Today’s News 9th September 2023

• The New Authoritarian Agenda Revealed (Globalism Rebranded)
  The New Authoritarian Agenda Revealed (Globalism Rebranded)

  From Brandon Smith

  In July of last year as the hype surrounding the Covid pandemic was finally dying out, I came across a video promoting a barely publicized project called the “Council for Inclusive Capitalism.”

  The group, headed by Lynn Forester de Rothschild, is the culmination of decades of various globalist agendas combined to represent the ultimate proof of conspiracy.

  Remember when people used to say that global governance by elitists was a paranoid fantasy?

  

  Well, now it’s openly admitted reality.

  The CIC is intimately tied to institutions like the World Economic Forum (WEF), the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but it is primarily an attempt to link all these organizations more closely to the corporate world in an open display of cooperation. The group pushes the spread of what they call “Stakeholder Capitalism.” This is the notion that international corporations are obligated to engage in social engineering. That’s another way of saying that corporations are required to manipulate citizens and governments with economic punishments and rewards.

  We witnessed this agenda in action during the Covid lockdowns and the rush to enforce vaccine passports. These efforts would not have been possible without the cooperation of major corporate chains working hand-in-hand with national governments. Luckily, the strategy failed as local governments and the public fought back.

  We have also seen stakeholder capitalism on display in the push for Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) guidelines among major companies. Most readers are probably familiar with ESG at this point, but keep in mind, the public was oblivious to the terminology until the past 2 years. Globalists have been developing ESG rules since 2005. As Klaus Schwab of the WEF notes in his book Stakeholder Capitalism:

  The most important characteristic of the stakeholder model today is that the stakes of our system are now more clearly global. Economies, societies, and the environment are more closely linked to each other now than 50 years ago. The model we present here is therefore fundamentally global in nature, and the two primary stakeholders are as well.

  …What was once seen as externalities in national economic policy making and individual corporate decision making will now need to be incorporated or internalized in the operations of every government, company, community, and individual. The planet is thus the center of the global economic system, and its health should be optimized in the decisions made by all other stakeholders.

  The carrot and the stick

  ESG was intended to be the tool that globalists and governments would use to force companies into the stakeholder capitalism model. It is a kind of social credit system, but for companies. The higher a company’s ESG score, the more access to capital and lending they would have (easy money).

  Modern ESG started out in 2005, initially focused on climate controls – influencing corporations to participate in the carbon credit marketplace or face additional taxation.

  But, by 2016 it became something else. ESG widely adopted woke politics including Critical Race Theory, feminism, trans ideology, various elements of Marxism, etc.

  This was the modern ESG that all of us are aware of today. It was an attempt to incentivize the business world to bombard the populace with woke messaging 24/7, and it worked, for a little while anyway.

  The exposure of ESG is perhaps one of the greatest triumphs of the alternative media. It was proof that the “woke-ification” of our economy and society was not the result of some grassroots activist movement or the natural evolution of civilization. No, everything woke was a product, forced into existence by corporate and globalist interests.

  It is with some disappointment I’m sure that Lynn Forester de Rothschild admitted the defeat of ESG at the B20 Summit in India recently. Though, as is usually the case, Rothschild admits that the goal will be to replace the term “ESG” with something else that the public is not as privy to while continuing to institute social credit scoring for companies as a means to dominate them.

  It is typical for globalists to re-brand their projects whenever they get exposed. It’s merely a way to throw the public off the scent. However, I don’t think this tactic is going to work anymore. Researchers are locked on to the ESG dynamic and changing the name will not help the establishment avoid scrutiny.

  Globalists go on the defensive

  I want to point out here that there has been a dramatic shift in globalist circles towards a defensive posture, rather than the offensive posture they held a couple years ago. Apparently, something went very wrong for them during Covid. They were brazen with their rhetoric not long ago, basically admitting their intentions to establish a global authoritarian system. Now they are sheepish and much more careful in the things they say.

  To this end, most of the honest discussion on globalism is no longer found in the statements of the WEF or the halls of the Davos forums. Rather, the true agenda is discussed at less prominent climate change events such as B20 in India or the Summit for a New Global Financing Pact in Paris which I covered in July. These are the events where globalists now feel increasingly free to talk about what they really want.

  Another admission by Rothschild at B20 should be noted as she suggests that Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act” is one of the best representations of incentivizing climate controls.

  This just confirms what we already suspected; the Inflation Reduction Act had nothing to do with inflation. Rather, it was a way to divert taxpayer funds into government subsidies for carbon taxation and green tech. Taking money out of your pocket and handing it over to corporations who toe the ESG line.

  The CIC wants to dictate global mandates that force companies to adopt ESG-like policies using trillions of dollars in climate funds ($7 trillion per year, to be exact).

  Think of it this way:

  1. Any company that “volunteers” to use less efficient green tech and to promote climate ideology gets access to government funds – they get rewarded.

  2. Any company that refuses to go along with the plan will ultimately face heavy taxation while trying to compete with their subsidized peers – they are forced out of business.

  Sound familiar? It’s not your imagination…

  This is, essentially, the early stages of a global communist/collectivist economic regime.

  “Inclusive capitalism” is a hoax

  And here we get to the crux of the issue.

  • There is no “inclusive capitalism.”

  • There is no “stakeholder capitalism.”

  • There is no “ESG.”

  • Climate change is not an existential threat.

  • Covid was never as severe as they wanted you to think.

  What do these things have in common? All of these issues represent smoke and mirrors, a way to distract the populace from the root intent to create total centralization in the hands of a select few elites. The prize for them is to convince the public to embrace economic micromanagement. This is what ESG was all about. This is what Inclusive Capitalism is all about.

  The globalists want to hand-pick winners and losers. Worse still, they want to use your money to reward the faithful and punish the skeptical. Their goal is to build a global economic panopticon, an unescapable prison where every transaction is monitored, evaluated, authorized or denied and (of course) recorded.

  A central bank digital currency (CDBC) is a crucial milestone in their progress toward this goal. Just imagine how much easier this will be when the 100 or so largest, most influential corporations in the world are on-board and enthusiastic about such a development…

  I wrote about this not long ago:

  All privacy in trade will be gone, except for those people engaging in barter, black markets and commodity-based transactions. This is one of the main reasons global central banks have persistently killed the idea of intrinsically-sound money, like physical gold and silver, for the last 50 years. Remember, barter and black markets are more or less by definition off the books. Untaxed, unregulated and untrackable.

  But don’t be misled – this is much more than an issue of privacy.

  Implementation of CBDCs would also mean that ownership of money and the ability to transact, to participate in the economy, will become privileges, not rights.

  In communist China, use of digital payments is tied to a social credit system. Want access to your checking and savings accounts? Better not say anything critical of the Party, or you could be reported by a neighbor (or a stranger) using the tattletale function on their smartphone. Digital money can disappear in seconds. Want your money back? Prove that you are “loyal” to the Party. There are many subtle levels between “upstanding citizen” and “outlaw,” though, and the CCP adjust their citizens’ financial statuses constantly. Bad social credit might mean taxis won’t even stop for you. That you’re prevented from purchasing from upscale shops. (Insufficiently healthy? Your e-yuan won’t even let you buy junk food at 7-11. Seriously!) The citizen is guilty until proven innocent.

  Once the economy is locked into an ideological prison and access to private trade can be denied by a handful of bureaucrats working with corporations, the establishment then has the means to dictate all of society.

  Our behaviors, our beliefs, our principles, our morals.

  For if the government has the power to determine whether you and your family eat or starve, they have the power to compel you to do anything.

  This is why owning untraceable, intrinsically valuable physical precious metals is crucial to your own personal liberty. Today, now, while you still can, diversify your savings with an alternative form of money that will always be accepted, without question, anywhere in the world.

  There’s a reason the globalists hate gold and silver. They’re virtually the only financial assets you can own that are “off the books.” Just as untrackable as cash (they hate cash, too, but not as much) and, better yet, uninflatable, unhackable and free from central bank meddling.

  Fight the globalist agenda every step of the way. And make sure that, no matter what, you and your loved ones can endure their tyranny without compromising your beliefs.

  *  *  *

  High inflation means your 401(k) or IRA will be worth less, potentially much less, when you retire. Personally, I recommend a Gold IRA for the ultimate retirement security. To see why, Click here to get a FREE info kit from Birch Gold Group about Gold IRAs. (This comes with NO obligation or strings attached.)

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/08/2023 – 23:40

• The World Behind Bars
  The World Behind Bars

  El Salvador has the world’s highest prison population rate, according to data collected in the World Prison Brief by the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research (ICPR).

  The Central American country had 1,086 people serving jail sentences per 100,00 inhabitants in May 2022.

  

  As Statista’s Florian Zandt shows in the chart below, most countries with a high prisoner-to-inhabitant ratio are small and could be considered developing economies – with one major exception.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  This exception is the United States, which boasts a prison population rate of 531.

  Technically, the U.S. is featured not only once but thrice in the top 8, with American Samoa and Guam being unincorporated territories.

  Other big economies mainly feature drastically lower on the ICPR’s list.

  Notable exceptions to this rule include Turkey, Brazil and Russia, placing 12th, 13th and 26th, respectively.

  When looking at the data from the perspective of the overall prison population, the picture is markedly different. By this indicator, the United States comes first, followed by China, Brazil, India and Russia.

  Interestingly, all five current BRICS nations but only one G7 member are featured in the top 15.

  While the ICPR’s dataset allows comparisons between countries, the reporting timeframes for the official figures often differ wildly from nation to nation. Given this caveat, the data doesn’t support showing the situation at one specific set date.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/08/2023 – 23:20

• House Education Chair Says Groups Like Moms For Liberty Face Daunting Task
  House Education Chair Says Groups Like Moms For Liberty Face Daunting Task

  Authored by Ben Sellers via Headline USA,

  Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., the chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, said that despite recent victories in the clash against wokeness within the public education system, a daunting road lay ahead for grassroots groups like Moms for Liberty that have risen to combat the encroaching threats of classroom indoctrination and grooming.

  

  Foxx touted the House’s passage in March of the Parents Bill of Rights Act, which currently sits stalled in the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions under chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

  The committee, stacked with firebrand progressives and wishy-washy RINOs, leaves the bill’s fate uncertain for the foreseeable future.

  However, in the event that the socialist Sen. Sanders were to bring it to the floor as written, the bill would mandate a newfound level of transparency, requiring that school boards provide clear information on their curricula and materials; budget and revenues; safety concerns; enrollment and transfer options; and a litany of red-flag behaviors related to staff, counselors and contractors.

  That, according to Foxx, is when the real work would begin.

  “All of this is going to entail tremendous involvement at the local level,” she said during an exclusive interview with Headline USA along with Brooke Weiss, the chair of the Mecklenburg County Moms for Liberty chapter. “… It’s going to be a sustained and focused kind of thing.”

  Friends and foes alike could count on Moms for Liberty to “keep showing up because we know we are fighting for the survival of America,” Weiss said in response to Foxx’s call to action.

  “[Y]ou can bet we aren’t going anywhere,” she tweeted following the interview.

  “Moms for Liberty is 2½ years old, growing every day, and making major progress in restoring parental rights and improving public education,” she added. “We are successful because our mission is focused on a singular issue (education) & because we are able to mobilize people into real action.”

  I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to meet w/ @virginiafoxx today.
  You can bet we aren’t going anywhere. @Moms4Liberty is 2 1/2 years old, growing every day, & making major progress. 1/ https://t.co/hghFhRvLL0

  — Brooke Weiss, instapot insurrectionist (@BrookeWeiss) September 6, 2023

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Although the tendency among some—even conservatives—is to look to the government for solutions to solve the mess that decades of subversive Marxist influence and dark-money coercion have wrought in the school system, Foxx pointed out that this would be counterproductive at best.

  “Anytime somebody tells me ‘I want a national something,’ I tell them don’t do it,” she noted in response to a question about a national book-rating system, which Moms for Liberty has endorsed.

  “It is the wrong way to go,” Foxx continued. “You put power in the hands of people far away from you—it is the most dangerous thing to do.”

  Rather than pivot too far in either direction, though, Foxx, 80—an 18-year congressional veteran who spent time previously in the North Carolina state legislature and as a sociology professor at Appalachian State University—took a more pragmatic outlook.

  She signaled that she did not, in principle, oppose the idea of abolishing the federal Department of Education, as some conservatives have called to do.

  “If the Lord put me in charge, I’d get rid of everything,” she mused.

  Yet, she noted that when former President Ronald Reagan ran on a campaign of doing that very thing, he ultimately wound up strengthening it.

  The only solution, as she saw it, was to “devolve the money back to the states” and allow each individual jurisdiction to decide how best to spend its funding.

  Even so, that would not entirely addresss one of the biggest concerns facing schools, which is the influence of outside organizations seeking intentionally to politicize the local school agendas and infect them with controversial issues such as critical race theory and transgenderism.

  Foxx said she remained mystified by people—including the Democratic House colleagues with whom she is sometimes forced to find common ground—who would oppose common-sense measures like transparency and accountability for schools.

  “I don’t know what planet they grew up on,” she said. “… It’s truly amazing to me.”

  Nonetheless, it is citizen–watchdogs like Weiss, she said, who have both the power and the responsibility to do what the most powerful government in the world cannot.

  Moms for Liberty has only continued to grow in its renown following a national summit in Philadelphia over the summer that featured former President Donald Trump and other luminaries.

  While the biggest storyline from the event may have been the Left’s violent and destructive protests outside of it—shortly after the parent group was labeled a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, in collusion with the Biden administration—Weiss said that exposing the true colors of left-wing extremists ultimately left M4L looking all the better.

  In June, M4L co-founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich offered Headline USA a defiant statement via email in reaction to the SPLC’s insults.

  “Empowering parents continues to be our mission today and that has fueled our organization’s growth—like wildfire to now 45 states in the country,” said the statement.

  “Name-calling parents who want to be a part of their child’s education as ‘hate groups’ or ‘bigoted’ just further exposes what this battle is all about: Who fundamentally gets to decide what is taught to our kids in school—parents or government employees?” it continued. “We believe that parental rights do not stop at the classroom door and no amount of hate from groups like this is going to stop that.”

  Headline USA reached out to the group for additional reaction to Foxx’s recent remarks asking whether M4L was prepared for the “sustained and focused” fight ahead and will update with any response.

  Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.

   

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/08/2023 – 23:00

• Chinese Imports Of Iran Oil Soar To Near Record In Clear Breach Of US Sanctions
  Chinese Imports Of Iran Oil Soar To Near Record In Clear Breach Of US Sanctions

  Less than a month ago, we reported that according to Kpler estimates, China was expected to import as much as 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil from Iran in August, the most since at least 2013.

  

  On Thursday, the latest China trade data confirmed just that when customs data revealed that China snapped up Iranian shipments, and state-owned processors ramped up operating rates after a period of maintenance work, in clear breach of US sanctions, soft as they may be, on Iranian oil purchases.

