President Joe Biden’s entire economic agenda is built around the notion of economic mediocrity rooted in a self-proclaimed higher justice. Paul Waldman of The Washington Post posited this week that Biden had launched an “economic policy revolution” rooted in fighting “inequality.” This would require “more active government intervention in the economy.”
And we will all learn to love such intervention, because it will be done in the name of a higher value: equality. Not equality of rights, but equality of outcome; not equality of value, but equality of resources. The problem with this philosophy is that it removes the incentive for all that creates prosperity: work, creativity, thrift, responsibility. And removing that incentive means more misery for everyone.
This week, The New York Times released a long expose of the shortcomings of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service. Long cherished as a crown jewel of Left-wing governmental policy, the NHS has been plagued by massive resource shortcomings, requiring rationing of critical infrastructure and care. Now, citizens are waiting up to 12 hours for ambulances. “It’s a near-crisis situation that experts say reveals a breakdown of the compact between Britons and their revered National Health Service,” the Times reported, “that the government will provide responsible, efficient health care services, mostly free, across all income levels.”
There can be only one excuse for such signal failure to serve the prosperity of your citizenry: the chimera of equality. This, in fact, is the clarion call of the Left: that human beings sacrifice well-being and prosperity on behalf of the cult of equal distribution of resources. Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum, says as much in his book, “The Great Narrative”: we should dispense with economic measures like gross domestic product (GDP) in favor of “what matters most: climate action, sustainability, inclusivity, global cooperation, health and well-being.” In fact, says Schwab, “We might even find we can live with such a scenario quite happily!” The end goal will be ending “inequality and the unfairness that underpins it” by enshrining “universal provision of social assistance,” which will require that governments “rewrite some of the rules of the game and permanently increase their roles.”
Closer to home, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie says the same when he argues in favor of government nationalization of all wealth and then redistribution of that wealth on a per capita basis… every generation. This would amount to a complete rupture of property rights — and this in turn would mean the end of innovation, since societies that dispense with property rights and profit margins regress into stagnation and then economic collapse. But at least we will have achieved Bouie’s goal: equality!
Indeed, members of the political Left are constantly asking citizens to simply reframe their perspectives on prosperity entirely.
Piketty is a Marxist who has written a great deal on income distribution to promote income redistribution and other Marxist goals. He exhibits no knowledge of economics and economic theory except that implied by the construction of economic statistics. His proposed solutions are implicitly violent, destructive, and unable to achieve the desired results.
Thomas Piketty A Brief History of Equality Harvard University Press, 2022
Thomas Piketty’s Brief History is the fourth installment of his assault on economic inequality, following as it does the best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Capital and Ideology. The third, Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016–2021, is just a collection of popular articles based on which the New York Times dubbed Piketty a “vaguely left-of-center” economist. This slim fourth volume from Harvard University Press calls for far-reaching socialist policies to establish economic equality. It is a siren song of communism: “economic justice” without any cost or noteworthy harm to society.
The primary reason for my concern with Piketty and this book is the relative influence of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto (written with Frederick Engels) versus his Kapital: A Critique of Political Economy. The Manifesto was short, on point, and politically actionable while Kapital was long, jargony, filled with footnotes, and nebulous concerning political action. Indeed, Marx’s view of history told Kapital readers to sit tight for generations and suffer, while the Manifesto was an immediate call to arms around the world!
In terms of relevance, the Manifesto’s ten-point program would become the political action platform for democratic socialists worldwide and public policy in leading nations by 1917. In contrast, the highly improbable Marxist takeover of Russia had no blueprint from Kapital, led to one economic disaster after another, and ended in failure, as Ludwig von Mises predicted. Piketty may have at least learned that lesson and advocates a social-democratic-type takeover.
All of Piketty’s books are terrible from an economic perspective. Most importantly, all are as dangerous to political economy as Marx’s books were catastrophic to hundreds of millions of people, especially the lower-income people Marx and Piketty propose to help. The brevity of this book makes it potentially the most socially devastating of the four.
Brief History
Up until two centuries ago, more than 95 percent of humanity lived in “extreme poverty.” That number had fallen to about one-third of the global population by the end of the 1980s and is now less than 10 percent, and still falling, all during a period of rapid population increase. This is one of the most important facts you can say about the entire history of humanity, and yet it seems not widely known—and how it was achieved is completely lost on Piketty.
Piketty gives no indication to me that he is an economist or any kind of disinterested objective scientific observer. However, his statistic- and chart-filled books give the impression of a scientific basis for his policy conclusion. Piketty is a Marxist, an advocate for communism, but all in the guise of a conventional democratic socialism. However, his dedication of the book reminds readers of the Manifesto’s finale.
He does admit that the last quarter millennium has also been a powerful movement toward greater economic equality, but he largely ignores how the enormous, sustained increase in the standard of living was achieved. It just happened. He does want readers to understand his views that this improvement was not the result of capitalism, that sociopolitical systems are just a matter of democratic choice, and that various forms of socialist and union agitation are to be credited with economic progress.
