“We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, press destroys information, religion destroys morals and our banks destroy the economy.”
This quote from American journalist and commentator Chris Hedges, is a sobering, and unerringly accurate account of what has become of the United States in particular and, in lockstep, many of our much cherished Western democracies around the globe over the last 40 years.
Once diligent and efficacious governance has been progressively co-opted by the most incompetent, corrupt, venal and amoral amongst us, whilst the foundational pillars of our societies, incorporating those institutions that were established principally to serve and protect us all, have been systematically subverted and undermined to work against the interests and aspirations of hard working citizens of those once great nations.
Hard won freedoms, enshrined in the Magna Carta Libertatum at Runnymede in 1215 CE, and the propensity to assuming individual responsibility for oneself and one’s community and nation have been effectively subverted, whilst established enlightenment principles of justice and procedural fairness, along with the aspiration for promoting social cohesiveness and equality of opportunity that had once epitomised Western societies have been effectively allowed to dwindle into obscurity, as mere shadows of their former glory. These values form the very core tenets that have underpinned the civilisation that many of our forebears fought fiercely and died for, often against apparently insurmountable odds.
Climate Change, Race Politics, Russiaphobia, Insurrection and Other Assorted Hobgoblins:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” H.L. Mencken
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” H.L. Mencken
It is difficult to know precisely where the corruption of Western Civilisation began, but its progression toward “decline and fall”, much like the Roman Empire before it, is gathering pace and has an air of inevitability that is both depressing and alarming.
When Rome fell to the Barbarians in 476 CE, they entered Rome unopposed. The “Barbarians at the gates” merely took advantage of difficulties already existing in Rome at that time- problems that included a decaying city (both physically and morally), having little to no tax revenue (economic incompetence), overpopulation (leading to overcrowding, unemployment and disease), poor leadership and having inadequate defense capabilities and preparedness.
As Edward Gibbon wrote ……“the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest, and as soon as time or accident has removed artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.“
So much of Roman civilisation’s fall is echoed in our present day decline in Western civilisation, where poor leadership is the norm, moral decay is both promoted and celebrated, and infrastructure has become degraded, exceeding the capacity for its ongoing maintenance and sustainability.
Our cities are being deliberately overcrowded, with citizens being confined like battery hens in medium and high density housing in the name of “saving” the environment, whilst relentless waves of unprecedented immigration (both “legal” and “illegal”) are being actively encouraged beyond the capacity of communities to remain cohesive and neighbourly, in favour of establishing enclaves where tribalism inevitably leads to societal division and segregation, rather than an harmonious integration.
Economic profligacy and malfeasance, in the vein of their Roman counterparts, has replaced what was once sensible stewardship, recklessly racking up debt to unprecedented levels across all Western nations, and disproportionately rewarding speculative practices while simultaneously deriding and disincentivising sensible investment, frugality and thrift. Free markets have been replaced with crony capitalism and asset bubbles where prices greatly exceed the intrinsic value of the product or service provided. We now stand on the precipice of a catastrophic economic collapse, the likes of which we have never seen before, and even likely exceeding the depths of the 1929 stock market crash and the ensuing “Great Depression” that followed it.
Our bureaucracies that are meant to service the needs of the people have grown exponentially and then metastasised, becoming unaccountable fiefdoms reigned over by unelected Napoleons who savour only their own positions, perquisites and power, and the edifice erected is driven to ruthless inefficiency and sclerosis through layer upon layer of middle managers and paper shufflers, intellectual non-entities who achieve nothing more than covering their own behinds and pretending to be indispensible.
During a late phase of the Roman Empire’s decline, during the reign of Diocletian (in 284-305 CE), Edward Gibbon spells out this reference to oppression as the product of twin evils which always go together: a swollen bureaucracy and excessive taxation.
“The number of ministers, of magistrates, of officers, and of servants, who filled the different departments of the state, was multiplied beyond the example of former times; and (if we may borrow the warm expression of a contemporary) ‘when the proportion of those who received exceeded the proportion of those who contributed the provinces were oppressed by the weight of tributes.’ From this period to the extinction of the Empire it would be easy to deduce an uninterrupted series of clamours and complaints. According to his religion and situation, each writer chooses either Diocletian or Constantine or Valens or Theodosius, for the object of his invectives; but they unanimously agree in representing the burden of the public impositions, and particularly the land-tax and capitation, as the intolerable and increasing grievance of their own times.“
Western Civilisation is now doing its level best to facilitate its own attempted suicide: inciting wars it has no intention of “winning”, recklessly engaging in debt monetisation (money printing) to the moon and back, surveilling and persecuting its own citizens and progressively stealing their liberties, and then onward to subjecting them to medical malfeasance, destroying their goods production and food-growing capabilities, and finally in subjecting the public at large to incessant campaigns of propaganda to systematically distract and demoralise them by falsifying and disfiguring reality.
Some prominent examples of this relentless propaganda campaign includes in shamelessly, and uncritically promoting the charlatanism of the doctrines of “Climate Change“, “Identity Politics” (involving “race” and “gender”) and “Cultural Marxism”.
