America goes 393
As the Catholic Church did in ages past, and Islam still does, the Left strives to bring every nation, and every last member of every nation, under its rule: a rule not of law but of lawyers, law-makers and law-breakers; bureaucrats, bankers, communication controllers, billionaires.
In America there are still tens of millions who refuse to comply, and they are being treated as heretics, infidels, and pariahs. If you are a Trump supporter, or in the least degree opposed to the Leftists who have seized the executive branch of government and now control both houses of the legislative branch, you are likely to be forced into conformity and unquestioning obedience. The means to be employed will be cutting you off from the services you need to live a normal life.
Through institutions of government and enormously powerful corporations, the heresies of patriotism, populism, anti-tribalism, individualism, and defiant defense of free speech, private property, arms bearing, and the teaching of reading writing reckoning and history to your children, will be punished.
You will be denied the services of banks, credit card companies, the internet, social media, insurance companies, the national health service, schools, universities. It will be very hard for you to find a job.
There will be degrees of deprivation. If you are a mild offender, you may be allowed some health care, for instance, and a low-paying job. If you are a grave offender – one who goes so far as to persist in speaking well of Donald Trump – you may face long imprisonment. An active attempt to reinstate him could be ruled a capital offense.
If you capitulate and submit, your life will not be easy. Your record will be held against you.
Even if you always supported the Left and voted the totalitarians into power, you will receive only the information that the rulers choose to allow you. You will have no way of knowing – unless by chance you personally witness a reported event – whether what you are being told is true or false.
Bruce Bawer writes at Front Page:
I’ve been ranting for years about the perfidy of the left. At times I’ve been accused of exaggerating. On rare occasions I feared – or hoped? – that perhaps I was exaggerating. In fact I can now see that these people are worse than I ever imagined. Worse than most of us ever imagined. …
Worse than even Donald Trump “with all his insight” imagined.
He went into office determined to clean up the swamp. He was tireless. But not tireless enough. No mere mortal could have been tireless enough. Trump had denounced the swamp in apocalyptic terms, but it proved to be even deeper and more extensive than he knew. It reached into the upper echelons of the intelligence community and the military, into cabinet departments and the judiciary.
Not only did the Democrats try to derail his campaign and then his presidency. Even people whom he appointed to White House jobs proved unreliable. Far from being too suspicious, he’d been too trusting. He’d appointed two-faced D.C. insiders. He’d trusted people who turned out to be snakes in the grass.
The news media, with very few exceptions, made it their task to thwart his progress and poison his name with a constant flow of disinformation. They said Trump had told people to drink bleach. They said he’d called neo-Nazis “good people”. They said many other outrageous things that they knew were outright lies. They relentlessly repeated the charge that he did nothing but lie, lie, lie, when in fact it was they, the media, who were constantly feeding us lies. …
When enemies of Trump, and of freedom, created violence and mayhem in cities around the country, they were whitewashed, protected, and even praised by the media, by Democratic politicians, and by police officials. In a debate with Trump, Biden said Antifa was an idea, not an organization. Congressman Jerrold Nadler called it a myth.
Meanwhile Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey gave BLM $3 million. While the leftist gangsters went unpunished, citizens who tried to protect their homes and businesses from destruction by them were arrested by the police and demonized in the media. If you tried to spread the truth about all this on social media, you were shut down by Silicon Valley bosses who said you were lying.
And then the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
Republican officials in the states affected by the steal sat on their hands. State legislatures, ditto. Even the justices he’d named to the Supreme Court refused to hear Texas v. Pennsylvania, absurdly maintaining that a state didn’t have standing to challenge the conduct of a presidential election in another state.
Trump’s supporters, ever civilized, waited patiently while every possible means of stopping the steal was dutifully exhausted. When it came down to the final vote certification in Congress, an army of [between 600,000 and 2,000,000!) MAGA folk gathered peacefully in Washington to show that they had Trump’s back.
Then a tiny percentage of them foolishly entered the Capitol building. And a tiny percentage of that tiny percentage – at least some of whom seem to have been Antifa goons – caused minor damage. Most of them appear to have milled harmlessly around the building, leaving paintings and statues untouched. The contrast with the conduct of Antifa and BLM insurgents during the previous year could hardly have been more striking. …
One of those people, an Air Force veteran named Ashli Babbitt, was shot dead by a Capitol Hill policeman. She didn’t do anything to provoke the shooter. It was impossible not to think of George Floyd, the career criminal who, on May 25 of last year, died while resisting arrest after committing a crime. Floyd was black; the arresting officer was white. In the ensuing months, Floyd’s death was used to justify rioting, arson, and vandalism by Antifa and BLM agitators, none of whom ended up being killed by a cop.
But nobody’s making a martyr out of Ashli Babbitt.
I’m not saying anybody should. I’m just saying that after four years of reportage that routinely demonized Trump, sugarcoated his opponents, and cruelly mocked his supporters, and after an election that was blatantly stolen yet described in the media as eminently fair, those supporters could hardly be expected not to explode – especially since they’d seen, during the previous few months, one leftist explosion after another rewarded with praise.
But they did not explode.
On January 6, Biden, oozing faux solemnity, addressed the ongoing situation on Capitol Hill. After months of referring to Antifa and BLM thugs as “protesters”, he called the non-violent people who’d entered the Capitol a “mob” of “domestic terrorists” who, in an action bordering on “sedition”, had made an “unprecedented assault…on the citadel of liberty….This is not dissent, it’s disorder”.
