The version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) agreed to by the House and Senate, known as the compromise version, includes provisions to block President Trump’s planned troop withdrawals in both Afghanistan and Germany.
For Afghanistan, there is language in the bill that would block funding to reduce troop numbers in the country before the Pentagon, State Department, and the director of national intelligence assess how the drawdown would affect US security. The assessment would be required before troop numbers could drop lower than they are when the NDAA becomes law, and again if they drop below 2,000.
Via Zuma Press/Xinhua
President Trump’s current plan is to bring troop numbers in Afghanistan down to 2,500 by January 15th. The US-Taliban peace deal signed in February paved the way for all US and other foreign forces to be out of the country by Spring 2021.
Another troop drawdown President Trump’s Pentagon is planning is a reduction of forces in Germany from about 36,000 troops to 24,000. Congressional aides told The Hill that the compromise version of the NDAA includes language that would block the drawdown.
“There is language that prevents reduction in the number of US forces stationed in Germany below 34,500 until 120 days after the secretary of Defense submits an assessment and planning regarding the implications for allies, costs, military families, deterrence and other key issues,” one of the aides said.
The provisions to block Trump’s withdrawals could add to the controversy that is already surrounding the NDAA. On Tuesday, President Trump said he would veto the spending bill if it did not include an amendment to repeal Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.
Section 230 gives tech platforms immunity from liability for content published by third parties.Trump doubled down on his call to include the provision in a tweet on Thursday after some Republican senators voiced their objection to the idea.
Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer says that those who refuse to take the COVID vaccine won’t have “freedom to move around” and will have to continue to wear masks.
Dr. David Williams was asked if he “would make some sort of mandatory vaccination recommendation.”
Williams acknowledged that “we can’t force someone to take a vaccine,” but when on to explain how people who didn’t take it would have their freedom of mobility severely restricted.
“What we can do is to say sometimes for access or ease of getting into certain settings, if you don’t have vaccination then you’re not allowed into that setting without other protection materials,” said Williams.
“What may be mandatory, is proof of vaccination, in order to have latitude and freedom to move around without wearing personal protective equipment.” – Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Williams pic.twitter.com/gHupcMxbcm — CrasHTalk (@CrasTalk) December 3, 2020
“What may be mandatory is proof of…vaccination in order to have latitude and freedom to move around…without wearing other types of personal protective equipment,” he added.
Williams also suggested that people would be prevented from entering certain settings without having been vaccinated if there was a “risk.”
As we previously highlighted, governments do not have to make the vaccine mandatory, they can simply make life unlivable for people who refuse to take the vaccine.
If bars, restaurants, cinemas, sports venues, airlines, employers and others all make the vaccination a mandatory condition of service, anyone who refuses to take it will be reduced to a personal form of de facto lockdown with their social lives and mobility completely stunted.
Authorities around the world have made it clear that they will do “whatever it takes” to vaccinate their citizenry with one of the first available vaccines. Authoritarian states may mandate universal vaccinations while less authoritarian states will favor a “carrot and stick” approach of offering benefits to the vaccinated and exclusions from employment, education, travel and most of everyday life for those who refuse to be vaccinated.
An idea that’s simple as an abstraction–vaccine ID cards–turns out to be extremely difficult once real-world operational realities must be dealt with.
Authorities around the world have made it clear that they will do “whatever it takes” to vaccinate their citizenry with one of the first available vaccines. Authoritarian states may mandate universal vaccinations while less authoritarian states will favor a “carrot and stick” approach of offering benefits to the vaccinated and exclusions from employment, education, travel and most of everyday life for those who refuse to be vaccinated.
To identify the vaccinated and unvaccinated, many nations are planning to issue ID cards or “vaccine passports.” As an abstraction, this seems straightforward, but if we start digging into the actual operational requirements of this mass ID card issuance and distribution, a number of common-sense issues arise.
First and foremost, it’s unknown how long the immunity offered by the vaccines will last. It’s still early days, so there is conflicting evidence: some claim the vaccines will be longer-lasting than the natural immunity of those who caught the virus and recovered, while other evidence suggests the immunity might decay after six months. Despite claims that natural immunity is long-lasting, a non-trivial number of people who had Covid have been re-infected.
Nobody knows how long either natural or vaccine immunity will last because not enough time has elapsed to collect sufficient data.
Given these intrinsic unknowns, how long will the ID card be valid? It’s easy to imagine variations in individual responses such that the vaccines’ effectiveness decays more rapidly in 20% of the vaccinated. This variability would introduce tremendous unknowns that no ID card could reflect: is the holder of the card at Month 10 still immune or not?
If the duration of the vaccine’s effectiveness is variable, then an ID card could be misleading. In other words, being vaccinated with a variable-duration vaccine tells us nothing about the individual’s actual immunity down the road.
Given these unknowns, the vaccinated may need booster shots in the future, and the ID cards would have to be re-issued. The task of keeping track of hundreds of millions of vaccination records, identities and then issuing ID cards is a non-trivial task.
To thwart black-market fake-ID cards, the security measures will have to be equivalent to a driver’s license or passport. Have you applied recently for either of these forms of ID? The process is painfully slow. The systems in place to process state drivers’ licenses and U.S. passports are already strained, and which agency is prepared to verify the identity of 280 million adult citizens, confirm the validity of their vaccine and then issue ID cards–and then repeat this process in a year?
If the procedures for issuing vaccine ID cards are slapdash due to time constraints–for example, downloading a digital record from the vaccine distributor or a printed card–these will likely be vulnerable to being duplicated or spoofed. Fake vaccine distributors will pop up issuing bogus digital records, hackers might download and sell digital records from trusted sources, and so on.
Then there’s the extra burdens being placed on the staff of airlines, cruise lines, etc. to scan these documents and deal with rejected cards. Who will have the legal authority to deal with claims that a rejected card is actually valid? How many smaller establishments simply won’t have to staff to do more than glance at the card?
Do authorities have the means to issue hundreds of millions of absolutely secure vaccine ID cards and then monitor all the attempts to find loopholes and weaknesses in the process? If authorities think that strict penalties will limit this activity, they underestimate the difficulty in getting such penalties enforced by overloaded court systems.
In nations with strong traditions of civil liberties, there will be pushback against mandatory vaccinations with essentially untested vaccines and against national databases tying identity to vaccination cards–a situation ripe with potential for abuse.
Authorities don’t seem to grasp that many of those hesitating to get vaccinated are not anti-vaxxers; they simply see the vaccine approval process as deeply flawed for common-sense reasons: for example, there is simply not enough data on safety, duration and real-world efficacy.
Authorities are counting on the “carrot” of air travel, cruises and concerts to persuade skeptics to get vaccinated despite their concerns. What authorities don’t seem to realize is that a great many people value their health, privacy and agency far more than they crave air travel, cruises or concerts. They will gladly forego all these activities until more reliable data is collected, peer-reviewed and distributed for analysis.
The more draconian the measures designed to pressure people into getting the vaccines, the greater the reluctance of skeptics who see the draconian measures as additional evidence the vaccines are half-measures being forced on the populace as a means of imposing a false assurance that all is well and “normal” will return as soon as the skeptics cave in and get vaccinated.
There’s also the possibility that the virus could mutate in ways that moot the vaccines’ effectiveness. While this is widely considered unlikely, it’s not impossible, either. If a mutated virus arises that evades the vaccine, then what value will the vaccine ID card have?
An idea that’s simple as an abstraction–vaccine ID cards–turns out to be extremely difficult once real-world operational realities must be dealt with. The fact is the first vaccines have been rushed to approval with virtually none of the testing demanded of previous vaccines raises common-sense concerns which cannot be dissolved with force or carrots and sticks.
In fact, as early as April, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told President Trump that the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort deployed to New York City by the federal government to help fight the coronavirus outbreak was “no longer needed”. Cuomo said the need for the support vessel “didn’t reach the levels that had been projected.” And I am certainly not the only one who has noticed that Covid cases seem to fluctuate curiously with the political climate.
