threatened to come into our homes and take our family members away, and even banished us from our own private properties.
We’ve also seen a breakdown in basic social conventions.
Family and friends have stopped gathering together in person out of fear that someone may be a carrier. Weddings and funerals are virtual. And a simple handshake is practically considered an act of biological terrorism.
And, just like 9/11 nearly two decades ago, many effects of Covid will never return to ‘normal’.
Then there’s the social justice movement… which tore onto the world stage two months ago with a desire to make important cultural changes.
At its core, the movement is virtuous. After all, it’s supposed to be about freedom.
But it has quickly become divisive, menacing, and pointlessly violent.
Everything is offensive. Intellectual dissent must be immediately squashed. People lose their jobs, receive death threats, or are censored, merely for expressing completely valid (and even supportive) opinions.
And some of the largest corporations in the world have all submitted to the Twitter mob, like Nazi collaborators in France who began goose-stepping with the Wehrmacht the moment Hitler took Paris.
History is being rewritten. Vocabulary is being replaced. And any civil discourse results in persecution.
Just like lingering Covid effects, this social turmoil will also be with us for years. Don’t fool yourself into believing it’s some some flash in the pan that will be over in a few weeks.
But what I wanted to tell you today is that there is a THIRD, major trend brewing right now. And it could prove to be even bigger than Covid, bigger than the social justice movement.
It’s not one that evokes the same emotion. So you won’t see too many people marching in the streets or cowering in fear in their homes. There’s no hysteria.
This third major trend is rational. And that’s why it’s largely been ignored. But its impact could be far bigger and longer lasting.
I’m talking about conflict with China.
Over the past several months we’ve witnessed a minor trade dispute between the United States and China escalating into a major diplomatic conflict, and now, into full-blow Cold War.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo left no doubt about this when he essentially declared cold war against China’s communist party in a speech late last week:
“If we bend the knee now, our children’s children may be at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party, whose actions are the primary challenge today in the free world.
General Secretary Xi is not destined to tyrannize inside and outside of China forever, unless we allow it.
Richard Nixon was right when he wrote in 1967 that ‘the world cannot be safe until China changes.’Now it’s up to us to heed his words.
Today the danger is clear. And today the awakening is happening.
Today the free world must respond. We can never go back to the past.”
It’s pretty incredible how China has already managed to get most of the world to bend to its will.
There are so many examples of this; major US airlines like Delta and American, have scrubbed references to “Taiwan” on their websites so as not to offend the Chinese communist party.
Hollywood, despite constantly thrusting its woke social justice politics in everyone’s faces, refuses to utter the slightest criticism of China, simply so they can squeeze out more box office revenue there.
And the National Basketball Association squashed an executive for Tweeting support to Hong Kong protesters last year.
Even the league’s biggest and most outspoken star, Lebron James, meekishly told reporters that China has “a complicated issue with racial, socioeconomic and geopolitical layers” and that he saw “little upside in speaking up” against the Chinese communist party.
Comparing sports team owners to ‘slave owners’ is perfectly fine. But don’t say anything bad about China!
In addition to Pompeo’s speeech, the US-China conflict escalated last week when the US government ordered the Chinese to close its consulate in Houston, Texas.
The Chinese government retaliated by closing a US consulate in China.
This is after months of sanctions, asset seizures, tariffs, arrests, expelling of foreign journalists, and plenty of tension about the Coronavirus.
I know there’s a lot of fear that an actual shooting war will break out between the US and China. And that is a possibility.
I’m probably biased as a West Point graduate, but I’m convinced that the US Marine Corps and Army Rangers are the most proficient fighting forces in the world.
But the reality is that China has a bigger army. It’s better equipped with newer, better technology. Its tanks are superior, and it has more of them.
China has also been investing heavily in its Navy and Air Force; it already has more ships than the US Navy, and it has also rolled out a fifth-generation fighter jet, the J-20, to compete head-to-head against the US military’s F-22 and F-35.
But that’s just conventional warfare. The next war will be highly unconventional… and the Chinese are dominant in “system destruction warfare”.
They could take down the US power grid, hack multiple defense and intelligence networks, and remotely disrupt key US command and control elements, before a single shot was fired.
This is not my assessment; the Pentagon has been wargaming conflict between the US and China for years. And in the words of one researcher who has participated in these scenarios, the US “gets its ass handed to it.”
Fortunately, a shooting war is unlikely. Why would China want to invade the US and deal with 400 million guns in the hands of the civilian population?