He wasn’t alone. In one voice, people who’d spent months cheering leftist violence expressed horror at the breach of the Capitol building and blamed it on Trump. Once the Capitol was secured, the planned challenges to the vote steal were scuttled and the election of Biden and Harris duly certified.
Whereupon the left – and not just the left – moved with the swiftness of lightning.
Accusing Trump of having incited the Capitol breach, [Speaker] Pelosi and [Senate minority leader] Schumer raised the possibility of using the 25th Amendment to deny him his last few days in office …
And she absurdly introduced a proposal to impeach him for a second time, though he had only a few days more as president. .
Republicans who were never strong Trump supporters to begin with were quick to profess outrage at Trump’s purported provocation. Cabinet members Elaine Choi and Betsy DeVos quit. The Wall Street Journal called on Trump to resign. Senator Pat Toomey gave a thumbs-up to impeachment. Forbes warned companies not to hire anybody with a Trump connection.
Both Twitter and Facebook deplatformed Trump, and when he shifted from his personal Twitter account to the POTUS account, Twitter silenced that one, too. Other enemies of the left were also kicked off social media – among them Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, and Steve Bannon. Facebook ejected the WalkAway movement, in the process deleting countless heartfelt posts by ordinary citizens explaining why they’d quit the Democratic Party. YouTube took down a video by Rudy Giuliani. Amazon, Google, and Apple removed Parler, a “free-speech” alternative to Twitter and Facebook, from their app stores. The CEO of Mozilla, developer of the Firefox browser, wrote an essay entitled “We Need More than Deplatforming.”
(Yet the social-media accounts of the Chinese Communist Party and Ayatollah Khamenei remained untouched.)
Pelosi tried to get the military to stop taking orders from the President. …
She urged the Chiefs of Staff to mutiny against their commander-in-chief! (They refused.)
The director of ABC News spoke of “cleansing” the Trump movement after January 20, whatever that might mean. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, who’d taken the lead in challenging the vote steal, to be expelled from the Senate. Simon & Schuster canceled Hawley’s contract for a book about cancel culture. Biden likened Cruz to Goebbels. …
There’s no intrinsic magic about America that protects it from becoming Mao’s China or Stalin’s Russia. Only utopians believe in the perfectibility of man. People are people. And some of the people who are now, or are about to be, in power in the United States would, if accorded enough power, do far more to those of us who falter in loyalty than merely take away our social-media accounts.
Indeed, as scary as the situation may be right now, one thing’s for certain: worse is on its way. The Democrats now control both houses of Congress and are about to be handed the executive branch. The totalitarian-minded elements in that party are on the ascent, backed up by Silicon Valley, the legacy media, and much of corporate America.
Bruce Bawer thinks that by “listing, arresting, and imprisoning ‘enemies of the state'” – as, he reminds us, was done in the terrible reign of Stalin, and under the brutal tyranny of Mao –
These people will overreach. Their lists will grow so long, their cancelations so widespread, that, as happened with the Reign of Terror, everyone who isn’t clinically insane will finally realize that things have gone too far and will, in one way or another, put an end to the madness.
He asks:
But how far will things have to go before that happens? How long will it take? And how many lives will be destroyed before it’s over? These, alas, are the all too sobering questions that have yet to be answered.
In the meantime, those of us who care about liberty will simply have to do our best to keep enduring the daily tsunami of evil ideology, fake news, and contempt for decent people, and to continue hoping that the true and good will yet prevail.
Much as we would like his optimism – such as it is, sorrowful and tentative – to hearten us, we are less sure that such a realization will come, or that “the true and good will yet prevail”.
What has happened seems to us to demonstrate that there is a tragic weakness in freedom and tolerance. They permit those who value neither to exploit them to gain the power to abolish them.
Not a happy new year 102
The year now ending, 2020, has been horrible.
It has been a year of oppression, impoverishment, and disappointment.
Oppression because of exaggerated fear of the Chinese virus.
Impoverishment as millions of people lost their jobs and their businesses because of the oppression.
Disappointment for at least half the population of America and uncountable millions in the rest of the world because President Trump has been cheated out of re-election.
But at least we had Donald Trump as our president in 2020.
2021 will be even worse, very much worse. When Biden is president, the year 2021 will not only be horrible with continuing oppression, impoverishment, and disappointment from the moment of its birth, it will become increasingly horrible.
Kurt Schlichter thinks so too. He writes – in part – at Townhall:
I predict pain.
No Krakens. Sorry.
Let’s get this out of the way. I predict President Asterisk will be inaugurated in January despite the massive cheating and incompetence that stole the election from the American people. … It is highly unlikely that any kind of constitutional maneuver or even the most meritorious court challenge is going to validate Donald Trump’s victory in the last election, even though it’s painfully clear that he did win and was only deprived of the victory by a combination of incompetence, scams and outright fraud. And I predict many Americans will refuse to accept this ancient pervert as their president. I know I will never name him without adding an *. I also know I’m not going to rest until the left pays. How about you?
Durham Will Do Nothing.
Santa Claus. The Easter Bunny. Durham the Avenger.
Nothing will happen to the real crooks. Nada. Zip. Zilch. What investigations the Asterisk Administration doesn’t order shut down will be closed out without action in the name of “preserving our institutions”. You might think justice and accountability are the best institutional preservatives, but that’s your wacky non-swamp thinking at work. The real answer is to cover it up and blame you for caring. What this will do is make us hate them even more for their corruption, incompetence, and arrogance, if that’s possible. …
Covid Will Continue Until We Revolt.