In a free society, the right to discriminate is essential and absolute. A free society must include the freedom to discriminate against any individual or group for any reason and on any basis. A free society may or may not be free of discrimination, but it must be free of discrimination laws. By their very nature, the rights of private property, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, free enterprise, and freedom of contract include the right to discriminate.
The grossly misnamed Equality Act is a government attack on the rights of private property, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, free enterprise, and freedom of contract. According to the official summary of bill (H.R.5):
This bill prohibits discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity in areas including public accommodations and facilities, education, federal funding, employment, housing, credit, and the jury system. Specifically, the bill defines and includes sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity among the prohibited categories of discrimination or segregation.
The bill expands the definition of public accommodations to include places or establishments that provide (1) exhibitions, recreation, exercise, amusement, gatherings, or displays; (2) goods, services, or programs; and (3) transportation services.
The bill allows the Department of Justice to intervene in equal protection actions in federal court on account of sexual orientation or gender identity.
The bill prohibits an individual from being denied access to a shared facility, including a restroom, a locker room, and a dressing room, that is in accordance with the individual’s gender identity.
Not surprisingly, the Equality Act is supported by the usual left-wing suspects like the ACLU, the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the NAACP, the AARP, and the National Organization for Women, the American Federation of Teachers, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, the American Psychological Association, and LGBTQ rights groups. But it is also supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and many of America’s largest companies, including Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, eBay, Starbucks, Kellogg’s, and Johnson & Johnson. It even has the support of some religious denominations and groups, including the Episcopal Church, the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, and the Interfaith Alliance.
The Equality Act has been languishing in the U.S. Senate since March 1 of this year. It was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives on February 18 and passed just a week later by a vote of 224–206. Every Democrat in the House voted in favor of the bill, but only three Republicans did. Although as of this writing, the Senate has not yet acted on it, the bill has a good chance of passing in the second session of the 117th Congress when Democrats see the handwriting on the wall that spells out “Republican landslide” in the 2022 midterm elections. The Republican alternative to the Equality Act, the equally misnamed Fairness for All Act, is no alternative at all if property rights mean anything.
Background
To understand the Equality Act, we must begin with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It claimed to be:
Whites can’t learn from qualified blacks on campus? Preposterous. Blacks can’t learn from competent whites at university? Equally silly. I, a white man, have learned more from Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams on the subject of racial and sexual discrimination than from any other two scholars. I am pleased and proud that several of my black students are making their way into academic professions. I hold a brown belt in karate. My teachers were the students or Asians. My best instructor is Iranian. I’m Jewish.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) amounts to the complaint that there are too many white males on the faculty and the demand that this be radically changed, forthwith. It would appear, at least to the grievants, that females, “people of color” (“colored people” is no longer allowed to be said at university, despite the continued existence of the National Association of Colored People), and members of the LGBT community cannot really learn from straight white male professors. Students with these characteristics, it turns out, need role models in the professoriate from their own demographics if they are to prosper in higher education. Numerous academic job notifications now routinely require adherence to DEI sensibilities.
I don’t want to criticize the students responsible for these complaints. They are young kids, and, presumably, don’t yet know any better. If anyone is to blame for this new campus initiative, it is their teachers (many of whom are woke white males).
The main charge in one particularcase is that the student body is less than 40% white male, while professors of the same ilk constitute about 75% of the faculty. Out of a board of trustees of roughly three dozen, almost two dozen are white men. The conclusion would appear to be that there should be something akin to proportional representation. The present situation is rejected as “shocking,” “bizarre.” As a result, students, all of them, are subjected to a “white centric” education where “whiteness” predominates.
There is more wrong here than you can shake a stick at. First of all, there is no such thing as white math, or black logic, or Asian economics, or male physics, or female chemistry, or homosexual astronomy, or heterosexual philosophy. This may or may not apply to grievance studies (black studies, gay studies, feminist studies), but if it doesn’t, then these are not worthy subjects to be studied at an institution of advanced learning. There are not many truths each for a separate category of human beings. There is only one. Get used to it.
Second, proportionality. Many people expect that absent racial, sexual, and other types of discrimination, all groups would be equally represented in all aspects of the labor market. But as the insightful work of ThomasSowell has demonstrated, this is simply not the case. The National Basketball Association comprises about 75% blacks, who make up only some 13% of the overall population. Players in the National Football League are roughly 70% black. Is this due to the fact that the NFL and the NBA discriminate against whites and Asians? Of course not. These sports leagues will sign up anyone, even people with chartreuse-colored skin and covered with pink and blue polka dots, provided, only, that they are world-class athletes with the requisite skills. Should we, in any case, kick out of the NFL and the NBA as many splendid black athletes as needed so as to attain proportional racial representation? That would solve one “problem,” but then many college teams would likely be able to beat these professionals unless, of course, we employed the same procedure for them. And so on down the line.
The Senate Armed Services Committee approved last month a National Defense Authorization Act that includes a requirement that women register with Selective Service on their 18th birthday. If the bill becomes law with this provision included and a military draft is reinstated, women will be forced to join the military, and America will have equality in slavery.
Proponents of drafting women argue that since women can now serve in combat it makes sense to make the draft “gender neutral.”