Citizens inhabiting Western democracies have been relentlessly bombarded with Global Warming (now known as “Climate Change“) ideology, with a litany false and exaggerated claims of eco-catastrophe that are entirely divorced from reality, and that have been promulgated successfully for the last more than 40 years. No stone has been left unturned and no opportunity missed in gleefully traumatising young impressionable children and adults with speculative, highly dubious (if not outright hysterical) apocalyptic predictions of a “dying planet”, “collapsing ecosystems” and “carbon pollution”. These are pretend calamities, meant primarily to promote unreasoning fear and unquestioning compliance, for which the only alleged solution is “net zero” carbon reduction policies that are destined to promote real poverty, suffering and privation, and which are designed to widen the gap between rich and poor, and to promote the financial interests of the privileged “haves” from an ever-burgeoning number of “have nots”.
Identity politics, similarly, is a pernicious influence that has pervasively infected Western culture, and is often rightly criticised for its intrinsic ideological biases and its diminishment of the human spirit. One of the main problems is its tendency to characterise people solely based on their race, gender, sexual orientation, or other identity markers rather than on the basis of their qualities as individuals, more often than not leading to an oversimplification of often complex and multifactorial social issues. This approach tends to pit different identity groups against one another, reinforcing societal divisions rather than promoting solidarity, social cohesion and understanding.
More tellingly, identity politics often ignores real economic and class-based inequalities, which are more germane factors in understanding and addressing any alleged systemic “oppression” it claims to address. Ultimately, it inevitably leads to a narrow-minded, victimhood mentality that undermines individual agency and personal responsibility of the alleged “victim”.
Cultural Marxism is a broader term used to describe the form of Marxist ideology that focuses on culture and identity rather than economic and class-based issues. The concept of “Cultural Marxism” has been justifiably criticised for its lack of coherence and academic rigour, and is the natural consequence of traditional Marxism having failed to initiate their much hoped for working class revolution against their hated Capitalist foes.
One would think that Marxist ideology that was and remains the very antithesis of the West’s merit based, freedom loving and prosperous way of life would have little traction in a well-educated and privileged society, but incrementally and by stealth its pernicious politics of envy has permeated what were once stable foundational pillars of civilisation, from academia to the law, from schools to universities to churches to the judiciary, and across the broad range of institutions to whom we naively entrusted the protection of citizens rights and privileges. Marxism, at its essence, represents a path to totalitarianism that breeds anarchy and tribalism along the way.
Alexis de Tocqueville’s words, in the nineteenth century, have the ring of truth and serve as a warning for those willing to listen: “Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty; socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”
One of the many potential dangers of Cultural Marxism, as outlined above, is its tendency to promote a mentality of adversarial tribalism, one that has now led to ever-increasing social polarisation and conflict. By framing cultural issues as a “battle” between self-appointed oppressed groups and their alleged “oppressors” (often arbitrarily and conveniently ascribed), Cultural Marxism creates an environment of pervasive resentment and hostility that undermines civil society (as it is intended to do), promoting a victimhood culture that encourages weak (and often easily led) individuals to see themselves as victims of so called “systemic oppression”, rather than focusing on their own much needed personal development, and upon assuming individual responsibility for their attitudes, actions and ultimately their social advancement.
The masses in Western democracies, largely insulated from what is really happening in the world around them by layers of technology, mindless entertainment, stilted reportage and various other mechanisms of distraction, are being routinely programmed through mainstream and social media to accept this march toward a totalitarian future, marked by the brutality, surveillance and dehumanising treatment of an evolving police state. This desensitisation to such authoritarianism is further rationalised as things that are happening, and can only happen to “other” people, particularly those of other political or ideological persuasions. The ramifications for the future of civic engagement, political discourse and self-government are incredibly depressing and demoralising, where moral principles and the rule of law are abandoned in favour of apathy, partisanship and wilful blindness.
As Edward Gibbon further noted about the fallen Roman Empire, the dwindling intellectual life of the average Roman led to an apathetic, feckless and inept society that was ripe for exploitation and conquest: “This long peace and the uniform government of the Romans introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated…. They received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign and trusted for their defense to a mercenary army…….. They no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence.”
Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire!:
“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.” Mark Twain
A confluence of public bureaucracies and corporate entities (forming a clandestine corporatocracy) has institutionalised the falsification of reality under the pretense of saving the human race from a cluster of H.L. Mencken’s hobgoblins, led by such hot button existential issues as Climate Change (formerly Global Warming before the warming became half-baked), Racism, Putin’s Russia and Heteronormativity.
These entities have been driven to the point of insanity by the probability of the pending economic collapse that is verging on being a mathematical certainty, coupled with the increasing likelihood of the war in Ukraine transforming into pan-European and then global warfare (with nuclear confrontation by no means off the table), a prospect which has only been accelerated by their own self-interested, neglectful, derelict and ultimately suicidal activities. As the saying goes: “Those whom God wishes to destroy, He first deprives of reason!”