Have you noticed that Establishment seems to love this pandemic? And why not? They get to boss the proles around and it sure doesn’t interfere with their pampered lives. They’re doing fine working from their penthouses. They’re still noshing at the French Laundry while the rest of us – at least in the unfree blue states – are trying to survive their idiotic lockdowns. …
However, he concludes –
Here’s one more prediction…we will win. Maybe not in 2021, but mark my words, the side of freedom and justice cannot lose. Victory is coming. And you can hold me to it.
We are not so sure that the side of freedom and justice cannot lose, however much we wish for its victory.
As wishing is all we can do right now, despite the grim outlook we wish our readers personal happiness in the New Year.
Fight now 92
This is Jim O’Neill’s cri de coeur from Canada Free Press* as we have posted it slightly shortened on our Facebook page:
If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.—Sir Winston Churchill
It is our life. It is our country. This is the time in our country’s history where if we don’t get this right our country is done. It will be over. —Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn
The American people must demand that the President stay in office until this is cleared up. Because it’s treason, it’s a coup d’état, against the government of the United States, and we cannot accept that …They are guilty of treason.—Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney
Those guilty of treason against the United States have been allowed to waltz free as birds while provably guilty as sin. The laws of the US have been treated as a joke—even by some judges. We the People are fed up with these arrogant miscreants thumbing their noses at us.
It gets worse, never better. Gen. Flynn was set up like a bowling pin, and framed by the FBI. Some of the very same individuals involved in the Flynn frameup are now being considered for faux president-elect Biden’s administration.
Everyone in the federal government—from the President on down—takes an oath to defend the US Constitution from “all enemies, foreign and domestic.” The same goes for members of the US military. “The oath of enlistment should not be taken lightly, you will be bound by it….”
We have had a front row seats to the recent massive election fraud.
Of course, President Trump is bound by an oath as well:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”
We the People have had front row seats to the recent massive election fraud. If that fraud is not a direct and blatant threat to the integrity of the US Constitution, then I don’t know what is. Millions of us are sworn to protect and defend the US Constitution. We are accountable, we are responsible.
President Trump, do you believe that your oath of office demands that you protect the US Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic? Do you believe that the stealing of a US presidential election is a direct and grievous assault on our Constitution? If so, what are you going to do about it? What are we going to do about it? Time to take the gloves off. Play time is over, it’s time for the adults to step in.
The guilty must be brought to justice.
The message is: FIGHT NOW.
The People could start with a tax strike. A strike by ALL who want to keep the free republic of the United States.
*His cry is from inside the USA, Canada Free Press publishes it. Find his bio here.
Government by the stupid for the stupid 218
… but not of the stupid.
Paul Joseph Watson is on to them.
He shows some of the ways Big Virtue tries to discombobulate us.
Behold the muzzled multitudes 185
Communist China spreads a pestilence across the world.
Everywhere people muzzle themselves as they are ordered to.
China rules. Free enterprise retreats. Small business fails. Totalitarianism is the flavor of the year.
Are we losing the idea that liberty is the highest value? Is individual self-determination to be lost not only in practice but even as an ideal?
Peter Hitchens writes this about what’s happening in Britain, but the picture of the submissive population applies equally to America:
This Government has no great authority. It is a Cabinet of undistinguished, inexperienced unknowns, headed by an exhausted and empty Prime Minister whose sparkle, such as it was, is fast fading.
In a few weeks’ time, the Government faces the onset of what may be the worst economic crisis since 1929. It needs to keep the fear levels up to maintain its authority.
One way of doing this is the ceaseless promotion of an alleged “second wave” of Covid, for which there is no evidence.
Another is to undertake a ferocious testing policy. This is now happening in Leicester where testers go from door to door to discover people who are ‘infected’ with Covid, even if they have no symptoms (which is usually the case) and are perfectly healthy. Then they can raise the alarm and close down the city.
But muzzling the populace is even better. People such as I, who think Ministers’ response to the virus is wildly out of proportion, have until now been able to live amid the propaganda, trying to stay sane.
But the muzzle is a badge of subservience and submission. Anyone who dons it publicly is agreeing to the Government’s crazy assessment of the level of danger.
Societies in which citizens are discouraged from speaking out against the regime, as this has become, are pretty disgraceful. But countries where the citizens are compelled to endorse the opinion of the state are a serious step further down the path to totalitarianism.
It is even worse than that.
Look at the muzzled multitudes, their wide eyes peering out anxiously from above the hideous gag which obscures half their faces and turns them from normal human beings into mouthless, obedient submissives. The psychological effect of these garments, on those who wear them, is huge.
And it also has another nasty result for society as a whole.
Dissenters, who prefer not to muzzle themselves, are made to stand out from the surrendered majority, who then become quite keen on pressuring the non-conformists to do as they are told, and on informing against them.
I predicted the same outcome during the House Arrest period in April, and was mocked for it, but it came true.
When all this began, I felt fear. But it was not fear of the disease, which was clearly overstated from the start.
It was fear of exactly what is happening to us, the final closing down of centuries of human liberty and the transformation of one of the freest countries on Earth into a regimented, conformist society, under perpetual surveillance, in which a subservient people scurries about beneath the stern gaze of authority.
It is my view that, if you don that muzzle, you are giving your assent to that change.
(Our thanks to Cogito for bringing the article to our attention)
Advertisement for totalitarian communism 177
By Ida Auken, Member of the Danish Parliament, from the World Economic Forum (“Davos”) – an annual meeting of billionaires and other members of Big Virtue:
Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city – or should I say, “our city”. I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes.