Some conservatives have made moral arguments against drafting women, saying that women should be able to decide for themselves whether or not to serve in the military. It is certainly true that it is immoral to force women into military service, but that is because it is wrong to force anyone into military service.
Forcing young people, regardless of their sex, to fight, kill, and even die in war is the worst violation of individual liberty a government can commit. Those who support the military draft implicitly reject the Declaration of Independence. How can someone support forced military service and still claim to believe all individuals are endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
While commonly thought of as a “left-wing” position, opposition to the draft has historically united Americans across the political spectrum. Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater both opposed the draft while running for president. Russell Kirk, the scholar who helped popularize the term “conservative,” opposed conscription.
Some progressives oppose a military draft but support other forms of mandatory national service. These progressives fail to understand that forcing someone to serve the welfare state is just as immoral as forcing someone to serve the warfare state.
Some conservatives join progressives in supporting mandatory national service. These conservatives claim that mandatory national service provides young people a way to “pay back” the debt they owe society. But these are moral obligations owed to families, churches, and communities, not legal obligations owed to, and properly enforceable by, the government.
Libertarians are consistent opponents of all forms of mandatory service. This is because libertarians apply the prohibitions against violence, theft, and fraud to governments as well as private citizens. So, if it is wrong for your neighbors to force your children to mow the neighbors’ lawn, it is wrong for government to force your children to serve in the military or perform any other type of “national service.”
The nonaggression principle is why libertarians oppose taxation, nationalized healthcare and education, and military crusades in the name of “democracy” or “human rights.” It is also why libertarians oppose laws telling people how to raise their children, limiting access to “extremist” websites, telling business owners who can and cannot use what bathrooms on their property, or prohibiting someone from gambling online, smoking marijuana, or drinking raw milk.
Some libertarians urge their liberty movement compatriots to not talk about the nonaggression principle. These “pragmatists” think the focus should be on making the “practical” case for liberty. But those who embrace liberty because it “works” better than statism will make “exceptions” if they think an authoritarian idea like mandatory national service is a more practical way of achieving their political, economic, or social goals. Only those committed to the moral case for liberty can be counted on to defend all liberty at all times.
But it is notoriously difficult to get the lower social classes to change their habits. Therefore, in the name of equality (for could there be any equality more important than in the number of years lived?), men of high social class, and women of all social classes, should be encouraged to smoke more, to smoke for the sake of social justice.
As everyone knows, or by now ought to know, the only possible explanation of differing outcomes between groups is prejudice, privilege, and oppression by those groups with more favorable outcomes. It follows that the only solution to the anomaly of differential outcomes, and the restoration of the primordial equality that is natural to mankind, is restitution, compensation, expropriation, positive discrimination, etc.
One of the most startling differentials, of course, is that between men and women. It is surely time for it to be redressed.
For example, I was reading in Le Figaro only yesterday that nearly 58 percent of deaths from Covid in France were of men, and only 42 percent of women. This only brings into sharp relief a fundamental injustice that has gone unaddressed for decades, indeed has been largely unnoticed, namely the fact that women live, on average, several years longer than men. For example, women live just over three and a half years longer in Britain than men; in the U.S., the difference is five years; in France, six; in Russia, ten. Overall in the world, men were the victims of 73 percent of fatal road accidents and 78 percent of homicides. “Once equality of life expectancy is achieved, our societies will be much happier.”
What is to be done about these truly shocking statistics? As we all agree, equality is one of the most precious, if not the most precious, of all political values, for there can be no justice without it.
Let us take homicide as an example. In only two countries, Switzerland and Hong Kong, is the desirable goal of equality of victimhood reached. How have they reached this elevated level of civilization, that is to say a just, fair, and equal distribution of the murdered? I confess that I do not have the answer, and I doubt that anyone else has it either. Could there be a more appropriate subject for an international commission of inquiry? Once it had reached its conclusions, other countries could institute homicide awareness training, to ensure that murderers, or potential murderers, were aware of the social justice implications of their acts.
Of course, achieving equality will not be easy: We shall have to guard against overcorrection, which would be equally unjust. But it must be frankly admitted that it is easier to increase the numbers of homicides than to reduce them, so that, regrettably, if the ultimate goal of equality is to be reached, it may be necessary… Well, I leave it to the reader to draw the conclusion.
Over the past half century and more we have witnessed a different kind of revolution; it does not employ as weapons of choice the tank and bayonet, nor the Gulag as the final destination for unrepentant opponents. It leaves nothing of substance behind in its wake. It is an unfolding, all-encompassing cultural movement, subverting and then incorporating in its service diverse extreme revolutionary elements injected into our educational system, into our entertainment industry, into our politics, even into the very language we use to communicate with each other. The “violence” it metes out is mostly of a cerebral nature, not of the physical kind, but rather predicated on shame, humiliation, and the fear of the loss of a job or reputation.
Occasionally I will write and publish longer, more detailed articles and essays for The New English Review. These essays are normally about classical music, philosophy, even a short story and a poem or two. They are not keyed necessarily or directly to specific current events. They usually differ from the shorter pieces of political and social commentary that a reader will find here at My Corner by Boyd Cathey.