Mass computerisation, the digital world that has been created around it, and its many ways of assembling and controlling information, has thus enabled the more pervasive control of the general population, especially directed at those who object to the totalising control that has been implemented through its agency. Without doubt, the nascent surveillance state is far more advanced than is openly admitted to on the surface, with innocent citizens being profiled and categorised “as we speak” for their thought crimes in holding opinions at variance with the ideological articles of faith of the prevailing fascist corporatocracy in the West.
What is unforgivable, from the point of view of the totalitarian ideologues who have assumed the apex of power throughout the West, is for an individual of conscience to see through the political partisanship, the wall to wall propaganda, and the veil of lies and obfuscation, and to have both a desire for objective truth and a dedication to one’s personal morality and sense of obligation to others. The access of free thinkers to the digital world is a double edged sword for these elites, a mechanism which they seek to exploit through covert unwarranted surveillance, psychological warfare and gaslighting, but which simultaneously threatens their control of the narrative as those who remain sceptical of the official line have a tool of unprecedented reach for the dissemination of counter-narratives to thwart their ambitions.
The list of lies and distortions of reality is extensive, and reveals much about the forces that are actively undermining the societal norms and culture in Western nations. The deceptive behaviour and outright lies can be traced back at least to the assassination of John F Kennedy, where the CIA involvement and the Warren Commission coverup were only part of the web of lies and misdirection; which was then followed shortly thereafter by the Gulf of Tonkin Incident that allowed the U.S. to engage more directly in the Vietnam War, whereupon the U.S. and its allies would remain mired there for another decade.
Putting aside the potential disinformation perpetrated surrounding the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the collapse of the World Trade Centres (as it is still too emotionally highly charged), it is more widely accepted that the narrative on Saddam Hussein having significant “Weapons of Mass Destruction” that were an existential threat to surrounding nations, and being a pretext for the subsequent invasion of Iraq, was gilding the lily at the very least, if not patently and completely false, and a deception for which those responsible remain unrepentant.
The lies surrounding the causes of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis were pervasive, with the role of the Clinton administration (through the deadly combination of passing the Community Reinvestment Act and then repealing of the Glass-Steagall Act) being particularly obvious (as outlined in a more detailed post “A Binary Poison: the Root Cause of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis” on this site), with Democrat-aligned apologists falling over themselves to deflect blame from where it clearly belongs. Similarly, one should also consider the bail outs from the Obama administration of the “Too Big To Fail” banks in the GFC aftermath, in spite of explicitly stating that those responsible for rampantly irresponsible speculative practices would be held accountable, and yet who were then conspicuously allowed a free pass and then given a golden handshake for their crimes.
The 2014 CIA directed coup in the Ukraine, alongside similar and near simultaneous “Colour Revolutions” in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, were depicted as entirely “organic” and self-determined when they were very far from it, and were clearly, at least in part responsible for the havoc of the Russia-Ukraine war that we are suffering the consequences of today.
By extension, one must also examine the role played by the U.S. and its allies in promoting the “Arab Spring”, the wave of “non-violent” popular uprisings against despotic (of varying degrees) leaders across Northern Africa and the Arab world. The U.S. goal in the Arab Spring revolutions was to replace these unpopular despotic dictators, while taking care to maintain the autocratic U.S.-friendly infrastructure that had brought them to power. All initially followed the nonviolent, “colour revolution” template and precepts that Gene Sharp outlined in his 1994 book From Dictatorship to Democracy.
In Libya, Syria and Yemen, the U.S. and their allies were clearly even prepared to introduce paid mercenaries when their Sharpian “revolutions” failed to produce regime change. In Libya, U.S. State Department trained activist “assets” were utilised to engineer the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, including by instigating nonviolent Facebook and Twitter protests timed to coincide with the 2011 uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. After Gaddafi’s assassination, some of those same CIA trained militants involved in his overthrow would go on to lead Islamic militias attempting to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
In Egypt, the Tahrir Square uprising was estimated to involve approximately 10,000 Egyptians who took part in NED (National Endowment for Democracy) and USAID (United States Agency for International Development) training in social media and nonviolent organizing techniques, in order to facilitate the takeover of Egypt by President Obama’s favoured Muslim Brotherhood, from the regime of Hosni Mubarak to that of Mohamed Morsi. The latter’s stint as President from 30 June 2012 to 3 July 2013, marked by the persecution and violence directed particularly at the Coptic Christian minority, was brought to an end when General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi removed him from office in a coup d’état after widespread popular (non-U.S. promoted, and genuinely organic) protests throughout that June.
Sustained street demonstrations also took place as part of the Arab Spring in Bahrain, Morocco, Iraq, Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman and Sudan. Minor protests took place in Djibouti, Mauritania, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, with varying levels of success, but all with a common thread of fostering regime change, and to a significant extent bearing the fingerprints of clandestine Western involvement.
The arrival on the political scene of Donald J Trump as the Republican Presidential nominee in 2015, ramped up the storm of lies and disinformation to the level of a force 10 gale. The establishment lied serially and shamelessly about the “Russiagate” fabrication, the non-existent links between Trump Tower and the Russian Alpha Bank, the infamous Steele Dossier (scuttlebutt and salacious fantasy dressed up as “intel”) and the roles of the DNC, Fusion GPS and others in generating false narratives to hamstring the eventual President in a “Crossfire Hurricane” of their making.