It might seem odd to you, but it makes perfect sense for us in this city. Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. We have access to transportation, accommodation, food and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.
First communication became digitized and free to everyone. Then, when clean energy became free, things started to move quickly. Transportation dropped dramatically in price. It made no sense for us to own cars anymore, because we could call a driverless vehicle or a flying car for longer journeys within minutes. We started transporting ourselves in a much more organized and coordinated way when public transport became easier, quicker and more convenient than the car. Now I can hardly believe that we accepted congestion and traffic jams, not to mention the air pollution from combustion engines. What were we thinking?
Sometimes I use my bike when I go to see some of my friends. I enjoy the exercise and the ride. It kind of gets the soul to come along on the journey. Funny how some things never seem to lose their excitement: walking, biking, cooking, drawing and growing plants. It makes perfect sense and reminds us of how our culture emerged out of a close relationship with nature.
“Environmental problems seem far away”
In our city we don’t pay any rent, because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it. My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there.
Once in awhile, I will choose to cook for myself. It is easy – the necessary kitchen equipment is delivered at my door within minutes. Since transport became free, we stopped having all those things stuffed into our home. Why keep a pasta-maker and a crepe cooker crammed into our cupboards? We can just order them when we need them.
This also made the breakthrough of the circular economy easier. When products are turned into services, no one has an interest in things with a short life span. Everything is designed for durability, repairability and recyclability. The materials are flowing more quickly in our economy and can be transformed to new products pretty easily. Environmental problems seem far away, since we only use clean energy and clean production methods. The air is clean, the water is clean and nobody would dare to touch the protected areas of nature because they constitute such value to our well being. In the cities we have plenty of green space and plants and trees all over. I still do not understand why in the past we filled all free spots in the city with concrete.
The death of shopping
Shopping? I can’t really remember what that is. For most of us, it has been turned into choosing things to use. Sometimes I find this fun, and sometimes I just want the algorithm to do it for me. It knows my taste better than I do by now.
When AI and robots took over so much of our work, we suddenly had time to eat well, sleep well and spend time with other people. The concept of rush hour makes no sense anymore, since the work that we do can be done at any time. I don’t really know if I would call it work anymore. It is more like thinking-time, creation-time and development-time.
For a while, everything was turned into entertainment and people did not want to bother themselves with difficult issues. It was only at the last minute that we found out how to use all these new technologies for better purposes than just killing time.
“They live different kinds of lives outside of the city”
My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.
Once in awhile I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.
All in all, it is a good life. Much better than the path we were on, where it became so clear that we could not continue with the same model of growth. We had all these terrible things happening: lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment. We lost way too many people before we realized that we could do things differently.
Remorse 178
As comment on “The Great Reset”, and in particular on the post Advertisement for totalitarian communism, here is an extract from L: A Novel History by Jillian Becker.* It is set in England in the 20th. century, but is precisely applicable to this moment of political choice in the US:
Here the (fictitious) historian relates what one or two enthusiasts for totalitarian communism discover when they get it:
At first the Winsomes had rejoiced in the revolution. It was what they had hoped for, worked for, and, as long as they could, voted for. “I don’t mind not owning my own house if nobody else does,” Ted Winsome had written cheerfully in his Revolution Issue of the NEW WORKER (which came out six weeks after Republic Day, as his paper, like most others, had been ordered to suspend publication until all newspapers that were to continue had been nationalised, and permits granted to their editors). Had not his wife, in her capacity as Housing Committee chairperson on Islington Borough Council set an example, by compulsorily purchasing more private houses for local government ownership than anyone before or after her (until the revolution made purchase unnecessary)? He was proud that she had been an active pioneer, one of the avant-garde of the socialist revolution.
However, he was less pleased when three families were quartered in his house. And then another was sent by the Chief Social Worker (a sort of district commandant) when his own children, delighted to drop out of school, had left home to join a WSP group and vent righteous indignation on landlords, capitalists, individualists, racists and speculators. All of his fellow lodgers were, in his view, “problem-families” – drunken, noisy, filthy, careless, inconsiderate and rude. (“That,” said the Gauleiter, “is why they were chased out of their last lodgings by angry co-residents on a former Council estate.” She had thought the Winsomes would be “more tolerant”.) Before he could hand over his stereophonic record-player to the local community centre – as he assured those he complained to that he had fully intended to do – one of the problem-children broke it, threw his classical records away, and also deliberately smashed his high-speed Japanese camera. His furniture was soon broken too. Precious antiques which he had restored with his own hands in hours of patient labour, were treated like fruit-boxes, to be stood on, and spilt on, and thrown about. When cups and glasses were smashed, it was he who had to replace them if he was to have anything to eat or drink out of; which meant recourse to the black market, against which he had so often fulminated in his editorials in the NEW WORKER. He started hiding things away in his room, taking special care to keep his carpentry and joinery tools from the hands of those who would not understand how he had cared for them, valued them, kept them sharp, adapted some of them to his particular needs. One of the problem-fathers accused him of “hoarding private property”, and threatened to go to the New Police with the complaint, or call in “some RI people”.
He confided to a woman journalist at his office how he had begun to suspect that “when a thing belongs to everybody, it belongs to nobody”. And he even went so far as to suggest that “as people only vandalise things they don’t own themselves, there is something to be said for private ownership after all”. The woman with whom he shared this confidence was a Miss Ada Corinth, a WSP member. She was also a spy for L, as most WSP members were.