Last night I went back and reread one of those longer essays. And I thought—given the Harris/Biden administration’s insane emphasis on what they call “equity,” and the dogmatic imposition of “equality” (which is whatever the progressivist Left currently defines it as)—that I might dust it off and offer it here. I think it gets into and explores the rickety structure, the utter egalitarian fakery that is being imposed on us and on our society, and, in fact, the slogan behind which all sorts of unnatural and devastating—and Satanic—evil is shoved down our throats and pounded into the malleable brains of our captive children.
Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, inThe Masque of Pandora, writes, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” He was not the first to use a version of the phrase, which is found in Sophocles’ play, Antigone. But the meaning has been fairly consistent for over two millennia.
Aren’t we witnessing this today?
A large number of our fellow citizens seem possessed by a kind of madness. They seem to exist in a kind of parallel universe, with its own set of beliefs, its own standards of truth and particular narrative of facts. In almost every respect this universe represents the contrary, the negation, of the inherited, rooted foundation on which our historic Western and Christian civilization is based.
This contrary reality did not all of a sudden spring up, it has existed and been cultivated and nurtured for centuries. Its founding ideologues understood that their premises and desired objectives ran up full force against the ingrained traditions and historic legacy of a culture and civilization that traced its origins not only to the beliefs of the ancient Hebrews, but also to the highest art, philosophy and statecraft of the Greeks and Romans.
Encouraged by the Emperor Constantine at the First Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.) and two centuries later by the Emperor Justinian the Great, the empire both East and West recognized the primacy of Divine Positive Law—the laws and revealed teachings of God and His Church. But not only that: this transformation signaled the explicit foundation of Europe based not only on Revelation, but also upon the reality of Natural Law, those rules inscribed in nature and integral to it that also have as their Author, God Himself. The Christian civilization that came about was built securely and firmly not only on Holy Scripture but also the traditions and the legacy of those ancient cultures that were not destroyed by the Faith, but fulfilled and completed by it.
In the incredibly rich inheritance of ancient philosophy there was a recognition that there were discernible “laws” which govern the orderly operation and functioning of the social order and make possible a harmonious communal existence within society. What the Christian church did was to confirm the existence of those laws while adding a capstone, a divine sanction and specificity derived from Revelation and the teachings of Jesus Christ and the Church. Thus, this transformation of ancient society was prescriptive, conservative in the best sense of that word.
Is this template not the exact opposite of the modernist, progressivist revolution which seeks to cut society off from its inheritance, depriving it of the accumulated wealth of that heritage?
No doubt, change and reform, in some degree, always must occur in society. But these changes do not affect the necessity of our acceptance of the unaltered and unalterable higher laws given by God or the laws inscribed in nature. Rather, they occur on a practical level in any well-functioning society. There is a quote from Prince Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s famous novel describing the revolutionary turmoil of mid-19th century Italy, The Leopard (Il Gattopardo): “Things will have to change in order that they remain the same.” In 1963 director Luchino Visconti directed an exquisite film of the same name based on that novel, starring, quite improbably, Burt Lancaster. The film vividly portrays the tensions between the immemorial past and the circumstances created by political and social change.
What Lampedusa’s principle character, the Prince of Salina is saying is that no society—no culture—can completely denude itself of its inheritance and its history and actually survive. And more, a denial of natural law and the Divine Positive Law ends catastrophically. Such experiments in total revolutionary transformation have inevitably ended in violent bloodshed and incredible destructiveness—in the massacres of the French Revolution, and more recently, in the Gulag and the concentration camp, or in blood-soaked Maoism.
Over the past half century and more we have witnessed a different kind of revolution; it does not employ as weapons of choice the tank and bayonet, nor the Gulag as the final destination for unrepentant opponents. It leaves nothing of substance behind in its wake. It is an unfolding, all-encompassing cultural movement, subverting and then incorporating in its service diverse extreme revolutionary elements injected into our educational system, into our entertainment industry, into our politics, even into the very language we use to communicate with each other. The “violence” it metes out is mostly of a cerebral nature, not of the physical kind, but rather predicated on shame, humiliation, and the fear of the loss of a job or reputation. It plays on the natural human desire for conformity, while steadily upping the ante in our laws—constantly moving the goalposts of what is acceptable and unacceptable. It is the kind of intellectual “violence” now writ large that once impelled people to look the other way when their neighbors were hauled off to Siberia under Comrade Stalin, or to Dachau under Hitler. But, arguably, it is worse, for it denies the very existence of those immutable laws that govern the universe.
It has been highly effective, utilizing as its major weaponry the terrifying twins, the inexpungable accusations of “racism” and “sexism,” and a whole panoply of sub-terms that accompany such charges: “white supremacy,” “historic white oppression,” “colonialist imperialism,” “misogyny,” “toxic masculinity,” and increasingly expanded to incorporate terms like “anti-migrant” or “anti-transgender” bigotry.
The overarching desire of this progressivist revolution is, in fact, not reform—not what Lampedusa’s Prince of Salina says consolingly about some things changing so that other things can remain the same. No, it is incredibly “post-Marxian,” making the older Communist and Marxist revolutionary dreams seem tame in comparison. It invokes and demands a total transformation in which nearly all, if not all, of those institutions, those traditions, and that inheritance vouchsafed to us from our ancestors is rudely discarded, rejected, and condemned as racist, sexist, fascist—in other words, our remembered past is cut off from us.