  China nation imported 52.8 million tons of crude oil last month, equivalent to 12.5 million barrels a day, 21% more than July, according to Bloomberg calculations. The monthly volume was near a record set in June 2020.

  Chinese purchases were driven by a binge on Iranian crude supplies, said Viktor Katona, lead crude analyst with Kpler ahead of data release, as offers from the Persian Gulf producer was “by far the most price-competitive option”. Additionally, imports were also driven by Chinese refiners’ re-stockpiling activity, he added.

  Importers were keen to buy discounted barrels from Russia and Iran in order to maximize profit margins from domestic and overseas fuel sales. State refiners were running at record rates in August, according to OilChem. A bumper exports quota issued last week means plants will keep their runs and inflows elevated in support for growth.

  Meanwhile, as noted earlier, Chinese oil products exports rose 11% to 5.89 million tons in August, the highest since February, as China aggressively ramped up its refinery output, in the process grabbing market share from Western processors crushed by idiotic, green and “woke” policies and regulations that seek to crush US fossil fuel industries and hand the market to China on a silver platter.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/08/2023 – 22:40

• Government Gave Millions To Top Reproductive Health Org To Promote COVID-19 Vaccines To Pregnant Women
  Government Gave Millions To Top Reproductive Health Org To Promote COVID-19 Vaccines To Pregnant Women

  Authored by Megan Redshaw, J.D. via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  The premier professional membership organization for obstetricians and gynecologists accepted $11.8 million from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to promote COVID-19 vaccines to pregnant women, despite the exclusion of pregnant women from clinical trials and regulatory data showing the vaccine had not been tested for safety during pregnancy.

  

  To learn more about COVID-19 funding received by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) during the pandemic and what prompted the organization’s guidance on COVID-19 vaccines for pregnant women, Dr. James Thorp, a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist and maternal-fetal medicine physician made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2022 to HHS.

  “My request was simple: It sought only to obtain documents involving the three ‘Cooperative Agreement’ grants HHS/CDC made to ACOG during the pandemic, one of which was for $11.8 million, listed on a publicly accessible open data source for federal spending, USASPENDING.gov,” Thorp told The Epoch Times.

  Documents obtained by Dr. Thorp show ACOG, on Feb. 1, 2021, was awarded the first of three cooperative agreement grants by HHS and the CDC. The receipt of COVID-19 grant money was contingent upon ACOG yielding substantial control over projects funded by the CDC to the agency and ACOG’s full compliance with CDC guidance on COVID-19 infection and control.

  “This is a cooperative agreement, and CDC will have substantial programmatic involvement after the award is made. Substantial involvement is in addition to all post-award monitoring, technical assistance, and performance reviews undertaken in the normal course of stewardship of federal funds,” the documents state.

  ACOG also agreed to allow the CDC program staff to “assist, coordinate, or participate in carrying out effort under the award.”

  The contracts further provided for the return of funding to the HHS if ACOG did not adhere to the federal government’s messaging that COVID-19 vaccines were safe and effective for pregnant women and new mothers.

  HHS Funds ‘Trusted Messengers’ to Increase Vaccine Confidence

  HHS, on April 1, 2021, launched the “COVID-19 Community Corps,” a “nationwide, grassroots network of local voices and trusted community leaders to encourage vaccinations,” with more than 275 founding member organizations, including ACOG, that had the “ability to reach millions of Americans.” An archived HHS webpage states the program provides resources and fact-based public health information through HHS in partnership with the CDC.

  As part of the multibillion-dollar program, Vice President Kamala Harris and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy met with founding members to discuss the next phase of the “public education campaign from the White House” to encourage vaccinations and increase vaccine confidence.

  Members received weekly updates on the “latest scientific and medical updates, talking points about the vaccine, social media suggestions, infographics, factsheets with timely, accurate information, and tools to help people get registered for an appointment and vaccinated.”

  “As part of the COVID-19 Community Corps, HHS awarded billions of federal dollars to recruit what HHS referred to as ‘trusted community leaders’ who could push vaccines within our most private relationships,” Thorp said. “Much like modern-day trojan horses, these ‘trusted messengers’ would be unique in their ability to permeate all facets of private life.”

  ACOG Encourages Members to ‘Enthusiastically Recommend Vaccination’

  Former CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, on April 23, 2021, announced for the first time during a White House COVID-19 briefing the agency was recommending all pregnant women get vaccinated despite limited data on the safety of the shot, as pregnant women were not included in COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials.

  Dr. Walensky said her decision was based on preliminary findings published in The New England Journal of Medicine on the use of COVID-19 vaccines during the first 11 weeks of the vaccine rollout.

  “We know that this is a deeply personal decision, and I encourage people to talk to their doctors and their primary care providers to determine what is best for them and for their baby,” Dr. Walensky said.

  ACOG, on July 30, 2021, along with the Society of Maternal Fetal Medicine (SMFM), began recommending COVID-19 vaccination in pregnancy.

  ACOG, founded in 1951, is the leading organization representing physicians and specialists in obstetrical care, with over 60,000 members. ACOG sets the standard of care for pregnant women and obstetrician–gynecologists generally follow the recommendations made by ACOG, just as pediatricians follow the recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

  The SMFM represents more than 5,500 individuals with additional years of formal training in maternal-fetal medicine, making them “highly qualified experts and leaders in the care of complicated pregnancies.”

  ACOG’s former president, Dr. J. Martin Tucker, in a statement on the organization’s website, encouraged members to “enthusiastically recommend vaccination” to their pregnant patients and to emphasize the “known safety of the vaccines and the increased risks of severe complications associated with COVID-19 infection, including death, during pregnancy.”

  “It is clear that pregnant people need to feel confident in the decision to choose vaccination, and a strong recommendation from their obstetrician–gynecologist could make a meaningful difference for many pregnant people,” Tucker added. “Pregnant individuals should feel confident that choosing COVID-19 vaccination not only protects them but also protects their families and communities,” he added.

  Dr. William Grobman, president of SMFM, said experts in high-risk pregnancy should “strongly recommend” pregnant women get vaccinated and that vaccination is “safe before, during, or after pregnancy,” despite the absence of clinical trial data.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/08/2023 – 22:20

• Which US Cities Have The Highest Airbnb Densities?
  Which US Cities Have The Highest Airbnb Densities?

  With 3,329 Airbnb listings for an estimated 94,589 inhabitants, Asheville, North Carolina, has the highest Airbnb density out of all U.S. cities and regions analyzed by InsideAirbnb as of June 2023.

  The project, which scrapes publicly available data from Airbnb’s website, was founded by activist and artist Murray Cox and has seen contributions by data journalists and researchers.

  As Statista’s Florian Zandt shows in the chart below, based on InsideAirbnb data, popular tourist spots don’t always have the highest amount of rental listings per 1,000 inhabitants.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  As we detailed previously, New York City, for example, recently passed Local Law 18, which requires short-term rental businesses to register with the city, limits guests per property to two and requires the owners to live in the space they’re renting out. In practice, this scales back a booming business model rivaling hotels to an approximation of a paid version of traditional couch surfing.

  A lawsuit by Airbnb to prevent the law was dismissed in August. Interestingly, New York City only has a density of 4.9 Airbnb listings per 1,000 residents.

  

  Another hot spot for domestic tourists that recently made the news due to devastating wildfires, the island state of Hawaii, ranks much higher in comparison. On all of the islands combined, the ratio of listings by 1,000 inhabitants stands at 22.4. Other popular tourist destinations analyzed include Los Angeles (11.4 listings per 1,000 inhabitants), Broward County (9.1), San Francisco (8.5) and Clark County, which includes Las Vegas (6.9).

  While InsideAirbnb provides details of the prevalence of Airbnb listings in selected cities and regions, it can only show part of the whole picture. The overall importance of the U.S. market for Airbnb can be seen in the company’s financial results. In 2022, $4.2 billion of the vacation rental provider’s total revenue of $8.4 billion was generated in North America, $3.9 billion of which was in the United States. The EMEA region was responsible for $2.9 billion, while the company generated $643 million and $622 million in Latin America and Asia-Pacific, respectively.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/08/2023 – 22:00

• A Deeper Dive Into The Role Of Spike Protein In Myocarditis And Blood Clotting After COVID-19 Vaccination
  A Deeper Dive Into The Role Of Spike Protein In Myocarditis And Blood Clotting After COVID-19 Vaccination

  Authored by Allison Kruig, MPH and Dr. Ram Durlseti via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  In this series, “Promise or Peril: Alarming COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Issues,” we explore how the introduction of mRNA technology lacked an adequate regulatory framework, setting the stage for serious adverse events and other concerns related to inadequate safety testing of lipid nanoparticles, spike protein, and residual DNA- and lipid-related impurities, as well as truncated/modified mRNA species.

  Previously: In Part 1, we introduced how the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) relaxed the rules for mRNA vaccines compared to mRNA therapies and discussed the available data regarding LNP distribution throughout the body based on animal testing, the fact that human testing was not done, and the lack of mRNA or spike protein biodistribution data. In Parts 2 and 3, we explored how the LNPs are constructed and how they behave in the body and affect health.

  

  Now we turn to another problem—the cargo contained in the LNP capsules: the mRNA and its encoded spike protein. We introduce the inflammatory response to the spike protein and one of its subunit proteins and how they may contribute to serious adverse events such as myocarditis and blood clotting.

  Rochelle Walensky, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), stated on “Good Morning America” in June 2021 that myocarditis cases are “really quite rare … minor, self-limited, they generally resolve with rest and standard medications.” However, this assertion was made based on a preliminary review of 300 cases and before conducting long-term follow-up.

  A study published on Aug. 1 followed 40 adolescents in Hong Kong for up to a year. Follow-up testing performed in 26 patients with initial abnormal findings revealed that 58 percent of those with vaccine-associated myocarditis had persistent heart muscle scarring. The authors concluded: “There exists a potential long-term effect on exercise capacity and cardiac functional reserve during stress.”

  This series demonstrates how exposure to the spike protein results in downstream cardiovascular issues. Given that vaccination causes the body to produce more spike protein, it is clear that additional research was needed to understand the health impacts of vaccination prior to licensure.

  Summary of Key Facts

  • The SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and its S1 subunit have known impacts on the cardiovascular system, such as an increased risk of blood clotting.

  • The vaccine-induced spike protein and its S1 subunit have been found in the blood following vaccination.

  • In lab studies, the spike protein activates white blood cells and may trigger an inflammatory response or clotting.

  • Free spike protein was found in the blood of adolescents and young adults with post-mRNA vaccine myocarditis but not in healthy control subjects without myocarditis.

  • The S1 subunit can interact with ACE2, platelets, and fibrin and may be what leads to an inflammatory response driving serious adverse events, including clots, myocarditis, and neurological problems.

  • As discussed in Part 3, lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) act as adjuvants, stimulating the immune system. This innate immune response peaks within six hours of vaccination and returns to baseline by about day nine, temporally corresponding to the onset of myocarditis, which typically occurs within the first seven days following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination.

  • Studies have not been done to evaluate how vaccination affects those who have already been infected with SARS-CoV-2.

  • The spike protein was implicated in small vessel microclots during COVID-19 illness; thus, postvaccination cardiovascular effects should have been anticipated.

  • The first deadline for FDA-mandated post-authorization safety studies has passed, yet to the best of our knowledge, the full report has not been made available to the public.

  The spike protein protrudes from the SARS-CoV-2 virus like a crown of sticky handles. The job of the spike protein is to grab onto the ACE2 receptor so the virus can enter the cell. The ACE2 receptor is found in many human cells in the lungs, kidneys, gut, heart, and the lining of the blood vessels.

  Spike protein is comprised of two parts: the S1 and S2 subunits. The S1 subunit protein sits at the tip of the spike protein and is responsible for attaching to the ACE2 receptor. Once bound to the receptor, the spike protein changes shape to allow the virus to enter. Having accessed the inside of the cell, the SARS-CoV-2 virus uses the cell’s own protein manufacturing process to make new viral proteins.

  Effective vaccines select recognizable antigens that induce a robust immune response. The spike protein was chosen for the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine because it is responsible for attaching to cells and gaining entry. However, research suggests that the spike protein and its S1 subunit may also be responsible for cardiovascular complications following both infection and vaccination.

  The S2 subunit may also interfere with tumor suppression, potentially explaining why COVID-19 can be more severe for cancer patients.

  

  Research shows that the spike protein is found in the blood following COVID-19 infection and vaccination. The spike protein modifies blood clotting and can stimulate an overactive immune response. A better understanding of these findings and the specific roles the spike protein and its S1 subunit play will help us determine who is most at risk for severe disease or vaccine adverse events.

  Cardiovascular Effects of Spike Protein Following Infection

  Although the studies are small, the spike protein has been found in the blood and clots of severely ill COVID-19 patients. The clinical evidence suggests a fingerprint of the spike protein’s cardiovascular effects.

  In a study of 41 patients published in Frontiers in Immunology, 30.4 percent of the 23 hospitalized were found to have significant levels of spike protein in their circulation. None of the remaining 18 uninfected or mildly ill individuals had circulating spike protein.

  A small case-control study detected the spike protein in clots retrieved from COVID-19 patients with acute ischemic stroke and myocardial infarction.

  Another study detected the S1 subunit in the plasma of 64 percent of COVID-19-positive patients, and S1 levels were significantly associated with disease severity. The nucleocapsid (N) protein, a marker for COVID-19 infection, was also detected. The authors speculated that the presence of S1 and N in plasma suggests that virus fragments enter the bloodstream, potentially due to tissue damage.

  The exact chain of events is not fully understood. Still, laboratory, clinical, and biopsy findings offer converging evidence suggesting a role for the spike protein and its S1 subunit in blood clotting and heart injury.

  Blood Clots Associated With Spike S1 Subunit

  In laboratory experiments like those performed in the Frontiers in Immunology study, the spike protein S1 subunit causes a chain reaction that sets up the right conditions for clots to form. In this chain reaction, the S1 protein binds to the ACE2 receptor on the cells lining the blood vessels. Binding to ACE2 then activates immune cells.

  This domino effect can also stimulate platelet binding, increasing clotting risk. Platelets are essential clotting agents that stop blood loss following injury by clumping together. The authors further noted that in vitro, “our group recently documented that exposing sera from severe COVID-19 patients to endothelial cells induced platelet aggregation.”

  In other words, the S1 subunit is of interest because, in vitro (in a test tube), it appears to cause changes to clotting mechanisms. If the S1 subunit can affect clotting agents like fibrin, complement 3, and prothrombin, this may be a mechanism through which SARS-CoV-2 can cause cardiovascular complications. Clotting causes changes in blood flow, potentially leading to thrombosis, stroke, and heart attack.

  Atypical Blood Clots

  Providing blood thinners to decrease the risk of clot formation did not appear to reduce the clotting risk in COVID-19 inpatients or outpatients. This may be because the clots formed after exposure to the S1 subunit may not be typical blood clots. Three findings suggest that the S1 subunit is important to clotting risk.