Soon Ted Winsome was no longer editor of the NEW WORKER. Nobody was. Everybody wrote what he was told to write. Ted Winsome felt a secret regret at his loss of power and pride in his position. He began to feel that hierarchies were not such a bad thing. They allowed promotion, advance, a sense of success and reward for effort. “I suppose I really am a bourgeois at heart,” he said, more wistfully than guiltily, to Ada Corinth.
Some weeks passed. The day of hunger descended on the city. The problem-families tucked under their arms as many of the things the Winsomes had once owned as they could carry, and set off to find survival where food grazed, roamed, swam or grew. And one night a WSP posse came and took Ted Winsome away to be treated in a special hospital for holding incorrect opinions.
Marjorie Winsome watched him go, calling out, “Don’t worry, Ted, I’ll go to Downing Street and see Ben or Jason or John Ernesto, or L himself if necessary. They can’t know about this. When they do they’ll have to let you go.”
She set out for Downing Street. Her old friends Shrood, Vernet and Ernesto would not see her; nor would Hamstead or Fist, or any of the others.
L was not at his office. So she walked to Hampstead Heath. As she approached his house, she was stopped by the guards, and she explained what she wanted. They didn’t seem to understand. They hardly seemed to understand English at all. She began to shout, “Comrade L is my friend! Don’t you understand?”
They told her to go away, and pushed her roughly. She shouted louder, “L! Comrade L – it’s me, Marjie, Marjorie Winsome. L, they’ve taken Ted! Can you hear me? L! L!….” and she struggled with the guards, trying to push past them to get through the gate and up the garden path to the front door. One of the guards pushed her away with his Kalashnikov sub-machinegun. She fell hard, but got up feeling stunned, bruised, and very bewildered. “But –,” she began. The man advanced again with his gun held in both hands, and she gave up.
Limping home, she “tried to think what had happened exactly”. She never did work it out, by her own account, though she survived the Republic, and lived to grieve and write a brief memoir. She became a heavy drinker, when spirits could be bought again. She mourned more for “the empty thing [her] life had become” than for her husband and children, all of whom she lost. She wrote sadly that “after the revolution, there was no way one could serve others any more. Except your family, but then families broke apart. You felt you could not build anything, whatever you did was just for that day, that moment.” She came to certain conclusions that her husband had come to: “You couldn’t achieve anything really, or if you did – say you discovered something or made something with your hands – there was no way you could get recognition for it, no feeling that it might be appreciated by other people, or that anyone would thank you or honour you for it.”
Read the book for a full and graphic description of what life would be like under totalitarian communist government as proposed by “The Great Reset”.
*From Chapter 9: The Floodgates of Chaos pages 261-263
What President Trump is protecting us from 107
James Delingpole writes at Breitbart:
#WhyAreTheyDoingThis has become a popular hashtag on Twitter for the increasing number of people concerned at the extraordinarily draconian and often scientifically inexplicable policies being adopted by governments the world over to deal with Coronavirus.
The Great Reset may be the answer.
And if it is the answer — and so if so many world leaders are on board — then my view is that there is only one man in the world who can save us from it.
That man is Donald Trump.
It’s why, in my view, this presidential election is probably the most important political event anyone alive will live through.
On the outcome depend our liberty, our prosperity, our civilization.
Also at Breitbart, Delingpole tells us what The Great Reset is:
The Great Reset is not a conspiracy theory. But lots of useful idiots want you to believe that it is.
Here’s an example [from The Spectator (UK)]:
The phrase has shot throughout the fringes of Right-Wing Twitter like a virus through a karaoke bar. According to Pauline Hanson of the Australian party One Nation it is an attempt to establish a ‘socialist left Marxist view of the world’. James Delingpole describes it as a ‘global communist takeover plan’.
You get the idea. Anyone who imagines that the Great Reset is a serious threat belongs on the crackpot fringe. I hear this a lot and it’s a point that needs addressing because if we’re not careful the bastards will get away with it.
Just as the devil’s greatest trick was to persuade the world he didn’t exist, so it suits promoters of the Great Reset for people to believe they’re not serious about their plan — even despite the fact that every last detail is spelled out on the World Economic Forum’s website.
And in its tweets (unless, like me, you’re blocked).
And on the cover of Time magazine.
And in books like the one WEF founder Klaus Schwab published this year titled COVID-19: the Great Reset.
So why, given the weight of evidence, do so many wiseacres think they know better?
The first reason is cowardice — or squeamishness if you prefer. No-one wants to believe that totalitarian rule is just around the corner (as it will be if the Great Reset is allowed to happen) because that’s a scary thought which many people would prefer not to entertain. It’s the equivalent of burying your head underneath the pillow to make the monsters go away — and lots of people do it long after childhood.
In the late ’20s, for example, lots of supposedly intelligent and informed commentators pooh-poohed the notion that the funny little man with the moustache building a power base in Germany presented any kind of genuine threat. Sure he’d spelled out exactly what he planned in a 1925 manifesto called Mein Kampf. But c’mon — those Lederhosen, that hysterical oratory — no way was he going to lead a level-headed, war-chastened people like the Germans into another insane global conflict…
The second reason is tone policing. Tone policing is a game played mostly by the left but which has been unthinkingly copied by the squishier sort of conservative. It’s a way of closing down arguments you disagree with or which make you uncomfortable. Instead of actually addressing the argument itself, you focus on a rhetorical flourish you consider to be overly dramatic or a word you find inapt — and use that to imply that this invalidates your opponent’s case.