This progressive revolution is predicated on the idea of equality. Yet, in fact, the equality as envisaged does not exist and has never existed in nature. For revolutionary “equality” is a slogan, in reality an exercise in guile and subterfuge employed to shame and cajole a weak-willed and gullible citizenry into eventually dissolving the traditional social bonds and inherited natural (and moral) laws that have governed our culture for two millennia. Its true objective is domination over and power in society.
As an increasingly independent outgrowth of an historic cultural Marxism formulated decades ago and insinuated into our educational systems and entertainment industry, this assault on our historic culture makes the template of the old Soviet Communists appear conservative. Josef Stalin would never have, and never did, put up with same sex marriage, transgenderism, or the kind of feminist extremism we see around us today. True, the Soviets talked of equality, and women occupied some professional positions, but for the Reds a strong family and observance of supposedly “outdated” traditional morality were still important.
Revolutionary equality, in the form of egalitarianism, is not only a rebellion against the Divine Positive Law, but also against Nature, that is, against the way things are and function naturally in our world, those workings and that usual consistency observed as prescriptive laws for thousands of years.
There is a parable in the Gospel of St. Matthew, the Parable of the Talents (Mt. 25:14-30; The Parable of the Bags of Gold/NIV), which both mirrors and confirms those laws. The three servants of the Master are given unequal amounts and told to be faithful stewards and invest the talents wisely. The first two, those with the largest amounts, comply and double their accounts; but the servant with the least amount fails to use his one Talent, and thus is condemned: “You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? . . . So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents . . . As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
Boyd D. Cathey was educated at the University of Virginia (MA, Thomas Jefferson Fellow) and the Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain (PhD, Richard M. Weaver Fellow). He is a former assistant to the late author, Dr. Russell Kirk, taught on the college level, and is retired State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives. Has published widely and in various languages. He resides in North Carolina.
Despite all the lip service about democracy, justice, human rights, freedom, equality and so forth—the entire Washington establishment exists for the sole purpose of perpetuating the empire.
How do I know?
Because the media response to the January 6th attack at the Capitol reveals the Washington establishment’s true nature.
The political class has commenced Operation Destroy Trump. The Washington machine will stop at nothing to expose every character flaw, every incompetency, and every authoritarian tendency of Trump.
Except one thing; if I wanted to prove that Trump was a dangerous racist dictator with no regard for human decency I could do it pretty easily, and I wouldn’t even have to search for subliminal messages in his bumbling speeches.
Trump has been complicit in a genocidal war waged by Saudi Arabia that has killed over 200,000 Yemeni civilians.
Trump illegally assassinated a high ranking member of the Iranian government—a sovereign government that the United States is not at war with—risking a conflict that would certainly produce more casualties than any other war this century!
Trump has dropped more drone strikes on Somalian civilians in 2020 than Bush and Obama did in 10 years combined! He also killed more Afghan civilians via airstrikes in 2019 than any other year in that war!
Where was mainstream media? Where was Congress? they must have been combing through speeches and tweets for racist dog whistles and subliminal calls to violence because they certainly weren’t monitoring the American drones dropping bombs on the heads of black children in Somalia.
Trying to prove Trump is the most dangerous president in U.S. history, while not attacking him on the worst atrocities he has committed is criminal, maybe even slanderous in a morbid way.
Why are the media and congress silent on these war crimes, especially at a time when they will stop at nothing to destroy President Trump?
Because the media is complicit—they exist to serve the empire.
Nothing that substantially challenges the presumption of U.S. global hegemony ever makes the airwaves. Yes, every once in a while the media will toss a low ranking soldier under the bus for war crimes, but those crimes are never presented in a way that challenges the policy. And to their credit, the media did create a hoopla over the assassination of Iranian General Qassam Soleimani, but again, they never asked the critical questions that would challenge U.S. policy in the region.
The mainstream media is state media in all but name. Journalists enjoy relationships with various anonymous sources within the intelligence community who leak cherry-picked intelligence for news rooms to gobble up in exchange for writing news stories that parrot the regime’s official lines.
After the lines are repeated enough times to satisfy Joseph Goebbels, a litany of retired generals who sit on the boards of defense contractors (which is never disclosed) make their rounds on cable news networks as they pass the ready-made sermons of the empire along to the people without a bit of skepticism from the host. In other words, the American people are exclusively inundated with the opinions of so-called experts who all stand to financially or professionally benefit from war.
The formula is rather simple. The think tanks create the policy; congress implements the policy; the network news manufactures your thirst for war; and the defense contractors fasten the weapons and buys everyone else off. Ultimately, money is moved from your pocket and is used to line the pockets of the whole cabal.
That’s why no one on network news, despite their real hatred of him, will ever dunk on Trump with the phrase “Trump is a war criminal.” Because even taking out Trump is not worth the American people wondering for even a second what exactly they mean by war criminal.
