“ANYTHING to oppose Trump” is the motto self-scorched into the anger-fired skulls of the Kings and Queens of the Universe – so crowned by the New York Times, with the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Guardian, and the ghost of Che Guevara in perpetual attendance.

This time, for that great cause, Global Royalty is trying to resuscitate the COVID-19 patient, the World Health Organization, an institution born of the iniquitous UN, run at vast expense by a puppet of China, for the pleasure of the world’s Gasbags.

President Trump, knowing the patient was always a wasteful useless parasite who recently did great harm to the whole world by helping to cause a pandemic, rightly decided to let it fade away. By defunding it.

So – it follows as the night the day – Global Royalty rushes to save it. By raising funds for it.

Lee Cary writes at Canada Free Press*:

The Event: A Star-studded fund raiser for the World Health Organization (WHO)

Contributors, filmed in their homes, included Elton John, Jennifer Lopez, Stevie Wonder, British soccer star David Beckham, former U.S. first ladies Michelle Obama and Laura Bush, Andrea Bocelli, Celine Dion, Billie Eilish, Bill Gates, Taylor Swift, Jennifer Lopez, Andrea Bocelli, Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Beyonce, Oprah Winfrey, Stevie Wonder, Lady Gaga – the usual cast of celebrities who show up to promote global causes.

The event kicked off with a one-minute video from WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus—a “superstar” according to Ms. Gaga.

Tedros said [in a speech compiled from the UN Book of Utter-Ready Phrases – ed]:

Today, we come together as one to express our common humanity. To mourn those we have lost. To salute the health workers who save lives. And to say, with one voice, we shall not be defeated. Covid-19 has taken so much from us. But it has often given unique opportunity to put aside our differences, to break down barriers, to see and seek the best in each other. And to lift our voices for health for all. And to insure this never happens again. Never again. The World Health Organization is proud to be part of this historic show of solidarity. I want to thank Lady Gaga, the many artists and many (inaudible), global citizens, my friend Hugh Evans, and the United Nations, for bringing us together as one world together at home.” 

In an article in The Dispatch titled Suspending WHO Funding Should Be Just the Beginning: let’s talk about what the organization does—and what it doesn’t do, the author  Lyman Stone writes*:

[The WHO] is a body for research, conferences, and grant-writing, not frontline disease-fighting.

The WHO’s current head, Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is not a doctor of medicine. 

[The WHO] spends from $200 to $600 million on travel expenses each year.

High-ranking WHO official and Canadian scientist Bruce Aylward racked up $400,000 in travel expenses helicoptering around West Africa during the Ebola epidemic, even as many African countries could not afford basic medical supplies or body bags.

The WHO pays for the travel costs of experts they invite to conferences. A huge part of the WHO’s budget is simply buying plane tickets and booking swanky hotel rooms for prestigious experts to give speeches and present papers they’ve already published online. 

Dr. Tedros made Robert Mugabe [dictator of Zimbabwe, a mass murderer – ed] a “goodwill ambassador” for the WHO in Africa.

And under his watch, the WHO has begun to include “traditional Chinese medicine” remedies in its international diagnostic manuals. What’s particularly galling about this is that the ingredients for traditional Chinese medicine often include the very wild animals that are over-hunted and endangered around Africa, and from which so many novel zoonotic diseases originate. For the WHO to endorse these practices is absurd and dangerous.

The WHO has done everything it can to support the propaganda of authoritarian regimes and cover up [not cure – ed] embarrassing epidemics.

Dr. Tedros spent his major speeches urging the world not to blame China, and claiming that “stigmatization” [of China] was as big a problem as COVID-19. 

As a result of the WHO’s delay, many countries delayed their responses by weeks, making a crucial difference that epidemiologists say may have doubled the total death toll.

The WHO has been dominated by shills for the Chinese Communist Party for nearly a decade and a half, and in that time it has systematically suppressed information about numerous epidemic outbreaks and actively advanced propaganda for authoritarian regimes at great cost to public health.

Any appropriate responsibility for the U.S. being unprepared for a pandemic such as COVID-19 falls heaviest on the eight years of the George W. Bush presidency, followed by the eight years of the Barack H. Obama administration.

So it’s no surprise that Laura Bush and Michelle Obama are among the Global Royals eager to fatten up WHO and get it organizing those luxury conferences again.

 

The UN must be destroyed!

 

*We have shortened some of the quoted passages.

*

Later:

About Tedros Adhonom Ghebrevesus

From our Facebook page, quoting from Discover the Networks:

The US paid most of the costs of keeping the World Health Organization in existence, and yet successive US governments allowed this to happen:

Tedros Adhonom Ghebrevesus is a corrupt, dishonest, communist, terrorist-loving thug. From 2005-2016 he was a member of the corrupt government of Ethiopia. In 2017, when he ran for the post of Director-General of the WHO, he stood accused of complicity in the commission of “crimes against humanity” in Ethiopia. That charge was related not only to three cholera coverups, but also to allegations surrounding Tedros’s longstanding political affiliation with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), an organization that grew out of the Marxist-Leninist League of Tigray and was responsible for horrific atrocities — particularly targeting the Amhara ethnic group in the country’s northwest region. The TPLF became Ethiopia’s principal ruling party. In the 1990s, the U.S. government listed TPLF as a terrorist group. The Global Terror Database continues to list it as such, given the organization’s ongoing commission of armed attacks in rural areas. Tedros remains a high-ranking member of TPLF’s Central Committee, or politburo. TPLF provided millions of dollars for Tedros’s campaign to become the leader of the WHO. Those funds – along with vital support from China – propelled Tedros to victory when, at the Seventieth World Health Assembly in May 2017, the WHO Member States elected him to a five-year term as their Director-General, making him the first person to hold that position without a medical degree. Notably, the wife of Chinese President Xi Jinping was the WHO’s longtime goodwill ambassador – a post that enabled her to effectively promote Chinese interests under the umbrella of the UN.