Why would the US want to invade China and deal with another Vietnam war?
War doesn’t benefit either nation, and on that basis it’s possible… but not probable.
What is likely is a total reset in the global financial system.
The current “Bretton Woods” financial system in which the US economy and US dollar are at the center of the global economy is decades old.
The US has derived extraordinary wealth and prosperity from this system for years.
Bretton Woods is the reason why the US national debt can be nearly $27 trillion (over 100% of GDP) without the dollar collapsing in value.
It’s the reason why the Federal Reserve can conjure trillions of dollars out of thin air and keep interest rates at 0% for years, but still be taken seriously.
Losing this advantage would be nothing short of catastrophic for the US economy.
And continued conflict with China is the one thing that is practically guaranteed to make it happen.
That’s why this trend– conflict with China– could be the biggest thing happening right now.
It’s not as scary as Covid, it’s not as emotional as social justice… but the effects may be permanently devastating.
On another note… We think gold could DOUBLE and silver could increase by up to 5 TIMES in the next few years. That’s why we published a new, 50-page long Ultimate Guide on Gold & Silver that you can download here.
- Turkish Lira Goes Berserk As Central Bank Briefly Loses Grip On Capital Controls
Turkish Lira Goes Berserk As Central Bank Briefly Loses Grip On Capital Controls
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/27/2020 – 19:25Some time in mid-June, Turkey’s president Erdogan and the central bank which he now de facto controls, decided to do to the Turkish lira what the Fed has done to the bond market, and nationalized it the result being an unprecedented flatlining in the country’s troubled currency which had been collapsing in the months prior and only the government’s ruthless intervention managed to halt the slow-mo collapse.
As shown in the chart below, for the past month the USDTRY was effectively pegged to a level of 6.85, ending the currency’s precipitous decline.
However today, just after 1pm ET, the government and central bank finally lost control of the lira their multiple capital controls failing to protect the currency from the forces of the free market, and the lira crashed 2% against the dollar in the space of minutes – posting its biggest intraday drop since October 7 as the USDTRY spiekd as high as 6.9835 – before the central bank finally regained control, and the currency quickly rallied back to recover most of its losses amid local limits on credit lines and liquidity.
The lira briefly also touched an all-time low the euro, falling as much as 3% to 8.2178 at 1:14 p.m. ET before retreating to trade at 8.0791
“A few theories could be the way domestic banks manage their FX exposures,” Wells Fargo FX strategist Brendan McKenna told Bloomberg. “Turkish banks have all but placed capital controls in place and any time there are some adjustments to regulations they can cause some swings in the lira.”
By “some adjustments”, he probably means that any time something unexpected happens and the capital controls fail to keep the currency pegged to its imaginary value, all hell breaks loose as it briefly did earlier today.
While Turkey has generally kept a very low profile in recent months, suffering from a substantial slowdown in foreign investment hitting its bond market and capital accounts, it has been hit by an escalating geopolitical conflict with Greece; as we reported over the weekend, tensions flared up over the weekend in the Mediterranean region after the government in Ankara said it was sending a ship to carry out a drilling survey in waters contested by Turkey and Greece.
- 10 Big Fat Lies You're Being Told About The Portland Riots
10 Big Fat Lies You’re Being Told About The Portland Riots
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/27/2020 – 19:05Authored by Victoria Taft via PJMedia.com,
Democrats have fully pivoted on the nightly Portland riots. They’ve gone all-in on blaming the riots on President Trump thus allying themselves with the antifa and Black Lives Matter anarchist and communist mobs. Instead of black bloc balaclavas or masks, the politicians have donned the cloak of civil libertarianism. In doing so, they make a mockery of it.
Democrats, so far as I can find, have never denounced the violent mobs, though New York Governor Andrew Cuomo once wagged a finger at George Floyd rioters while simultaneously explaining that it wasn’t really their fault because “income inequality” led to violence. Indeed, the only remonstrance issued was over people burning down black-owned businesses – their “own house” as he put it, because burning your own stuff “never makes sense.” As denunciations go, it was a rambling nothing-burger. Atlanta’s mayor voiced similar disgust with the arsonists and looters.
In fact, mayors, governors, and prosecutors have fallen all over themselves to support the violent mobs in Seattle, New York, St. Louis, Washington, D.C., and, of course, Portland, often conflating the “mostly peaceful” protesters upset with the killing of George Floyd – remember him? – with the ones looting Louis Vuitton, tearing down statues of George Washington, and trying to burn down federal buildings.
Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan ceded a section of the fancy Capitol Hill neighborhood to the mob. She handed over a police precinct to the mob. Two murders, gunshot wounds, assaults, and rapes took place at her pet mob’s little “summer of love” squat. She’s never apologized.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey gave over a police precinct to the mob. Police officers inside thought they’d die that night and if they’d stayed they would have. When rioters weren’t boosting free stuff from the Target, looters and rioters were spectating the conflagration they’d started at the precinct with a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. The mayor later asked President Trump for money to help rebuild it. Trump said hell no.
But this is an election year and time is short. The mobs are deployed to cause chaos and misdirection, as they were in Portland and elsewhere in the months leading up and after the 2016 presidential election. They are cracking heads and cold-cocking Trump rally-goers who dare bring a contra-narrative to one of their riots.
Far from denouncing the violent and destructive nightly arsons and assaults, Democrats embrace the riots to denounce President Trump. They point to the mobs of concerned citizens who have been impelled, catapulted from their spot at the tattoo parlor to join the mob in the streets because how-dare-Trump-send-police-to-defend-a-federal-building that the left is obsessed with bringing down.
It’s a real-time exercise in psy-ops. It’s gaslighting writ large. But they believe you’re dumb enough to believe it.
Instead, follow along on these ten big lies the Left wants you to believe about the Portland riots and learn something.
Lie 1: The Riots Are Committed by Mostly Peaceful Protesters
Everyone knows the riots are a disgraceful dumpster fire of venom and vinegar with green lasers and IEDs thrown at cops to give them that special something. Those of us covering the Portland Professional Protester™ scene for years have seen most of this behavior before.
The fire rises pic.twitter.com/puQfv48MNm
— Sergio Olmos (@MrOlmos) July 23, 2020
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Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler allowed the riots to go on in a section of downtown for six weeks before the Trump administration came in to protect its own buildings and roll up the bad guys attacking them.
Acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Ken Cuccinelli, says bringing weapons, gas masks and shields are “preparations for violence. Peaceful protester? I don’t think so.”
Here is a shield and a couple of gas masks from a rioter arrested in Portland. Not a sign with a slogan that someone expressing their first amendment rights might carry, but preparations for violence. Peaceful protester? I don’t think so. pic.twitter.com/0Re1V129ge
— Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli (@HomelandKen) July 23, 2020
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Wheeler’s strategy, if you can call it that, of letting the rioters riot and ruin part of downtown, leaves Oregonians feeling unsafe, police outraged, and the rule of law in tatters. Now Wheeler says Trump’s defense of the federal buildings is somehow breaking the law. The entire Leftist monoculture has coalesced around this absurd assertion.
So certain is Wheeler that the rioters should be viewed as misunderstood arsonists and predators that the mayor/police commissioner took an armed five-person plainclothes police detail with him on his “listening session” photo op to show everyone how safe it was during a Portland antifa and Black Lives Matter street riot.
Over the weekend, there were multiple shootings and stabbings at these “mostly peaceful” protests, or, as the news media likes to dub them, “rowdy rioters.”
Wheeler may be a lot of things, but heroic isn’t one. He took a team of men with guns to protect him from the rowdy rioters.
Lie 2: Tear-Gassed Mayor Says It Was a Total Surprise
On his “listening” session at the riots last Wednesday night, Mayor Ted Wheeler stood at the fence line protecting the federal courthouse, which he’s now trying to remove because it’s in the way of a bike lane (side note: there’s only one group of people more beloved than antifa in Portland and that’s bicyclists).
As he stood there staring intently at the IED-pocked, scorched, and graffitied building, there was an “unprovoked” gassing of the protesters. Wheeler was overcome by the fumes, his COVID-19 mask not being enough to keep out the smell. He later pronounced that the feds had no provocation for gassing the crowds—that he had seen nothing which could possibly, remotely, ever, ever cause cops to shoot tear gas canisters.
As protest-watcher Andy Ngo pointed out, “the building had been set on fire and rioters were throwing explosives.”
.@tedwheeler says, “I saw nothing that provoked this response” when asked about his thoughts on federal law enforcement deploying tear gas.