The globalists responsible for engineering a medical tyranny across much of the Western world have something valuable to teach right-wing nationalists and would-be fascists, and that is you don’t sell your damaged product out of the barrel of a machine gun, but rather dripping from the end of a syringe that promises to end all pain and misery.
Patrick Henry, one of America’s more outspoken Founding Fathers, famously remarked “give me liberty or give me death” when the life of his nation was on the line. Today, America’s famous battle cry has been replaced by a masked and muffled gasp that advises, without hope of a second opinion, “give me lockdowns and keep me safe.” So terrified is the American public of catching a virus that comes with a 99 percent survival rate that they are willing to forego Thanksgiving, the great national holiday commemorating – with no loss of irony – their Pilgrim ancestors’ collective courage to overcome the wild, hostile conditions of their new land.
It must be said that no fascist party has ever been so adept when it came to sealing the collective fate of their people to a common enemy. That’s because the threat facing mankind today, or so we are told, is not some nefarious ideology, like communism, or even a terrorist organization that the masses can be rallied to fight. Rather, the threat is a microscopic contagion that is capable of invading every nook and cranny of our lives. Already the age of manly handshakes is over, replaced by an emasculated majority, while an entire generation of youth now looks at their fellow human beings as infernal germ factories.
And unlike a traditional enemy that can be seen, attacked and eventually defeated, the coronavirus – we have been oddly forewarned – will make landfall again and again, while regularly morphing with comic book abilities into an increasingly deadlier villain. In this landless battle, only the medical authorities are decorated as heroes, while the people, lacking the professional credentials, are forced to be passive and helpless onlookers, their freedom of movement severely constrained. More importantly, the forces of nationalism have become irrelevant; only a globalist, one-world-order response can defeat this pandemic.
There is very good reason to suspect, however, that either the science on all of this is half-baked, or we the people are being intentionally duped on a grand scale. In fact, it’s probably a little bit of both. First, relying on nothing more than empirical evidence, it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that there is no existential emergency confronting mankind. If there were, we would expect to see decomposing bodies piling up in the streets, like in the medieval times during the Black Plague. This would be especially the case among the homeless population, which is certainly not practicing social distancing etiquette as they pass around open containers on street corners.
Nor does there seem to be any massive queuing up at hospitals for emergency treatment. In fact, as early as April, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told President Trump that the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort deployed to New York City by the federal government to help fight the coronavirus outbreak was “no longer needed”. Cuomo said the need for the support vessel “didn’t reach the levels that had been projected.” And I am certainly not the only one who has noticed that Covid cases seem to fluctuate curiously with the political climate.
Let’s not forget that the overwhelming majority of Covid ‘victims’ recover nicely at home, according to no less of an authority than Anthony Fauci. At the same time, many people who acquire the disease are asymptomatic and never even knew they were infected. Children, meanwhile, seem amazingly impervious to the virus. That is not to say that there has been no sign of a virus this winter season. Of course there has been, just like every year. But while Covid cases may be on the rise in some places, and invisible in others, the death rate from this illness remains low and tumbling, predominantly hitting elderly people already suffering from comorbidities.
There are other reasons to be suspicious that what we are dealing with is not a first-class medical emergency, but rather something much more sinister. Like maybe an excuse for rolling out a Western-made vaccine that carries a microchip implant with tracking technology? Such a claim will sound less fantastic when it is realized that it has already been developed.
It is no secret that just one month before Covid-19 made its dramatic landfall in the United States, purportedly from Wuhan, China, MIT researchers announced a new method for recording a patient’s vaccination history: storing the smartphone-readable data under the skin at the same time a vaccine is administered.
“By selectively loading microparticles into microneedles, the patches deliver a pattern in the skin that is invisible to the naked eye but can be scanned with a smartphone that has the infrared filter removed,” MIT News reported. “The patch can be customized to imprint different patterns that correspond to the type of vaccine delivered.”
Would it surprise anyone to know that the research was funded largely by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the same family venture that now provides the bulk of funding to the World Health Organization?
In a new interview, Bill Gates authoritatively states that mass public gatherings will not come back “at all” until we have mass vaccination. Who made him king of the world? https://t.co/siW7bZ9yGc … https://t.co/ivaCI8eAEl
Then, in September 2019, ID2020, a San Francisco-based biometric company that counts Microsoft as one of its founding members, announced a new project that involves the “exploration of multiple biometric identification technologies for infants” that is based on “infant immunization.”
We could continue here with a long list of other disturbing technologies that would effectively turn people into walking antennae for the rest of their lives, but the point is hopefully clear: although many people might be willing to accept a vaccine against Covid-19, they probably do not want the extra technological add-ons that people like Bill Gates, a man with zero medical qualifications, seem extremely anxious to include.
“The food supply chain is breaking,” Tyson Foods warns in a full page ad in NYT today pic.twitter.com/5cyusH6L9V
So what can Americans expect next? How about ‘Freedom Passes’ that Britons may need before they are able to return to some semblance of normalcy?
According to the Daily Mail, “Britons are set to be given Covid ‘freedom passes’ as long as they test negative for the virus twice in a week, it has been suggested…To earn the freedom pass, people will need to be tested regularly and, provided the results come back negative, they will then be given a letter, card or document they can show to people as they move around.”
And this is what they call a “return to normalcy.”
Personally, I call those plans the approach of fascism. And for those who doubt that it could not happen in America should heed the words of the late sagacious comedian George Carlin, who once quipped that “when fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jackboots. It will be Nike sneakers and smiley shirts.” Had Carlin been alive today to see the tremendous mess we’ve inherited, he would most likely have included a syringe in the neo-fascist’s toolkit.
Here’s the history lesson: Chicago was one of scores of cow towns turned trading posts in the West whose fortunes rested with their leaders’ ability to attract capital from the East; namely, from New York, Boston, and Philadelphia banks. A founder and the first mayor of the city, William Butler Ogden, an Easterner himself, knew that if Chicago was to be great (that means rich), it could not default on loans provided to the city’s enterprises and entrepreneurs during the epic Panic of 1837. In other words, Ogden tasked himself with making sure that Chicago did not become the equivalent of a third-world, capital-starved nation among many other cities vying to become America’s next top metropolis. He had some convincing to do. The easy road would have been default and run.
All due deference to Jerry Seinfeld, the man who is one of the geniuses behind the greatest American sitcom about nothing, but in the recent war/argument/discussion/exchange over the status and future of New York City, it is hard to award dear Jerry with a win.Seinfeld took to the New York Times (only the sophistication of the old Gray Lady would do) to upbraid former Manhattan comedy club owner and entrepreneur James Altucher for declaring the New York as they once knew it, well, dead.
Frankly, Altucher makes a compelling case for this time being different than other seemingly existential threats of the past that might have appeared to compel the city that never sleeps to do just that—for good. For Altucher, the heavy, onerous arm and boot of government have become too much for New Yorkers—residents and businesses alike—to bear. The covid hysteria, inept lockdowns, and mismanagement by the likes of DeBlasio, Cuomo, and their sycophant ninnies have all led to, not only the snuffing out of the entrepreneurial spirit but very much destroyed, in the most direct means imaginable, the enterprises themselves. Back that up with the New York police being ordered to stand down in front of BLM and Antifa rioters (and asinine Ruth Bader Ginsberg riots?!) looting stores and burning down their fronts, and the civil authorities have not held up their end of even the corrupt Rousseauan social contract.
Altucher is not the only sensible one to leave New York for greener and warmer pastures—many have, are, and will be doing so in the future. Thus, what New York and other massive cities in the United States like my own formerly fair Chicago now face is a retraction of what had characterized the past few decades of people of means moving back into the inner cities. Cities gentrified. Formerly unattractive and even dangerous neighborhoods received an injection of interest and capital, and of course, the requisite Starbucks. Hipster artist types faux lamented the increase of “balconization” as ever-increasing lofts and condos with balconies dotted the new façades of old buildings. To be sure, they did not seem to recognize that loss of traditional, cultural neighborhood identification came with all of their suburban friends moving into the place as they sipped their chais and waxed unpoetic about how horrible all of the capitalism was from their iPhones.