The peaceful democratic transition of power was fatally undermined by outgoing President Obama in initiating surveillance on the Trump campaign (in echoes of the Watergate scandal) under false pretences, with the full complicity of the DOJ, CIA and FBI alphabet agencies, who each variously and severally exceeded their remit to become partisan political tools to condemn the innocent, and to then protect the guilty, not least of whom being members of their own agencies.
The actions subsequent to Donald Trump’s election as the 45th President of the United States amounted to an attempted coup to overthrow the will of the people who elected him, and particularly to derail his agenda of revitalising American manufacturing and industry, restoring its energy independence, controlling its borders, and especially in promoting employment opportunities for working class people for their best chance of economic and social advancement.
From the unwarranted surveillance of the Trump campaign when he was presidential nominee, there then followed by a series of attempts to hamstring, curtail, obstruct and otherwise hinder his mandated agenda, including selectively leaking against him to the media by high ranking government officials, and various impeachment hoaxes and partisan investigations, each designed primarily to entrap him into an “obstruction of justice” charge were he to release information to attempt to exonerate himself, efforts that could then be shown to compromise the “investigations” being run concurrently and overlapping throughout his presidency and beyond (as I outlined in depth in the post “A House of Cards: Six No Trumps and One-Eyed Jacks Are Wild” elsewhere on this site). The are indeed “six ways from Sunday” to becoming a banana republic, and the “Uniparty” and the alphabet agencies were determined to use every last one of them to hell and back – “because Trump!”.
On the other side of the aisle, the political establishment and their media lackeys lied incessantly to agitate social unrest during Trump’s presidency, for example in exploiting George Floyd’s death, in questionable circumstances (but allegedly at the hands of law enforcement), as a tool to defund police forces, removing from them the ability to contain rampant crime and protect the citizenry from lawlessness, actions which particularly victimised the Black and Hispanic communities in socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Democrat run major cities, adding to and further entrenching the social disadvantage of law abiding citizens in those communities, rather than “helping” them as was claimed.
When the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests were to become marred by graphic violence, destruction of property (to the tune of $2 billion USD) and widespread looting, leading to injuries to more than 200 police officers and deaths of dozens of innocent individuals in the riots that followed, the mainstream media fell over themselves to describe the violence on full display as “mostly peaceful“. This fatally undermined the credibility of the mainstream media in the eyes of a significant, if silent majority of the population, whereupon trust in the mainstream media has since fallen to its lowest ever ebb in Western societies. We no longer buy what they are selling.
The lawlessness, including assaults on police precincts and government buildings, and then the setting up of “self-governing” autonomous zones (like Seattle’s “CHAZ”), were lionised by the media and by weak, left-wing politicians, who uncritically praised these experiments in anarchy, chaos and brute-force criminality, where crime rates surged unchecked and gangs ran the streets, with the law of the jungle maintained by self-appointed “leaders” who “ruled”, for a short time at least, by intimidation and at the point of the gun. Those politicians and the media personalities involved utterly disgraced themselves, as they cheerled the destruction of peaceful co-existence and civil society that were assumed, up until then, to underpin our civilisation.
During the COVID pandemic, the lies that underpinned the pandemic and its response were off the charts, and anyone who strove to assert any contradiction, or insert even a small semblance of rationality into the narrative being spun were quickly marginalised, ostracised, de-platformed, derided and delegitimised, up to and including loss of employment and tenure, regardless of the credentials of the person involved.
When questions arose as to the possible laboratory derived origins of the COVID-19 virus, the establishment across the West circled the wagons, prominent virologists lied through their teeth in seeking to protect themselves from the consequences of their irresponsible gain of function research, and a full-court press of propaganda was employed to ensure the truth was hidden from an unsuspecting and trusting public. (For a more in depth assessment, see “Gain of Function: the True Proximal Origin of SARS CoV2?” elsewhere on this site)
There was also never any justification for many of the responses to the pandemic, where science was selectively ignored, and Public Health as a discipline was brought step by egregious step into disrepute, as the fullness of time has since shown that society-wide lockdowns and school closures were counterproductive, community wide mask mandates were next door to useless, and the prophylactic and early treatment protocols (or lack thereof) were woefully inadequate in both planning and execution.
The dereliction of duty and broad mismanagement was widespread and pervasive, with the fish rotting from the head, with leading “experts” like Anthony Fauci, and institutions like the CDC and the FDA leading the way down a primrose path to calamity for not only the U.S. but the entire Western world. The entire premise of vaccinating oneself out of a pandemic, for example, flew in the face of all previous immunological knowledge, and was particularly fraught in relying upon a “leaky”, non-sterilising vaccine that cannot help but induce evolutionary pressure to produce more virulent strains of an already dangerous virus.
In the lead up to the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, the cover-up of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop computer, left carelessly and abandoned at a repair shop, clearly had a hand in influencing the election outcome. A gaggle of 51 intelligence agency experts be-clowned themselves, swearing black and blue that the contents were Russian disinformation when they were not only genuine, but a damning indictment of the Biden family misusing their position for influence peddling, and in their clandestine wheeling and dealing with foreign oligarchs and politicians for apparent personal gain.