Women on the whole are less strong than men. Why pretend otherwise? And children are dependent and need kind, warm, personal guarding and guiding. Government and its institutions cannot look after them as they need to be looked after. Government is not kind, warm or personal. Children need a mother or the nearest thing they can have to a mother. Again, why pretend otherwise?

Multitudes of women and children have suffered irreversible harm from the changes in custom brought about by the Left and all its sub-movements, especially feminism. 

What can we know about those famous female feminists? What drives them? Sure there are lots of men who describe themselves as feminists too, but they are aiders and abettors in this vast social tragedy. The women are the working demons.

An insight into the personality of one of the most infuential of the demonesses has been provided by her sister.

Mark Tapson has written an article about the siblings at Front Page, in which he draws attention to another article written by the sensible sister.

Feminist icon Kate Millett passed away recently in Paris at the age of 82. Her 1970 book Sexual Politics, called “the Bible of Women’s Liberation” by the New York Times, had a seismic effect on feminist thought and launched Millett as what the Times called “a defining architect of second-wave feminism”. … Kate’s sister Mallory, a CFO for several corporations, resides in New York City with her husband of over twenty years. In a riveting article from a few years back bluntly titled, Marxist Feminism’s Ruined Lives Mallory revealed what she saw of the subversive undercurrent of her sister’s passionate radicalism.

So we go now to Mallory Millett‘s article published at Front Page on September 1, 2014. (We quote extensively from it, omitting parts where she refers directly or indirectly to God, Bible and church, because God, Bible and church in our view are quite as rotten repositories of trust as government. Both she and Mark Tapson ascribe some of the blame for the ruination of modern family life to militant atheists and atheism itself. Obviously we disagree with them about that.)

I was a young divorcee with a small child. At the urging of my sister, I relocated to NYC after spending years married to an American executive stationed in Southeast Asia. The marriage over, I was making a new life for my daughter and me.  Katie said, “Come to New York.  We’re making revolution! Some of us are starting the National Organization of Women and you can be part of it.”

I hadn’t seen her for years.  Although she had tormented me when we were youngsters, those memories were faint after my Asian traumas and the break-up of my marriage.  I foolishly mistook her for sanctuary in a storm. With so much time and distance between us, I had forgotten her emotional instability.

And so began my period as an unwitting witness to history. I stayed with Kate and her lovable Japanese husband, Fumio, in a dilapidated loft on The Bowery as she finished her first book, a PhD thesis for Columbia University, Sexual Politics.

It was 1969. Kate invited me to join her for a gathering at the home of her friend, Lila Karp. They called the assemblage a “consciousness-raising-group”, a typical communist exercise, something practiced in Maoist China. We gathered at a large table as the chairperson opened the meeting with a back-and-forth recitation, like a Litany, a type of prayer done in Catholic Church. But now it was Marxism, the Church of the Left, mimicking religious practice:

“Why are we here today?” she asked.
“To make revolution,” they answered.
“What kind of revolution?” she replied.
“The Cultural Revolution,” they chanted.
“And how do we make Cultural Revolution?” she demanded.
“By destroying the American family!” they answered.
“How do we destroy the family?” she came back.
“By destroying the American Patriarch,” they cried exuberantly.
“And how do we destroy the American Patriarch?” she replied.
“By taking away his power!”
“How do we do that?”
“By destroying monogamy!” they shouted.
“How can we destroy monogamy?”

Their answer left me dumbstruck, breathless, disbelieving my ears. Was I on planet earth? Who were these people?

“By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution and homosexuality!” they resounded.

They proceeded with a long discussion on how to advance these goals by establishing The National Organization of Women.  It was clear they desired nothing less than the utter deconstruction of Western society. The upshot was that the only way to do this was “to invade every American institution.  Every one must be permeated with ‘The Revolution’: The media, the educational system, universities, high schools, K-12, school boards, etc.; then, the judiciary, the legislatures, the executive branches and even the library system.”

… To me, this sounded silly.  I was enduring culture shock after having been cut-off from my homeland, living in Third-World countries for years with not one trip back to the United States. I was one of those people who, upon returning to American soil, fell out of the plane blubbering with ecstasy at being home in the USA. I knelt on the ground covering it with kisses.  I had learned just exactly how delicious was the land of my birth and didn’t care what anyone thought because they just hadn’t seen what I had or been where I had been.  I had seen factory workers and sex-slaves chained to walls. …

And it is still happening in shithole countries.

How could twelve American women who were the most respectable types imaginable – clean and privileged graduates of esteemed institutions: Columbia, Radcliffe, Smith, Wellesley, Vassar; the uncle of one was Secretary of War under Franklin Roosevelt – plot such a thing?  Most had advanced degrees and appeared cogent, bright, reasonable and good. How did these people rationally believe they could succeed with such vicious grandiosity?  And why?

I dismissed it as academic-lounge air-castle-building.  I continued with my new life in New York while my sister became famous publishing her books, featured on the cover of “Time Magazine” [which] called her “the Karl Marx of the Women’s Movement.”  This was because her book laid out a course in Marxism 101 for women.  Her thesis: The family is a den of slavery with the man as the Bourgeoisie and the woman and children as the Proletariat.  The only hope for women’s “liberation” (communism’s favorite word for leading minions into inextricable slavery; “liberation,” and much like “collective” – please run from it, run for your life) was this new “Women’s Movement”.  Her books captivated the academic classes and soon “Women’s Studies” courses were installed in colleges in a steady wave across the nation with Kate Millett books as required reading.

Imagine this: a girl of seventeen or eighteen at the kitchen table with Mom studying the syllabus for her first year of college and there’s a class called “Women’s Studies”. “Hmmm, this could be interesting,” says Mom. “Maybe you could get something out of this.”