So, in the piece mentioned above, the author invokes the word “conspiracy” to imply that the whole notion is a bit tinfoil hat; and the word “communist” in order argue that the Great Reset is actually more of a “capitalist” endeavour — as if somehow these nitpicking debating points suddenly make the Great Reset OK.
But the Great Reset is not OK. It really doesn’t matter whether you want to cast its masterplan — which remember, ultimately includes the abolition of private property — as communist or fascist or technocratic. The much more important point is that it represents a totalitarian takeover by a small, powerful, oppressive, unelected elite which will leave the rest of us impoverished, immiserated, and deprived of our liberty. …
These people and their ideological confreres have been talking about it for decades. Sometimes it comes under the United Nations codename Agenda 21 (or LA 21), which has now been updated as Agenda 2030. Sometimes it comes under the catch-all phrase — at once vague and extremely dangerous — “sustainability”. Sometimes it’s known as the “fourth industrial revolution” (though “deindustrial apocalypse” would be more accurate).
It’s a plan whose blueprint you’ll find embedded everywhere — in local government policy plans, in speeches by prime ministers, at UN conferences like the annual COP events such as the one at Paris whose Paris Accord President Trump sensibly pulled out of because he knows a rat when he smells one…
The reason it has become so pressing and urgent and frightening and newsworthy now is simply that the pandemic of 2020 has been seized, Rahm Emmanuel style, as the crisis the globalists won’t let go to waste…
And again he writes:
“Build Back Better” is the slogan of the Great Reset and the man who invented it, Klaus Schwab. Schwab is a bald German in his early Eighties with a strong accent and the sinister air of a James Bond villain who in the 1970s founded what is now known as the World Economic Forum. The WEF holds the annual summit at Davos in Switzerland where, it has been said, ‘billionaires go to lecture millionaires on how ordinary people live.’
Up until recently, Davos has probably seemed like a harmless event: a sort of annual joke in which we all get to laugh at the absurd spectacle of the one percent of the one percent turning up in their private jets and their limousines to expound on the importance of sustainability and saving the planet.
But the events of 2020 have changed all that because COVID-19 has provided the perfect pretext for the kind of co-ordinated globalist takeover which might previously have been little more than an evil glint in Klaus Schwab’s eyes.
By Schwab’s own admission, the world must “act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies” — in short, he says, ever industry must “be transformed… we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism”.
In a warning of the rollercoaster of change we can expect if this plan goes ahead, Schwab continues: “The level of cooperation and ambition this implies is unprecedented. But it is not some impossible dream. In fact, one silver lining of the pandemic is that it has shown how quickly we can make radical changes to our lifestyles. Almost instantly, the crisis forced businesses and individuals to abandon practices long claimed to be essential, from frequent air travel to working in an office.”
As the WEF puts it of the coming technocracy that would rule our lives: “Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.” [See the post above, Advertisement for totalitarian communism.]
There is nothing new about the Great Reset. Schwab and his acolytes have been talking about it for years. Chinese Coronavirus – or rather the draconian, liberty-sapping measures taken by governments in order to combat it – has merely accelerated the process.
As I reported in an earlier piece, Schwab has written several books about his masterplan:
His latest, called Covid-19: The Great Reset, makes no bones about the fact that the chaos of the Coronavirus pandemic represents the perfect opportunity to accelerate the entire world towards a “new normal”. …
That’s why Joe Biden used “Build Back Better” as his campaign slogan. It’s why the UK Conservatives feature the website on their Twitter page. And why UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson inserts the phrase into his speeches.
How many of those who, by their own choice, voted for Joe Biden had the least idea of what they were voting for? Perhaps only those who are themselves members of Big Virtue – the billionaires, the princes, the technology giants. And the decision-makers of the Democratic Party – a cabal that may include Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff, Obama, Bannen, Clapper, Sulzberger, Soros. (But almost certainly not Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.)
All free men and women who want to remain free are in debt to James Delingpole for informing us of this. Though what we can do about it remains to be thought.
We would argue with only one thing Delingpole says, not because we think it is wrong, but because we think it is understated. He says: “This presidential election is probably the most important political event anyone alive will live through.” We would go much further and say that this is the most important presidential election since the Enlightenment freed the Western world from the tyranny of the Roman Catholic Church and inspired the founding of the free American republic.
The case could not be put more succinctly and accurately than Delingpole puts it when he says of this election:
On the outcome depend our liberty, our prosperity, our civilization.
A Sunday story 109
… from the annals of Christianity:
On a raw March afternoon in 1314, a scaffold stood in the shadow of Notre Dame. The people of Paris knew what macabre show was imminent. Seven years before, the King’s constables had stormed all the Templar estates in France and arrested 5000 knights of the order, much to the astonishment of the people. Now the curtain was about to drop on a bizarre tragedy, one scripted by the king himself.
The Knights Templar were a smelly lot – they didn’t wash. A common expression of their time was “stink like a Templar”. They were brave soldiers – crusaders in Outremer – and brilliant bankers. The order was very rich.
King Philip the Fair of France owed them a huge sum of money and coveted their wealth, so he destroyed them. He had to get them to confess to crimes and acts of blasphemy as an excuse. They might in fact have been heretical by the rules of the Catholic Church. There is some evidence that suggests they were secret Gnostics, but to a rational humane mind, nothing they did surely deserved the punishments the good Catholic king devised for them.
Here is an account of what they confessed to and what King Philip (grandson of Louis IX, known as Saint Louis) had done to them:
The things the knights confessed under torture defied belief: trampling and urinating on the Crucifix, secret rites of obscene kisses, sodomy, usury, treason, idolatry, and heresy. After the arrests came seven years of inquisition, then hundreds and hundreds of public executions by burning.