The suspicious death of Jeffrey Epstein whilst incarcerated in August 2019, and the details of the honeypot blackmailing scheme to which he was central, has shone a light on the depths of moral depravity of many of those at the apex of political and economic power in the West, and the ease with which inconvenient people like Epstein can be murdered under the custody of the state and in the full glare of media, whereupon a cone of silence is predictably lowered, and the curtains drawn on the incident without so much as a murmur of disquiet or even an ounce of incredulity from the complicit media, or a compliant populace.
Meanwhile, the contents of thousands of hours of video known to exist showing various local and world leaders and captains of industry, etc. in compromising situations with often underage girls are hidden from public view, with no mainstream investigative journalist even remotely interested in sourcing the contents, or probing the identities of those involved, or even to what end the FBI could be using this information in its possession. Given the conspiracy of silence surrounding the latter, it is not unreasonable to assume that blackmail of these “gentlemen”, to exert control over them for geopolitical goals, is well within the realms of possibility.
The catalogue of lies and subterfuge took a turn into cyberspace with the now documented collusion between Twitter, Facebook, and Google, and the various arms of government (FBI, CIA and the NSA) to help influence elections and to control the narrative with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic. The just released Twitter files, brought into the open through the agency of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, was testimony to the billionaire’s personal integrity (a highly unusual trait, to say the least) in attempting to thwart such subterfuge and collusion being perpetrated away from public scrutiny, by releasing these files into the public domain.
The 2020 U.S Presidential Election brought the lies and subterfuge to almost stratospheric levels, as the desperation of the Deep State players to remove President Donald Trump by any means, fair or foul, became glaringly obvious to an almost comical (if it weren’t so deadly serious) extent. Under the cover of the COVID-19 pandemic, ballot harvesting reached epic proportions that, along with organised gaming of the voter rolls and the various digital voting systems, compromised the integrity of the election process to the extent that a significant proportion of U.S. voters still believe the election was stolen more than two years later.
The ballot-harvesting agenda of the “Left Wing” (the DNC/Democrats) in the U.S. could not be more crystal clear. They have accumulated thousands of indoctrinated and networked groups, funded by donor activity (with $400 million in funding from Mark Zuckerberg alone), that have been organised at the grass roots in every community to assemble ballots, independent of actual votes. Perhaps Joe Biden’s notorious Freudian slip: “We have put together I think the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics” was not so far from the truth after all.
Their “Right Wing” opponents, the Republicans, are far more interested in garnishing donations than they are in the business of winning elections. Provided the monetary gravy train continues to roll on, and they enrich themselves personally in the process, they are content to be in “opposition”, because they are cynical enough to realise that it matters little who is in power, because it is one big Uniparty club, and the citizens who elect them are not invited.
As the cornerstone of the legitimacy of the democratic process, the integrity of voting in elections is an issue far more important than the merits or otherwise of any individual leader, and needs to be protected vigorously to avoid further disenfranchising the citizenry any more than they already have been in having a say in the running of the nation.
Not surprisingly, the realisation of at least one side of the political spectrum that the process has been fatally rigged against their interests, goaded them into mass protests that turned violent at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021. What appears to many as an example of an “insurrection” against the democratic process was far more nuanced than that, as it is the only insurrection in history without a single weapon being raised.
Video footage released initially, selectively edited for popular consumption, certainly shows violent protests with some of the protestors damaging windows and engaging in aggressive behaviour assaulting Capitol police officers. However, as time has passed much of the official narrative has collapsed, particularly with the release of the remainder of the surveillance footage on the day.
It is now clear that no police officers were killed on that day, that two of the protesters were murdered in cold blood, and another 4 protesters died of natural causes on the day. Rather than breaking into the Capitol (a public building), most of the protesters had doors opened for them and were ushered in, and most of them merely filed around slowly and peacefully and were generally well behaved.
Many of the worst perpetrators of violence, breaking windows and glass doors, etc were dressed in black rather than MAGA gear and were claimed by some of those present to be ANTIFA agent provocateurs, whilst the FBI had dozens of agents embedded amongst the protesters and were egging the protesters on to enter the Capitol. Strangely, none of those people that engaged in this activity have since been charged for their actions, whilst others who merely wandered in and out and did nothing untoward had the fullest extent of the law thrown at them.
Nancy Pelosi, as Speaker of the House, had responsibility for securing the Capitol, and had been requested days previously to engage National Guard reinforcements given the size of the protest expected, but refused to do so. Meanwhile, by complete coincidence of course, Pelosi’s daughter was filming a “documentary” in the Capitol on the day of the protest and was able to capture the moment from “behind the scenes”. The optics of the occasion served its purposes admirably, whereupon the questionable nature of the 2020 election soon dissolving into the aether in the context of an “insurrection” that threatened the sanctity and security of the Republic. How easily we were played.