  1. Clots Resist Normal Breakdown

  First, when the S1 subunit was added to healthy blood in the lab, it created dense, fibrous clot deposits. These fibrous “amyloid” clots formed even when blood taken from healthy people was exposed to the S1 subunit.

  The S1 subunit appears to be associated with clotting resistant to fibrinolysis—the normal breakdown of clots necessary to restore blood flow after injury. These amyloid clots are shown in Figure 1 below.

  Amyloid clots occur when a protein is damaged and begins to fold abnormally on itself. When these abnormal amyloid proteins accumulate in the body, they can interfere with normal function.

  Figure 1. Amyloid Clots Formed in Response to Spike Protein S1

  

  2. S1 Subunit Can Induce Amyloid Substances

  Second, these dense clots may be caused by certain protein segments on the S1 subunit. The spike protein has seven protein segments (peptides) that can induce fibrous (amyloid) substances. While the fully intact spike protein (S1 and S2 subunits attached to form the full spike) did not form this amyloid, the S1 subunit did. This finding is interesting because it suggests that the subunits of the spike protein may have unique effects on cells.

  3. Spike Blocks Other Clot-Inhibiting Proteins

  Third, spike protein can outcompete other proteins, which prevent clots from forming. In another laboratory experiment designed to understand how this process plays out, scientists found that the spike protein blocks proteins important to breaking down clots.

  In summary, the in vitro (laboratory-based) research suggests that the spike protein subunit S1 can induce clot formation and impair clot dissolution. While we do not know precisely how this translates to processes in the body, Epoch Times’ Jan Jekielek explored clotting and the role of spike protein with pathologist Dr. Ryan Cole on June 3 and Dr. Paul Marik on May 23. In the interview, Dr. Cole explained that the spike protein persists in the body longer, inflames tissues wherever it lands, and acts as an irritant or toxin in the body.

  Spike Protein Found in COVID-19-Vaccinated Myocarditis Patients

  Studies of COVID-19-vaccinated patients diagnosed with myocarditis found spike protein in the patients’ blood and heart muscles but not in those without myocarditis.

  Found in Blood

  The full-length spike protein has been found in the blood of vaccinated adolescents with myocarditis but not in the blood of those without myocarditis.

  It is unclear why the spike protein was circulating freely or unbound by antibodies. The adolescents who developed myocarditis had similar immune markers to those who did not develop myocarditis. In other words, the group with myocarditis did not appear to have any immune problems.

  Rather, these adolescents may have had an overactive natural immune response. Strong natural (“innate”) immunity helps the body fight off disease without any prior exposure. However, the first responders (inflammatory cytokines) can sometimes be exuberant. If the innate immune response overreacts, it may trigger myocarditis.

  Found in Heart Muscle

  The spike protein coded by mRNA has also been found in heart muscle cells. An endomyocardial (heart muscle) biopsy study was conducted among 15 patients with myocarditis following vaccination. No other viral infection could be found that might have caused the myocarditis.

  The investigators found SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in nine of the 15 patients. Immune cells (CD4+ T) were also detected in the biopsy samples. These observations suggest an inflammatory reaction to the spike protein.

  The authors concluded: “Although a causal relationship between vaccination and the occurrence of myocardial inflammation cannot be established based on the findings, the cardiac detection of spike protein, the CD4+ T-cell-dominated inflammation, and the close temporal relationship argue for a vaccine-triggered autoimmune reaction.”

  A 2022 modeling study also suggests that the spike protein can cause an autoimmune response by mimicking human molecules, causing antibodies to bind to “self” proteins.

  Spike S1 Detected in the Blood of Vaccinated Adults

  Another study found that 11 of 13 adults vaccinated with Moderna’s mRNA-1273 had the S1 subunit in their blood as early as one day after vaccination.

  Plasma was collected from 13 participants at various times during the first month after each dose. The antigens S1 and spike were measured to estimate the amount of mRNA translation into protein products.

  After the first 100-microgram dose, S1 antigen was detected in the plasma of 11 participants. In contrast, the spike antigen was detected in three of 13 participants. The S1 antigen peak was detected on average five days after vaccination. Again, the timing of this peak for S1 seems to add to the clues suggesting an autoimmune response in the week after vaccination.

  mRNA Detected in the Blood and Lymph Nodes After Vaccination

  Vaccine mRNA, which encodes the spike protein and its S1 subunit, also persists in the blood and lymph nodes. Following vaccination, spike-encoded mRNA has been found in the blood for 15 days and in lymph nodes for up to 60 days. Spike-laden exosomes have been found circulating in the blood for up to four months. This finding is important because it refutes the CDC’s claim that the mRNA is so fragile that it dissolves quickly at the injection site (see Figure 2a in Part 1).

  The lymph nodes continue creating better-fitting antibodies after any viral infection. This is a critical way that our bodies prepare for new variants naturally. However, persistently high levels of vaccine-induced mRNA and spike protein may not be helpful when the immune system is asked to respond to future variants. In other words, if the immune system is tasked with continuing to pump out antibodies to a previous variant, it may be less nimble when asked to create a high-quality antibody for a new variant.

  Inadequate Clinical Trials Leave Unresolved Questions

  Given what we know about the harmful effects of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, we should not have assumed that the vaccine-encoded spike protein would be harmless.

  And, given what we know about clotting issues following COVID-19 infection, future studies should test whether the S1 subunit produced in response to vaccination can also cause clotting issues via the same pathway. These studies should include both lab experiments and human observations.

  In addition, we do not know the relative amounts of free spike protein in circulation following infection versus vaccination.

  In the case of the COVID-19 vaccines, the active ingredient was not studied prior to authorization. The manufacturers used mRNA that encodes for a substitute protein (luciferase) to test the safety and biodistribution of the mRNA vaccines.

  Pfizer submitted animal biodistribution data to regulatory agencies using the surrogate RNA encoding for luciferase, as discussed in Part 1 of this series.

  However, these studies were inadequate in describing how mRNA, the spike protein, its S1 subunit, and the LNP carrier would affect the human body.

  In this article, we described laboratory findings showing clotting associated with the S1 subunit. Studies like these reinforce why thorough preclinical studies are so crucial. The studies conducted by pharmaceutical companies were not sufficient to address these questions.

  We had very little information about how people would respond to vaccination depending on age, sex, immune status, overall health, or history of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection. The original clinical trials did not enroll enough people who had already recovered from COVID-19; they were not designed to provide an understanding of how prior infection would affect a person’s response to vaccination.

  Required Pfizer Post-Authorization Safety Study Unavailable to Public

  Pre-authorization studies were clearly inadequate. Post-authorization, the FDA has only acknowledged that passive surveillance is insufficient to establish safety. The agency responded to adverse event reports by requiring Pfizer to conduct additional studies, with the first monitoring report due October 2022.

  On page 6 of the approval letter, the FDA acknowledges this fact (see Figure 2 below):

  “We have determined that an analysis of spontaneous postmarketing adverse events reported under section 505(k)(1) of the FDCA will not be sufficient to assess known serious risks of myocarditis and pericarditis and identify an unexpected serious risk of subclinical myocarditis.

  “Furthermore, the pharmacovigilance system that the FDA is required to maintain under section 505(k)(3) of the FDCA is not sufficient to assess these serious risks. Therefore, based on appropriate scientific data, we have determined that you are required to conduct the following studies. …”

  Has the FDA received the monitoring report from Pfizer, which was due by Oct. 31, 2022? The next report, the interim report, will be due in October.

  Figure 2. FDA Postmarketing Safety Study Requirements

  

  Read Part 1: FDA Overhaul Needed for New Vaccines and mRNA Therapies

  Read Part 2:Health Implications of Poor COVID-19 mRNA Testing: Miscarriage, Vision Loss, Immunotoxicity

  Read Part 3: Pulling Back the Curtain: mRNA Lipid Nanoparticle Design Created Potential for Clotting and Triggering Immune Overdrive

  Next: In Part 5, we will discuss the mRNA manufacturing issues affecting contamination with double-stranded DNA and the potential for genome integration.

  For all references, click here.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/08/2023 – 21:40

• 'Defund The Police' Democrat Politician Left With Broken Leg, Bloodied Face, After Violent Carjacking In Minnesota
  ‘Defund The Police’ Democrat Politician Left With Broken Leg, Bloodied Face, After Violent Carjacking In Minnesota

  Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  The second vice chairwoman for Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, who previously vowed to “dismantle” the Minneapolis Police Department amid widespread Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, is now calling for tougher crime laws after she was violently carjacked this week.

  

  In a lengthy Sept. 7 post on Facebook, Shivanthi Sathanandan claimed the carjacking incident took place in the driveway of her Minneapolis home in front of her children, who are aged 4 and 7.

  The incident left her with a broken leg, deep lacerations on her head, and bruising and cuts all over her body.

  Ms. Sathanandan shared a photo of herself with what appeared to be blood pouring down her face alongside the post.

  “Four very young men, all carrying guns, beat me violently down to the ground in front of our kids,” she wrote. “The young men held our neighbors up at gunpoint when they ran over and tried to help me. All in broad daylight.”

  “Look at my face in the picture. This is the face of a mother who just had the [expletive] beaten out of her,” she continued. “A mother whose only thought was, ‘let me run far enough and fight hard enough so that my kids have a chance to get away.’ This is the face of a mother who just listened to her four-year-old daughter screaming non-stop, her 7-year-old son wailing for someone to come help because bad guys are murdering his Mama in the back yard, her neighbors screaming in outrage… all while being beaten with guns and kicks and fists.”

  .@Shivanthi Sathanandan, the vice chair for the Democrat Party @MinnesotaDFL in Minnesota, virulently advocated for the dismantling of the Minneapolis Police Department even as neighborhoods in the city were burned to the ground by #BLM–#Antifa rioters.

  Now, she has come… pic.twitter.com/Plc4m2SSJO

  — Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) September 7, 2023

  Attackers Must be ‘Held Accountable’

  “These men knew what they were doing. I have NO DOUBT they have done this before. Yet they are still on OUR STREETS. Killing mothers. Giving babies psychological trauma that a lifetime of therapy cannot erase. With no hesitation and no remorse,” Ms. Sathanandan wrote.

  “I’m now part of the statistics. I wasn’t silent when I fought these men to save my life and my babies, and I won’t be silent now. We need to get illegal guns off of our streets, catch these young people who are running wild creating chaos across our city, and HOLD THEM IN CUSTODY AND PROSECUTE THEM,” she said.

  “Look at my face. REMEMBER ME when you are thinking about supporting letting juveniles and young people out of custody to roam our streets instead of HOLDING THEM ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS,” the Democrat wrote.

  A report from the Minneapolis Police Department obtained by KSTP states that Ms. Sathanandan’s vehicle was later abandoned by the suspects and recovered.

  It is not clear if any suspects have been arrested. The Epoch Times has contacted the Minneapolis Police Department for further comment.

  

  ‘Dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department’

  The alleged attack on Ms. Sathanandan and her subsequent comments come roughly three years after she accused police of having “systematically failed the Black Community,” and vowed to “dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department.”

   

  In a post on Facebook at the height of the BLM protests taking place throughout the country, sparked by the death of George Floyd while in police custody, Ms. Sathanandan wrote: “We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. Say it with me. DISMANTLE The Minneapolis Police Department.

  “MPD has systematically failed the Black Community, they have failed ALL OF US. It’s time to build a new infrastructure that works for ALL communities,” she wrote. “If you are still disagreeing with that BASIC FACT, I’m not sure what to say to you.”

  In her post on Thursday detailing the alleged carjacking, Ms. Sathanandan vowed that the criminals would not win.

  “We need to take back our city. And this will not be the last you hear from me about this,” she said.

  The Democrat concluded the lengthy post by thanking the “incredible Minneapolis 4th Precinct Officers, Mayor Frey, Chief O’Hara, Paramedics, neighbors, friends and DFL family” who “all came to our aide during this terrifying experience.”

  “I’m so grateful for this community that wraps us in love,” she wrote.

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

   

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/08/2023 – 21:00

• Doug Casey On The 2024 Election
  Doug Casey On The 2024 Election

  Authored by Doug Casey via InternationalMan.com,

  

  International Man: President Biden is running for reelection in 2024.

  However, many Americans are questioning Biden’s physical and mental faculties. He appears half asleep on many occasions—often forgetting his train of thought or stumbling on his words.

  Biden will soon be 81, making him the oldest president in US history.

  What’s your take?

  Doug Casey: The very fact that he’s supposedly even contemplating running in 2024 is further proof that he’s non compos mentis. He’s so far gone that he doesn’t even realize what an embarrassment he is. But it’s not a question of his age, per se.

  A lot of people in their eighties are sharp as a tack. Age slows you down, true. But if you’ve gained wisdom through many years of experience, you can still play the game. The problem with Biden isn’t so much that he’s decrepit and feeble—although those things are highly undesirable in a national leader. It’s that he lacks any semblance of ability, has no judgment, and is devoid of morality and ethics. The world is asking: How degraded are the American people that they could not just elect but are thinking of reelecting, such a pathetic shell?

  Trump is only four years younger, but he appears hale and hardy. All this should be academic, however. It should, ideally, make little difference who the president is.

  Switzerland is the most prosperous country in Europe, and nobody knows or cares who the president of Switzerland might be. It would be nice if the president of the US was nothing but a figurehead, someone respectable to set a moral tone and give a good example. Perhaps that’s the biggest reason Biden shouldn’t run. He’s almost the antithesis of a role model. Although admittedly superior to his thoroughly degenerate son, who he once identified as the most intelligent man he knew.

  International Man: Despite the countless indictments against him, Donald Trump is still the frontrunner for the Republican ticket with an enormous lead.

  What’s your perspective on Trump this time around?

  Doug Casey: I did an interview here in 2016 when he first talked of running—and nothing has changed.

  He has absolutely no philosophical core; he flies by the seat of his pants. Trump is popular because he’s a traditionalist and a nationalist. He wants the US to return to the values of a kinder and gentler era. However, he’s not a libertarian. He has no understanding of economics, as evidenced by the fact that he wants massive duties on imports. He has no fear of gigantic deficits. He’s fine with borrowing even more money. He’s quite willing to put on regulations when he arbitrarily thinks it’s a good idea.

  At a time when the US is collapsing in on itself, bankrupt, crime-ridden, and overtaken by crazy wokeness, I believe most people would prefer a traditionalist—at least someone who’s not a Jacobin looking to overturn the whole basis of society. I hasten to add that Biden himself isn’t even the real problem—as degraded as he is—it’s the people who manipulate the doddering old fool. His cabinet and top officials are an assortment of criminal personalities. They are, without exception, stupid, incompetent, and/or psychotic. That’s a radical statement, but I believe it’s factual. The overweight tranny sporting an admirals costume while masquerading as a woman is far from the worst of the bunch.