Seems innocuous to her.  How could she suspect this is a class in which her innocent daughter will be taught that her father is a villain?  Her mother is a fool who allowed a man to enslave her into barbaric practices like monogamy and family life and motherhood, which is a waste of her talents.  She mustn’t follow in her mother’s footsteps. That would be submitting to life as a mindless drone for some domineering man, the oppressor, who has mesmerized her with tricks like romantic love.  Never be lured into this chicanery, she will be taught.  Although men are no damned good, she should use them for her own orgasmic gratification; sleep with as many men as possible in order to keep herself unattached and free. There’s hardly a seventeen-year-old girl without a grudge from high school against a Jimmy or Jason who broke her heart.  Boys are learning, too, and they can be careless during high school, that torment of courting dances for both sexes.

By the time Women’s Studies professors finish with your daughter, she will be a shell of the innocent girl you knew, who’s soon convinced that although she should be flopping down with every boy she fancies, she should not, by any means, get pregnant.  And so, as a practitioner of promiscuity, she becomes a wizard of prevention techniques, especially abortion.

The goal of Women’s Liberation is to wear each female down to losing all empathy for boys, men or babies. The tenderest aspects of her soul are roughened into a rock pile of cynicism, where she will think nothing of murdering her baby in the warm protective nest of her little-girl womb.  She will be taught that she, in order to free herself, must become an outlaw. This is only reasonable because all Western law, since Magna Carta and even before, is a concoction of the evil white man whose true purpose is to press her into slavery.

Be an outlaw! Rebel! Be defiant!  (Think Madonna, Lady Gaga, Lois Lerner, Elizabeth Warren.) “All women are prostitutes,” she will be told.  You’re either really smart and use sex by being promiscuous for your own pleasures and development as a full free human being “just like men” or you can be a professional prostitute, a viable business for women, which is “empowering” or you can be duped like your mother and prostitute yourself to one man exclusively whereby you fall under the heavy thumb of “the oppressor”.  All wives are just “one-man whores”. 

She is to be heartless in this.  No sentimental stuff about courting. No empathy for either boy or baby.  She has a life to live and no one is to get in her way.  And if the boy or man doesn’t “get it” then no sex for him; “making love” becomes “having sex”. “I’m not ‘having sex’ with any jerk who doesn’t believe I can kill his son or daughter at my whim.  He has no say in it because it’s my body!” (Strange logic as who has ever heard of a body with two heads, two hearts, four arms, four feet?)

There’s no end to the absurdities your young girl will be convinced to swallow.  “I plan to leap from guy to guy as much as I please and no one can stop me because I’m liberated!”  In other words, these people will turn your daughter into a slut with my sister’s books as instruction manuals. (“Slut is a good word. Be proud of it!”)  She’ll be telling you, “I’m probably never getting married and if I do it will be after I’ve established my career,” which nowadays often means never. “I’ll keep my own name and I don’t really want kids.  They’re such a bother and only get in the way.”  They’ll tell her, “Don’t let any guy degrade you by allowing him to open doors for you. To be called ‘a lady’ is an insult. Chivalry is a means of ownership.” …

I’ve known women who fell for this creed in their youth who now, in their fifties and sixties, cry themselves to sleep decades of countless nights grieving for the children they’ll never have and the ones they coldly murdered because they were protecting the empty loveless futures they now live with no way of going back. “Where are my children? Where are my grandchildren?” they cry to me.

“Your sister’s books destroyed my sister’s life!”  I’ve heard numerous times. “She was happily married with four kids and after she read those books, walked out on a bewildered man and didn’t look back. The man fell into despairing rack and ruin. The children were stunted, set off their tracks, deeply harmed; the family profoundly dislocated and there was no putting Humpty-Dumpty together again.” …

The character of the American woman has been distorted by this pernicious movement. From where did this foul mouthed, tattooed, outlaw creature, who murders her baby without blinking an eye and goes partying without conscience or remorse come?  And, in such a short little phase in history?

Never before have we heard of so many women murdering their children: Casey Anthony killing her little Caylee and partying-hearty for weeks; Susan Smith driving her beautiful little boys into a lake, leaving them strapped in the water to die torturous deaths; that woman who drowned her five children in the bathtub?  “Hey, if I can kill my baby at six months of gestation why not six months post-birth, just call it late late-term abortion.”

… When those women at Lila Karp’s table in Greenwich Village set their minds to destroying the American Family by talking young women into being outlaws, perpetrators of infanticide, and haters of Western law, men and marriage, they accomplished just what they intended.  Their desire — and I witnessed it at subsequent meetings till I got pretty sick of their unbridled hate – was to tear American society apart along with the family and the “Patriarchal Slave-Master”, the American husband.

We’re all so busy congratulating each other because Ronald Reagan “won the Cold War without firing a shot” entirely missing the bare truth which is that Mao, with his Little Red Book and the Soviets, won the Cold War without firing a shot by taking over our women, our young and the minds of everyone tutored by Noam Chomsky and the textbooks of Howard Zinn. Post-graduate Junior is Peter Pan trapped in the Never Neverland of Mom’s (she’s divorced now) basement. Christina Hoff Sommers says, “Moms and dads, be afraid for your sons. There’s a ‘war on men’ that started a long time ago in gender studies classes and in women’s advocacy groups eager to believe that men are toxic… Many ‘educated women’ in the U.S. have drunk from the gender feminist Kool Aid.  Girls at Yale, Haverford and Swarthmore see themselves as oppressed.  This is madness.”

If you see something traitorous in this, a betrayal of my sister, I have come to identify with such people as Svetlana Stalin or Juanita Castro; coming out to speak plainly about a particularly harmful member of my family.  Loyalty can be highly destructive.  …  I was one of the silent but at last I’m “spilling the beans”.  The girls have been up to something for years and it’s really not good. It’s evil. We should be sick to our souls over it.  I know I am. And so, mass destruction, the inevitable outcome of all socialist/communist experiments, leaves behind its signature trail of wreckage.

So much grace, femininity and beauty lost.

So many ruined lives.