These confessions were extorted from them under extreme torture.
Stripped of their habits, chained, and cast into dungeons, the old men were tortured with rack and thumbscrew. The soles of their feet were smeared with animal fat and then held over hot coals. Their weary frames were crushed under iron weights.
Sometimes the accused was tied down, a cloth stuffed in his mouth. Water poured into the cloth caused it to swell: The choice was to confess or drown. A more creative option was to place a man into a pit no wider than himself, where he would be left to stand in his filth and starve. The rack was used to dislocate shoulders and hips.
Subtler methods of interrogation worked as well. Denied sleep and the chance to void his bowels or bladder, the accused could be subjected to a constant battery of bewildering questions by an endless string of interrogators, some cruel, some appearing compassionate. Rare is the man who could withstand this to the point of death, which would be his only relief. Under such conditions, hundreds and hundreds of Templars confessed to appalling crimes. …
The last five of them, having been imprisoned in a dungeon for six years, were burnt to death on the Île de la Cité in Paris on March 18, 1314.
As a large crowd closed around the scaffold, the last Master of the Knights of the Temple of Jerusalem, 70-year-old Jacques de Molay, stood alongside four of his brothers in arms, listening as the papal legate read their crimes in horrible detail.
However, mercy would yet be theirs if they repeated to the people of Paris the guilt they had confessed before the inquisition. Five stakes piled high with brushwood and faggots awaited them if they did not.
Two [three?] of the knights, eyes cast downward, mumbled their guilt. Then de Molay and Geoffrey de Charney of Normandy stepped forward.
“On this terrible day,” shouted de Molay, his gaze meeting the eyes of the crowd, “in my final hour, I shall let truth triumph and declare, before heaven and all the saints, that I have committed the greatest of all crimes.” The crowd pressed in. “But my crime is this: that I confessed to malicious charges made against an order that is innocent so that I could escape further torture. I shall not confirm a first lie with a second. I renounce life willingly. I have no use for days of sorrow earned only by lies.”
The King’s police seized the two knights and chained them to the stakes. Brush and branches were set aflame. As the old men were roasted alive, they shouted their innocence and their love for Jesus Christ before falling silent. Thus the last Master of the Knights of the Temple of Jerusalem was reduced to ashes.
Then Pope Clement V abolished the order and the “beautiful” King Philip availed himself of their assets. He did not enjoy them for long. He died on 29 November, 1314, eight months after burning the old Knights to death – because, it was popularly believed, de Molay had cursed him. If “God” took note of a curse spoken by de Molay and acted on it in the case of Philip’s death, what – you may be tempted to ask a Christian – had “He” been doing when the same man was being tortured and burnt? Don’t expect an answer. Though the believer may go so far as to say in reply that “He has mysterious ways”.
Forced masking is grooming for totalitarianism 118
The muzzle policy is all about power and fear. The muzzle is a badge of subservience and submission. What is happening to us is the final closing down of centuries of human liberty and the transformation of one of the freest countries on Earth into a regimented, conformist society, under perpetual surveillance, in which a subservient people scurries about beneath the stern gaze of authority.
So Peter Hitchens writes at the Daily Mail.
We strongly agree with him.
Here’s more of his article:
England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, … said that wearing face masks would do little to combat the outbreak [of the Coronavirus]. While noting that if someone was infected, they might reduce the danger of spreading the disease by covering their faces, Prof. Whitty said wearing a face mask had almost no effect on reducing the risk of contracting the illness.
He stated: “In terms of wearing a mask, our advice is clear: that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that.”
Also in March, the Advertising Standards Authority banned two firms’ advertisements for masks, saying that the adverts were “misleading, irresponsible and likely to cause fear without justifiable reason”.
At about the same time, Dr Jenny Harries, a Deputy Chief Medical Officer, warned that people could be putting themselves more at risk from contracting Covid by wearing muzzles. She said masks could “actually trap the virus”, and cause the person wearing it to breathe it in. She explained: “For the average member of the public walking down a street, it is not a good idea.”
On April 3, the other Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, said he did not believe healthy people wearing them would reduce the spread of the disease in the UK.
The British Government has also zig-zagged. As recently as June 24, in a series of official pamphlets for reopening shops and services, the Department for Business and Enterprise said repeatedly: “The evidence of the benefit of using a face covering to protect others is weak and the effect is likely to be small.”
This was true at the time and it is still true. The evidence is indeed weak. There is plenty of research showing that the case for muzzles is poor, especially a survey done for the dental profession four years ago, which quietly vanished from the internet after mask opponents began to cite it.
The scientific papers in favor of muzzling are full of weak, hesitant words such as “probably”, “could” and “may” – which can equally well be expressed as “probably not”, “could not” or “may not”.
There has not been any great discovery in the past few days.
Generally, the main way of discovering if something works is the Randomised Control Trial (RCT), in which the proposed treatment or method is tested directly and thoroughly.
This hasn’t been done with muzzles, probably because it would be a bit difficult and possibly because muzzle zealots fear the results would not help their case.
Amazingly, the chief spokesman for science in this country, who should surely support proper rigor, has dismissed such RCTs. Venki Ramakrishnan, president of the Royal Society, sneered at “inappropriate” RCTs as “methodological fetishism”. He did this while advocating more compulsory muzzle-wearing when he appeared on Radio 4’s Today program on July 7 – as the political lobbying for muzzles intensified.