The mainstream media is not just complicit with the empire, in fact, their sole job is to protect the empire against any threat to it, such as Trump. Trump was the first candidate in recent history to make it into the Oval Office without the approval of the Washington establishment. He cracked the code of American politics by circumventing the filters of the corporate media and spoke directly to the American people through social media. The recent social media purges against Trump and his inner circle was not spontaneous, it was premeditated. The Washington machine was merely waiting for a catalyst event to occur so it could reassert its stranglehold on American political discourse.
Before Trump broke the system, the presidential primary elections were designed specifically for the corporate media to weed out unacceptable candidates. What constitutes unacceptable? Anyone who opposes the American global empire. The media gatekeepers successfully scuttled every campaign that advocated radical foreign policy change. Tulsi Gabbard spent her 2020 primary season getting ridiculed on TV for allegedly being a friend of dictators, which is an impressive way to spin her anti-war platform. Gabbard was simply getting the Ron Paul treatment, who was also lambasted by the elites during his presidential runs (2008, 2012) for having the gall to point out the evil hypocrisies of American foreign policy. The Washington machine conspired to steal the democratic nomination from Bernie Sanders twice – not because of his democratic socialism – but because he wasn’t an empire zealot either. The message is clear: anything goes in American politics except questioning the empire.
In 2016, on a Republican debate stage Trump openly called the Iraq war a mistake, criticized our wars in Afghanistan and Syria, and questioned our role in NATO. The media worked overtime to ensure a Trump defeat, but Trump proved to be bulletproof because of his cult-like following on social media. Of course, Trump never quite lived up to his promises of an America First foreign policy as he perpetuated the criminal wars of his predecessors. However, it was clear that the Washington establishment was terrified of what he might do, which is why most of his administration was plagued with a ridiculous investigation of a Russian collusion hoax that nobody believed, followed by an impeachment based on the flimsiest of pretexts. They were grasping at straws to get rid of Trump.
Trump’s improbable victory caused a panic in 2016 until the establishment realized that Trump had very little understanding of his own America First ideology. A Trump presidency could be managed by the Washington machine as long as Trump didn’t appoint anyone who could implement his campaign promises. For the most part, the Washington establishment was able to control the Trump administration with well placed neocons such as Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, and Jim Jeffrey who worked tirelessly to undermine Trump’s vision at every foreign policy turn. The only redeeming quality the Washington establishment saw in Trump was his hawkishness on China, which the media has been happy to help propagandize the American people into supporting a trade war and military posturing in the South China Sea.
As the Trump movement comes to an end the chickens are coming home to roost. Washington was so worried about controlling and eliminating Trump that they neglected his base, which has become increasingly radicalized due to the media’s deranged hostility towards them.
The anger of Trump’s base came to head on January 6th when protesters stormed the Capitol building because they believed the election had been stolen from Trump. Of course the violence at the Capitol was inexcusable, but why was the Washington outrage machine cranked up to level 11?
Washington is panicking because they see the unfolding events as an existential threat to their stranglehold on the American people and their global empire. The Washington machine was unable to stop Trump’s 2016 insurgent campaign, and Washington’s damage control strategy only worked to contain Trump’s policies but failed to control his growing popular base. Here’s three reasons why panic is suddenly setting in in the Imperial city.
First, the ruling class recognizes that their power is waning. George Bush’s Global War on Terror was truly a global war fought on two fronts, international and domestic. The national security state was given a shot in the arm with the Patriot Act, and Americans have been taking their shoes off at airports ever since. After twenty years of war, it’s undeniable that the war abroad has been a miserable failure (Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria). But despite the empire’s failures abroad, the American people could always be counted on to stay in line. Now it seems the population is spiraling out of control of the Washington handlers.
Second, the violence is finding its target. The ruling elite has always tolerated violence as long as it stays on the peripheral and is directed at factions within the population, such as the Black Lives Matter protests this past summer. Although their cause may be misguided and their legitimate anger has been manipulated, the Capitol protesters have at least identified the proper source of all their frustrations, Congress. Congress has robbed all of us blind in pursuit of their maniacal vision of global dominance, and now—to their surprise—the war has come home.
Finally, whether the claims of the protesters are true or not, this event exposes American democracy for the sham that it is. The assumption of U.S. global hegemony is derived from the belief that America has a uniquely exceptional system of government. When an angry mob storms the Capitol building because 34% of voters believe the election was fraudulent, America’s exceptional system appears to be a myth. Therefore, the foundation of America’s global empire is nothing but a house of cards on display for the world to see.
To the empire zealots, this wasn’t just an attack on a government building, this was an attack on a religious structure, which should raise red flags. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi both referred to the Capitol as a “temple to democracy.” Joe Biden called the process of ratifying the election “sacred.” The Capitol is their vatican, their religion is American democracy, and their salvation is fighting evangelical wars to spread their religion far and wide. To these true believers, only America’s government is sacred. No one was referring to Muammar Gadhafi’s government buildings as sacred when Schumer, Pelosi, and Biden all supported Obama bombing those buildings to spread the blessings of American democracy to Libya. Trump and his supporters have exposed America’s favorite export, democracy, as a rotten product. For Washington’s empire lackeys, such as Republican Liz Cheney, this attack on America’s religion can not be tolerated.