The building had been set on fire and rioters were throwing explosives. #PortlandRiots pic.twitter.com/M21iOcDfLa
— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) July 23, 2020
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It turns out that the mayor missed a few things—such as the bags of burning garbage, IEDs, assorted other fireworks, and green lasers being shot into the eyes of law enforcement. In fact, this Christian Broadcast Network reporter, who was standing near the mayor, says rioters were given several warnings to get out or they’d be pushed back with crowd-control devices – tear gas. The mayor knew this. The reporter from CBN called the mayor a “liar” for alleging that the federal police response was unprovoked. He thinks Wheeler did it for a photo op.
Lie 3: ‘Moms’ Bravely Leave Children’s Sides to Attend Riots
After Democrats issued the new talking points that federal cops were “Trump’s secret police,” women, some of them known antifa members, took off their black balaclavas to refashion themselves into “moms.” Somehow these individually acting, concerned mothers all knew to get a yellow shirt, riot helmet, and “hey, hey, ho, ho” chant to drive away those bad federal officers.
Incredible scene in Portland right now. A group of Moms are chanting, “Feds stay clear! Moms are here!” at the federal courthouse.
— Joshua Potash (@JoshuaPotash) July 19, 2020
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Ngo writes of these “moms,” “I recognize a lot of the so-called ‘moms’ as the same antifa women who dressed in black as recent as a couple days ago. They just put on a yellow shirt now for optics. Most of these people aren’t mothers & many don’t even identify as female. #PortlandRiots”
If you hadn’t figured it out yet, it’s Portland’s version of Pallywood. These are merely actors playing a role.
Lie 4: These Dads With Leaf Blowers Showed Up Out of Thin Air!
Then the “dads” showed up at the riots. Of course, to get “dads” to show up with leaf blowers, which you’ll come to learn are dead-useful at a riot, you must put out a casting call – and bring your gas masks and bring your leaf blower.
Dads ASSEMBLE!!! pic.twitter.com/HzUg9zY4y4
— @PDXDadPod (@pdxdadpod) July 24, 2020
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The casting calls for Portland’s Professional Protesters™ have been going on forever. This one’s from Occupy Portland that occurred in 2011-12.
Is #OPDX #OccupyPDX HIRING ACTOR to pretend they’re apologetic captains of industry to rile up their mobs? http://t.co/27n9SiaZ #5vtshow
— Victoria Taft (@VictoriaTaft) March 1, 2012
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A quick look at these grassroots “dads” on Twitter reveals they’ve been around – hold on a second – since July of 2020. Just in time for the riots!
The “Dads,” who look oddly like the rioters from the night before, came with the leaf blowers to blow back at federal officers all the CS or tear gas they’ve deployed, while their “comrades” – yes, they call them “comrades,” lobbed IEDs. Another set of dads were armed with umbrellas to keep the gas out of the faces of the rioters so they could continue to ready their munitions to throw at the federal building.
Protest dad, using a skateboard as a shield pic.twitter.com/dzU5onfsq5
— Sergio Olmos (@MrOlmos) July 23, 2020
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As you may have wondered, yes, Portland has a leaf blower ordinance ( Leaf Blower Regulations – 18.10.035) banning the use of them in the city after 7 p.m. But, Governor Kate Brown has COVID restrictions on large gatherings too. The duplicitous politicians have agreed that the law doesn’t apply to the Democrats’ pet protesters. Look for more shutdowns after Oregon experiences another spike in COVID cases in the next few weeks from the riots. They’ll cancel church, but not the riots.
Lie 5: Rioters Are Patriotic, Flag-Waving American Veterans!
You’ve heard the saying that dissent is patriotic and it is. Riots, however, are not protected speech. They necessarily conflict with other people’s rights to be left the hell alone and in peace to go about their lives.
People watching Portland’s antifa/Black Lives Matter riots have been appalled by the violence, lawbreaking and head-cracking. The stated goal of both antifa and Black Lives Matter is the destruction of the country of which the flag is a symbol. But now, the same people who spit on, poop on, stomp on, beat up people with, and set fire to American flags are recasting themselves as patriots.
That’s why all of a sudden you’ve seen rioters holding American flags.
The flag waving is a propaganda move for the cameras. They are discussing on Reddit & other places new ways to “change” public perception on the riots. This is a group that beats people carrying flags, burns US flags, & chants for abolishment of the US. pic.twitter.com/FipxGJUxNS
— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) July 22, 2020
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These are people who want to burn down America. Because so many people know they want to burn down the country’s institutions, the Left has formulated another sub-group culled from Central Casting just for these riots.