  At least Trump is something of an outsider. The people in the evil party hate him simply because he’s an outspoken traditionalist who resonates with the hoi polloi. They suffer from what’s known as “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

  I’m not really a fan of Trump, except for the fact that he’s a traditionalist. It’s interesting that the people who do hate him, hate him just because he’s a traditionalist. I see zero evidence that he’s a criminal. He is just a successful self-promoter, a celebrity who made some money in real estate and has genuine concerns about his country. Plus, he’s very entertaining—that actually counts for something.

  International Man: Now that actual libertarians seem to be running the Libertarian Party, do you see anything interesting coming from them in 2024?

  Doug Casey: I neither follow nor care about the Libertarian Party. It only counts because it’s registered to run candidates in all 50 states. None of them have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning more than a local race for dogcatcher. That said, the major parties will each try to use it to draw votes from the other party. That was the case in 2016 when Johnson/Weld got 4.5 million votes, 3.3% of the total. That’s a big deal in a close election.

  Except for Ron Paul and Harry Browne, who intelligently used the election as a bully platform to spread the philosophy, the Libertarian Party’s candidates have been non-entities. I’m sure that’ll be the case this year as well.

  In fact, they’re worse than just narcissistic non-entities. Their 2016 candidate, Gary Johnson, was just a good-natured pothead who somehow got elected governor of New Mexico. He picked William Weld, ex-governor of Massachusetts and a classic Deep State operative, as his VP. How did that ever happen?

  I understand the Libertarian Party has evicted the party-archs who promoted that ticket. I used to say, if you’re going to vote, at least vote Libertarian as a protest vote. But it really is a wasted vote from every point of view these days. Not that it really matters. I understand the arguments why you should vote, but the fact is that your vote counts about as much as a grain of sand on a beach, especially if the election is rigged.

  International Man: Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, suggested a Trump/RFK ticket would win in a massive landslide.

  Presuming the DNC rigs the primary against RFK Jr., what role do you see him playing in the general election?

  Doug Casey: They’re both outspoken and very entertaining—90% of politics is entertainment. They mostly agree on Covid, which is wonderful. They’re both anti-war. They’re both anti-Deep State.

  It’s possible that Bannon’s right; the public would love two refreshing semi-outsiders. But it would probably be like taking a couple of cats and tying their tails together.

  Kennedy, as I explained before, is basically an old-style “reasonable” Democrat. He believes in a “safety net” (i.e. welfare), regulation, the green agenda, and the rest of it. So does Trump, to a great extent. It’s not that Bannon’s wrong; it’s just that the two of them would always try to overshadow each other. But at least they’re not woke Democrats…

  In my view, the Republicans are the stupid party, and the Democrats are the evil party. Given a chance between stupid and evil, you should probably go for stupid. They might be less destructive. Although perversely, since stupidity is amorphous, illogical, and unpredictable, they could be just dangerous in a different way. It’s a classic Hobson’s Choice.

  International Man: What sort of dirty tricks do you see occurring in the run-up to the 2024 election?

  Is it possible the Deep State will find a way to cancel the election if it isn’t going their way?

  Doug Casey: You may recall that in 2016, I placed a money bet that, against all odds, Trump would win. In 2020, I gave six reasons why the Democrats would win.

  So I’m foolishly starting to think I’m a handicapper of the how hoi polloi will vote. Or at least who’s best at fixing an election.

  The Democrats might win simply because the American electorate has become so corrupt; they accept socialism in principle. In addition, the Dems currently control the apparatus of the State and are aggressively using it to cement themselves in power.

  They’re actual Jacobins, Neo-Marxists, and will do anything to stay in office. Like the way, they’re prosecuting Trump in four different jurisdictions for scores of nonsensical, fabricated charges. They’re attempting to bankrupt him with legal fees, de-legitimize him with unthinking voters, and tie up his time so it’s impossible for him to campaign.

  This is the type of thing, like the extraordinary sentences handed down for the Jan 6 protests, that goes on in Third World countries. Serious MAGA people could go wild. It’s possible that we won’t even have an election in 2024, as outrageous as that sounds.

  The Dems can’t run Biden. It’s egregious elder abuse; the old criminal is just a shell of a man. Nor can they run the cackling, dim-witted Kamala, even though many black people will predictably cry racism in today’s environment. She’s a parody of herself.

  So, who can the Democrats run? Michelle Obama? She is way too much of a hot potato ultra-leftist. Another option is Gavin Newsom, who’s undistinguished by anything except being good-looking and running California into the ground. I don’t see anybody else with name recognition.

  There are several other huge X factors. Between now and the election, we’re very likely to have a financial and economic crisis. The Greater Depression could well up from under the surface and explode like a volcano, creating chaos. The military crisis in the Ukraine could spin out of control into an actual war against Russia. The US continues to antagonize China, a big wild card. And Washington seems to be plumping for a war in North Africa.

  Perhaps most important is the fact that the red people and the blue people in the US actually hate each other. It’s much more serious and widespread than any culture clash we had in the past, including the late 1960s and early 1970s.

  It could lead to something resembling a civil war. The US Government itself is losing legitimacy with wide swaths of domestic and foreign public opinion. I know it’s outlandish to consider seriously, but is it possible that we could wind up with a military government in the US?

  Although the US military has become corrupt and is also collapsing on itself, it’s about the only government institution that Americans still trust. In a time of chaos, when neither party can put forward a candidate, we could get a general as a (temporary) solution. Likely an opportunistic leftist like the recently defrocked Petraeus.

  It’s a reasonably safe bet that 2024 is not going to be just a bad year but one for the record books.

  *  *  *

  Disturbing economic, political, and social trends are already in motion and now accelerating at breathtaking speed. The risks that lie ahead are too big and dangerous to ignore. That’s exactly why bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released a free report with all the details on how to survive an economic collapse. It will help you understand what is unfolding right before our eyes and what you should do so you don’t get caught in the crosshairs. Click here to download the PDF now.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/08/2023 – 21:00

• FBI, HHS Stonewalling Congress Over Illegal Chinese COVID Lab In California
  FBI, HHS Stonewalling Congress Over Illegal Chinese COVID Lab In California

  The Chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has threatened to subpoena the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) after they refused to produce information on an illegal Chinese lab that was “caught red-handed conducting dangerous research related to COVID-19 and other deadly diseases without a license by FBI agents and California officials.”

  

  In Thursday letters to the agencies (FBI letter, HHS letter), Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) noted their failure to respond to prior requests for information, and says that if they fail to comply with oversight, “we will be forced to evaluate the use of the compulsory process.”

  The letter also puts the agencies on notice that the Subcommittee may request that employees sit for voluntary transcribed interviews.

  As we previously noted, the lab was found in what was thought to be a empty storage building in Reedley, California – located in the central San Joaquin Valley.

  

  It was only discovered after a local code enforcement officer noticed a garden hose poking out a back wall of the building, according to YourCentralValley.

  Public Health staff also observed blood, tissue and other bodily fluid samples and serums; and THOUSANDS of vials of unlabeled fluids and suspected biological material.

  Additionally they found 900 genetically engineered mice, engineered to catch and carry COVID-19, living in “inhumane” conditions.

  773 of the mice had to be euthanized, and officials found another 178 mice already dead.

  “This is an unusual situation. I’ve been in government for 25 years. I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Reedley City Manager Nicole Zieba.

  Even county health officials were left in shock.

  “I’ve never seen this in my 26-year career with the County of Fresno,” said Assistant Director of the Fresno County Department of Public Health Joe Prado.

  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tested the substances and detected at least 20 potentially infectious agents, including coronavirus, HIV, hepatitis and herpes, according to a Health and Human Services letter dated June 6.

  Agents also found thousands of package boxes – many with shipping labels from China. Below is a photo included in court documents in California.

  

  NBC News reports that an investigation found the tenant was Prestige BioTech, a company registered in Nevada and unlicensed for business in California. City officials spoke with Xiuquin Yao, who was identified as the company president, through emails included in the court documents.

  Yao told officials that Prestige BioTech moved assets belonging to a defunct company, Universal Meditech Inc., to the Reedley warehouse from Fresno after UMI went under. Prestige Biotech was a creditor to UMI and identified as its successor, according to court documents.

  Officials were unable to get any California-based address for either company except for the previous Fresno location from which UMI had been evicted.

  “The other addresses provided for identified authorized agents were either empty offices or addresses in China that could not be verified,” court documents said.

  Related:

  • Newsom Funded Chinese COVID Lab Known To Biden’s FDA

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/08/2023 – 20:40

• Victor Davis Hanson: What Game Is Hunter Biden Playing?
  Victor Davis Hanson: What Game Is Hunter Biden Playing?

  Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,

  What shameless act or felonious activity was not evidenced on Hunter Biden’s laptop?

  Racist attitudes toward Asians?

  Soliciting prostitution?

  Felonious use of drugs?

  Photographed nudity and perverse sex?

  Admissions to illicit foreign shakedowns?

  

  Hunter all but accused his own father, President Joe Biden, of also being on the foreign take:

  “I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family … Unlike Pop I won’t make you give me half your salary.”

  Hunter’s alleged felonies range from bribery to tax evasion. That he has not yet been prosecuted for anything is scandalous. His exemption is attributable only to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s likely weaponized directives to federal prosecutors to downgrade or forget altogether felony charges against Hunter.

  So given such wild behavior, why would not Hunter tone it down, stop the global grifting, cease the reckless behavior — and quit redirecting attention to the likely illegal acts of his father, the president?

  Why did not Hunter early on just settle the child support suit filed by his paramour Lunden Roberts? Why haggle over money for his own daughter?

  Hunter instead outrageously claimed near poverty. That excuse was hilarious given he flies on private jets and pays nearly $16,000 a month to rent a house in tony, celebrity-ridden Malibu.

  Why did Hunter ever get involved with a performance stripper in the first place after his past widely publicized liaisons with prostitutes? Why also with his own widowed sister-in-law?

  Given Hunter has little or no experience or training in high-stakes international finance and investment — and thus has no market value as an investor or broker. But he was infamous for translating that nothingness into millions in lucre due solely to his ability to monetize the influence of then-Vice President Joe Biden.

  So why now when under 24/7 scrutiny, would Hunter dare recreate himself as an “artist,” by blowing through straws in his mouth?

  His amateurish canvasses somehow have sold for up to $500,000 a pop. Both Biden donors and gamers saw their buys of such mediocre art as gambits either to meet with or profit from his father, Joe Biden.

  But would not his painting grift only bring greater prosecutorial scrutiny and greater embarrassment to the president?

  Hunter Biden’s attorneys sought to leverage federal prosecutors into agreeing to drop their charges — by threatening to call in as a pro-Hunter witness President Joe Biden himself and thereby likely invoke a constitutional crisis!

  In such a scenario, the president under oath would be forced to lie again that he had no knowledge of or involvement in Hunter’s illegal behavior. Or if he admitted the truth that he did, he would thus contradict years of his adamant denials.

  Why would Hunter put his father and president in such a publicity circus?

  Hunter has lost an incriminating laptop by abandoning it at a repair shop. He has forgotten his crack pipe in a rental car. His illegally registered handgun turned up in a trash dumpster near a school.

  So would not the carefree Hunter insist that all the Bidens in the spotlight remain extra careful never to abandon incriminating drugs — especially in the White House.

  Yet in a West Wing first, recently cocaine was found lost in an entrance vestibule. Various media outlets claimed it belonged to someone in the “Biden family orbit.”

  One of two things explain the continuous reckless behavior of wayward son Hunter Biden:

  • One, he is either still on drugs or so suffers from past addiction that he has lost all common sense and judgment, and simply cannot control his behavior.

  • Or, two, Hunter is an embittered, angry son. As the Biden bagman for foreign shakedown cash, he did the dirty work and most risked the legal exposure that made all the Bidens rich.

  Yet, instead of familial praise — or so the broke Hunter seems to whine on his laptop –Hunter gets no respect from those he enriched.

  And now he, not they, might first go to jail.

  As a result, does his continuous recklessness send a not so-subtle reminder to all the Bidens – his father the “Big Guy” especially?

  That is, Hunter is not going to take the fall.

  He will not end up in prison for decades while the other exempt Bidens continue to enjoy their ill-gotten riches, due to Hunter’s imaginative cons.

  No wonder the first family for months moved Hunter into the White House and put him on Air Force One.

  Is it now, “Keep Hunter close and self-important — or else”?

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/08/2023 – 20:20

• "I Don't Give A F***": Top Maryland Education Official Caught Using Encrypted Msg App As Grade Scandal Deepens
  “I Don’t Give A F***”: Top Maryland Education Official Caught Using Encrypted Msg App As Grade Scandal Deepens

  Investigative journalist Chris Papst of Fox45 News’ Project Baltimore has been leading the charge in exposing a massive grade scandal and subsequent cover-up in the country’s fourth most funded school system. The corruption isn’t confined to the Baltimore City Public Schools level; it extends all the way up to the Maryland State Superintendent of Schools. 

  SCANDAL: #ProjectBaltimore can now confirm the Maryland Schools Superintendent @MdPublicSchools used an encrypted, auto-deleting, messaging App (Signal) to conduct state business. Add this to his hidden email account and the 98 deleted texts we uncovered.https://t.co/lgu2t7xNHP

  — Chris Papst (@chrispapst) September 7, 2023

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  The latest report Papst shared comes weeks after his team found metadata for 98 text messages sent or received by Maryland Superintendent Mohammed Choudhury in the first quarter of this year — around the time the state changed grades that no longer can be seen. 

  Before

  

  After 

  

  And why would the state change the grades? Well, it’s alleged that Superintendent Choudhury needs good optics for the crime-ridden metro area after Papst’s team released this shocking report in February: ‘Education Crisis’: 23 Baltimore City Schools Have No Students Proficient In Math. 

  Papst believes these text messages hold the answer to why the state government made the statistical cover-up. His latest report includes “an encrypted cell phone app and never meant to be seen by the public are now shedding light on what’s happening at the Maryland State Department of Education,” according to the Project Baltimore report. 

  Here’s the report:

  The messages appear to support concerns over the state superintendent’s leadership, transparency, and creation of a toxic workplace culture.

  Project Baltimore asked Superintendent Mohammed Choudhury about the messages at the August 22 state board of education meeting.

  “Mr. Superintendent, have you ever used the Signal Application in commission of your job?” Project Baltimore’s Chris Papst asked.

  Choudhury replied, “I have no comment. For my job, no.”

  “You’ve never used Signal for your job?” Papst asked again.

  “No,” replied Choudhury.

  On record, Choudhury told Papst that Signal wasn’t used for work-related purposes. However, new screenshots from a senior employee in Maryland Public Schools (who wished to remain anonymous) suggest otherwise. 

  Project Baltimore obtained screenshots of conversations between Choudhury and high-ranking employees within the Maryland State Department of Education.

  Each one is a “Signal Message” sent by “Mohammed Choudhury” to at least one high-level employee at MSDE who asked not to be identified. Project Baltimore received multiple text threads, which the source says were sent between late 2021 and 2022.