In response, the domestic War on Terror, which previously relied on spying and government psyops, is now being fought in plain sight. Congress immediately moved to impeach Trump with just days to go in his administration to make sure that he never gets near the strings of power again. The Capitol protestors are labeled as “domestic terrorists” to clear the road for a new domestic terrorism bill in the upcoming Biden Administration. Big tech has been co-opted to do the government’s bidding by removing anyone deemed a dangerous subversive from the internet. Take out their leaders, label them terrorists, and disrupt their lines of communication. Sound familiar?
The Republican base, which has always been loyal to the Empire, has lost its faith in American Exceptionalism. The Past 12 months of impeachments, lockdowns, corporate bailouts, left-wing riots, mandatory white privilege training, and censorship has pushed a large segment of Republicans into a corner where they feel like they have nothing to lose. Despite all the nonsense rhetoric about right wing militias, the reason the Capitol police was so unprepared for this moment was because the right doesn’t normally act like this. Now Washington realizes they have a full on insurgency on their hands that isn’t going away no matter how bad they want to wish it out of existence.
It’s tempting to interpret the empire’s employment of its awesome powers against the American people as a sign of its overwhelming strength. But that’s false. This is a sign of weakness. This is how empires die, like a wounded beast lashing out as it takes its last gasps. The war on the home front is failing. The people are rejecting the government which increasingly feels as if it’s being forced upon them. The government response is merely the domestic surge (like Iraq’s in 2007, and Afghanistan’s in 2009) that puts a bandaid over an infection that will continue to spread underneath. That infection is our lack of consent. Washington is now recognized for what it is, an occupying force that hardly anyone consents to anymore. After the last 4 years of the left declaring “not my president,” the right will share that same sentiment for the next 4 years.
People are finally waking up and realizing that the federal government stopped caring about its citizens long ago. The beginning of the end was when President Truman stood up the national security state after World War II and declared that the U.S. government would counter the Soviet Union in every country on the map, including our own. After 70 years, the United States has morphed into a rogue military state hiding behind a facade of democracy that exists only to feed its own lust to dominate the globe at the expense of the American people. While the empire spoiled over $6.4 Trillion in the last 20 years looking for other countries to fix, America was slowly crumbling and stood woefully unprepared to respond to domestic emergencies, such as a pandemic or a fedup American population that has begun to reject government legitimacy.
There is no putting the genie back in the bottle. The system is exposed. The empire can not be reigned in, it’s a cancer that has metastasized to engulf the entirety of the beltway. The only solution is secession and a peaceful dissolution of the federal government. If that sounds crazy to you, consider the alternative: a perpetual cycle of hatred and violence that may end in a bloody civil war.
Kenny MacDonald is a former Navy SEAL and veteran of the war in Afghanistan. He is currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in history. Follow his Youtube channel here.
There are so many totalitarian agendas being met, that little will be left for the ruling elite to accomplish, as the entirety of the population is making it easy for the government to turn this country into an authoritarian cesspool.
There is no way to know for sure if this alleged new virus is real or fake, but what is certain is that people worldwide have accepted the hype, and are panicking to an extent that is sheer lunacy.
This is what the “American people” have allowed by their apathetic behavior and indifference, and by their selfish desire for undeserved and unattainable equality. What will be left after this takeover will be an empty existence, and all will be equal, as all will be slaves.
“I admit that I myself am far from having a complete command of every topic I touch on, but my knowledge of my subject is always greater than the interest or the understanding of my auditors. You see, there is one very good thing about mankind; the mediocre masses make very few demands of the mediocrities of a higher order, submitting stupidly and cheerfully to their guidance” ~ Alfred de Vigny, Stello
The newest pandemic to strike America, and the rest of the world as well, is a disease with many strains of the gene called “stupidity.” I have not in my lifetime seen this much ignorance displayed by so many all at the same time. Something so normal as a minor flu has stilled the earth, and has caused almost all of humanity to be consumed by fear and a total lack of logical thought. It is even worse than I present here, as people are going against each other, monitoring their neighbors for the state, hiding in their homes as ordered, closing their businesses, voluntarily leaving their jobs, and cowering to the false authority of a government that is pretending to be God on high.
As of this writing, a little over 10,000 people have supposedly died from this so-called coronavirus, and that number is most likely much overstated. All this as 300,000 to 700,000 will die worldwide this year from the common flu. This is no pandemic; it is madness. Why are so many so blind?
There are so many totalitarian agendas being met, that little will be left for the ruling elite to accomplish, as the entirety of the population is making it easy for the government to turn this country into an authoritarian cesspool. What is ahead is rule by the few over a weak and mindless proletariat. If the real criminals were as easy to round up and control as the collective society of America, there would be no crime. Instead, the criminals will remain in power, while the rest of this pathetic populace will house in their own prisons.
Propaganda at this level is unheard of, and this moment in time will go down as the most absurd and fantastical idiocy in the history of man. All should fear for their very lives, but not due to any fake virus or pandemic, but because they have submitted to an absurdity beyond the imagination of the sane. Apparently, the world we have known is over, and the new world order that will replace it will be one of total control. This is not science fiction; it is now reality.