You thought the Great White Way was closed for COVID? Welcome to Portland, with its white protesters cast for their newly announced production, the “Wall of Vets,” a collection of protesters who now call themselves military veterans. Some of them may be military vets. The idea is to show that rioting to bring down the country and serving to protect this country are totally the same thing. Totally.
“Team Joe” member, Jon Cooper, the “Draft Joe Biden for President 2016” finance chair and former chair of The Democratic Coalition, points to the veteran street theater as a moving event in a cheap attempt to whitewash antifa and BLM’s anti-Americanism.
‘Wall of Vets’ joins Black Lives Matter protests in Portland https://t.co/8rMM0NsXJt
— Jon Cooper 🇺🇸 (@joncoopertweets) July 25, 2020
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If you see a media outlet or politico selling this Broadway production-pap, they’ve been had and you need to re-think your news sources.
Lie 6: Portland Antifa Says, Hey, It Ain’t Us Doing These Riots!
Of all the whoppers, Portland’s antifa is stating explicitly that they have nothing to do with the riots in their own city and, in fact, it must be the right-wing doing this.
“We’ve said this before, but to re-iterate: we are not organizing, leading, or otherwise behind the local protests. We are FULLY supportive, but defer to the leadership of the Black organizers who have dedicated themselves to fighting for Black liberation & against state violence.”
We’ve said this before, but to re-iterate: we are not organizing, leading, or otherwise behind the local protests. We are FULLY supportive, but defer to the leadership of the Black organizers who have dedicated themselves to fighting for Black liberation & against state violence.
— Always Antifascist (@RoseCityAntifa) July 22, 2020
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Antifa welcomes new rioters coming to town like a host city for a convention. You could argue that this is the Democratic Party’s in-person convention. As my Facebook Friend Kathleen Worman wrote in response to a contest of sorts I’m having to come up with clever names for the riots and rioters, the Oregon woman pronounced them “Demtifa.” Another friend dubs the riots as “Commie-Con.” True that.
Rose City Antifa writes in a tweet: “since we see a lot of new folks coming out to the local protests (welcome!), we’d like to remind everyone of the importance of good cybersecurity…”
A later Rose City Antifa tweet vowed: “we’ve never been more prepared to fight for what we believe in and what is right.”
Rose City Antifa is being sued by Andy Ngo for death threats and attacks and he’s asking for damages. They’ve recently been outed by James O’Keefe and Project Veritas and are most certainly under scrutiny by the feds. Consider their statement their official legal disclaimer, even as they help put together IEDs and source green lasers for rioters.
If they’re not outright organizing it with their Lisa Fithian-like trainers around the country, they’re in it.
Lie 7: Riot Groups Are Not Organized
The media and Leftists, but I repeat myself, often point to the fact that federal charging documents against rioters do not include the word “antifa.” They say it’s proof the group doesn’t exist as an organization.
As my points about the riotous “wall of ____” (insert moms, dads, vets) groups should point out, there is organization. On cue, protests to “support Portland” from Trump’s “secret police” are popping up in cities across America.
Lights! Camera! Action! Quick! “Get down to the Justice Center” for more mayhem.
Who says they’re not organized?
👇@KerriKupecDOJ @realDonaldTrump @USAO_OR
👇 https://t.co/gDROHeCLw4— Victoria Taft (@VictoriaTaft) July 26, 2020
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Stories abound about how “you can help” the organized riots are ubiquitous. Besides bringing your leaf blower and wearing your yellow shirt, you can bring food and water.
So what can we do? Here’s a masterpost from early June, which I just discovered today, and which still seems to roughly apply (but check before donating to anything that the org in question still wants donations).https://t.co/bwWRBTbEQ4
— Peter Garnett (@number_one_twit) July 26, 2020
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Antifa even has its own food cart in downtown Portland. Now that the antifa hard cider hang out “Cider Riot!” is out of business, you can help out the organized “Riot Ribs” food cart to make food for hungry rioters. Oh, and they’d like your money to buy a mobile food truck to be called “Riot Kitchen” in a Seattle expansion.
Gee, I’m sensing a theme here.
Hey Twitter family, let’s try and get @riotkitchen206 their food truck! They’re so close. They’ve been helping us a ton! Donate to their GoFundMe!
— RIOT RIBS 🔥 (@riotribs) July 26, 2020
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Not organized? Getouttahere.
Lie 8: The City Isn’t Under ‘Siege’
Local and national press argue that only downtown Portlanders are inconvenienced by the riots – as if that’s somehow OK – and that the riots don’t affect anyone else.