  In the screenshots, Choudhury’s name and picture are visible. The phone number is also registered to the superintendent. In the messages, Choudhury certainly appears to be talking about work.

  In one screenshot, Choudhury “set the disappearing message timer to 1 hour”, which applies to select messages.

  Choudhury writes, “All of that teacher assignment stuff is too much.”

  In another Signal message, Choudhury tells an employee a project needs “A LOT of work.” He goes on to say, “as of now, I’m not even close to green lighting anything there”.

  In another instance, Choudhury appears to berate his employee, saying, “What feels like a waste of time is tell (sic) me last minute we are changing survey links when I told you I didn’t want to do this.”

  The employee responds, “I don’t understand what you see the issue to be”

  Choudhury writes back, “I’ll make it easy for you guys. Your (sic) not changing it. It’s staying as is. Don’t meet with me today. Done. That’s a directive.”

  “So cancel the Qualtrics license?” Asks the employee.

  Choudhury responds, “Yes, I don’t give a F*** about Qualtrics at this point.”

  

  What remains troubling is why the superintendent would use Signal on his personal phone, with some messages disappearing in one hour for work-related tasks. 

  “And if those messages are set to disappear, they can’t be accessed under open records laws. Parents and taxpayers cannot see what’s being said by their state superintendent about public schools,” Project Baltimore said. 

  Here’s more from Papst. 

  Papst asked Tina Williams-Koroma, founder and CEO of TCecure, a Baltimore cybersecurity company: “Does it concern you that the highest-ranking public education official in the state is using signal to conduct state business?”

  “Yeah, I think it’s concerning to me that some of the information in records may not be accessible and discoverable,” Williams-Koroma replied.

  Where is the national outrage? 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/08/2023 – 20:00

• Biden Biography Bombshell: Hillary Violated Logan Act, Drew Rebuke From Ex-Crony
  Biden Biography Bombshell: Hillary Violated Logan Act, Drew Rebuke From Ex-Crony

  Authored by Ben Sellers via Headline USA,

  Once again, Hillary Clinton appears to have flagrantly violated federal law and faced no consequences for her actions, according to an inadvertent admission from a new biography of President Joe Biden.

  

  The book, Franklin Foer’s The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future,” casts an otherwise rosy glow on Biden’s catastrophic tenure—perhaps as part of a last-ditch bid to rehab the flailing president’s popular support and legacy while making it appear as though his scripted policymaking has been carefully studied and scrutinized.

  But according to a report from the Associated Press on some of the key takeaways from it, the book reveals how Clinton, the former secretary of State under Barack Obama, took an active role in attempting to help Afghan women flee the Taliban after Biden’s botched military withdrawal plan went awry.

  Her efforts to assist the female refugees at first appeared noble—in particular due to the fact that they seemed so selflessly removed from Clinton’s thirst for money, power and acclaim.

  “She directed a group of them to wear white scarfs [sic] so they could be identified by U.S. Marines guarding the Kabul airport, and unilaterally contacted world leaders to find places for their eventual evacuation flights to land,” the AP reported.

  However, Clinton’s decision to “unilaterally contact” world leaders as a civilian also put her in direct violation of the Logan Act.

  The act prohibits any U.S. citizen “who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government… in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States…”

  Its punishment includes up to three years in prison, as well as a hefty fine.

  Specifically, after reaching out directly, without authorization, to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about the prospect of taking in Afghan refugees, Clinton drew a rebuke from her own former campaign policy adviser, Jake Sullivan.

  According to Foer’s book, Sullivan—who is currently the Biden administration’s national security adviser—told her “What are you doing calling the Ukrainian government?”

  Clinton, in turn, responded, “I wouldn’t have to call if you guys would.”

  While the stunning violation of protocol is likely to go unpunished by the Biden administration, it is easy to imagine the many ways that Clinton’s outreach to Zelenskyy might have undermined delicate negotiations already in progress over the likelihood of what would soon be a full-scale Russian invasion.

  Sullivan had undoubtedly been deeply involved, at that point, in laying the scaffolding for the proxy war—an extension of the CIA-backed color-revolution that began in the country during Obama’s presidency.

  Apart from any unspoken obligations the U.S. may have to aid in the country’s defense, the Biden administration’s peculiar interest in Ukraine spans an array of possible motives—from money-laundering to child-trafficking to blackmail to helping globalist oligarchs like BlackRock and George Soros to use the country as their sandbox for the Great Reset.

  Notwithstanding, it is clear that Clinton was the last person they wanted in the middle of those diplomatic discussions.

  Clinton, meanwhile, joined her own successor as secretary of State, John Kerry, in having egregiously violated the 1799 law.

  Kerry controversially inserted himself into foreign policy negotiations with Iran during the Trump administration, even having the chutzpah to tell the rogue regime that it should wait out Trump’s presidential term before taking any rash steps.

  He was not prosecuted for his actions.

  Ironically, the person closest to being prosecuted under the Logan Act may have been Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

  Members of the Clinton campaign team and the Obama intelligence community collectively strategized on how to ensnare Flynn in a legal trap after having illegally unmasked him for unsolicited phone calls he had received from a Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.

  After Obama imposed sanctions against Russia for its alleged interference in the 2016 election, Kislyak sought—and received—Flynn’s assurances that the Trump administration would not continue with his predecessor’s policy.

  On Jan. 5, 2017, top Obama team members, including his top spies, seditiously plotted to use the Logan Act as the pretense to open a secret investigation into the incoming administration, giving them the ability to wiretap Trump and his top deputies, based on the false pretense—which they knew to be false at the time—that Trump was colluding with Russia.

  Shortly thereafter, FBI agents, led by Peter Strzok, interviewed Flynn in his office and snared him in a perjury trap for failing to remember the exact details of his conversations with Kislyak—which, unbeknownst to Flynn, they had been given a transcript of.

  The transcript of the calls was later leaked to the Washington Post for the purpose of embarassing the new administration, and it ltimately was what triggered the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate the Russia-collusion hoax.

  Fittingly, Jake Sullivan was deeply involved in both Kerry’s operation as “lead negotiator” in Iran, and in Clinton cover-ups such as her e-mail scandal and Benghazi cover-up.

  He also testified against Flynn during a House Oversight investigation of the Russia hoax—which he, himself, had helped to concoct and spread.

  Sullivan claimed before Congress that Flynn had “absolutely” colluded with the Russians in violation of the Logan Act.

  “lf l went out right now and started telling foreign officials, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll avoid some action the current government is taking,’ that would be a violation of the Logan Act,” Sullivan testified in response to a question from then ranking minority member Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.

  “And I think what Flynn did here—I mean, I’m not an attorney, but just on the face of what the purpose of this act is, what he did ran directly contrary to it,” he added.

  Other highlights from Foer’s Biden biography:

  • Biden reportedly was angered when contronted by Chinese president Xi Jinping about the rumors of U.S.-backed bioweapons facilities in Ukraine, telling Xi: “You know better than that, this is crap. Stop mouthing nonsense Russian talking points: I know you know that, so give me a break,” the Daily Caller reported.

  • Despite having spent four decades as a political elite, Biden was resentful of Barack Obama’s Ivy League education and claimed he couldn’t even curse properly, the AP reported, saying Obama was unable to deliver a “f—- you” with “the right elongation of vowels and the necessary hardness of consonants; it was how they must curse in the ivory tower.”

  • Vice President Kamala Harris damaged her rapport with Biden by initially asking to be in charge of relations with Scandinavia because it was “away from the spotlight.” Biden, in turn, bestowed on her the “thankless” job of uncovering the “root cause” of immigration at the U.S. border.

  • Biden has privately admitted to feeling “tired” despite denying publicly that he is unfit to lead due to his advanced age.

  Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/08/2023 – 19:40

• Walmart Pay Cuts For New Hires Indicates Economic Downturn Has Arrived
  Walmart Pay Cuts For New Hires Indicates Economic Downturn Has Arrived

  The latest jobs reports (read: here & here) have revealed the US labor market, while still adding jobs, shows signs of cooling. Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, has noticed the slowdown and is cutting pay for new store hires. 

  According to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the retailer introduced a new payment structure for new employees that went into effect in mid-July. Anyone who is hired today receives less pay than someone who was hired three months ago. 

  The new payment structure means new hires who join the digital or stocking departments will make about a dollar an hour less than they would have if hired earlier this year. 

  

  “This will allow for better staffing throughout the store,” said one of the documents. Walmart has already raised hourly pay for 50,000 workers because their pay was below the new minimum. 

  On Thursday, a Walmart spokeswoman confirmed the pay structure change, adding it allows new workers to learn and improve on skills to climb the company ladder. 

  News of Walmart’s pay reduction for new hires comes as the labor market appears to be cracking:

  • Labor Market Implodes: Job Openings Crater, Prior Data “Unexpectedly” Revised Sharply Lower
  • Unemployment Rate Unexpectedly Surges As BLS Revises Payrolls For Every Month In 2023 Sharply Lower

  More importantly, David Bassuk, the global head of retail at AlixPartners consulting firm, noted that retailers are scrambling to cut costs ahead of a period of consumer weakness. 

  “This is one example of many where retailers are doing everything they can to try to head off increasing costs,” Bassuk said.

  Walmart’s moves “signal the industry where things are either headed or what they should be considering,” he said. “I think we are starting to see the pendulum start to swing back to a different set of priorities.”

  The retailer sees precisely what we’ve explained to readers in recent months: low/mid-tier consumers are tapped out after two years of negative real wages that forced them to deplete savings while boosting credit card spending to make ends meet. Now, student loan payments are kicking in and will serve as an even larger economic headwind. 

  Goldman’s take on all of this is that the wage-price spiral is over: 

  It is worth noting that the market ticked higher as soon as the WMT story hit about looking to lower labor costs. Keep in mind, they were among the very first large companies to make major wage investment announcements years ago so this does feel like a notable story. Even if not an immediate needle mover to numbers, it is likely to be a driver for sentiment given the market’s large focus on CPI. “Walmart is paying some new store workers less than it would have three months ago, a sign that employers are seeking to cut labor costs as the once-hot market for hourly staff cools.” This is the first story of this kind we have seen. Also, they are the keynote speaker on day 1 of our retail conference next Tuesday, the 12th.

  In a recent earnings call, Walmart’s CFO voiced concerns about “uncertainty in the economy during the rest of the year.” The decision to reduce pay suggests that America’s largest employer is already feeling downward pressure in the economy. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/08/2023 – 19:20

• Power Vacuum: How The State Wants To Suck Electricity From The SUV You Are Required To Buy
  Power Vacuum: How The State Wants To Suck Electricity From The SUV You Are Required To Buy

  Authored by Thomas Buckley via The Mises Institute,

  A literal power vacuum – that’s what California Senate Bill 233 proposes.

  And what is to be sucked? Your electric car.

  The bill – which has passed the Senate and is now winding its way through the Assembly – states that all new electric vehicles to be sold in California after 2030 be “bidirectional.”

  

  Because the state has decided to essentially go all electric without having the ability to actually provide enough electricity, the climate warriors have gotten a bit creative and now see the millions of electric vehicles (EVs) in the state as tiny batteries to make up for their incompetence.

  Currently, not every EV can send power back to the grid (like home solar panels that ship excess power to their local utility.) The bill—almost certain to pass because this is California—would change that.

  The bill, however, is only the first step in the process of being able to drain your EV, as the technology to get the electricity back onto the grid does not actually exist. As with so many other Golden State climate-related projects, it is based on being able to do it someday . . . probably . . . maybe.

  While this approach allows solons and nabobs to tout their green-a-fides, set even more absurd future goals by assuming things will work eventually, increase state spending to fund such projects, and create an excuse to not actually do anything practical—like build natural gas generators—to shore up the state’s extremely wobbly grid, it does nothing to address California’s self-imposed “energy insecurity.”

  The idea becomes even more absurd when one considers that shortly after announcing all new vehicles sold in the state by 2035 must be electric, the state asked the public to not charge their EVs after work because the grid couldn’t handle it.

  In theory, this bill raises the specter of electricity being drained out of your full Tesla to power your neighbor’s empty Volt.

  Furthermore, the concept is extremely dangerous. Imagine an emergency situation in which you have to leave your home immediately but you cannot because the state drained your car. The implications for fire evacuations, earthquake response, etc. are terrifying.

  And its not terribly clear if you would get paid for your power and/or if you would have to buy it back.

  Beyond the impracticalities, the concept does shine a light, as it were, on how easily the electrical power supply can be controlled and—if the grid is your only power option (no gas cars, no gas stoves, no propane, etc.)—how easily the public can be controlled through it.

  From “The Psychology of Electricity”:

  Now, a person can go to a gas station, put solar panels on their roof, buy propane at the hardware store, use natural gas in their home, even cut down trees to burn for heat. In other words, there are options other than electricity; there are literally millions of ways to not need to use electricity.

  But imagine a literally all-electric world—you are reduced, confined, required to get the energy you need to live from one source, one centrally (by necessity) controlled source that everything you own runs on, one centrally controlled source that can cut the power to your specific home anytime it wants.

  Conceivably—see China/social credit systems/central bank digital currency/“you’ll own nothing and be happy” and smart city concepts—[the] reasons for the power being cut will move beyond just being bill-related but conduct-related.

  The power of energy as a social control lever is nearly limitless.

  And that’s another reason why this legislative initiative is a very bad idea.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/08/2023 – 19:00

• Biden's New Campaign Ad Presents Him As Last Action Hero Entering Ukraine "Under The Cover Of Night"
  Biden’s New Campaign Ad Presents Him As Last Action Hero Entering Ukraine “Under The Cover Of Night”

  “He entered Ukraine under the cover of night. And in the morning, Joe Biden walked shoulder to shoulder with our allies in the war-torn streets,” the narrator of a new one-minute Biden campaign ad begins. “Standing up for democracy in a place where a tyrant is waging war to take it away.”

  Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, where he’ll likely face Trump as the Republican nominee, the Biden team is focusing the reelection campaign around his surprise visit to Ukraine which took place last February. It’s being touted as the first time in American history that a sitting president traveled to an allied nation at war. “In the middle of a war zone, Joe Biden showed the world what America is made of,” the narrator says. “That’s the quiet strength of a true leader, who doesn’t back down to a dictator.” Watch the one-minute ad below:

  So while his critics sarcastically refer to him as “sleepy Joe” – his supporters are envisioning him as some kind of last action hero being covertly whisked into a dangerous “war zone” in the dark of night. “Air raid sirens blared as the two men walked together,” the clip dramatically continues, showing Biden shoulder to shoulder with Zelensky.

  The video was timed to be released to coincide with Biden’s trip to the G20 summit in India, where he’ll likely have strong words for Putin, who will not be attendance. NBC writes of the spot entitled simply “War Zone”:

  The new, 60-second advertisement will air in battleground states this weekend during the prime-time broadcast of “60 Minutes” while Biden is due to attend the G-20 Summit here, a gathering of leaders of the world’s largest economies that won’t include two geopolitical rivals, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping.