All that has changed is the politics. Why are they changing? Interestingly, Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s muzzle edict was the first action by the London Government which actually copied a move made by Nicola Sturgeon’s extremely Left-wing Edinburgh administration.
There are many signs that it has not been thought through, at least by scientists.
Why are we more likely to spread Covid in a shop than we are to do so in a pub or restaurant? The question cannot be answered.
What evidence there is certainly suggests that the risk of transmission is greater if we linger longer, but the Government does not dare close down the catering trade again, because it would be wildly unpopular and because these businesses are on the point of bankruptcy – and such an action would shut them.
The truth is that the muzzle policy is all about power and fear.
The Government began its wild, disproportionate shutdown of the country by spreading fear of a devastating plague that would destroy the NHS and kill untold thousands.
Now, as many people find that Covid-19 is, in fact, nothing of the kind, new ways have to be found to keep up the alarm levels.
One was exposed on Friday by the superb scientists of the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine. Puzzled by the way that Covid death figures in England continued to pour in, while they had all but ceased in Scotland, they looked at the figures from Public Health England (PHE). And they found, in their own devastating words:
It seems that PHE regularly looks for people on the NHS database who have ever tested positive, and simply checks to see if they are still alive or not. PHE does not appear to consider how long ago the Covid test result was, nor whether the person has been successfully treated in hospital and discharged to the community. Anyone who has tested Covid positive but subsequently died at a later date of any cause will be included on the PHE Covid death figures. By this PHE definition, no one with Covid in England is allowed to ever recover from their illness. A patient who has tested positive, but been successfully treated and discharged from hospital, will still be counted as a Covid death even if they had a heart attack or were run over by a bus three months later.
This problem would be avoided by having a simple cut-off, where those who tested positive more than 28 days ago were no longer counted as Covid deaths. Scotland does this. That is why its figures are lower.
Findings are now also pouring in which suggest that a horribly high number of the excess deaths during the last few months were not caused by Covid, but by people failing to seek treatment for heart attacks, strokes and cancer.
Despite the propagandists of the BBC, which has tried as hard as it can never to mention the legions of dissenting scientists who dispute the Government’s policy, people are beginning to wonder, in increasing numbers, if they might have been taken for a ride.
This Government has no great authority. It is a Cabinet of undistinguished, inexperienced unknowns, headed by an exhausted and empty Prime Minister whose sparkle, such as it was, is fast fading.
In a few weeks’ time, the Government faces the onset of what may be the worst economic crisis since 1929. It needs to keep the fear levels up to maintain its authority.
One way of doing this is the ceaseless promotion of an alleged “second wave” of Covid, for which there is no evidence.
Another is to undertake a ferocious testing policy. This is now happening in Leicester where testers go from door to door to discover people who are “infected” with Covid, even if they have no symptoms (which is usually the case) and are perfectly healthy. Then they can raise the alarm and close down the city.
But muzzling the populace is even better. People such as me, who think Ministers’ response to the virus is wildly out of proportion, have until now been able to live amid the propaganda, trying to stay sane.
But the muzzle is a badge of subservience and submission. Anyone who dons it publicly is agreeing to the Government’s crazy assessment of the level of danger.
Societies in which citizens are discouraged from speaking out against the regime, as this has become, are pretty disgraceful. But countries where the citizens are compelled to endorse the opinion of the state are a serious step further down the path to totalitarianism.
It is even worse than that.
Look at the muzzled multitudes, their wide eyes peering out anxiously from above the hideous gag which obscures half their faces and turns them from normal human beings into mouthless, obedient submissives.
The psychological effect of these garments, on those who wear them, is huge.
And it also has another nasty result for society as a whole.
Dissenters, who prefer not to muzzle themselves, are made to stand out from the surrendered majority, who then become quite keen on pressuring the non-conformists to do as they are told, and on informing against them.
I predicted the same outcome during the House Arrest period in April, and was mocked for it, but it came true.
When all this began, I felt fear. But it was not fear of the disease, which was clearly overstated from the start.
It was fear of exactly what is happening to us, the final closing down of centuries of human liberty and the transformation of one of the freest countries on Earth into a regimented, conformist society, under perpetual surveillance, in which a subservient people scurries about beneath the stern gaze of authority.
It is my view that, if you don that muzzle, you are giving your assent to that change.
Why does Joe Biden, the senile Democrat nominee for the US presidency, insist that masking should be compulsory?
Rush Limbaugh has an answer:
Rush Limbaugh believes that Biden’s support for forced masking is really all about the candidate’s basement strategy. The Biden team has mostly confined Joe to the basement of his Delaware home in an effort to preserve his poll numbers. It’s a good strategy for a 77-year-old gaffe-prone candidate who a majority of likely voters believe has dementia …
According to Limbaugh, Biden’s calls for mandatory masking represents Biden’s doubling down on his basement strategy. …
“This is how Plugs intends to keep himself unavailable,” Limbaugh told [his radio] listeners on Friday. “Plugs” is Limbaugh’s nickname for Joe Biden, due to the obvious hair plugs on Biden’s head. “It’s just too dangerous, folks, to go out there. Everybody must wear the mask for three months because they can’t afford for Joe Biden to leave the basement.”
For the Left in general, anywhere and everywhere, the pandemic is a gift of an excuse to compel obedience. They tried it on with global warming, but that didn’t work. This time it’s different. People everywhere, all over the globe, are covering their faces on the orders of their masters.
This forced masking is grooming for totalitarianism.
We are being groomed for totalitarianism.