There is no way to know for sure if this alleged new virus is real or fake, but what is certain is that people worldwide have accepted the hype, and are panicking to an extent that is sheer lunacy. The most likely and most plausible cause of this virus is that this flu strain, regardless that it is not what is being projected, was created in a lab, and if that is accurate, then this entire takeover of the world economy was purposely planned far in advance. This is how the ruling elite and their pawns in government do things, and the only new aspect of this is the severity of the propaganda, and the ludicrous lack of response to those lies by the common collective hordes of sleeplike drones.
The economy as it has existed is finished, and a new system will be forthcoming. Cash will have to be eliminated, whether it be due to a false threat of contagion or not, but a new fully controlled system will be implemented over time, and it will be digitally controlled. This will allow for the monetary system to be used to force people into compliance with all state rules and restrictions, because all access to life-sustaining needs will be subject to behavior and credit scores. This system that is coming is one that relies on a central grid controlled by a hidden governing body beholding to the master planners. This is called technocracy, and given that this coup is successful, it will in time become the norm.
Resistance will most likely be absent, just as it has been so far, mainly because once this economy is purged, and the financial collapse is complete, the destruction of current savings will be evident. This leaves most everyone vulnerable and dependent on government, just as is planned. Without freedom of movement, productive jobs, food, staples, and without wealth, little will remain for the lowly citizen other than to comply with state mandates in order to survive.
Trump, the dictator puppet in charge, has the power to ground all flights, to halt all stock trading for markets, and also could order all to stay in their homes by force of law. This would be nothing less than planned totalitarian rule by fiat, and would cause the end of many lives, and forever alter the lives of all remaining. Any left standing would be subject to martial law. This is not only possible, but could be coming soon.
This is what the “American people” have allowed by their apathetic behavior and indifference, and by their selfish desire for undeserved and unattainable equality. What will be left after this takeover will be an empty existence, and all will be equal, as all will be slaves. This is really happening, and is not temporary, but will be the new normal if a total revolt by the masses is not forthcoming. Be prepared for the worst mankind can dish out, because what will come of this is pure hell!
Ottmar Edenhofer, lead author of the IPCC’s fourth summary report released in 2007, speaking in 2010 advised: “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”
U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres said that the true aim of the U.N.’s 2014 Paris climate conference was “to change the (capitalist) economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”
Christine Stewart, Canada’s former Minister of the Environment said: “No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits. … Climate change (provides) the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
Tim Wirth, former U.S. Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs and the person most responsible for setting up the Kyoto Protocol said: “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”
The absolute worst case of professional incompetence and dishonesty is in the area of climate science. Tony Heller has exposed some of the egregious dishonesty of mainstream environmentalists in a video he’s titled “My Gift To Climate Alarmists.” Environmentalists and their political allies attribute the recent increase in deadly forest fires to global warming. However, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, forest fires reached their peak in the 1930s and have declined by 80% since then. Environmentalists hide the earlier data and make their case for the effects of global warming by showing the public and policymakers data from 1980 that shows an increase in forest fires.
Climate scientists claim that rising sea levels are caused by man-made global warming. Historical data from the tide gauge in Lower Manhattan shows that sea levels have been rising from about the time when Abraham Lincoln was president to now. Heller says that sea levels have been rising for about 20,000 years. He points out that anthropologists believe that when the sea level was very low people were able to walk from Siberia to North America.
Hot weather is often claimed to be a result of man-made climate change. Heller presents data showing the number of days in Waverly, Ohio, above 90 degrees. In 1895, there were 73 days above 90 degrees. In 1936, there were 82 days above 90 degrees. Since the 1930s, there has been a downward trend in the number of days above 90 degrees. If climatologists hide data from earlier years and started at 1955, they show an increase in the number of above 90-degree days from eight or nine to 30 or 40. Thus, to deceive us into thinking the climate is getting hotter, environmentalists have selected a starting date that fits their agenda.
You might ask: “Who is Tony Heller? Does he work for big oil?” It turns out that he is a scientist and claims to be a lifelong environmentalist. From what I can tell, he has no vested interests. In that respect, he is different from those who lead the environmental movement, who often either work for or are funded by governments.
Once in a while environmentalists reveal their true agenda. Ottmar Edenhofer, lead author of the IPCC’s fourth summary report released in 2007, speaking in 2010 advised: “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.” U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres said that the true aim of the U.N.’s 2014 Paris climate conference was “to change the (capitalist) economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.” Christine Stewart, Canada’s former Minister of the Environment said: “No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits. … Climate change (provides) the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.” Tim Wirth, former U.S. Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs and the person most responsible for setting up the Kyoto Protocol said: “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”
Not all scientists are dishonest and not all news reporters are leftists with an agenda. But one wonders at the deafening silence where there’s clear, unambiguous evidence. For example, if ocean levels have been rising for some 20,000 years, why do scientists allow environmentalists to get away with the claim that it’s a result of man-made global warming? Why aren’t there any reporters to highlight leftist statements such as those by Edenhofer, Stewart and others who want to ride global warming as a means to defeat capitalism and usher in socialism and communism? I would prefer to think that the silence of so many scientists represent their fears as opposed to their going along with the environmental extremist agenda.
MCViewPoint 