  This comes as he’s set to pour yet billions more of American taxpayer dollars into Kiev’s coffers. Yet war observers and analysts have of late expressed intensifying concern over uncontrollable escalation in what’s now obviously a US-NATO proxy war against Russia. But Biden is doubling or tripling down, showing the world “what America is made of”, apparently.

  

  At a moment Congress is mulling Biden’s latest request for more than $24 billion for Ukraine, one independent commentator has compiled a list of the mammoth aid sent so far. Again, the below is all “courtesy” of the American taxpayer, many of them unwilling of course…

  • 2/20/2023 $500 Million
  • 2/23/2023 $10 Billion
  • 2/24/2023 $2 Billion
  • 3/3/2023 $400 Million
  • 3/20/2023 $350 Million
  • 4/04/2023 $2.6 Billion
  • 4/19/2023 $325 Million
  • 5/08/2023 $1.2 Billion
  • 5/18/2023 $3 Billion
  • 5/19/2023 $375 Million
  • 5/19/2023 $40 Billion
  • 5/31/2023 $300 Million
  • 6/09/2023 $2.1 Billion
  • 6/13/2023 $325 Million
  • 6/16/2023 $205 Million
  • 6/20/2023 $6.2 Billion
  • 6/26/2023 $500 Million
  • 07/07/2023 $800 Million
  • 07/18/2023 $1.3 Billion
  • 07/21/2023 $400 Million
  • 08/13/2023 $13 Billion
  • 08/15/2023 $200 Million
  • 08/29/2023 $250 Million
  • 09/05/2023 $125 Million
  • 09/06/2023 $1 Billion
  • 09/07/2023 $600 Million

  …and these are just the publicly disclosed funds spent – never mind what’s likely a massive CIA black budget for Ukraine.

  Meanwhile, look how Huffington Post and the “never Trump” MSM is already framing the “issues” going into 2024… the GOP is supposedly “appeasing Putin”. According to the far left outlet, “As GOP Argues About Whether To Appease Putin, Biden Leans In On Support To Ukraine”:

  A new TV ad to run on “60 Minutes” highlights Biden’s February trip to Kiev, making a clear contrast with Trump and other Republicans’ statements on the invasion. https://t.co/arOQihw8ob

  — HuffPost (@HuffPost) September 8, 2023

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/08/2023 – 18:40

• Reinventing Democracy
  Reinventing Democracy

  Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

  The whole point of democracy and free markets is to force competition on elites who are desperate to eliminate competition.

  What’s the point of discussing reforms that aren’t even possible in the current status quo? That’s a good question, as any discussion of major systemic changes can be dismissed as pointless (since they’ll never be adopted), and a distraction from the “real work” that can be managed within the current system.

  On the other hand, we might ask: what’s the point of discussing what is do-able in the status quo, i.e. superficial feel-good policy tweaks that change nothing in the power structure? In other words, everything is ultimately a superficial feel-good policy tweak if it doesn’t change how power, “money,” credit and resources are amassed and distributed.

  

  The argument for discussing “impossible” systemic changes is this: we must ponder other ways to structure who has power for two reasons: 1) to validate how far we descended into neofeudalism and neocolonialism, and thus how desperately we need to re-arrange the power structure, and 2) to explore different models of governance and economic incentives, with an eye on the value of competition between ideas and systems.

  Richard Bonugli and I discuss ways to restore or reinvent democracy in our recent podcast, The Roundtable Insight Vision Series: Democracy (29:36).

  Although this sounds cynical, it isn’t: democracy is not really about self-rule, it’s about keeping an elite-run system stable by institutionalizing a safety valve and a governor on elite greed, corruption and mismanagement.

  Democracy gives the rabble a restricted voice as a means of limiting elite misrule, which is the natural path taken by elites everywhere, in all eras. The elite echo-chamber is: we’re entitled (by birth, rights granted by the gods, superior intelligence, merit, etc.) to rule, and therefore whatever we decide is wise–even if it is self-serving and delusional.

  Other models of governance rely on competition between elites to keep whichever elite is currently dominant from destroying the whole arrangement via their hubris, narcissism, greed, corruption, stupidity, delusions of grandeur and all the other pathologies of power.

  These models tend to fail because the dominant elite tends to see eliminating competitors as a very good strategy for consolidating power–just like corporations always seek monopolies or cartel arrangements to eliminate the pesky risks of open competition–which as we all know, introduces the possibility of losing, which a bad thing. To eliminate the possibility of losing, eliminate competition: what an excellent solution!

  This is why “capitalism” isn’t really about free markets, any more than colonialism is about “civilizing the natives;” it’s all about eliminating competition and rigging markets. In this way, “capitalism” and democracy are a perfect partnership, as each claims a noble cloak to obscure the actual machinery of elite self-service.

  The strength of democracy in system terms is it introduces a feedback loop that serves to limit systemically dangerous extremes, for example, a dictatorship that requires everyone to wear their underwear on the outside of their clothing, or (ahem) a system like ours that has boiled away social mobility and financial security, leaving a rapaciously exploitive machine that feeds off persuading poor people to borrow even more money to convince themselves that they’re not poor and powerless.

  The wealthy own the income-producing capital, the poor “own” debt: the wealthy own the mortgage / auto loan / student loan, the poor owe the mortgage / auto loan / student loan. Funny how neofeudalism works: the financial aristocracy is in the castle, protected by the Central State, and the debt-serfs are toiling away down there, protected by, well, no one. But by all means, vote for your favorite actor on the tawdry side-stage erected to amuse the public: what flourishes, what emotion, what comedy.

  (Please pardon the outburst of “truthiness.” I’ll try not to let it happen again.)

  If democracy is boiled away, the only pressure-relief valve and governor-on-greed left is messy uprising or a messy uprising plus the wholesale abandonment of the status quo by the technocrat class that keeps the whole thing glued together (what I call opting out).

  

  The prime directive in governance is to always, always, always centralize power to extend the reach of the elite currently at the wheel, and to limit the number of grubby hands trying to reach the wheel. Centralizing political power makes life considerably easier for elites, as they only need to bribe, blackmail or persuade a handful of folks at the top to cement their power / monopoly /cartel.

  I discuss this in my book Resistance, Revolution, Liberation.

  Consider the difficulties of cementing a quasi-monopoly on banking if banking were restricted to the county level. The would-be cartel grifters would have to bribe, blackmail or persuade 3,000+ county councils, all of whom are far closer to voters and far more exposed to competition than federal regulators or the Federal Reserve or Congress-critters, who as we all know, are re-elected like clockwork except in a few cases that are basically signal noise.

  This illustrates the value of Subsidiarity in a democracy, with Subsidiarity defined as “the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level.”

  The Subsidiarity principle only works in a democracy if capital is also democratized. What’s conveniently forgotten or left unsaid is: capital always “votes” three times.

  1) Capital’s beneficiaries, allies and employees will vote to keep their gravy train running;

  2) Capital influences the public with ad campaigns and public relations, all of which are quite affordable;

  3) Capital influences the political / regulatory power players in private, a.k.a. lobbying, revolving doors between corporations and the political/regulatory agencies, junkets, farcically bloated speaking fees, etc.

  The only possible conclusion: if we don’t democratize capital, democracy is boiled away. I wish this could be sugarcoated, but it’s much like my other aphorism: if we don’t change the way money is created and distributed, we’ve change nothing.

  In other words, if we don’t change the money/credit system and democratize capital, then all we’ll ever have is more superficial feel-good policy tweaks: all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

  There are ways to re-structure the system to restore / reinvent democracy. Ellen Brown has made a persuasive case for public / community banking for many years, and the same idea can be applied to private-sector companies: How Community Companies Can Smash Monopolies (via Sadie).

  It seems impossible at this point to decentralize power and capital, but with the pressure-relief valve and governor-on-greed of democracy both disabled, the system is starting to shake apart at the seams. I’ve often discussed the various classes and elites jostling for power in the U.S., and it’s possible some elite might awaken to the necessity to restore the possibility that those with the vast majority of wealth and power might actually lose, i.e. restore real competition in the economy and our system of governance.

  This competition starts with the competition of ideas. That’s the point of our discussion on Democracy (29:36), which covers many other interesting ideas for decentralizing / reinventing democracy.

  Where to start? Here: the whole point of democracy and free markets is to force competition on elites who are desperate to eliminate competition.

  

  (via K.K.)

  *  *  *

  My new book is now available at a 10% discount ($8.95 ebook, $18 print): Self-Reliance in the 21st Century. Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

  Become a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/08/2023 – 18:20

• BofA Warns Clients Detroit Auto "Strike Almost Guaranteed"
  BofA Warns Clients Detroit Auto “Strike Almost Guaranteed”

  The United Auto Workers are nearing the end of their negotiations with Detroit’s “Big Three” automakers – General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, the producer of Chrysler – concerning a new four-year labor agreement for approximately 146,000 workers. The current labor contract expires next Thursday as the union has made demands that even the UAW’s own president calls “audacious.” 

  General Motors and Ford have already sent their proposal contracts to UAW earlier this week and last — only to get quickly rejected. On Friday, Stellantis made its first proposal on wages of around 14.5% — still well under UAW President Shawn Fain’s demand of 46% over four years. 

  The automakers’ underwhelming offers put President Biden in a tough spot ahead of next week. “Union Joe,” while relaxing at his beach house in liberal white-elitest Rehoboth Beach last week, said he ‘wasn’t too worried about potential strikes.’ 

  

  Fain has described the labor talk discussions with Detroit’s Big Three as a battle between billionaires and the working class. As the deadline looms, none of the proposals have met the union’s demands, which has led John Murphy, a senior auto analyst at Bank of America Securities, to warn clients on Friday: “Strike almost guaranteed” next week. 

  Murphy expects negotiations will result in a 25-30% increase in labor costs over the next four years with “sizable cash signing bonuses and adjustments to other benefits” once contracts are finalized. 

  He said the word on the street is “UAW may offer a counter-proposal to the OEM offers shortly” but warned, “We continue to believe a strike is very likely after the Master Agreement expires next Thursday, September 14.” 

  Murphy explained if a strike was to occur next Thur., then negative headlines could weigh down automaker stocks: 

  Should this occur, it could drive some headline-related downwards movement to the stocks, but our discussions with investors and the valuations for GM and Ford (with the stocks down – 15% and – 9%, respectively since 7/31 vs. – 3% for S&P 500) suggest the stocks largely reflect the risks of a material strike. The UAW’s strike with GM in 2019 lasted 6 weeks and a one – to two-month strike appears to be the likely outcome here, in our view.

  When BofA’s note was published, Stellantis had not disclosed their proposal to the union. Below is a comprehensive overview of the offers from Ford and GM and how they match up with UAW’s demands.

  

  Everyone is eagerly awaiting UAW’s counter-offer before the deadline next Thursday. Union Joe may care a little more this weekend. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/08/2023 – 18:00

• The Rise Of Unapologetically Partisan News Reporting
  The Rise Of Unapologetically Partisan News Reporting

  Authored by Carl M. Cannon via RealClear Wire,

  The Huffington Post was envisioned from its inception as a progressive answer to conservative talk radio and various right-leaning voices being amplified by new technology. Most specifically, it was designed as a counterpoint to the Drudge Report, a widely read and highly profitable website with populist sensibilities. The players involved in planning the new venture belonged to a select clique of Hollywood liberals and political activists in Arianna Huffington’s orbit.

  

  Among the cast of characters were film mogul David Geffen, a prodigious Democratic Party donor, along with Democratic political consultants Peter Daou and James Boyce. Jonah Peretti, a 30-year-old marketing whiz kid (and future BuzzFeed founder), was present at HuffPo’s inception, as was Kenneth Lerer, a New York investor who secured most of the money for the new venture.

  The least likely member of the core group was Andrew Breitbart, a creative and energetic conservative blogger in his mid-30s who had worked on the Drudge Report himself. Although he passed muster with the group because he was relatively liberal on social issues, Breitbart’s real connection to the enterprise was that he had known Arianna Huffington since the 1990s — when she was still an outspoken conservative. The most charismatic collaborator, of course, was the eponymous founder herself.

  “Arianna,” as everyone called her, first attained prominence in California politics as the wife of one-term Republican Congressman Michael Huffington, heir to a family fortune made in oil and gas exploration. Michael Huffington lost his 1994 Senate campaign, and the couple divorced in 1997. By 1998, Arianna was rejecting party labels and asserting that conventional “left-right divisions are so outdated.” Her evolution was just beginning. In 2001 she joined forces with environmental activist Laurie David in an endeavor dubbed the Detroit Project, which sought to shame automakers (and the Bush administration) into phasing out gas-guzzling cars and trucks.

  By April 2004, Arianna was endorsing Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show.” In July of that year, when asked during an interview in her stylish Brentwood home what she wanted out of life, Arianna replied, “I want George Bush defeated.”

  Although this answer struck Los Angeles magazine writer Steve Oney as glib, it turned out to be sincere. When her wish didn’t come true — when Bush won reelection by defeating Kerry — Huffington pursued the online journalism venture that still bears her name. Meeting in that same house in the weeks after the 2004 presidential election, a new and overtly partisan outlet was fast-tracked. It launched on May 9, 2005.

  Many traditional reporters and editors were troubled by the new direction journalism seemed to be taking. It wasn’t only the creation of the Huffington Post. Veteran political writers at venerable news organizations complained privately how sneering at Republicans, President Bush in particular, had become commonplace in their newsrooms. The legacy media had been considered left-of-center for decades, but something was changing. Conservatives had long complained about their treatment in the press (while progressives simply denied the existence of “liberal bias”), but open partisanship in newsrooms had long been discouraged.

  The Huffington Post didn’t engage in any such charades. As it gained traction in the first decade of the new millennium, its editors made no pretense about which side of the ideological spectrum it occupied. Arianna certainly didn’t.

  “We are opposed to the war in Iraq,” she told Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz in 2007. “We think the troops should come home. [Huffington Post] headlines are going to reflect what is in the best interests of the country.”

  A handful of media critics considered this trend not just refreshing for its candor, but an improvement over the old journalism model. For starters, they found it more intellectually honest. Also, at a time when the old advertising foundation was cracking, Huffington Post’s ability to quickly attract a huge readership showed that the Fox News business model might translate to the Internet. “Attitude is a huge positive, not a negative,” Ken Lerer told Kurtz. “People don’t have to love you. Maybe people come to you because they don’t love you.”

  “Attitude” was only part of the Huffington Post formula. Initially, celebrity journalism was an ingredient of its secret sauce. Well-known Hollywood liberals such as Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Robert Redford and Julia Louis-Dreyfus graced its pages with their (typically liberal) takes. HuffPo gave space to prominent progressives ranging from Dennis Kucinich and Melinda Gates to Alec Baldwin and Bernie Sanders. Lefty activists Ralph Nader and Michael Moore were contributors, as were more traditional Democrats Gary Hart and John Conyers.