Hypocrites and the genuine alike enjoyed and even relished the comforts of urban living. The museums and parks were within walking distance. Amazing restaurants. Easy Uber to sporting events. A new local favorite pub.
Now, pandemic hysteria and race riots have exposed the latent sore. Without the culture, the life, the hum, and the energy of the city, without the shopping and walks, the theater or a ball game, city life now has all of the dangers and inconveniences and none of the comforts. High taxes, potholed roads, homeless encampments, no parking, and violent crime have rendered city life rather unlivable. And to the politicians who have long contributed to cities’ deterioration and the squandering of those previous local tax windfalls, shame on you—but the problem lies with the voters who put them into power.
Will these same citizens be able to muster enough intestinal fortitude to resurrect these cities with much-needed integrity and sacrifice? Will the Phoenix City (Chicago’s actual nickname) rise again? I don’t think so. We are witnessing the effects of a long and sustained decline. Contrast the culture of the city of Chicago today (or insert your city name here) with that of the founders of the city back in 1837. Here’s the history lesson: Chicago was one of scores of cow towns turned trading posts in the West whose fortunes rested with their leaders’ ability to attract capital from the East; namely, from New York, Boston, and Philadelphia banks. A founder and the first mayor of the city, William Butler Ogden, an Easterner himself, knew that if Chicago was to be great (that means rich), it could not default on loans provided to the city’s enterprises and entrepreneurs during the epic Panic of 1837. In other words, Ogden tasked himself with making sure that Chicago did not become the equivalent of a third-world, capital-starved nation among many other cities vying to become America’s next top metropolis. He had some convincing to do. The easy road would have been default and run.
Ogden advocated for the opposite as a public gathering convened intent on debt relief. From historian Donald Miller:
The crisis peaked when large numbers of the city’s frightened debtors organized a mass movement for relief from their financial obligations. A public meeting was called to have “stay laws” passed for the suspension of court action on the collection of debts. “Inflammatory speeches greatly excited and made desperate many of the crowd, and everything looked as if dishonor would crown the city’s brow,” said an early city historian. At that point, Ogden stepped forward to address the crowd, his first and only public talk as mayor. Speaking in cool, reasoned tones, he urged his fellow citizens to have the “courage of men” and to remember “that no misfortune [is] so great as one’s own personal dishonor….Above all things…do not tarnish the honor of our infant city.” Ogden’s measured eloquence carried the meeting. Efforts to repudiate debts were voted down, and Chicago emerged with its credit image intact. Later, this allowed Ogden to help put together a bond and loan package with Arthur Bronson and other outside investors that allowed the state to resume canal construction in 1845.
Our contemporary urbanites do not—as a habit—display anything remotely akin to personal responsibility or the “courage of men.” That would require some tough love about lowering collective time preference and ending the expectation that government can and will save the day. Blue city mayors and blue state governors instead have their hands out to Congress and the Fed, begging them to bail them out of decades of disastrous, self-inflicted policies.
As a libertarian an-cap, I have no team in the fight, red or blue. However, I do hope that the red state politicos have enough gumption and sense to understand that no promises, no kickbacks are worth bailing out the criminal blue politicians and their constituents. Those are very, very bad loans that no bankers in 1837 or 2020, for that matter, would issue.
And, who cares about L.A.?! As a comely and insightful British lass exclaimed to me in Nice, France, in 1998: “Californians couldn’t grow culture in a Petri dish!”
As was the case with the churches, their behavior may seem irrational, but only until we remind ourselves of the left’s ideological purpose. The structures and statues they vandalized commemorated the efforts of people who in one way or another advanced the cause of western civilization. It is the protestors’ deep-seated antipathy toward the west that explains why they acted the way they did.
In the previous piece we showed that ending (non-existent) racism could not have been the real goal of the riots that convulsed the United States this year. Rather we argued that the riots represented a dramatic eruption of the left’s anti-western animus which is the psychological disposition that frames the left’s mindset and actions.
We will see what the riots’ real purpose was when we consider what the so-called anti-racist “protestors” targeted for destruction. In the weeks following the death of George Floyd hundreds of attacks against Catholic churches were reported across America. This may seem strange, given that America’s woke commissars of social justice never really charged the Catholic Church with complicity in this country’s current “racist” regime or the death of George Floyd. If anything, in recent years the Church has been a notable abettor of the progressive movement, having incorporated parts of the woke agenda into its own teachings. This has been especially true during the pontificate of Francis who in many ways sounds like a secular progressive clad in papal robes.
The protestors’ raids on Catholic churches, therefore, bewildered many people. But if you remember what the left’s driving impulse is, these acts will make perfect sense. Despite its recent dabbling in wokeness, the Catholic Church – along with our classical Greco-Roman heritage – has been a foundational pillar of Western civilization. This is the real reason why the churches became a target of the left’s destructive urge. To make their motivation completely clear, in some instances the protestors even inscribed sickle and hammer on the walls of the sacred structures they vandalized. Sickle and hammer stand, of course, for the Soviet Union and its communist revolution which condemned the western model and established a new system based on ideas that were antithetical to occidental tradition.
The attacks on churches, however, were not the only clue exposing the hidden agenda behind the faux anti-racist protests. The war on statues was just as revealing. They initially began with monuments of those who had at least some connection – however remote or tenuous – to slavery. Very quickly, however, no statue was safe from the mob’s wrath. So much so that they targeted even those who had done much for the advancement and liberation of black people. Abraham Lincoln would be one of them. This despite the fact that Lincoln is generally considered to be the man who effectually ended slavery in the United States. The widely-held view of Lincoln as the emancipator of black people was well expressed by the journalist Edward Achorn who wrote recently that in most Americans’ eyes Lincoln stands as “a symbol of wisdom, decency, sacrifice, and perseverance in defeating slavery and liberating millions of black Americans.”
And yet the allegedly “anti-racism” protesters repeatedly attacked Lincoln’s statues across America. The attacks were so flagrant that even CNN had to take note. In its October 12 dispatch, CNN reported that “protesters in Portland, Oregon, pulled down statues of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt…”
The protesters did not stop there, however. As part of their statue rampage, they also attacked edifices associated with our national heritage. In a piece headlined “The Mob Goes After Abraham Lincoln,” the Daily Signal reported that they “trashed the Oregon Historical Society, which preserves treasures of the past so that people of succeeding generations may understand their culture and history.”
The next morning CNN quoted Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell who made this observation:
“These events late at night, they purport to have a racial justice nexus. But they’re not that. They’re about violence and criminal destruction.”
Chuck Lovell is absolutely correct. The rioters’ actions had nothing to do with race – they were all about destruction. As was the case with the churches, their behavior may seem irrational, but only until we remind ourselves of the left’s ideological purpose. The structures and statues they vandalized commemorated the efforts of people who in one way or another advanced the cause of western civilization. It is the protestors’ deep-seated antipathy toward the west that explains why they acted the way they did.
Since the leftist mindset is transnational in nature, we could expect that a powerful eruption of its anti-western animus in one country would trigger corresponding disruptions in other countries belonging to the western stream. And this was, in fact, what happened. Within two weeks of the start of the George Floyd riots in the United States, similar events began taking place in other western nations. The protests waxed especially strong in leading European countries such as the United Kingdom, France and Germany where hundreds of thousands took part. On June 6th a British newspaper ran a report which opened as follows:
“Furious Europeans have taken to the street this week to protest against police brutality and racism, following the death of George Floyd in the US, as major capitals across the EU were shut down by the protesters. Europeans have defied official bans against mass gatherings across the continent, as protests continue to erupt across major capitals from Paris to Berlin.”
The piece continued by listing some of the European nations where the “protests” took place.
“Thousands have taken to the streets in Europe to protest racism and police brutality, following the tragic US police killing of George Floyd, which has first triggered a wave of protests in America. Thousands poured in the streets in countries including France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Finland, Slovakia, Greece, Ireland, Poland, Sweden and others.”