We would add, so much happiness lost. There are few sources of it, and raising one’s children is very often one of them – for many men and women the best of them.

To return now to Mark Tapson’s report of his conversation with Mallory Millett, she  told him this:

So, they plotted for Hillary Clinton to go to the White House simply because she was female. She is a proven liar, a persecutor of her husband’s sexual victims, a woman whose campaign for President was remarkably incompetent. Yet, they were certain (still are) that she was up to running America and to be the Leader of The Free World! She couldn’t even run her own campaign. But that didn’t matter to Kate and her pals. She was a woman and that was enough. Is this not sexism? Is this not madness?  

Yes, it is madness. Mallory made it clear that her sister Kate was clinically insane:

Kate’s life story is a saga of our family desperately trying to have her involuntarily received into a mental institution where they may have helped her. She vividly chronicles most of it in two of her books, Flying and The Looney-Bin Trip. Over and over our elder sister Sally, our mother and I, and various nephews and nieces endeavored to have her hospitalized.

This was especially true after an incident when I was trapped alone with Kate in an apartment in Sacramento for a week and she did not allow me to sleep for five days as she raged and ranted, eyes rolling in her head, frothing at the mouth and holding chats with “little green men”. Not knowing a single person in Sacramento, I had nowhere to turn. Too terrified to go to sleep, I wasn’t sure she even knew who I was but I could imagine a butcher knife thrust into my back as I slept. Big sister Sally came from Nebraska to rescue me.

After that there was an enormous effort by the family wherein we all took Kate to court for legal commitment in Minnesota.She hired a male feminist hotshot New York lawyer and managed to swim back out into the world to hurt, menace, and harm ever more people. When Sally called last September to say Kate dropped dead in a Paris hotel room that morning, I was flooded with such indescribable relief that she could no longer spread her filth, lies and misery, nor could she go on threatening the lives and safety of others. Once, she wrote an entire book describing her deep passion for her lover, Sita. Sita’s response was to kill herself. My biggest anxiety about Kate has always been that one day she would take out a family of five on the Saw Mill River Parkway as – laced with liquor, wine, lithium, marijuana, and God knows what else – she hurtled, ranting and raging, up that difficult road. For many years I have braced for that call in the night.

She had enablers everywhere. She was worshiped on all seven continents. We did a massive intervention with twelve of us: family and friends, a psychiatrist, two ambulances standing by, several cops, and she managed to elude us all by hopping on a plane for Ireland. Her “instability,” as you put it, was apparent enough to both airline and cops in Shannon that she was committed by the police straight from the plane to an Irish psychiatric ward whereupon her ubiquitous groupies – this time Irish – managed her escape through a second-story window in the middle of the night.

Without a doubt, over time, once she became enmeshed in the larger group of leftist activists around the world, her madness, buoyed by their lunacy, became even greater and more impossible to penetrate. Their groupthink is so dense, so full of lies, the vocabulary is so deceptive and intricately designed to brainwash, that just to witness it and their interactions from a distance is beyond alarming. After we buried our mother I never spoke with Kate again, as I’d finally come to accept that there is no honest communication with this mental illness that is today’s liberalism.

All those academics, men and women, all those journalists, all those Leftist women activists, have helped to destroy our civilizational shelter of long-proved custom on the hysterical demand of a raving madwoman and her pack.

Leftism itself is an insane movement. As insane as any religion, and as cruelly destructive as the worst of them.

Leftism is so-o last century.

But it has done its destructive work.

It has driven the Western world into a state of decay.

Ed Klein gives an example of what he justly considers a sign of decadence in the US:

If you have any doubt about the deleterious effect of our culture on the direction of our country and its politics, I invite you to visit the Guggenheim Museum on New York’s Fifth Avenue.

There, on the fifth floor, you will find a long line of people in front of a sign that says “There is a two-hour wait”.

What are these people waiting two hours for?

They are waiting to enter a small rest room that contains an 18-karat solid-gold toilet.

This gold toilet is the creation of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. He has labeled his installation “America”.

Yes, in one of our country’s leading cultural institutions, people are waiting on line for two hours to urinate and defecate into “America”. 

Maybe the time has not yet arrived for an American Gibbon to write a new Decline and Fall, but we are approaching the point of no return.

The failure of most pundits to recognize this reality prevented them from grasping the significance of the populist revolt that has swept across America and made Donald Trump the nominee of the Republican Party.

In Europe there is no need to look for signs of decadence. Europe is decaying so rapidly, decadence is so much the everyday condition of existence, it is taken as normal.

Here then is – not a sign but – a symptom of European decadence:

Jacob Lewis, writing for The Sun, reports:

Sex rooms, bondage dancers and 60 hour drug raves… a rare look inside the world’s most exclusive club

Berghain Club, Berlin

Covered in face tattoos and piercings, the German stares me down, running a finger across his skull-shaped rings as he decides my fate.

My heart is racing and a tiny voice inside me is screaming, “Please, please!”

Then it comes, a slow nod of the head from the man in black.

My ordeal is over. I try hard to control my trembling body as I slowly walk forward inside, to safety.

Welcome to Berghain, “the world’s best club” — where getting past legendary doorman Sven Marquardt is to survive an ordeal that has been known to make grown clubbers weep.

Doorman Sven Marquardt

Housed in a former East Berlin power station, it is as famous for its door policy as for its [public] sex and drug binges at parties that run from Friday night to Monday afternoon.

There are even special “dark rooms” downstairs where couples have very explicit sex — to a soundtrack of bullet-hard techno beats.

Meanwhile upstairs on the main dancefloor, male and female performers — naked apart from the odd slice of bondage leather — dangle in cages attached to the ceiling or gyrate on podiums.

On the top floor is the Panorama bar with its X-rated sculptures.

Florence Welch and Jake Gyllenhaal are just two of a long list of stars said to have been denied access and the chance to boggle at it all.

But those that make it in speak of an almost religious experience.