  Their work was supplemented by the hiring of respected journalists such as Thomas B. Edsall and Mickey Kaus. The success of the enterprise also depended on the sheer volume of the site’s content. This was accomplished by several additional strategies. One was aggressively appropriating other outlets’ work, a practice that gave way to the slightly more kosher ploy of doing quick rewrites of other journalists’ work. (“Lynn Sweet: Obama Reorganizing Campaign, Reinforcing Leadership Ranks”). Finally, traffic was also driven by an army of “citizen journalists” who reported and wrote for HuffPo without remuneration.

  All these efforts were overseen by a cadre of editors who carefully monitored readership traffic and changed headlines or swapped out stories that weren’t doing well. The site’s success inspired copycats, some of them on the right. Just as HuffPost was a response to Drudge, conservative properties such as the Daily Caller were launched as antidotes to what their founders considered a mostly liberal landscape, including Arianna Huffington’s new online powerhouse. (Once again, the ubiquitous Andrew Breitbart was in the middle of it.)

  For the most part, these imitators mimicked the ideological imbalance of HuffPo. This view of the press — as a weapon for political advocacy — has only gained traction in the ensuing years, among partisans on both sides of the political divide.

  “One reason conservatives hate the ‘mainstream media’ is that it pretends to be something it isn’t,” British columnist Nathan Robinson wrote in The Guardian. The editor of Current Affairs, an online socialist publication, Robinson suggested in his 2019 essay that readers are alienated by hypocrisy more than ideology. “The best course of action is to acknowledge where we’re coming from,” he wrote. “If we show an awareness of our own political leanings, it actually makes us more trustworthy than if we’re in denial about them.”

  Some conservatives arrived at the same conclusion. Amid the feeding frenzy accompanying the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation process, a headline in The Federalist gave voice to this view: “The Entire Media Is Biased: They Should Just Embrace It.”

  It’s a provocative point of view, but it raises other questions. Let’s start with one point raised by Nathan Robinson: “more trustworthy” to whom? Ideologues who agree with you already? Partisans who despise you, but give you credit for being honest? Perhaps. But what about moderates or political independents — or fair-minded partisans who crave a more fact-based diet of political news without the relentless spin? This cohort, which ranges from a significant minority to a plurality of the voting public depending on the issue, seems vastly underrepresented in the new landscape of political journalism.

  Yes, it’s true that Fox News’ regular viewers generally find the network credible. Ditto for devotees of MSNBC. But these audiences are, by design, self-selecting peer review panels. Fox News’ motto since 2017 has been “Most Watched. Most Trusted.” The logic here is circular. Fox is trusted by those who watch it precisely because they know they’ll see what they want, which is bashing of Democrats and liberal elites and reflexively defending conservative personalities, politicians, policies, and culture. MSNBC and an increasing bloc of legacy media companies are Fox’s mirror image.

  The original slogan at Fox News, coined by Roger Ailes when he and Rupert Murdoch launched the network in 1996, was “Fair and Balanced.” This claim, which has resurfaced recently, induced apoplexy among liberals, which was partly Ailes’ intent. But that’s not all it was meant to signify. Inside the network, the mantra was understood to represent an intention that wasn’t cynical at all. Operating in a predominately liberal media landscape, Fox was promising to be “fair” to Republicans and their voters by providing the “balance” conservatives found missing in the rest of the press.

  One prominent Fox News journalist told me that those who dismissed Fox programming as being targeted to “a niche” market revealed the problem — and the key to Fox’s success. “Quite a niche,” he quipped. “Half the country.”

  Profitability of a Partisan Press

  Modern journalism — or, at least, modern American journalism education — dates to 1908 at the founding of the journalism school at the University of Missouri. The “J-school” is situated in the heart of the sprawling campus, which is fitting because the program has long been a source of pride for Mizzou graduates as well as journalists who’ve never even visited the college.

  Walter Williams, the visionary who started the program and later became president of the university, wrote a “journalist’s creed” that has been etched in bronze at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., since 1958, the 50^th anniversary of the founding of Missouri’s journalism school. Some of its language sounds stilted today, but the larger question is whether the values of the creed are considered outdated in the 21^st century.

  Let’s consider three items memorialized by Williams’ creed:

  • A media property is “a public trust … and acceptance of a lesser service than the public service is betrayal of this trust.”
  • “Clear thinking and clear statement, accuracy and fairness are fundamental to good journalism.”
  • “Suppression of the news, for any consideration other than the welfare of society, is indefensible.”

  Powerful forces in contemporary America are working to undermine those tenets. Financial considerations are one of them. In 2008, Fox News surpassed $500 million in annual profits. This was nearly as much as CNN ($410 million) and MSNBC ($148 million) netted combined — and a $200 million increase over 2007.

  What happened in the centennial year of America’s first journalism school that made a television network with a readily identifiable point of view so profitable? Here’s part of the answer: A national political campaign took place featuring two Democratic presidential candidates whom Bill O’Reilly and other Fox News commentators pilloried relentlessly. These attacks appealed to conservatives, who flocked to Fox for the nightly skewering of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Higher ratings translated into higher advertising revenues.

  Executives at rival networks noticed. Progressive commentators, too. One anchorman in particular had been seething over Fox’s influence for years. As Howard Kurtz noted, MSNBC anchorman Keith Olbermann had already consciously positioned his nightly program as “a liberal alternative” to O’Reilly’s show. Years before Donald Trump arrived on the political scene, Keith Olbermann conducted public discourse like a New York insult comic.

  Once, at a television award show, Olbermann gave O’Reilly a Nazi salute. When he wasn’t saying George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had committed impeachable offenses and should resign, Olbermann was accusing the president and vice president of being stupid, dishonest, cowardly, and hypocritical. Olbermann framed one segment on Bush thusly: “Pathological presidential liar or an idiot-in-chief?” On Valentine’s Day in 2008, he called Bush “a fascist,” and later that year urged John McCain to “suspend” his campaign. Most incongruously — and in an eerie foreshadowing of Trump’s own slurs against McCain — Olbermann declared that the acclaimed Vietnam War hero displayed a “disturbing lack of faith in America.”

  Periodically, the suits at NBC would give lip service to reining Olbermann in, but their hearts weren’t in it. For one thing, the feud he initiated with Bill O’Reilly led to skyrocketing ratings. Liberal audiences loved it, and his show was one of the few MSNBC ever aired that made money. And after his contract was not renewed in 2011, it was clear that MSNBC had found its own niche. Olbermann’s place was taken by Rachel Maddow, a colleague he had mentored. The new anchor was brainy and hard-working, but just as liberal in her commentary. MSNBC had moved on from Keith Olbermann’s style, but not his substance. By August 2012, New York Times media critic Alessandra Stanley wrote a story titled “How MSNBC Became Fox’s Liberal Evil Twin.”

  The context for Stanley’s essay was MSNBC’s coverage of the Republican National Convention that nominated Mitt Romney. Stanley wrote that the network’s “hyped up panelists” routinely dismissed Republican assertions as “lies,” while taking various cheap shots (Chris Matthews claimed that the GOP looks upon welfare recipients as “looters”). Stanley noted that in “recasting itself as a left-leaning riposte to Fox News,” MSNBC drew significantly more GOP convention viewers than CNN.

  “That’s because,” she added, “MSNBC offers counterprogramming, not coverage.”

  Four years later, Donald Trump’s victory pushed CNN into the MSNBC camp. The New York Times followed suit. What had once been known as the “mainstream media” began to feature entire platoons of Keith Olbermanns not only among commentators and anchors, but even among supposedly nonpartisan White House correspondents tasked with covering the news.

  In the runup to Trump’s reelection campaign, journalist Matt Taibbi wrote a book about this development called “Hate, Inc.” In it, Taibbi attributed much of the press partisanship to bottom-line concerns. I initially thought his book title was too strong and that what openly partisan journalists were selling was indignation and outrage — and fear, maybe — but not hate. The events of Jan. 6, 2021, and their aftermath revealed that this may be a distinction without a difference.

  Whatever one calls it, this much can be said: In contrast to New York Times owner Adolph Ochs’ 1896 vow that his newspaper would “give the news impartially without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interest” (and unlike Walter Williams’ creed calling suppression of the news “indefensible”), 21^st century media outlets have a habit of hyping and inventing negative information harmful to the political faction they disapprove of, while downplaying or censoring facts detrimental to the side they favor. For much of the 20^th century, this wouldn’t have been considered journalism at all.

  Rationalizing Regression

  It’s not a cop-out to concede that the arrival of the digital age posed historic challenges to the economic model and cherished assumptions of traditional media. Amid the chaos, novel arguments were proffered. Many were simply acknowledgements of new realities. Some were conscious challenges to the status quo, while others sought to rationalize problematic behavior on the part of the media. Here are four such arguments:

  • Defenders of the new free-wheeling style of journalism point out, not inaccurately, that for much of America’s history the press was unabashedly partisan. Objective, non-biased reporting aimed at a mass audience was a post-World War I development that is no longer relevant to modern audiences, or even economically viable.
  • In an unfettered media landscape, news consumers can find a multitude of views and choose from among them. What could be more egalitarian? If you dislike Rachel Maddow, switch to Tucker Carlson. The old model was staid and boring, these advocates say — and elitist. If one disparages television or radio shows or podcasts with high ratings, isn’t one denigrating the American people?
  • Reprising a theme from the 1960s, another critique of the traditional model comes from those who attack the very concept of objectivity. Arguing from the standpoint of identity politics, these critics dismiss the term as a standard “that was dictated by male editors in predominately white newsrooms and reinforced their own view of the world.” In this school of thought, the exigencies of covering race, sexual identity — and even climate change — necessitate going beyond what’s disparagingly called “bothsidesism.”
  • The trend of conflating opinion and news was a defense mechanism to cope with a presidential candidate who arrived on the scene with no experience and no desire to tell the truth — and who used social media to circumvent the media’s traditional gatekeeper role. This point of view was notably offered in an influential August 2016 column by New York Times media critic Jim Rutenberg, who framed the dilemma this way: “If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?” Although he posed the dilemma as a question — and pointed out the pitfalls of appearing partisan — Rutenberg suggested that reporters who found the idea of a Trump presidency a danger would naturally “move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional.” Many did just that.

  For purposes of this essay, let’s stipulate that those reasons are offered in good faith by people who care about the civic life of this nation. That does not make them right.

  Back to the Future

  Whatever one thinks of partisan journalism, those who say that it’s not a new phenomenon are correct. The first newspaper to cover politics on these shores, the New York Weekly Journal, is not only the publication that inspired the name of this series. A partisan organ, it helped foster the idea of a free press on this continent in 1735.

  It’s also true that a partisan press helped bring America into existence. In 1776, the American Colonies had 50 newspapers, many of them agitating openly for revolution. By the time George Washington completed two terms as president, this number had quintupled. The Colonial-era press took sides in the nation’s most fractious disputes: The Federalist Party we associate with Alexander Hamilton and John Adams (and the Democrat-Republicans of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison) were identifiable by the newspapers that supported them. Six decades later, partisan newspapers stoked the passions that led to civil war.

  “Editors unabashedly shaped the news and their editorial comment to partisan purposes,” Harvard historian William E. Gienapp noted in a study of 1850s American newspapers. “They sought to convert the doubters, recover the wavering, and hold the committed.”

  “Partisanship was extreme on both sides,” Lincoln scholar Richard Allen Heckman wrote a century after the Civil War ended. In what seems like a contemporary description, Allen added, “Republican and Democratic papers often arrived at opposite conclusions after witnessing the same event.”

  Does this sound familiar? It should. After Hunter Biden’s business partner Devon Archer testified before the House Oversight Committee, most of the legacy media issued a verdict: Nothing to see here. Echoing Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman, The New Republic put this headline on its story: “New Transcript: Star Hunter Biden Witness Refuted Every GOP Talking Point. Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Devon Archer, undermined all of Republicans’ claims in his testimony.”

  Meanwhile, Fox News had an entirely different take: The headline of its online story was “Devon Archer Transcript Shows How Democrat Rep. Goldman Spun ‘Illusion of Access’ Narrative.” Mind you, these are competing stories reporting on the very same transcript.

  Not everyone sees this as a problem. But the events of Jan. 6, 2021, show what happens in a hyper-partisan political environment when “red” America and “blue” America have fundamental differences of opinion on something as basic as whether a presidential election was honest or a sham.

  Americans of different races, creeds, generations, religions, geography, and political affiliation have always differed in their perceptions of politics and culture. But having a baseline set of shared facts turns out to be important. Political parties deliberately skew those facts for their own purposes. However, when journalists repeat those partisan narratives word for word — or, worse, amplify them — they are interfering with the prime directive.

  Earlier this year, political scientists David Broockman and Joshua Kalla released a study showing how many Americans dwell in media “echo chambers” that not only bolster their existing political biases, but deepen their level of partisanship.

  “Most people who tune in to Fox News lean to the right, but Fox draws them further to the right,” Broockman explained. “Likewise, MSNBC is pulling those to the left further left. And neither side almost ever watches the other.”

  This is the succinct rebuttal to those with laissez-faire attitudes about partisan news coverage. Americans can get the other side of the story, if they try, but don’t often do so. Ken Lerer’s expressed hope that conservatives might read the Huffington Post to know what the other side is thinking is not how most people consume media.

  It was always thus. In “The Press Gang: Newspapers and Politics, 1865-1878,” scholar Mark Wahlgren Summers wrote how common it was for publishers to knowingly print lies or simply ignore newsworthy events that reflected poorly on their party. “The truth was not suppressed,” Summers wrote. “It was simply hard to get in any one place.”

  Readers who wanted to know what was really happening in local as well as national politics had to read several newspapers, not just one. The problem is that this is not how most citizens consume news, and it never was. My point here is that journalists in this country haven’t always even attempted to provide their readers, listeners, and viewers with the complete story. They haven’t always tried to tell the truth. But this elusive quest is the implied promise that helped create the idea of a free press in the first place.

  ‘The Best Cause’

  Although rarely invoked today, the name John Peter Zenger still lingers in the recesses of American journalism’s institutional memory. The University of Arizona gives an annual award in his name. The National Press Club has a room named after him. A bronze plaque in New York City signifies the site of a local election, in 1733, covered by Zenger’s newspaper, The New York Weekly Journal.

  For the better part of three centuries, Zenger’s sacrifice was praised whenever freedom of the press was mentioned. Arrested in November 1734 on charges of “seditious libel” after his newspaper criticized the royal governor of New York, Zenger persisted in publishing from jail with help from his wife and sons — and the political provocateurs who wrote the offending material. Nine months later, Zenger was acquitted in a sensational jury trial. Fifty years after that, Gouverneur Morris, a signer of the U.S. Constitution, wrote: “The trial of Zenger in 1735 was the germ of American freedom, the morning star of that liberty which subsequently revolutionized America.”

  Although there is truth in this characterization, the story is not that tidy.