It is deeply significant that the protests in Europe were organized by chapters of BLM. This should make us pause, given that BLM is an American organization which came into existence in 2013 in response to a shooting death of a black American teenager in Florida. Why, then, is this outfit organizing mass demonstrations across Europe? And even more importantly, why is Black Lives Matter trying to incite protests in countries that have virtually no black populations? In nations such Finland, Poland, Ireland or Slovakia – which are for the most part ethnically homogenous – racism has never been a significant problem.
The stick behind the stick is a penalty of up to ten years in federal prison and a $10,000 fine. Registration involves filling out a thirteen-page registration form and providing fingerprints and a photograph of yourself.
According to Biden the pragmatist circa 1985:
During my 12.5 years as a Member of this body, I have never believed that additional gun control or Federal registration of guns would reduce crime. I am convinced that a criminal who wants a firearm can get one through illegal, nontraceable, unregistered sources, with or without gun control. In my opinion a national register or ban of handguns would be impossible to carry out and may not result in reductions in crime.2
Despite his recognition of the futility of using gun control to reduce crime and gun violence, the “pragmatist” turned to the dark side when it became politically expedient to do so.
Joe Biden’s gun policy platform offers support for almost all conceivable forms of government restrictions on the Second Amendment. This includes bans and restrictions on sales, expansion of registration and background checks, expansion of buyback programs and gun-grabbing statutes, and the closing of all sorts of “loopholes.”1
While we are only at the policy platform stage, where proposals are grandiose and imprecise, Biden’s legislative agenda will clearly be anti–Second Amendment and not a program to reduce crime and violence. First, he wants to stop the “gun violence epidemic” with restriction on rifles when it is handgun shootings, not rifles, that are a problem and one that is mostly confined to big cities controlled by leftists. Second, he wants to go after “assault weapons” and “weapons of war” when he should know that rifles like the AK and AR “sporters” are not military-grade fully automatic weapons. Third, he would like to hold gun manufacturers civilly liable for criminal acts committed with guns, a move which would shut down the industry, the true goal. In support of the government’s buyback program, i.e., the carrot, Biden has added a gun tax for anyone who wishes to keep their rifles and high-capacity magazines. If you want to avoid the buyback and keep your guns and high-capacity (greater than ten rounds) magazine, you would have to register both under the National Firearms Act, which triggers a $200 tax for each rifle and magazine—the stick. The stick behind the stick is a penalty of up to ten years in federal prison and a $10,000 fine. Registration involves filling out a thirteen-page registration form and providing fingerprints and a photograph of yourself.
This is certainly bad enough for gun owners and Americans in general, but if history is a teacher the end results could be much worse, potentially catastrophic.
Joe Biden was sold to the American voter in 2020 as a moderate of the Democrat Party. He was not a conservative, but neither was he an AOC progressive or a Sanders socialist. His image as a white moderate male was also used to help sell the voters on Barack Obama.
There was also a time when Biden was actually a pragmatist on Second Amendment rights. As the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, he helped pass the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act, which overturned decades of anti-gun court rulings and regulations to restore most gun owner rights and reexpanded commerce by eliminating restrictions on how and where guns could be sold. The legislation’s passage helped lay the foundation of the modern gun rights movement. According to Biden the pragmatist circa 1985:
During my 12.5 years as a Member of this body, I have never believed that additional gun control or Federal registration of guns would reduce crime. I am convinced that a criminal who wants a firearm can get one through illegal, nontraceable, unregistered sources, with or without gun control. In my opinion a national register or ban of handguns would be impossible to carry out and may not result in reductions in crime.2
Despite his recognition of the futility of using gun control to reduce crime and gun violence, the “pragmatist” turned to the dark side when it became politically expedient to do so. In 1993 he helped pass the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which required background checks through a new national checking system (the National Instant Criminal Background Check System [NICS]). The next year he helped obtain a ten-year ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazine sales.
As vice president, he was President Obama’s point man in developing legislative proposals and executive orders to shore up gun control at the national level, and yet even that administration admitted that gun control is almost a futile endeavor and that their efforts amounted to little more than feel-good measures.
While no law or set of laws will end gun violence, it is clear that the American people want action. If even one child’s life can be saved, then we need to act. Now is the time to do the right thing for our children, our communities, and the country we love.3
Indeed, with more than a century of experience we know that gun control does not reduce crime but rather increases it, as John Lott has demonstrated. According to Lott’s evidence and that of independent researchers, no form of gun control has positive effects and most forms have negative effects on crime, murder, and mass shootings. Indeed, the most noteworthy policies that improve these problems are the elimination of gun-free zones and the expansion of concealed carry laws.4
With respect to Biden’s proposed gun tax, what are the expected outcomes? The tax is certainly not designed to raise revenue, as it would raise little and entail a good deal of bureaucratic spending. It would no doubt encourage gun buybacks and reduce gun ownership at the margin, but to what end? It would mostly impact responsible gun owners economically impacted by the lockdowns and unemployment. These are the gun owners who reduce crime rates because of the deterrence factor they provide. The gun tax would also encourage the diversion of guns and high-capacity magazines to the black market.
Most importantly, would the gun tax reduce access to guns and in turn reduce crime and violence? Biden has already admitted that the answer is no: “a criminal who wants a firearm can get one through illegal, nontraceable, unregistered sources, with or without gun control.” Efforts to reduce gun violence through policies of red tape and taxes are doomed to fail and only lead to further inroads of enhanced policies of restrictionism and even outright prohibition.
For example, in order to address the real and imagined problem of narcotics addiction, which was already in decline at the end of the nineteenth century, the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act was passed in 1914 to regulate and tax the production, importation, and distribution of opiates and cocaine products.
However, the courts interpreted the legislation to mean that doctors could prescribe these drugs in the course of normal treatment, as a dental anesthetic or for short-term pain management, for example, but not as a treatment for addiction. This turned regulation into prohibition and quickly turned the imaginary crimes of blacks and Asians into very real crimes all across the country. Desperate addicts were willing to pay high prices and commit crimes to satisfy their addictions, and smugglers and drug dealers quickly developed a black market.
Similar negative consequences resulted from the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which started as a tax to reduce imagined crimes by minorities, i.e., Reefer Madness, only to quickly devolve into an outright prohibition. Fortunately, we as a people have recognized this mistake and are moving to legalize cannabis and hemp, i.e., marijuana, in a state-by-state process that works in the face of federal and international law.
As horrific and far-reaching as the consequences of the war on drugs have been, the consequences of “commonsense” gun control laws are potentially much greater in the long run. In a very important contribution, Stephen Holbrook demonstrates that the Nazis used gun registration information instituted and collected by the Weimar Regime to rapidly disarm the Jews and other political adversaries. This in turn greatly facilitated the Holocaust.5 A disarmed American population would similarly be much more vulnerable to political repression.
But putting this possibility aside, Biden’s gun control proposals, including the gun tax, offer no possibility of improved security, while most of them will make us less secure and more prone to crime and violence. Most importantly, they are all an affront and threat to our liberty as enshrined in the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
5. Stephen P. Halbrook, Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State” (Oakland, CA: Independent Institute, 2013); Audrey D. Klein, review of Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State,” by Stephen P. Halbrook, Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 17, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 264–70, https://cdn.mises.org/qjae17_2_9.pdf.
Mark Thornton is a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and the book review editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. He has authored seven books and is a frequent guest on national radio shows.
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed.”
~ Mark Twain (apocryphal)t
If you feel you can’t trust the news anymore, you have good reason.
Award-winning — and newly independent — journalist Matt Taibbi (of “vampire squid” fame) returns to Peak Prosperity to break down for us how the news media industry became corrupted by the profit motive and now intentionally produces content to “entertain” rather than “inform”.
The five media behemoths who own more than 90% of all US media outlets (Comcast, Viacom, Disney, Time Warner, Newscorp) have discovered that it’s much more profitable to focus on discrete audience segments and give them the information they want to hear.
Which is why the time-honored approach of “just the facts” reporting to a general audience has practically disappeared. There’s less money in it, so it’s just not pursued anymore.