With such an extensive litany of utter mendacity on the part of the mainstream political establishment demonstrated above, particularly in the U.S., how can any thinking individual believe anything that their elected representatives ever assert as being the “truth” or an unimpeachable “fact”? In such a climate of distrust in authority, is it any wonder that so many have lost faith in the institutions at the heart of Western civilisation, and are increasingly cynical about their elected representatives, doubting their sense of morality and the worthiness of their motives?
The Confederacy of Dunces Idiocracy Finds It’s Leadership Dream Team:
“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” H.L. Mencken
The catalogue of lies and deceptions continued unabated during the Biden administration, particularly surrounding (but not limited to) their suicidal economic, social and legal policies in setting the U.S. on the path to self-destruction.
The ongoing grand lie, at the heart of much that has since spiralled out of control, and which forms the basis of the (Orwellian) “Build Back Better” program that is in train at this very moment, is that mankind somehow controls the global climate through his industrial and farming activities, and that Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is the control knob that only needs to be reduced in the West (but strangely not in Asia or elsewhere) for our climate to be restored to its former placidity.
This is a concept so inane that only a child could believe it, but Climate Change (former known as Global Warming, until the utter modesty of any minor warming actually occurring became too inconvenient a truth) has become the “noble” lie that all “the best” people wish to be seen to be believing; a fashion statement that became a pseudo-religious cult– a religion for atheists.
This Climate Change cargo cult, seeking “to usher in an age of great material wealth by ritual imitation”, has led to the Biden administration engaging in massive expenditure on all manner of boondoggles alleged to “save the planet”, but which are really designed to impoverish the middle and working class, and to enrich his friends and donors in the “champagne socialist” private jet set. Simultaneously, the energy independence advantage that the U.S. enjoyed under Trump has been deliberately undermined, and its strategic oil reserve diminished to near zero.
Meanwhile, spiralling inflation, driven not by the war in Ukraine as claimed, but by rising input energy prices (caused primarily by Climate Change policies) and lack of supply particularly in food and medicines. Western governments, including the U.S. through Joe Biden, have limited and curtailed the production and exploitation of Oil, Coal and Natural Gas, leading to shortages which then causes the prices of these energy sources to skyrocket. The response of Central Banks in reducing demand to match supply with interest rate rises (monetary policy) is cover for the true cause of these ongoing supply side issues, as they try in vain to make the Build Back Better square peg fit the round hole of the economy. It will not end well.
In the little over two years of the Biden Presidency, it is hard to imagine a more incompetent handling of the affairs of state. From presiding over a far greater death rate than his predecessor in the COVID pandemic (in spite of availability of a vaccine, and a far less virulent strain of COVID to contend with), to a southern border crisis of unprecedented proportions (more than 2 million per year for each of the last 2 years, and 250,000 in December 2022 alone), to an embarrassingly ham fisted withdrawal from Afghanistan (leaving $80 billion in military equipment for the Taliban, causing dozens of deaths, deserting allies and leaving the country in chaos), to the spiralling national debt heading to upwards of $31.5 Trillion USD, it is hard to imagine anyone could possibly do a worse job of administering their nation if they tried.
As a consequence of the proxy war in Ukraine, where America’s plans to weaken Russia and promote a regime change targeted at Vladimir Putin has backfired spectacularly, with sanctions against Russia only strengthening the Russian Rouble, not to mention their resolve, and simultaneously damaging their European allies economically. Sanctions have also driven a former foe in China into an alliance of very strange bedfellows (given their history of antipathy), united against a common enemy (the West) with all the inherent geopolitical dangers their combined might can cause.
Confiscating the assets of Russian oligarchs only served to undermine the confidence of all and sundry in the security provided by the banking sector against arbitrary confiscation of one’s wealth, and blocking Russia from access to the Swift (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) payment system, the global financial artery that allows the smooth and rapid transfer of money across borders, has only led to Russia to develop its own cross-border transfer system called the System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS) as an alternative to Swift. Moscow is also working with Beijing to connect to China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) – yet another alternative to Swift, which processes payments in Chinese yuan.
The end result of these ill-conceived machinations can be seen in the “de-dollarisation“* that is now unfolding with almost depressing inevitability, where the status of the $U.S. Dollar as the international reserve currency is now very tenuous indeed, and with it the hegemony of the U.S. led unipolar world order is increasingly in doubt, to be replaced by a multipolar world where those disaffected with U.S. foreign policy begin to trade their commodities in either Chinese Yuan, Russian Roubles or Indian Rupees.
*Since the enthronement of the $U.S. dollar as a reserve currency in 1944 at the Bretton Woods conference and then the establishment of the petrodollar in the early 1970s, almost all international trade has been conducted in $U.S. dollars. Thusly, $U.S. dollars are held by every country’s central bank to settle international trade flows.
The practice of trading oil in $U.S. dollars dates back to 1943, during WW2 when then President F.D. Roosevelt met the then Saudi king, Abdul Aziz, in 1943, and declared that Saudi oil was vital to U.S. security. In exchange, the U.S. agreed to build military bases and supply the Saudi army with training and equipment.