  Peter Zenger, as he preferred to be called, arrived in New York harbor in 1709 speaking little English and facing daunting prospects. The Zenger family — Peter, his parents and two younger siblings — were among the 2,200 German refugees from the Palatinate region who sailed in a 10-ship flotilla to America in search of religious freedom. The crossing was harrowing: Some 470 of the migrants perished, among them Peter’s father. At 13, the oldest Zenger child needed to find a trade to help support his family.

  The boy landed an apprenticeship with a publisher named William Bradford, a kindly Quaker who had followed his own father’s footsteps. In the early days of manual typesetting, publishing was an exacting, highly technical craft. There were other obstacles, too, including the scarcity of ink and paper. The biggest danger was running afoul of the authorities.

  “To understate the matter, the printing trade was not much encouraged in colonial America,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Kluger noted wryly in his authoritative 2016 book, “Indelible Ink: The Trials of John Peter Zenger and the Birth of America’s Free Press.”

  William Bradford knew this lesson well. He’d essentially been chased out of Pennsylvania for running afoul of William Penn and the Quaker elders who controlled every aspect of life in the colony. Bradford’s sins — for which he was fined, briefly imprisoned, and had his printing presses confiscated — included the mere mention of Penn’s name in an annual almanac and daring to reprint the colony’s official charter.

  But on both sides of the Atlantic, the most dreaded accusation was “seditious libel,” a felony. The American Colonies were ruled by Britain, where libel simply meant defaming or criticizing another person, especially someone associated with government. Under British common law dating to the notorious Star Chamber proceedings, truth was not a mitigating factor to the crime. “It is not material whether the libel be true or false,” the Star Chamber judges had ruled.

  That’s because the aim of libel law wasn’t to regulate civic discourse in a way that made it more honest. The law’s intent was to preserve order and prevent rabblerousers from riling up the populace. The controlling legal authority in British common law, and by extension in the Colonies, was titled “A Treatise of the Pleas of the Crown.” Written by an English barrister named William Hawkins, it held that printers and authors were guilty of defamation if they wrote or printed words that exposed any person, alive or dead, “to public hatred, contempt, or ridicule.”

  It did not matter if the defamed person already had a bad reputation. Taking Star Chamber logic to its ultimate, and ultimately perverse, conclusion, Hawkins explained “that it is far from being a justification of a libel that the contents thereof are true … since the greater the appearance of truth in any malicious invective, so much the more provoking it is.”

  Political factions were just getting started in New York, then a city of 10,000 souls. Newspapers were a rarity as well. The only two printers in the colony were Willam Bradford and his former apprentice, Zenger. Neither man was much interested in the news business. Mostly they reprinted religious tracts and government-approved legal notices and texts, much of Zenger’s in Dutch and German. Eight decades before the dawn of the great New York publishing houses, all books in New York were imported from London.

  This somnolent arrangement was disturbed by King George II’s 1732 appointment of a minor aristocrat and British military officer of little distinction named William Cosby to be the governor of New York and New Jersey. It was not an inspired appointment and Cosby’s preening nature and obvious greed immediately alienated the locals.

  His initial grift, which ignited the political fires in New York, was his insistence that the previous acting governor turn over the portion of his salary from the time Cosby was named to the job — even though he didn’t arrive in New York for many months. His predecessor, a well-connected Dutchman named Rip Van Dam, sued Cosby. When the colony’s chief justice, Lewis Morris, ruled against the new governor, Cosby simply replaced Judge Morris. A powerful and formidable lawyer with a habit of holding grudges, Morris used numerous machinations to fight back. One of them was teaming with his friend and ally James Alexander, another powerful lawyer, to persuade John Peter Zenger to publish a new newspaper.

  Appearing on Nov. 5, 1733 — 272 years before The Huffington Post — the first issue of the New York Weekly Journal carried the account of Lewis Morris’ political comeback: his election to the Assembly. For the next 10 months, in articles almost exclusively ghostwritten by James Alexander, the Journal published satire, limericks, and opinion pieces critical of Cosby, though never by name.

  Nobody was fooled, however, least of all Cosby, who variously ordered the newspapers burned, pressured the colony’s other printer to respond in kind, and finally had Zenger arrested and charged with a crime. In preparation for trial, Cosby tried to pack the jury with his allies and installed a crony named James De Lancey as chief justice in the colony. When lawyer William Smith and his co-counsel James Alexander (the anonymous author of the anti-Cosby material in Zenger’s broadsheet) made a pre-trial motion for De Lancey to recuse himself, the judge instead kicked them off the case — and disbarred them on the spot.

  This heavy-handed move backfired. Alexander sought the services of a Philadelphia lawyer named Andrew Hamilton. A native of Scotland, and not high-born, Hamilton had arrived in Virginia in his early 20s. He married into a Quaker family in Virginia, then moved to Maryland, where he helped write that colony’s laws and served in the legislature. After relocating to Pennsylvania in his 40s, Hamilton came to represent the family of William Penn, served as a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, and supervised the construction of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. Hamilton’s career signified the possibility of upward mobility in the New World. He was also considered the best trial lawyer on these shores. He would need to be.

  As expected, the prosecutor argued that the libel laws of England were the de facto libel laws of New York and that any defamation against the crown — or its agents — was merely a matter of proving the identity of the author. In other words, insofar as the jury was concerned, there was no real defense at all.

  Without exactly explaining why, Hamilton challenged this logic. He posited that the laws of England should not necessarily apply to New York. Judge De Lancey was utterly unpersuaded. “The jury may find that Zenger printed and published those papers and leave to the Court to judge whether they are libelous,” he responded. But the defense strategy was to talk past the judge — straight to the jury and, by implication, the wider court of American public opinion. Addressing his argument to Zenger’s peers, Hamilton was going for jury nullification: “I know that [the jurors] have the right beyond all dispute to determine both the law and the fact,” he intoned.

  In his summation, Hamilton went further: “The question before the court and you, gentlemen of the jury, is not of small or private concern. It is not the cause of the poor printer, nor of New York alone,” he said. “No! It may in its consequence affect every free man that lives under a British government on the main of America. It is the best cause. It is the cause of liberty.”

  The jury agreed with defense counsel. It returned quickly from its deliberations, and foreman Thomas Hunt called out the verdict: “Not guilty!” Hurrahs rang out through the courtroom, drowning out the demands of the judge for order. Something had been started that would be hard to quell.

  Skeptics

  As early broadcaster Westbrook Van Voorhis liked to say, time marches on. In the 1960s, a questioning era like our own, a slew of revisionist historians tossed cold water on the John Peter Zenger legend. For starters, he didn’t even write the material he was jailed for, they noted. And Gouverneur Morris, the Founding Father who eulogized the Zenger trial as “the germ of American freedom” and “the morning star” of liberty on these shores, was hardly an impartial chronicler: Lewis Morris was his grandfather.

  Pulitzer Prize-winning constitutional scholar Leonard Levy characterized the image of Colonial America as a society that cherished freedom of expression as “a sentimental hallucination.” Stanley Katz, a star Princeton historian, wrote that libel laws were reformed, in due time, but not because of anything James Alexander wrote, Peter Zenger printed, or Andrew Hamilton argued to a New York jury in 1735. It was, Katz claimed, “as if Peter Zenger had never existed.”

  Today, a more subtle kind of rethinking is taking place. Richard Kluger, who persuasively debunks the 1960s-era Zenger debunkers, gets to the heart of the matter. “William Cosby was almost surely an ignoble character during his 3½-year tenure in New York, but if he was in fact half the villain his colonial critics claimed, they failed to marshal firm evidence of it.”

  Moreover, after its inaugural issue, the New York Weekly Journal never covered another election after Lewis Morris’ return to the Assembly. Instead, its pages were used to compare Cosby to Nero, refer to the governor as “our affliction from London,” and accuse him of cluelessly escorting a French naval officer around the town so he could see the city’s defenses. Consorting with the enemy was a serious charge then, as it is today, but Zenger’s paper wasn’t calling Cosby a traitor. It was accusing him of being “but one degree removed from an idiot.”

  It was this kind of thing that prompted veteran newsman Bill Keller, in his New York Times review of Kluger’s book, to compare the New York Weekly Journal to the now-defunct gossip website Gawker. It was not intended as a compliment. More generally, ideologues on both sides invoke the style of America’s earliest newspapers to question the legacy, and even the virtue, of nonpartisan journalism and the striving for objectively.

  In an interview with “Frontline” in the early days of online journalism, Scott Johnson, co-founder of the conservative online outlet Power Line, put it this way: “The fact that the press was partisan and wild and outrageous during the Revolutionary era, during the era in which the Constitution was ratified, was not only true then; it really is the tradition of the American press up until the Progressive Era, essentially yesterday. The press was always partisan.”

  He’s not entirely wrong, but using this historic fact as an excuse to cover the news in a one-sided way today — trying to shape outcomes instead of merely to inform — misses the point of the jury’s verdict in the 1735 trial of Peter Zenger. His lawyer didn’t merely argue that government shouldn’t muzzle a free people. Andrew Hamilton compared a libel case in which a defendant couldn’t argue the truth of his statements to a murder trial in which the defendant couldn’t offer evidence that the victim was actually still alive.

  This gambit was a bluff. No witnesses could prove the truth of the contention that Gov. Cosby was “but one degree removed from an idiot” any more than Keith Olbermann could prove the same about George W. Bush. In the Zenger trial, Judge De Lancey didn’t buy it anyway. Nonetheless, Hamilton risked contempt of court by pivoting directly toward the jury and saying, “Then, gentlemen of the jury, it is to you we must now appeal for witnesses to the truth of the facts we have offered and are denied the liberty to prove.”

  Actually, neither side called any witnesses in that trial, but the jury took Hamilton’s point. Their verdict wasn’t an endorsement of defamation. It was a recognition that if a people are to be free, they have the right to pursue the truth and tell it as best they can — and that neither government nor any political faction has a monopoly on veracity. Pursuing truth, not partisanship, was the principle that carried the day in a New York City courtroom on Aug. 4, 1735.

  Citizen Journalists

  The Zenger saga has an instructive postscript. It occurred 273 years later, just three years after the launch of The Huffington Post.

  As it turned out, Arianna Huffington’s interests went far beyond creating an online media counterweight to George W. Bush’s presidency. Focusing on the future of journalism at a time when the old media’s business model was already under financial stress, Huffington joined forces with well-known New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen to create an army of “citizen journalists.”

  Launched in early 2007, the venture was named “OffTheBus,” a sly reference to Timothy Crouse’s classic 1973 book on presidential campaign reporting. This endeavor was a subversive response to the good-old-boy reporting network Crouse immortalized. OTB’s tag line was “Campaign coverage by people who are not in the club.”

  Ultimately, it engaged some 1,700 unpaid writers to cover the 2007-2008 presidential cycle. This all-volunteer army was overseen by a tiny staff of professionals. One was Marc Cooper, a progressive political writer and University of Southern California journalism professor. Another was Amanda Michel, who today is director of global engagement at The Guardian but in 2007 was a 29-year-old wunderkind with no formal journalism training. Her talent was harnessing online communities, which she’d learned while working on the Howard Dean and John Kerry presidential campaigns.

  Their team would produce thousands of stories and countless page views and attracted some 5 million unique visitors to Huffington Post’s website in October 2008 alone. Its best-remembered story, by far, was an account of an April 6, 2008, political fundraiser in Pacific Heights, a toney San Francisco neighborhood. The candidate was Barack Obama. The HuffPo citizen journalist in attendance was Mayhill Fowler, a 61-year-old native Tennessean who lived across the bay in Oakland.

  In the decades since she’d graduated from Vassar and moved to the Bay Area to study at the University of California at Berkeley, Fowler had wed and worked sporadically, by her own account, as “a teacher, editor and writer, but mostly raised two daughters.” An uncommonly thoughtful person, she had quickly emerged as a favorite among OTB’s editors — and readers. In an October 2007 piece on OTB, New York Times political writer Katharine Seelye singled Fowler out as one of the site’s “emerging star correspondents.”

  Fowler took a particular interest in Obama. She contributed the maximum $2,300 to his campaign, which was not only normal for OTB citizen journalists, but was encouraged, as it granted them increased access to campaigns they were covering. Fowler had previously traveled at her own expense to see Obama campaign in the Midwest and in Texas, but the San Francisco event was close to home so she wrangled an invite to the fundraiser, which was closed to the mainstream press. With Obama leading Hillary Clinton in pledged delegates, the conversation that night turned to the looming Pennsylvania primary. From the audience, some of whom were preparing to go east for the faceoff, came a question: What could they expect when they went to campaign in the Rust Belt?

  “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” Obama replied. “And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not.”

  So far, so good. Then Obama added: “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

  Fowler had covered Obama when he campaigned across Pennsylvania and that’s not what he had said to the faces of those voters, and she was “taken aback” by his judgmental tone.

  “I’m a religious person, and I grew up poor in a very wealthy family — sometimes we didn’t have enough to eat, but my larger family was rich,” she told Seelye in an April 2008 story, adding that her father was a hunter. “Immediately, the remarks just really bothered me,” Fowler added. “For the first time, I realized he is an elitist.”

  Fowler had a dilemma. She was smart enough to know the sneering remarks about rural Americans might hurt the candidate whom she still wanted to win. She confided in her husband, who didn’t see anything particularly wrong with what Obama had said. But it nagged at her and she called Amanda Michel. To Michel’s credit, she advised Fowler, “If you’re going to cover the campaign, you have to not be partial or your coverage isn’t worth as much as it could be.”

  So, following her gut feeling and her editor’s supportive advice, Fowler blogged about the incident. Hillary Clinton’s campaign pounced, and the mainstream media jumped on the story (often omitting Fowler’s name). Some Obama fanboys attacked her for being disloyal, but Team Huffington rallied behind her. Arianna defended her reporter in a blog post while vacationing on a yacht, lambasting Clinton’s campaign. Jay Rosen, one of the most level-headed advocates of the proposition that disclosure of bias is preferable to feigned objectivity, examined the ethical questions thoroughly on his blog. After the campaign was over, Michel did something similar for Columbia Journalism Review.

  Almost two years later, Fowler published an e-book on the election, “Notes From a Clueless Journalist: Media, Bias and the Great Election of 2008.” It’s a nuanced and informative book, as anyone who read Fowler’s blog would expect. In the preface, she explains her motives, not just for writing about the Pacific Heights fundraiser, but also chronicling the inspiring saga of Barack Obama himself. “All I cared about,” she wrote, “was getting the election story.”

  Notwithstanding the title of her book, traditional reporters who read it or followed her writing found Fowler anything but clueless. She came across as committed, empathetic, curious, intellectually honest, and highly ethical. It gave many of us hope for the future.

  But here’s the rub, the postscript to the postscript, if you will: If something like that happened today, would an online media outlet with a clear point of view deign to report it? For that matter, would the legacy media? The treatment of the Hunter Biden laptop story suggests an answer, and it is not an encouraging one.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/08/2023 – 17:40

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