So we’re now served a steady diet of intentionally-biased outrage and pablum, with opinions replacing facts, and any intellectually “triggering” content quickly gunned down by today’s trigger-happy censors.
It’s no wonder that a recent Gallup poll revealed that the majority of Americans no longer trust the US media to report accurately or fairly.
This is a huge social challenge. In such a world, where can one turn for objective information? And what are the consequences of creating such a poorly-informed populace?
While there are no easy solutions, Taibbi shares how he and other respected investigative journalists are ejecting from the system and self-publishing their work, freeing them of the control and biases of corporate overlords.
To understand just how broken our news media is and to learn how to navigate your way to the few reporters and channels remaining dedicate to sourced, factual journalism, play this interview with Matt Taibbi:
Transcript
[unedited]
Adam Taggart: Welcome to Peak Prosperity. I’m Peak Prosperity Co-Founder Adam Taggart here with Matt Taibbi. Matt’s an American author, a national magazine award winning journalist and podcaster. He has keenly researched and reported fearlessly in the areas of finance, media, politics, and sports. You may know him, he’s forever endeared himself to the Peak Prosperity audience by coining the term Vampire Squid for Goldman Sachs. And Matt is here with us today to talk about the media landscape. And one of the main reasons why I wanted to get Matt on here, not only because he’s such a seasoned and accomplished journalist in his own right, but he has also recently gone independent with publishing his work. Though he does remain a contributing editor to Rolling Stone. But I wanted to get an independent perspective into the area of media.
And the reason why I want to dig into that is that it’s all about trust in media today which has actually plummeted to all time lows. Back in the old days, the vast majority of the country listened to the likes of Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow. And they trusted that they were being kept well informed. Now you contrast that to today where the landscape of news sources has fractured into millions of different options with opinion often replacing facts and accusations of fake news. Resulting in a tsunami of modern day censorship the likes that we haven’t seen for many decades.
So Matt I want to start here with a recent Gallup poll that shows that a full 60% of Americans no longer trust that the US media is accurately and fairly reporting the news. And these results came out before the Presidential election with its contested results. And the huge tangle of conflicting narratives that have erupted since then. So my question for you Matt is what has brought us to this point where the majority of the masses no longer trust the press?
Matt Taibbi: Yeah I’m actually surprised, first of all thank you Adam for having me on. I’m surprised that number isn’t higher frankly. We’ve been in a trend where belief and trust in the news media has been on a downward planed trajectory for some time now. And there’s an odd kind of paradox there because as people trust the news media less, they’re actually consuming it more. Which, to me, tells me that news is moving into the entertainment space. And it’s becoming more of an entertainment product that people do consume a lot of, they just don’t believe it as much anymore. And that has a lot to do I think with the commercial strategies of the news business. I wrote about this in a book called Hate, Inc. Basically I think in our business we’ve switched out an old model that was based on the idea of the news being non-denominational, nonpartisan, and sticking to just the facts, to a highly politicized, opinionated presentation that people enjoy but they don’t necessarily believe. And that model I think is going to have negative consequences for the business in the long run.
Adam Taggart: And is that driven by the profit motive of corporations? Or is it driven by other agendas? Just one stat I want to mention here. In 1983, there were about 50 corporations that owned pretty much most of the media in the country. Today that has concentrated to just five key players: Comcast, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and News Corp. So clearly, the vast majority of whatever news we see is rolling up into one of those companies which has its own profit objectives and whatnot. Is it just all about the dollar or are there other factors in play here too?
Matt Taibbi: I think the economic considerations are central to all of this. You talk about the concentration as you go up the chain, but the products have been atomized and fragmented since 1983. So back at that time there were only three or four major newscasts. Now, you have hundreds or even thousands of news products dotting the internet including the traditional legacy media. But there’s something for everybody. Most of them are owned by those companies, one of those companies.
But the strategy now has changed from trying to get the entire audience which is what CBS, NBC, and ABC used to try to do, they tried to get everybody. To recognizing that they’re not going to do that anymore. And trying to pick an audience and just dominate it. Which was the strategy that Fox pioneered. Let’s not go for everybody, let’s pick a certain demographic. Maybe older, conservative, suburban, or rural. And we’ll just feed them news that we know they’re going to like. And that’s kind of the business model now. And it works, but it has a tendency to fragment and polarize news audiences when you employ it.
Adam Taggart: Yeah so here’s where I’m going to get to your experience as a journalist working for media organizations. There’s, you hear all the time that they news media is biased. Oftentimes called the left wing media and whatnot. And I think the data does prove that out that most of these major news organizations do have a bias. You just said that they’re kind of picking an audience and selling into that audience. Just another bit of data, a recent Texas A&M, Arizona State University research survey showed that over 60% of journalists identify as being left of center. So not moderate but left of center. Interestingly the number of conservative journalist was surprisingly small. The ones that identified as conservative.
So we have a lot of left leaning organizations. We also have some conservative ones and I think that the severity of bias is just as extreme on both sides. But what happens is you get to a point where their ideology is determining what news is. Right? And we’re seeing more and more extreme examples of that. And I think one and we’ll get to social media in a second, but one important one was when Twitter decided to not let the New York Post tweet out its articles about the Burisma investigation. Which, hard to argue at least it’s not relevant to what was going on there. I’m not saying it’s good or it’s bad. But it was, I think the New York Post is one of the largest, oldest newspapers in the country. Maybe the fourth largest. Yeah and Twitter was just saying hey we don’t believe your version of the news is acceptable. Right?
So when you’re working in a newsroom and you’re trying to be an independent journalist and get the story out as you see it as factual, but maybe the editorial staff comes to you and says no you got to take this stuff out because it doesn’t really fit our ideology. How rampant is that right now? How hard is it to be an honest reporter in today’s environment?
Matt Taibbi: That’s a great question. That dynamic has changed drastically since I first started working in media 30 years ago. My father was in the news media also. Once upon a time, it was a virtue, it was considered a virtue in the business if nobody knew what your politics were. And especially the viewers in the audience were supposed to be left guessing as to what you really thought about things. They had to trust your factual reporting so they didn’t really want to know what you thought about things. And that was true inside the newsrooms as well. It tended to be true that most of the people who worked as reporters were misanthropes and just hated everybody if they had an orientation at all.
That has changed dramatically and especially in the last four or five years it’s now the case where if you’re not a team player politically, it can become a serious problem in newsrooms. And we saw over the summer there were a number of controversies at publications, ranging from The Intercept to the Huffington Post, to Bon Appetit, to Variety, to a whole bunch of others. Where there were internal revolts directed at people whose politics were unorthodox. And that’s a problem. Again, it’s okay to have political leanings and to have political beliefs. I think it would be odd if you didn’t have them. But for the job, you have to be able to shut that off and with each story, approach each set of facts with a clean slate and at least embrace the possibility that things are going to be different this time. Right? You have to consider alternative news stories.
And so items like the Hunter Biden story, there’s no evidence to suggest that that wasn’t real. People might have said it wasn’t important or that it wasn’t something that needed to be paid attention to. But I don’t see the justification for yanking it out of the news landscape. That doesn’t make any sense to me.
Adam Taggart: Yeah so I want to talk just a moment about your decision to go independent which I mentioned at the beginning of the video here. Because I know others are also following your lead. But I’m just curious, I’m going to dig into this point just a little bit more. What is it like to be a journalist in this environment maybe before you headed off on your own, hung your own independent shingle? In the newsroom, can you go out and identify a story and work on it the way that you see fit? Or is it really sitting down with the editors and the editors are kind of giving marching orders. Hey, we want a story, an article that tells this to get our angle of the story. How much independence does the average journalist have today? Do they still have leeway or are they really just order takers today?
Matt Taibbi: So it’s not really like that. They don’t give you orders. I think what happens in news organizations is that over time, journalists are sort of given, it’s made clear to them what is desired and what isn’t desired. Right? So just to take a really crude example. When I worked in Russia, that was where I began my career was in post-Communist Russia. I learned pretty early on that editors love stories about American culture being exported to the Soviet Union like McDonalds or Ikea or whatever it was. I guess that’s not American, but western culture.