Homeland actress Claire Danes, 37, has described it as “the best place on Earth”.

And Lady Gaga chose the venue to launch her last album, arriving for the night in little more than a bra and knickers . . . and a moustache.

Lady Gaga entertains

The club’s enigmatic entry rules are the subject of endless debate among Berliners and tourists alike.

Internet forums buzz with rumours about how to win the right to pay your 16 euro entry fee. Turning up in big groups, talking in line and wearing anything but black are all reported to see you waved away.

There is even a website called Berghain Trainer that uses your camera and microphone to analyse your body language and voice as you try and get past a virtual doorman.

The 1,500-capacity club opened in 2004 in a deserted part of town and has since become an institution.

This month it was even awarded the same cultural tax status as the city’s theatres and museums.

I arrived at 12:30am on a Friday night and had barely opened the cab door out the front before I was offered drugs by one of half a dozen busy dealers.

The queue is mostly full of stony-faced, black-clad hipsters, despite Sven insisting there is no dress code or even favoured “type”.

The bearded icon, 54, who recently designed a T-shirt range for Hugo Boss, said: “I don’t mind letting in the odd lawyer in a double-breasted suit with his Gucci-Prada wife. If they make a good impression, let them in. We also take guys in masks and kilts, or Pamela Anderson blondes in run-of-the-mill high-street outfits who tag along with bearded blokes, licking the sweat off each others’ armpits. That, for me, is Berghain.”

Tom Gallagher, a 25-year-old expat from Dublin has seen for himself just how liberal the dress code can be.

He recalled: “I was there at 6am having just been rejected when I saw a bloke wearing nothing but a huge elaborate wedding turban and high heels step out of a cab. The bouncers didn’t bat an eyelid and he strolled right in.”

I only managed to get in on my second attempt. For my first try I had worn black jeans, black boots and a buttoned denim shirt.

The queue of stern, silent hopefuls moved slowly, with as many being sent packing as made it inside.

I watched as all but two friends from an eight person group of stunning girls were rejected.

The lucky two didn’t so much glance back at their former friends as they entered.

Five others were swiftly sent packing with German efficiency and then it was my turn.

Sven sat in the doorway behind a lackey who dished out his judgements, swiping us left or right like we were faces on a Tinder app.

The gatekeeper stared into my soul for ten seconds. I stared back. Then just as the underling seemed to be about to wave me in, I heard a barely audible mutter: “Nein.”

Sven had decided. His minion spoke: “I’m sorry. You can’t come in.”

Judged uncool, I walked back up the path face turning red with shame, past the waiting crowds to the hotdog stand that makes a killing selling beer to rejects. Stall-owner Alex P, 38, gave me some tips for next time.

He said: “You should look like you can party. If you have a good vibe and don’t look like a f***ed-up English tourist then it’s easy. No buttoned shirts for example.” …

My rejection just made me more determined than ever to get in. The next day I went shopping in Zara for black clothes and met three other wannabes doing the same.

Digby Burges, 30, a master’s student from Australia now living in Berlin, admitted: “I’m trying to find some dodgy black shoes. They’re really ugly but that’s what Berghain wants.”

I bought a jacket similar to what I had seen Sven wearing, as well as a black felt cap, some suspect “fashion” specs and a black T-shirt.

And this time when I rocked up to the door I had a tactic.

Ignoring the two hour-long queue stretching down the road, I set my face to stern mode and strolled right to the front, slotting in arrogantly in front of a group of friends.

My gamble paid off — people were too worried about seeming uncool in front of the bouncers to call me out.

A few minutes later I was in front of Sven again. This time I made sure to tap my feet to the sound of techno beats and look impatient.

Then came the stare, the fingering of his skull rings. And moments later I was inside. Victory!

Photography is strictly barred and once in the club, both my iPhone’s cameras were covered with stickers. Privacy is the key to Berghain’s success. And it is not hard to see why.

Within minutes of arriving I find myself in the “dark rooms” where naked bodies romp in the shadows.

Mirrors and reflective surfaces are also banned in the club. This is presumably to save party-goers from the sobering horror of catching their reflection halfway through a 36-hour drink, drug and sex marathon.

Some clubbers have been known to spend 60 hours straight here, despite beats so hard that I feel like my ears are going to bleed, even though I’m no dance music novice.

Len Faki, resident DJ at the club since it opened, said: “What I value the most is the freedom and diversity it offers. It’s an open minded space that gives everyone the chance to be themselves, to express themselves without judgement.”

Alan Smith, a 33-year-old musician and British expat, said: ‘I think it’s really good that’s there’s a place where people can do whatever they want to do and not be judged. It’s very free. What I love about it is that there’s a real sense of freedom and sexual emancipation. These people are not wanting your approval, they’re just there to do whatever the f*** they want and have a good time.”

As I left the party, I saw the fresh-faced shoppers I’d met in Zara excitedly waiting in line in their new kit.

They called me later to let me know they never made it past Sven.

Thousands straining to be weird enough to be admitted to orgies.

Orgies have happened, do happen, will always happen.

When do they become a sign of decadence?

When a society becomes proud of them.

It is against reason to oppose fracking. But the Left opposes it with passion. That is to say, the opulent elite who vote left and have political influence, oppose it with passion.

Of course, in the Great Divide between the politics of Reason and the politics of Romanticism, the Left is the Romantic side: the side of the emotions. Reason is its enemy.

So there should be no surprise that wealthy Democrats hate industrial progress. They find the landscapes of poverty too pretty to spoil.

Here’s the story.

We quote from The Liberal War on American Energy Independence, by Arthur Herman, in the February 2015 issue of Commentary.

Williamsport sits on the edge of the Marcellus Shale area, the second-largest natural-gas find in the world. It stretches across most of Pennsylvania and into New York, West Virginia, Ohio, and Maryland. Most of it was inaccessible until a decade ago, when a combination of new extraction technologies—including hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” and horizontal drilling—opened up the shale to energy development.