In 1974, following an oil embargo by the Arab state members of OPEC (the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries) the “petrodollar” system was consolidated by a deal between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, which formally agreed to price and trade oil in $U.S. dollars,, and to recycle the Dollars by buying U.S. government debt – Treasury bonds.
No one in the key positions of power in the U.S. appears to understand anything about real money and real finance. They are blinded by the promise of Keynesian economics and modern monetary theory, which posits that creating aggregate demand (Keynesianism) funded by massive money printing (modern monetary theory) is the sure path to economic progress. They fail to appreciate that the steady fall in the purchasing power of the $U.S. dollar, and that the rise of an alternative trade settlement system are the inevitable consequences of their hubris and wilful blindness.
The continued debasement of the $U.S. dollar, now coupled with arrogant and harmful financial sanctions, will encourage the establishment of an alternative international reserve currency, and all the consequences that it will bring to an unprepared US-dominated world.
If China manages to usurp the U.S. and become the world’s reserve currency, then things will get really bad, really fast. Virtually overnight, the $U.S. Dollar would become worth little more than the paper it’s printed on. Its purchasing power, which has been slipping for some time now, would bottom out. Not to mention that all the U.S. debt that China holds would very shortly thereafter come due, devaluing the $U.S. dollar that much more. At this point the financial chickens will have come home to roost, and the sudden impoverishment of the U.S. and those societies tied to it would be at least calamitous, if not catastrophic.
The leadership in the U.S., in response to their catalogue of failure, continue to double down on identity politics and woke symbolism. President Joe Biden shuffles from press conference to press conference, mouthing jumbled word salad and failing to respond to inconvenient questions, losing his temper without warning with outbursts (such as calling one Fox News reporter’s question “stupid,” or referring to another reporter as a “stupid son of a bitch”), with frequent memory lapses and losing his train of thought, which could be considered clues to possible significant evolving cognitive problems.
His Vice President, Kamala Harris, has over the last 2 years cemented her place as possibly the worst VP in U.S. history. As a consequence of her absolute lack of acumen and being completely out of her depth, she often is seen laughing and cackling inappropriately when serious questions arise about, for example, the deadly chaos in Afghanistan or spiralling fuel prices for American consumers or the unfolding refugee crisis in the Russia-Ukraine War. This latter performance prompted President Zelensky’s former press secretary to state: “It would be a tragedy if this woman won the presidency.”
The Washington Post recently spoke with 18 current and former Harris staffers. Their assessment was uninspiring, to say the least. “It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work,” one ex-staffer said in the scathing Dec. 4 piece. “With Kamala you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully and it’s not really clear why.” (Source: New York Post)
What has become increasingly apparent is that Kamala Harris lacks the leadership, problem-solving and management skills required in the highest echelon of government. At every test, when her nation needed the Vice President to step up to the plate and solve serious problems affecting American lives — including the safety and security of US troops — she fell short.
In making Kamala Harris the “border Czar”, charged with the responsibility in addressing the crisis at the southern border, she responded by not even visiting the border in person, and doing precisely nothing to even attempt to address the 2 million plus border crossings that occurred in each year of the Biden administration.
American voters are rightly concerned about the illegal weapons and deadly drugs such as Fentanyl pouring into their country, killing tens of thousands of Americans and making their communities unsafe. Disturbing reports of human trafficking, women being sexually exploited and abused as they make the treacherous journey to America, and other horrors on the administration’s, and therefore border Czar Kamala Harris’ watch, are met with masterly inactivity, and callous indifference to suffering.
Kamala Harris is the embodiment of P.J. O’Rourke’s well known quote about the nature of politics: “Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.“
The Biden/Harris dream team are, two years into their administration, on the threshold of largely destroying what took 250 years, and blood and sweat and tears to build. Whatever it’s faults, the U.S. (when properly administered by genuine representatives) still represents, at its best anyway, the best hope for humanity in avoiding the authoritarian future that many of the globalist elites seem to have mapped out for us.
Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX: Bernie Madoff & Enron Redux:
The recent FTX cryptocurrency exchange collapse is a case study in much that is wrong with so many aspects of society in the West, where we witness a poorly regulated space (cryptocurrency), coupled with the greed of emotionally and intellectually immature people, who have been given a saloon passage into obscene levels of wealth, achieved on foundations made of sand.
In this particular case, the young entrepreneur at the centre of this travesty was a young man by the name of Sam Bankman-Fried, who was the founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and the associated trading firm Alameda Research, companies that both experienced a high-profile collapse resulting in chapter 11 bankruptcy in late 2022.
Prior to FTX’s collapse, Bankman-Fried’s net worth peaked at $26 billion. By November 11, 2022, amid the bankruptcy of FTX, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index considered that his net worth had been effectively reduced to zero. Before his wealth evaporated, Bankman-Fried was a major donor to political campaigns, donating mostly to Democratic candidates, and he has claimed that he planned to spend around $1 billion in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. (Source: Wikipedia)
But according to the Securities and Exchange Commission: “Bankman-Fried was orchestrating a massive, years-long fraud, diverting billions of dollars of the trading platform’s customer funds for his own personal benefit and to help grow his crypto empire.” In other words, an old fashioned Ponzi scheme in the same vain as the infamous Bernie Madoff investment scandal in 2008, and the Enron scandal in 2001 before it.