But they hated stories about western programs failing. So American advisors would advise shock therapy and that would not do well. And they didn’t want to hear that. So it’s not like they would tell you not to file or to present those stories. But you would learn that if you did file those stories, they probably wouldn’t make it. You know? So over time you develop a sense of what editors want and what they don’t want. And what’s happening in this environment politically is that just everybody knows what the editors do and do not want. And where it gets uncomfortable is where you feel like you have an obligation to try to push something because you think it’s true or important but you know that the editors aren’t going to want to deal with it.
And I think one of the first stories that was a serious problem for a lot of progressive journalists anyway was the Russia Gate story. Where it was made clear to everybody early on that nobody wanted to hear the idea that there were problems. There were problems with that story. So everybody who had an aggressive take on that got published and everyone who didn’t, either kept their mouth shut or didn’t get published. And that’s where you have problems, is when there’s the self-editing that goes on.
Adam Taggart: Got it. And it sounds too like you said that there’s sort of this incentive of attrition which means you know sure write what you want to write. But if it’s not fitting our narrative that we want to tell, it’s just not going to see the light of day type of deal.
Matt Taibbi: Right or you learn that there are going to be additional problems. So you file that kind of story and they say oh it’s really good but we just want you to work on a little more. So you learn that it takes X amount of energy to get this kind of story published and a lot less energy to get the other kind published. And what end up happening is you just start selecting for the easier path.
Adam Taggart: Got it and I think this is probably obvious but it sounds like this is probably a term that has accelerated during the course of your thirty years in journalism?
Matt Taibbi: Oh yeah absolutely. And I should emphasize, I have kind of a unique situation. I always did with Rolling Stone. I always had a lot of freedom. They always encouraged me to pursue ideas that maybe the editors didn’t necessarily agree with. And that was really great. I mean if you look back, you can see that I criticized, for instance, the Obama Administration when the rest of Rolling Stone wasn’t doing that too much. But for most people who are in journalism, you kind of get an idea of where the newsroom is politically and there are now basically there’s a price to pay for sticking your head up and being the one who tries to be different. And that’s so unusual because this business used to be about people who wanted to be different. Like most journalists were independent minded once upon a time. And now it’s much more of a herd type activity which is really strange.
Adam Taggart: Yeah alright so let’s now talk about your transition to being an independent publisher of your own work. First, if you can tell us your main reasons for doing that. I’m assuming that they’re tied to what we’re talking about here but if that’s an incorrect assumption, let us know. And also, there have been some other big people making similar departures like that. So very recently Glenn Greenwald just announced that is going to the same service that you’re publishing on, Substack. And the really interesting part about Glen’s story is is first he worked for The Guardian, ended up colliding with the editorial issues we’re talking about there. And founded a company called The Intercept. And ended up having similar collisions of interests with the partners that he had worked with to put that together. So now he’s gone totally independent.
We also have Bari Weiss at the New York Times, who very sort of publicly said hey look I did this for as long as I could, but it’s just not the place I originally joined. So you’re seeing these, I would call these types of journalists kind of the modern day paragons for independent investigative work. These are the people that are breaking big news. They’re really telling important stories that weren’t being told before they got out there and advanced them. And it really does seem like a breaking point on their end where they’re just saying I can’t work within the system anymore. I’m going to have to start working outside of it. So anyways if you can comment on your transition to Substack and what you and your peers, why you guys are making that transition?
Matt Taibbi: So my situation is slightly different from Glen or somebody like Matt Yglesias who’s another amazing example because he was the Co-Founder of Fox and he ended up having to basically leave his own company because he was squeezed out by the pressures you’re talking about. I really wasn’t experiencing that so much. It was more that I had kind of an inkling that this was going to be a successful for people like me in the future. And I had some experience with this company because I had serialized a couple of books through them. It was an experiment that I had done. So I made that move that was more of a professional calculation than what’s actually happening with a lot of these other people is that they’re being literally forced out of their companies. And this is where they’re going because they have to.
Where the tie in for me is, is that a lot of audiences are now leaving organizations like the New York Times or The Intercept or Salon or Vox because they’re tired of getting basically a media monoculture and they want some independence of thought. So they’re going to these new sites like Substack where we don’t have editorial constraints because that’s where you can find it. And so that’s where I’m connected to people like Greenwald Andrew Sullivan whose politics are different from mine or Matt Yglesias. It’s because there is a big audience out there that is leaving traditional media and they’re looking for something new and that’s what we’re trying to deliver on.
Adam Taggart: Good, good. I’m going to ask you in a second how that’s working out so far. But I just want to underscore, so we at Peak Prosperity we are an information site. And I think we’re in existence because there’s plenty of people out there that are looking for information sources that they feel are more trustworthy, more agnostic. Just sort of more pragmatic and unbiased. And of course I’m biased in my opinion to that because it’s the company I created. But as you said I think people out there are really hungry because they’re looking at the major mainstream sources and just again losing faith for all the reasons we’ve talked about and we’ve already shared all the survey data and stuff like that. So I’m curious Matt, I know it’s a relatively recent transition of yours, within the past year or so. How has it been working out so far with the initial results?
Matt Taibbi: It’s amazing. One of the other Substack writers said to me Substack is the greatest invention since penicillin. It definitely works. Financially I think it’s working better than I expected. But I think what I would say is that this is a model that’s going to work for people who already have some profile before they make a move like this. The subscriber based model is going to be difficult when it comes to trying to figure out how we pay for institutional investigative reporting. Just something that’s disappeared gradually since going back to the 80s. We still don’t really have a way to pay for that. We might be able to pay for some individual people but the problem is that this model depends on regular content. So you can’t be a Seymore Hirsch who works on one story every five months and live on Substack. I think that’s going to be difficult. So this is a solution for a certain kind of media figure but it’s not a cure all for the problems of news media.
Adam Taggart: Alright great. Two more questions for you before we wrap this up. Again real quickly I just want to cite an experience that we’ve had here at Peak Prosperity is we saw a huge influx of new readers and viewers primarily coming in through YouTube due to our coverage of the coronavirus. Particularly in the earlier months of the epidemic where just quality information was really hard to come by. Initially, the government, our leaders weren’t really sharing too much. They weren’t, from our opinion, taking it as seriously as they later on realized they needed to. But there was just so much conflicting information out there. And people I think coronavirus, 2020 has really done a lot to continue to kick trust in the media while it’s already down. You had the coronavirus for those reason I just mentioned and then of course you’ve had run up to the elections and all the dust still in the air from that. Where people are just hearing so many different narratives from so many different sides.
But again here at Peak Prosperity we witnessed that firsthand this year by just seeing our YouTube audience basically jump from I can’t remember it was like 50,000 subscribers or something like that, it’s up to like 370,000 now. Because that many people were that hungry. Alright but that’s a good segue into this next question I want to dive into. We mentioned it super briefly with the hyper fragmentation of the media landscape now. But I just want to get your opinions on social media. I’m assuming and tell me if you haven’t, but I’m assuming you’ve seen the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma or something similar to that. And for those that haven’t seen it, it basically just really kind of deconstructs how social media is creating just literally billions of bespoke custom newsfeeds for each individual. And so we are increasingly just living within our own eco chambers. So from an information standpoint, we’re getting a very slanted view of reality. And then on top of that, information is being pushed at us that’s largely being driven by sponsors and advertisers who want us to think a certain way, behave in a certain way. And it very clearly does influence beliefs and behavior.
So people are waking up to that and I think increasingly they are questioning the news they’re getting whether it’s through social media or other channels and saying look is this actually information at all, or is it just marketing? Am I just basically being marketed to all the time through these channels? What’s your opinion of the impact of social media on these issues that we’re talking about in terms of being able to trust the media?