Since 2002, fracking has generated in Pennsylvania more than 24,000 drilling jobs and some 200,000 other support jobs in trucking, construction, and infrastructure, according to the state’s Department of Labor and Industry. Wages in the gas field average $62,000 a year—$20,000 higher than the state average.

To Pennsylvania, fracking has brought in $4 billion in investment, including a steady flow of income to local landowners and local governments leasing mineral rights to their land. According to National Resources Economics, Inc., full development of the Marcellus Shale could bring another 211,000 jobs to this one state alone, not to mention other states on the formation, including New York.

But there will be no such jobs in the state of New York. In December, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a complete ban on the use of hydraulic fracturing. The cost of that move was already foreshadowed three years ago when I drove across the border from Pennsylvania into New York. The busy modern highway coming out of Williamsport, U.S. Route 15, shrinks down into a meandering, largely empty two-lane road. On the way to Ithaca, I passed through miles of a deserted rural landscape dotted with collapsing barns and tumble-down houses reminiscent of Appalachia.

The one thing that broke the dismal monotony were the signs, many painted by hand, that had sprouted up along the road and in the fields, all saying the same thing: Ron Paul for President. The state was then in its fifth year of a moratorium on fracking, and that moratorium had turned upstate New York’s rural residents into libertarians. Bitter ones, at that. They didn’t particularly care about Ron Paul’s views on Israel or the Federal Reserve. All they wanted was a chance to collect the lucrative fees a gas company would pay them to drill on their land; they would have voted for anyone who would help them make their land generate an income again for themselves and their families.

This sort of gain is precisely what the left’s war on fracking (which has scored its most significant victory so far with Cuomo’s permanent ban) aims to prevent. It is nothing less than a policy of selective immiseration.

Fracking — a technique that uses a mixture of chemicals, sand, and water to break apart deep formations of oil- and gas-rich shale rock and draw it to the surface — is the most important American industrial enterprise of the 21st century. It joins the automobile industry, aircraft and aerospace, the computer and the digital revolution, as one of America’s great successes in technological innovation, productivity, and entrepreneurial flair. Like other industrial revolutions, including the first in 18th-century Britain, the fracking revolution is bringing about enormous changes in how we live — and sharply altering the nation’s income-distribution curve.

The fracking revolution has also brought America’s oil and gas industry back to life. In 2000, fracking accounted for less than 3 percent of all oil and natural-gas production in the United States, which was then importing more than 60 percent of its oil. Today, fracking accounts for more than 40 percent, and that percentage is going steadily upward, as the U.S. replaces one country after another on the list of the world’s biggest oil and gas producers. Our oil imports from OPEC countries have shrunk by half.

Indeed, the production gushing from America’s shale oil and gas deposits — from Eagle Ford in Texas to the Marcellus Formation in Pennsylvania and the Bakken oil field in North Dakota — doesn’t just promise the long-elusive goal of energy independence. It points to an energy dominance and economic power that the United States hasn’t seen for 100 years, since the heyday of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil.

The difference is that instead of that power being lodged in a single megacorporation or the Seven Sisters of the 1950s (Mobil, Shell Esso, etc.), the fracking revolution is being created by hundreds of smaller, more agile independents who are transforming the technology as fast as they are pumping the oil and natural gas out of the ground.

They are also pumping out jobs by the tens of thousands. It is no longer the case that good-paying blue-collar employment in America is on the verge of extinction. Fracking employs thousands of people in physically demanding jobs that require no college degree and pay, in many cases, six figures.

In North Dakota, where fracking has turned the Bakken Shale formation into the most productive oil patch in the country, an entry-level job hauling water and helping to move rigs and machinery averages $67,000 a year. A well specialist with a couple of years experience will be looking at a $100,000 salary, while a directional driller—the highest job a fracking employee can hold without a B.A.—earns close to $200,000.

Overall, the fracking boom has driven up North Dakota’s per capita income to $57,367 in 2012—the highest in the nation save for Washington D.C. The per capita figure has jumped 31 percent since 2008, the year after the fracking boom got under way, compared with 10 percent for frackless South Dakota.

The other beneficiaries are private landowners, many of them farmers. They have been able to lease out the mineral rights to their land for large sums; and if a well opens up, it quickly becomes a gusher of cash. In North Dakota, that has produced a series of so-called High Plains millionaires; for other landowners, leasing fees have become a lifeline for their farm or property.

Private-property rights, often of middle-income people, are the real drivers behind the fracking revolution, with county and state governments leasing rights on their lands not far behind. It’s one reason so many state capitals have been amenable to the fracking revolution: They’ve been prime beneficiaries.

Under the Obama administration, the number of oil- and gas-drilling leases on federal lands has fallen, and oil production on federal lands is at levels lower than in 2007. Nevertheless, America’s oil production jumped by 1 million barrels a day last year thanks to fracking—even as we’re bringing up more natural gas than at any time in our history.

In less than a decade, the boom has already changed the energy map, with the rise of states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Dakota joining Texas, Oklahoma, and Alaska as major energy producers, and with many others poised to join the club, from Illinois and Wisconsin to Alabama and California.

Indeed, the fracking revolution is the one sector of the Obama economy that’s been steadily booming, creating more than 625,000 jobs in the shale-gas sector alone—a number estimated to grow to 870,000 in 2015. Its benefits also flow in trickle-down savings by lowering the cost of energy, particularly natural gas. Mercator Energy, a Colorado-based energy broker, has calculated it’s saving American families more than $32.5 billion in lower natural-gas bills for home heating and electricity.

It has also had a positive impact on U.S. manufacturing, especially petrochemical and plastics firms that have cashed in on lower natural-gas and oil prices and the increasingly abundant supply. From 2010 to 2012, energy-intensive manufacturers added 196,000 jobs as Rust Belt cities such as Lansing, Michigan, and Gary, Indiana, have been revived by cheaper, more abundant energy.