Authorities claim the wrongdoing started at the very beginning. A parallel lawsuit filed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, said the method by which Bankman-Fried siphoned FTX customer funds into the coffers of his trading firm, Alameda Research, was installed into the structure of the operation from the day it opened in 2019.
John Ray III, a veteran bankruptcy expert who took over FTX after its collapse, told Congress recently that this was a case of “old-fashioned embezzlement”. Ray and his team sifted through the company’s records to find out how much money is missing, who was owed what and how much he might be able to claw back. But Ray asserts that he has been hampered by the parlous state of FTX’s record keeping and its “unprecedented and complete failure of corporate controls”.
In addition to allegedly enriching himself at the expense of investors who foolishly trusted him, Sam Bankman-Fried and his FTX operation diverted a not insignificant proportion of its ill-gotten funds to funnel it directly and indirectly to predominantly Democrat political candidates. The complicated money-go-round helped curry favour through donations to political allies, which clearly helped perpetuate the scheme, using much the same template as the recent Theranos fraud perpetrated by Elizabeth Holmes from 2003 to 2015.
In each case, a sophisticated but ultimately vacuous proposal or commodity, built on the flimsiest of foundations, is lent credence and authenticity by the endorsements of its political associates – with both schemes being prime examples of Woke crony capitalism where the lure of easy money and the desire to associate oneself with “the next big thing” overwhelms any inclinations to due diligence and one’s better judgement.
The moral of the story: – It’s not sufficient for a failing empire to be comprised of corrupt and idiotic leaders and representatives, but you also need institutional failure, lack of oversight, and an economy that values charlatans and chancers over those with integrity and genuine ingenuity.
So, here we are.
Glossary of Terms:
a) Kakistocracy– is the term given to a government run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens.
The word was coined as early as the seventeenth century, and used often to defend the legitimacy of the aristocracy (derived from the Greek “aristo” – meaning best), so therefore literally “rule by the best”. Whilst history shows that to be often very far from the truth (although not always), with hereditary heirs and peers often demonstrating the basest of instincts, the worst of intentions, and often less than even the merest tincture of either moral or intellectual capacity.
As novelist and poet Thomas Love Peacock is quoted as saying in describing the French Revolution: “Anarchy is not so much the absence of government as the government of the worst—not Aristocracy but Kakistocracy—a state of things, which to the honour of our nature, has seldom obtained amongst men, and which perhaps was only fully exemplified during the worst times of the French Revolution, when that horrid hell burnt with its most horrid flame. In such a state of things, to be accused is to be condemned—to protect the innocent is to be guilty; and what perhaps is the worst effect, even men of better nature, to whom their own deeds are abhorrent, are goaded by terror to be forward and emulous in deeds of guilt and violence.”
Whilst he clearly had a pertinent point in relation to the French Revolution, and the subsequent Jacobin Reign of Terror that replaced the detached and often indifferent Bourbon monarchy with something far more deadly and blood thirsty, there are an embarrassment of riches in enumerating the various aristocracies that were anything but the rule by “the best”.
b) Ineptocracy – Defined as a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing the goods and services that sustain a vital and enterprising society.
In turn, those who are least capable of producing are the members of society least able to sustain themselves or succeed, without being unduly rewarded through the confiscated wealth of an ever diminishing number of productive members of society.
This tends to take the “rule of the worst” idea and expand it to incorporate societal forces that drive its implementation, with the blame laid at the foot of those members of the plebeian classes who are unproductive in terms of contributing to society, and who in turn reward those politicians cynical enough to reward them for their lack of productivity.
c) Democracy– A way of governing which depends on the will of the people, a government by the people and for the people, which is exercised either directly or through elected representatives.
Not that “democracies” (from the Greek “demos”- meaning the populace) always deliver a rule by the best either, although it can successfully be argued that at least the resort to popular vote in free and fairly run elections gives the semblance of an opportunity for correcting one’s errors of past judgement, if their rule has been sufficiently unsatisfactory or blameworthy.
The renowned wit and political commentator, H.L.Mencken is quoted as saying that “Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance” and also that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. …“, which might at first glance seem unduly harsh and cynical, but the phrase “the voter is always right” may well be a truism from political concession speeches, but it is completely wrong as often as it is even remotely correct.
d) Corporatocracy– is an economic, political and judicial system controlled by corporations or corporate interests.
The concept has been used in explanations of bank bailouts, excessive pay for CEOs, as well as complaints such as the exploitation of national treasuries, people, and natural resources. It has been a term variously used by critics of globalisation, sometimes in conjunction with criticism of the World Bank, or those who engage in criticism of unfair lending practices, as well as of the downsides of the trend toward instituting free trade agreements. (Source: Wikipedia)
It is this latter that has been ascendant in recent decades, a crypto-fascist unholy alliance that aims to privatise profits and socialises losses, and boosted to prominence by the globalist agenda of the World Economic Forum and the Davos elite.
1984redux 