I just want to emphasize for the zillionth time that these protests happen in a very tiny part of Portland. I park several blocks away, and often find myself walking by people getting off work or going on a date. I’m wearing chest plates and feel like an absolute alien.
— Tuck Woodstock (@tuckwoodstock) July 26, 2020
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Here’s another from the local Oregonian newspaper, whose reporters should know better, that said the rest of downtown is just fine. Until it’s not.
Feds, right-wing media paint Portland as ‘city under siege.’ A tour of town shows otherwise https://t.co/bhwZ4ttGkx pic.twitter.com/vYH1D0jwNa
— The Oregonian (@Oregonian) July 18, 2020
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Portlanders know that mobs historically migrate from downtown to the northwest, southeast, northeast, and north sections of town. They know they’re not safe from the rabble.
They “direct traffic,” block freeways, block bridges, block ingress to the airport, barricade doors of police precincts, and set the building on fire and burn police union halls. People who talk about violence are prosecuted and those who commit acts of violence are not.
This is not downtown Portland.
Whose streets? Their streets. Whose freeways? Their freeways. That’s because the political class of like-minded “public servants” agree with them and let them do it.
Lie 9: What Lasers?
A few days ago federal authorities acknowledged that three police officers defending the federal courthouse may have sustained permanent damage to their eyesight because rioters shone lasers in their eyes. This is the stuff of terrorists and it’s real, as Acting Department of Homeland Security Deputy Ken Cuccinelli says.
These can, and are intended to, cause serious eye damage to law enforcement officers. https://t.co/RGBj2ElQmG
— Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli (@HomelandKen) July 26, 2020
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This was widely scoffed at. But here’s video of the “dads” at the riot providing cover for the laser operators.
As the deputy chief of PPB calls them “light mage” pic.twitter.com/Gee6hskQFZ
— Sergio Olmos (@MrOlmos) July 23, 2020
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Lie 10: They Want ‘Liberty’
Antifa and their BLM brethren seek to destroy American institutions because they claim those institutions are somehow racist and oppressive.
They want to riot, burn, loot, and command and control with impunity and they want to use their “comrades” to do it for the good of the “collective.”
Like this: “Every city, every town, burn those precincts to the ground.”
Black Lives Matter and Antifa in Portland chant: “Every precinct, every town, burn the precincts to the ground.”
The Portland Police Association building was broken into and fires were set shortly after. pic.twitter.com/blPZIUA1M1
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) July 19, 2020
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Black Lives Matter was formed after Trayvon Martin was killed by a neighborhood watch guy who fought back with a gun.
BLM demanded that the institutional racism they alleged occurred at the local Ferguson cop shop was why Michael Brown, he of the phony “hands up, don’t shoot” big lie, was killed. Three investigations, including one by Obama Attorney General Eric Holder, showed that wasn’t true. At all.
But BLM has soldiered on, recasting the group as being in support of “black lives,” when it’s only blacks killed in connection with a law-enforcement action that they care about.
And, as PJMedia colleague Stacey Lennox reported, BLM has intentionally adopted a more decentralized antifa model, muted their own well-known founders, and are now a much more political organization.
The group and antifa are connected at the hip.
They both want to tear down law enforcement and “defund” police because of high-profile cop killings that bring in big money from Democrats’ online fundraising tool “Act Blue.”
The only freedom they want is freedom from the laws that make a civil society work. That means they can’t take over streets that other people use, commit violent acts against others, and tear down, burn and loot other people’s property.
Democrats, like this “democratic strategist,” cheer them on.
If you are looking for a way to help Portland and aren’t in the area please check this out and spread the word: https://t.co/kwU4vmx9mM https://t.co/JyLeoDm3lm
— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) July 23, 2020
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They claim to practice “empathy,” but they’re not about black people whose lives have been snuffed out by abortion, black-on-black crime, or during riots.
Respected Milwaukee community figure, Bernell Trammell, Trump and Black Lives Matter supporter, fatally shot in front of own store. pic.twitter.com/XNLdPWRJUr
— Rish (@aqbelsarafl) July 25, 2020
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They believe there’s no normal, no family, and this is “liberation.” If you don’t agree, you don’t matter and will be canceled By Any Means Necessary (BAMN). See Lies #1 and #8.
After their enemies are vanquished and they get a few more socialists and communists like AOC in place, they’ll be in charge. That’s why these riots are taking place right before the November election.
It’s about power—the power of the collective against the rights of the individual, which is the fundamental precept upon which this country was built.
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