Wallace Tyner, an economist at Purdue University, estimates that between 2008 and 2035 the fracking revolution (oil and gas combined) will add an average of $473 billion per year to the U.S. economy. That’s roughly 3 percent of today’s GDP.

The most striking change, however, has been at the gas pump. Falling U.S. demand for imported oil (a drop of 40 percent since 2005) has lowered global prices overall, and has been a huge factor in oil’s 25 percent price plunge in 2014. Filling up the family car at $2.80 a gallon versus $3.80 a gallon is a great benefit to Americans, especially in low-income households. A strong case can be made that the shale revolution’s impact on natural-gas prices has been the equivalent of a poverty-relief program, since the nation’s poor on average spend four times more of their incomes on home energy than do the more affluent. On average, the drop in natural-gas prices has given low-income families an effective tax rebate of some $10 billion a year.

This is one of the most notable aspects of the fracking revolution. Unlike the computer and digital revolution, for example, which created an industry dominated by Ph.D.’s and college-trained engineers, this is an economic bonanza of particular meaning to those in the middle- and low-income brackets, with the potential to benefit many more.

Yet today’s liberal left is, virtually without exception, implacably opposed to fracking, from the national to the state to the local level. In the forefront have been environmental lobbying interests. In localities such as Ithaca, New York—the hub of the anti-fracking movement in New York State—liberal elites have banded together to prevent an economic transformation that would pad the wallets of their neighbors and upset the socioeconomic status quo.

Of all the national environmental groups, the Sierra Club probably has the mildest official position: that further fracking in the United States must stop until its overall impact on the environment has been studied more carefully. More typical is Greenpeace’s April 2012 joint statement on fracking (co-signed by the Water and Environment Alliance and Friends of the Earth Europe) that makes a fracking well seem not entirely different from a nuclear-waste dump.

That document asserts that “fracking is a high-risk activity that impacts human health and the wider environment”. It warns that natural-gas development through fracking “could cause contamination of surface and groundwater (including drinking water)” and pollutes both soil and air while it “disrupts the landscape and impacts upon rural and conservation areas”.  Greenpeace also claims that fracking and its related activities produce smog, particulates, and toxic methane gas; cause workers to expose themselves to toxic chemicals used in the fracking process; increase “risks of earthquakes”; and lock local communities such as Lycoming County into a “boom and bust economy” that will run out when the oil and gas run out. Greenpeace and its allies insist that these places look to “tourism and agriculture instead”.

The document creates a dire picture, yet nearly every one of these claims is false. Since fracking operates thousands of feet below the aquifer, the risk to drinking water is nil; and there are no proven cases of water supplies becoming contaminated from fracking, despite the thousands of fracking wells drilled both in the United States and Canada. Yet the charge is repeated ad nauseam in anti-fracking ads, films, and pamphlets.

So is the charge that fracking exposes people, including workers, to dangerous chemicals. More than 99 percent of the fluid used to fracture rock in the operation is nothing more than water and sand mixed together. In fact, most of the statistical risks associated with fracking in terms of contact with dangerous chemicals (benzene is a favorite example, radioactive isotopes another, methane yet another) are no higher, and sometimes lower, than those associated with any other industrial job or outdoor activity, including driving a big-rig truck.

The charge that fracking can leak methane into drinking water stems from a Duke University study that examined a mere 68 water wells in a region of Pennsylvania and New York in which 20,000 water wells are drilled each year—and those who conducted the study never bothered to ask whether any methane concentrations existed before the fracking began (which turned out to be the case).

That fracking might cause earthquakes is another oft-repeated alarmist charge with no facts or evidence behind it. In certain conditions, deep underground injections of water and sand used in fracking can lead to detectable seismic activities, but so can favored green projects such as geothermal-energy exploration or sequestering carbon dioxide underground. None of these adds up to seismic rumblings any human being will notice, let alone an Irving Allen movie-style catastrophe. And given the fact that for years there have been thousands of fracking wells around the country that operate without any detectable seismic activity, the argument seems clearly driven more by the need to generate emotion than the imperative to weigh actual evidence.

But perhaps the oddest claim from groups such as Greenpeace is that increasing the use of natural gas will not reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The evidence is overwhelmingly the opposite. As natural gas continues to squeeze out coal as a cheap supply of energy, especially for power plants, the greenhouse-gas-emission index will inevitably head downward. In fact, since the shale boom, those emissions in the United States have been cut by almost 20 percent, a number that one would expect to make any environmental activist smile.

All of which suggests that the war on fracking is waged in defiance of facts. And that, in turn, suggests a particular agenda is at work in the anti-fracking camp. A hint of it appears in Greenpeace’s claim that local communities would be better off sticking to “sustainable agriculture and tourism”, meaning organic farming and microbreweries that cater to the tastes of affluent and sophisticated out-of-towners. The war on fracking is a war on economic growth, which the shale revolution has managed to sustain in the middle of the Obama recession, and a war on the upward mobility any industrial revolution like fracking triggers.

It is part of what the Manhattan Institute’s Fred Siegel has called the “liberal revolt against the masses,” and a good place to see it in action is in New York State.

In 2006, then-gubernatorial candidate Eliot Spitzer made a campaign swing through the so-called Southern Tier of upstate New York. The Manhattanite expressed shock at a landscape that was “devastated,” as he put it, and was steadily being abandoned for lack of jobs and economic opportunity. “This is not the New York we dream of,” he said.

Much the same had been true of large portions of rural Pennsylvania. Fracking reversed the downward course there. But the moratorium Spitzer’s successor, Andrew Cuomo, placed on fracking in 2008 before locking it in permanently late last year has frozen those portions of the state in their relative poverty.

Local farmers have been furious over the de facto ban. They are frustrated that the valuable source of income that fracking would generate has been denied them — and that Albany and its liberal enablers are content to crush them under the twin burden of some of the highest property taxes in the country and a regulatory regime that, in Fred Siegel’s words, “makes it hard to eke out a living from small dairy herds.”.