Matt Taibbi: Oh it’s horrid and pernicious and it’s as destructive to your mind as tobacco is to your lungs. As a consumer product, they’ve turned information into something that’s completely unhealthy. And I was talking about this with somebody the other day who described it this way. Imagine a circle and then within that circle is a smaller circle, and that smaller circle is the information that, say, a company like Facebook is guessing that you’re interested in. And so what they do is they just find all that information and they keep feeding all this stuff that’s in that circle to you.
Now if they were trying to be responsible and trying to create people who had a little bit more breadth of opinion, they would at least move the subset of content out of that circle occasionally. But they’re not doing that. They want to give you the pure heroin of information that they know that you agree with. Right? And they do it relentlessly over and over and over again. And what they’ve done is they’ve created these addictive patterns for people where they’re just on their phones all day long looking at stuff that is designed to either trigger them or reinforce their anger or whatever it is. But it’s designed to do everything except make you think. It’s the worst possible use of this technology.
And from the standpoint of the news business, this is terrible because what it’s doing is it’s raising a whole generation of people who are unable to take in information that they disagree with or that is uncomfortable for them. And that makes the job of people like me infinitely harder because our job is to try to convince people of stuff that might be difficult or unsetting. And it’s been awful. And that documentary was right on the money and I think that issue going to start becoming more important.
Adam Taggart: Alright. I was kind of hoping you were going to poke some holes in my negativity there but you just added a few. And I know you’re a parent as am I. And I think any parent watching this, you probably had a real nervousness in your gut around social media for many years watching your kids increasingly become addicted to it. And I think everything you just talked about Matt just says that we’re right to be that concerned.
Alright well Matt as we wrap up here, I’m going to try to inject hope into this story if there’s any to inject. So what is your advice to concerned viewers? People that are watching this and are agreeing and maybe a little outraged, maybe a little bit more concerned again about where things are headed. Two questions basically. What changes should they be demanding either with their votes at the voting booth or with their wallets in terms of the type of media models that they’re going to support? And then how can they reduce their exposure to media bias? How can they find sources of information that they feel are more factual, will give them a more informed world view than these kind of biased channels that we’re talking about?
Matt Taibbi: Great question. The first one’s harder. Like what do you do about it? I’m not really sure. I really wish that people were more concerned about the censorship angle because I think what’s going on there is that you have a whole series of very powerful actors who realize the power of this technology and rather than try to make it less harmful, they want to harness it for propaganda purposes. And that is deeply troubling. So any kind of cooperation between the federal government and this handful of tech distributors that dominates news, I would hope that people are on the lookout for that and are urging their elected representatives to at least pay some attention to that.
In terms of how people can break out of these patterns, I think people do break out of those patterns. The amazing thing about the situation that we’re in is that we’re seeing this amazing flowering of independent media, whether it’s your show or shows like Joe Rogan’s that just completely crush the cable news networks in terms of views. There’s a lot of stuff out there that is really interesting and creative and well done. And the history of our country is that we have a lot of, that there’s always an independent powerful voice that rises and that people learn to trust and it breaks through the propaganda. Whether it’s IF Stone or Attatar Bell or Hunter Thompson or Tom Wolf or whatever it is. We have a really strong history in that area in this country. And I think that tradition will continue. It’s just going to be in a different medium going forward. And until they completely clamp down the internet, I think we can expect that something like that is going to lead the way to something better. That’s what I’m hoping anyway.
Adam Taggart: Alright great. Well in just a second I’m going to ask where people can go to find out more about you and your work. Because Matt you are one of my trusted sources of information and I presume you are for many other people too. But real quick before I let you do that. Is there a topic that we haven’t touched on yet, a question I haven’t asked that you think is important for folks to know about this general topic about media trustworthiness?
Matt Taibbi: I mean not really I think we’ve covered a lot of it. I think the main thing is, and you touched on this is this idea of people becoming aware, that what they’re experiencing is marketing and not news. I think that’s going to become more important. Like people have to start having consumer awareness about information in the same way that they have learned to have it about food or cigarettes or cars or energy sources. This is also a consumer product. And I think we have to have a debate about what’s healthy and what isn’t. And so that’s the only other thing I would stress is that people start thinking about that a little bit. Because it’s become a serious issue in our lives.
Adam Taggart: Alright great it’s honestly just like the, I liked your analogy about food. We talked with Joel Salitan who very famously noted of America’s farmeries the figurehead for sustainable farming in America. And one of the things Joel talks about all the time is we can vote with our votes, but we can also vote with our dollars. And there are all these better models for food production. Many of them local and whatnot. And yeah that might cost a little bit more but you’re also getting lots and lots of additional benefits for that additional cost. Both health benefits, local economy, etcetera. And basically says the more that we direct our dollars and our patronage to those models, the more they’re going to blossom and eventually hit critical mass and whatnot. And I think it’s very much the same dynamic here. So alright so as we wrap things up Matt first thank you so much for taking your time and giving us so much of your expert opinion. Great conversation. So if people do want to learn more about you, follow your work, where should they go?
Matt Taibbi: Primarily to Taibbi.substack.com. I’m also on Rollingstone.com and I’m the Co-Host with Katie Halper of a show called Useful Idiots. So that’s once a week, comes out every Friday. And @mtaibbi on Twitter.
Adam Taggart: Alright great and I’ll put up the URL there for your Substack site and also your Twitter handle there too. Alright folks as we wrap, again Matt thank you so much and if you are new to Peak Prosperity, if this is one of the first times you’re watching this video and you are interested in hearing more conversations like this that are hopefully delivering informative, unbiased, and practical information, take a quick second and just subscribe to this YouTube channel. The subscribe button is right there below the like button there. And if you click the little bell icon you’ll get alerted the next time we publish another video like this. Alright Matt, wonderful talking to you. Look forward to having you on again soon.
Matt Taibbi: Likewise. Thank you so much Adam. Take care.Read More
Roberts is a Republican and therefore believes that the Democrats stole the election. A Democrat, once it turns out that Trump won after all, would believe the opposite. But that makes no difference because, as I keep repeating, the US is not a democracy and it doesn’t matter who is its president.
I’ve been holding back on commenting on current events because they are far too silly. At this point it is safe to say that the elections in the US have been thoroughly botched and that, no matter who is ultimately chosen as president for the next for years, enough questions will remain in the minds of enough people to thoroughly delegitimize the national leadership in the eyes of at least half the country.
Just this morning I got a missive from Paul Craig Roberts containing the following bullet points:
• Joe Biden’s Twitter account has 20 million followers. Trump’s Twitter account has 88.8 million followers.
• Joe Biden’s Facebook account has 7.78 million followers. Trump’s Facebook account has 34.72 million followers. How likely is it that a person with four to five times the following of his rival lost the election?
• Joe Biden, declared by the biased presstitutes to be president by landslide, gave a Thanksgiving Day message and only 1,000 people watched his live statement. Where is the enthusiasm?
• Trump’s campaign appearances were heavily attended and that Biden’s were avoided. Somehow a candidate who could not draw supporters to his campaign appearances won the presidency.
• Despite Biden’s total failure to animate voters during the presidential campaign, he received 15 million more votes than Barack Obama did in his 2012 re-election.
• Biden won despite underperforming Hillary Clinton’s 2016 vote in every urban US county, but outperformed Clinton in Democrat-controlled Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia, the precise cities where the most obvious and most blatant electoral fraud was committed.
• Biden won despite receiving a record low share of the Democrat primary vote compared to Trump’s share of the Republican primary vote.
• Biden won despite Trump bettering his 2016 vote by ten million votes and Trump’s record support from minority voters.
• Biden won despite losing the bellwether counties that have always predicted the election outcome and the bellwether states of Ohio and Florida.
• Biden won in Georgia, a completely red state with a red governor and legislature both House and Senate. Somehow a red state voted for a blue president.
• Biden won despite the Democrats losing representation in the House.
• In Pennsylvania 47 memory cards containing more than 50,000 votes are missing.
• Pennsylvania 1.8 million ballots were mailed out to voters, but 2.5 million mail-in ballots were counted.
Roberts is a Republican and therefore believes that the Democrats stole the election. A Democrat, once it turns out that Trump won after all, would believe the opposite. But that makes no difference because, as I keep repeating, the US is not a democracy and it doesn’t matter who is its president.