Locals are furious, too, that the ban is denying blue-collar jobs that could help young people find work in a fracking site and could transform local standards of living. In 2012, the state’s health department determined that hydro-fracking could be done safely in the state and concluded that “significant adverse impacts on human health are not expected from routine HVHF (hydro-fracking) operations”.  This was not what state officials wanted to hear, and the report was buried. When someone leaked it to the New York Times, the Department of Environmental Conservation’s spokesperson quickly disavowed it. Meanwhile, Cuomo’s acting health commissioner, Howard Zucker, served as front man for his boss’s permanent ban.

Ithaca is the center of New York’s anti-fracking hardliners. Their leader is Helen Slottje, who organized the Community Environmental Defense Fund to use local zoning regulations to keep fracking out of the surrounding county. She admits that many local people down the hill from Ithaca resent their efforts and think that she and her environmentalist militia are little more than thieves stealing money from their pockets.

But Slottje dismisses their worries, just as she angrily dismisses the charge that she’s a classic example of someone who opposes salutary change because she doesn’t want it in her own back yard. “If a serial killer knocks on your door,” she says, “it’s not NIMBYism to fight back.” She doesn’t bother to wonder whether her comparison of frackers to serial killers might be slightly exaggerated. She simply adds, “We’re not NIMBY, we’re NIABY. Not In Anyone’s Back Yard.”

She is joined in her activism by the Duncan Hines heiress Adelaide Gomer, whose anti-fracking Park Foundation is based in Ithaca and bankrolls much of the activism. “Hydro-fracking will turn our area into an industrial site,” she has proclaimed. After citing the usual charges about poisoning the aquifer, she also adds, “It will ruin the ambience, the beauty of the region.” The beauty of falling-down barns, rusted cars and farm equipment, and abandoned farmhouses may be lost on the locals, but it’s united the rich and influential in New York City. They want to keep things that way — and keep the “creepy advances of environment-trashing frackers” out of the state.

Gomer was able to mobilize demonstrations around the state to maintain the ban despite lobbying in Albany to overturn it, while celebrities such as Alec Baldwin, Robert de Niro, Yoko Ono, Debra Winger, Carrie Fisher, David Byrne, Jimmy Fallon, Martha Stewart, Lady Gaga, and the Beastie Boys signed an Artists Against Fracking petition. Like other Manhattanites, they have no reason to worry much about low land prices in the Southern Tier—but they do worry about development that would benefit the locals while possibly spoiling the view.

By cloaking their social snobbery in the clothes of the environmentalist movement, New York’s well-heeled have managed to forestall the kind of wealth transfer that fracking has brought to Pennsylvania. Indeed, some like Slottje are hoping to spread the same anti-fracking gospel back across the state line and stop Pennsylvania’s economic boom dead in its tracks. …

Anti-frackers also thought they had a shot at stopping the industry in Colorado. The state is one of the wellsprings of environmental activism, after all, with plenty of willing foot soldiers from campuses such as the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Denver. But Colorado also sits on one of the biggest shale fields in North America and is one of the top natural-gas states. In 2013, oil and gas contributed $30 billion to Colorado’s economy, in addition to thousands of jobs.

A serious effort to launch an anti-fracking initiative, which would have banned drilling within 2,000 feet of homes and hospitals and given local community councils effective veto power over fracking efforts, ran aground early in 2014. Colorado Democrats realized it could endanger the reelections of Governor John Hickenlooper and Senator Mark Udall. Fracking is popular with Colorado voters, especially working-class voters. They convinced the multimillionaire congressman Jared Polis to set aside his petition drive for the bill just as Hickenlooper and Udall suddenly turned squishy on the fracking issue, to the fury of local environmentalists. …

When regulatory agencies actually investigate the dire charges made against the industry, most of the charges evaporate under scrutiny. Remaining health and safety matters, such as waste disposal, turn out to be manageable with simple oversight. In the end, this means that the fight to ban fracking outright is steadily turning into a losing battle.

And when politicians and courts decide to quit the field, what’s left for the left? More protests, even civil disobedience. “We will resist this with our bodies, our hearts, and our minds,” one southern Illinois organic farmer told the website Green Progress. “We will block this, we will chain ourselves to trucks.” …

While the activists are lying in the road, fracking and its technologies are constantly evolving. Far from rejecting the environmentalists’ demands for more safety and for meeting community standards, companies are constantly adjusting to make their work as clean as possible. Many now employ reusable water for the hydro-fracking process, for example, while cutting back their use of toxic chemicals. Technologies for water-free fracking are already here and will become increasingly widespread in areas where water resources are scarce. That will be another body blow to fracking’s opponents, who like to claim it wastes water needed for human consumption or agriculture.

And we haven’t even begun to explore the possibilities of natural gas. While fracking has yielded record levels of oil production in the United States, those reserves-in-rock are limited. American natural-gas reserves are not. According to a recent Colorado School of Mines study, they amount to 2.3 quadrillion cubic feet of technically recoverable natural gas in the United States, enough to fuel our energy needs for decades — and the constant technological innovations of the industry will make extracting those reserves increasingly cost-efficient. …

Beyond that, there are methane hydrates — deep deposits of crystalline natural gas, embedded in large parts of the Arctic permafrost and ocean bottoms. Even when shale oil and gas have eventually run out, technologies to extract methane hydrates will be able to supply almost limitless energy — according to the U.S. Geological Survey, more than all previous discovered oil and gas put together, even while wind and solar are still trying to figure out how to generate power efficiently.

Progressives who believe themselves to be on the side of science and the little guy at the same time are in fact defying both. This is a battle between the partisans of a discredited ideology from the past and those who see the fast-advancing future.

We were reluctant to cut out any parts of the article, which is long but rewarding. Lean meat all the way through.

If you like the taste we’ve given you, read all of it here.