It is not a democracy because the vast majority of votes—all Democratic votes in Republican states and all Republican votes in Democratic states—are simply thrown away. That’s roughly half the electorate who have no chance of making their vote count in the state where they live. Of course, they could move to a different state, in which case their vote would be thrown away for the opposite reason—lost as part of a superfluously large majority.
This is easy enough to explain to any rational person—but not to the vast majority of Americans, for whom such logic goes in one ear and comes out the other. In short, they are not rational. Worse than that, their leaders are not rational either. This brings us to the second point—that it doesn’t matter who is president.
Trump keeps talking about making America great—by bringing manufacturing back from China. Except that the opposite has happened over the past four years: China’s industrial production has continued to grow (although more slowly than before) while in the US it has continued to decline. Nor is is there any reason at all to think that this is going to change over the next four years.
Biden keeps talking about America continuing as the leader of the free world—except that America is no longer the leader of much of anything and there is no reason to think that anything can be done to reverse this slide. Thus, no matter who becomes (or remains) president, the US administration will continue to wallow in nostalgia while steadfastly refusing to admit defeat.
This defeat has multiple elements. First, the shale oil gamble is over. Drilling rates have collapsed, many shale oil companies are bankrupt, and US oil production is set to plummet from over 12 million barrels per day at its peak to around 5 million by next June (according to Art Berman, whose opinion I trust). After that point the US will once again become a major oil importer, and since no other swing producers are available this will drive up oil prices, perhaps beyond the previous all-time record of $150/barrel, resulting in a US oil import bill of half a trillion dollars a year. But it is doubtful whether that much extra oil can be produced at almost any price.
Second, national bankruptcy is looming ever closer. The federal government now overspends its revenues by a factor of two or more, meaning that for every dollar of federal revenue it borrows and spends at least two. Previously, despite its already ridiculous size and exponential growth rate, US federal debt could be given an appearance of legitimacy because enough foreign buyers could be found for it; but this is no longer the case. And so this debt is looking less and less legitimate because it is being monetized—simply printed into existence—as the Federal Reserve degenerates into a pure pyramid scheme.
Third, the US dollar (along with some other currencies to which it is tied) is poised on the edge of a hyperinflationary wipe-out. In an effort to shore up the economy a great deal of money has been unleashed into the economy and it went chasing after stocks, keeping it from triggering hyperinflation. Thus we have the truly bizarre combination of a record-high stock market along with record-high bankruptcies, foreclosures and evictions. At some point confidence in the stock market will evaporate and all of this notional money will go chasing after anything that isn’t made of paper (with the possible exception of toilet paper). Much of this notional money will evaporate as people liquidate their stock holdings, but enough will remain to result in hoarding and hyperinflation. The US dollar will devalue internationally and the US will lose access to imports.
Fourth, the US has lost its lead militarily, definitely to Russia and possibly to China and Iran. Its major military asset is its aircraft carrier fleet, which is by now completely useless because it can be destroyed using conventional weapons from a safe stand-off distance which is greater than the reach of its aircraft. Consequently, it cannot be deployed close enough to an enemy shore to make its aircraft useful. US military bases, hundreds of which are scattered all over the globe, but mostly clustered along Russia’s and China’s borders, are also useless militarily, as demonstrated by Iran’s rocket attacks against two of them in Iraq. In short, the entire US military is by now more of a liability than an asset—likely to draw the US into a military confrontation which it cannot win.
Now, do you hear these points discussed in the national media, in the course of the election campaign or otherwise? Do these points come up at all in conversations with colleagues, neighbors, friends and family? Are these topics of discussion in high school civics classes? (Wait, what high school civics classes?) No? And yet they are real, and their consequences are at this point unavoidable, and refusing to acknowledge them will only exacerbate their effects.
Collapse is bad enough when you and everyone around you can acknowledge it. But if everyone from the president (pick either one) to the lowliest convenience store clerk is incapable of accepting it as real and thinking through some of the immediate consequences, that makes it much, much worse. I refuse to accept any of the responsibility for this dreadful state of affairs; I’ve been doing all I can to warn people for a decade and a half now. It is now pointless for me to issue any more warnings. All I can do now is watch the inevitable unfold.
Note that none of this is organic – the result of market forces, of people freely choosing that it makes sense. Instead it is being forced on the people, to thwart their free choice – of a piece with the “mandates” to wear the Holy Rag and (soon) the “mandate” to submit to a vaccination.
But the cattle have difficulty seeing this, their vision being limited by the sight of the rear-end of the cow ahead of them.
A piece in the trade journal Automotive News talks about something styled “micromobility” – which translated means an American take on the Chinese concept of mobility . . . circa 1970, when most Chinese used pedal power to get wherever they were headed. Which was necessarily not very far – and thus they were more readily corralled.
The American take on this concept 50 years later is the electric pedal bike, the so-called “e-bike.”
You can see these things in urban areas all over the country – as they are being heavily nudged via sweetheart contracts with the providers, who profit from a corollary campaign to kick cars out of urban areas via “road diets” (the reducing of traffic lanes, as from two to one each way so as to make traffic worse) and even by the outright elimination of asphalt for cars, replaced by “walkable” (and electric-pedal-bike-able) downtown cores.
It’s easier to corral the cattle this way.
Note that none of this is organic – the result of market forces, of people freely choosing that it makes sense. Instead it is being forced on the people, to thwart their free choice – of a piece with the “mandates” to wear the Holy Rag and (soon) the “mandate” to submit to a vaccination.
To several vaccinations – as there will be more than just one, once the principle is normalized that it is acceptable to force people to submit to this injection. To believe it will be limited to just this injection is to believe that allowing the government to tax one thing won’t mean it will tax other things.
But the cattle have difficulty seeing this, their vision being limited by the sight of the rear-end of the cow ahead of them.
These e-bikes, like pedal bikes, can only go so far – and not very fast. Most are limited to a speed about as fast a man can run – about 15 MPH – and have a range of about 20 miles.
This makes it hard to run away on one.
They also have the “advantage” – from a certain perspective – of being largely unusable in poor weather due to the exposure of the rider to the cold and wet and the inherent danger of riding anything on two wheels on the snow and ice.
Cars slide. Bikes topple over.
But sssssssaaaaaaaaaaaafety isn’t the point. Getting people out of cars – which enable them to escape the corral – is. The way this is being done is indirect and for that reason, ingenious. The car is not to be outlawed; much too noticeable, that. Instead, they are to be made so expensive and so inconvenient as to be no longer viable for the bipedal cattle.
You cannot drive what you cannot afford. This includes a house far away from the urban core cattle pen, which requires an income sufficient to be able to afford it, as opposed to the renting of a small apartment in the urban core cattle pen.
The WuFlu hysteria has made it very difficult for millions of people – most especially the young – to be able to afford anything more than a small apartment in the urban core cattle pen. It is hard to earn anything when you are debarred from working Because Corona. Actually – accurately – because of the totalitarian measures imposed using the pretext of Corona.
These measures – not “the virus”- are the cause of the economic ruination of the nation, though not of the big corporations who have massively benefitted from the economic ruination, which has served to enrich them while enserfing the population.
A majority of the young – which encompasses those pushing 40 – have never left home. Their parents’ home. They can afford that . . . until their parents no longer can. Then they will need “housing” – which will not be a house at all but rather an apartment, probably shared with others, in the urban core cattle pen.
They will still need to get to their neo-feudal job, of course. And so they will share – not own – a community bike, electrically powered – because many are so obese they cannot pedal one the distance.
They will pay each time they use it. Or rather, a certain sum will be deducted from their Universal Basic Income each time they use it. Which they will be permitted to do so long as they are good bipedal cattle, obediently “masked” and vaccinated. If not, their UBI will be withdrawn and they will have to walk.
If they’re allowed to do that. If there’s anywhere they’re allowed to go. If there’s anything they’re still allowed to do.
This is the micromobility of Chinese America 2030.
. . .
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