The Biden directive also targets Bible buyers and Bass Pro Shop customers.
Serves you deplorables right for clinging to your religion and all that other stuff government doesn’t like.
The failing banking industry has been rolling over and reporting on customers since 9/11 and Dubya. Probably before that. They can’t survive without government handouts.
This week, Hillary Clinton publicly proposed “formal deprogramming” for MAGA enthusiasts…
Our public politicians fear those who – much like the ownership class in the Soviet Union circa 1980s – have already decided what debt to write down, which investments to consolidate, and how to profit from the coming collapse of government debt, and governments, around the planet. Our first priority may be to recognize that the public enemies called out by our frightened politicians may be nascent heroes, future martyrs, and standard bearers.
This week, Hillary Clinton publicly proposed “formal deprogramming” for MAGA enthusiasts, piling on a repeated President Biden theme of trying to deal with “an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy. The MAGA movement.”
The nation recently discovered that the FBI has a new “MAGA Extremist” category. All this hard work by government is aimed at “preserving democracy.” Clinton is particularly concerned about the small extremist “tail” wagging the House Republican caucus, and destroying not only decorum, but the institution itself.
It is tempting to be mildly entertained by all of this, but as Tho Bishop noted “Weak regimes are particularly dangerous.” The Western/NATO/Blackrock conversation about Ukraine turned to “next steps” many months ago. Our current weak regime here at home – a group of dominant state beneficiaries looking down the barrel of a financial, societal, and military hegemonic collapse trifecta– is also considering next steps for us.
Beyond hunting down MAGAts, and perhaps loading them on trains for deprogramming somewhere, what else is coming, and what can we learn now that will help?
We can learn from the collapse of the USSR in 1989, a seemingly sudden breakdown of what appeared to be a strong and centralized federal state, that had in actuality lost control of the economy, the culture, and the narrative at least a decade earlier. People and regions itching for independence, and those challenging the narrative, were enemies of the State. At the end of that story, what remained were many of the same political oligarchs, many of them internationalized, in control of most of the former USSR’s economic and natural resources. The poor, invested in and dependent upon socialist promises, stayed poor, and many got poorer.
For several years, the death rate climbed in Russia. Power shifted, but maybe not as radically as we were told. While we celebrate Gorbachev as the leader who made the end of the USSR possible with restructuring and transparency – many Russians saw, and experienced, what happened a little differently.
The main-stream media has repeated almost daily that Donald Trump and several important MAGA-friendly organizations continue to support the so-called “big lie,” namely, that the 2020 election was stolen. They also repeat almost daily that this conclusion about that election is totally bogus since “no evidence” of substantial election fraud was ever uncovered in the 65+ lawsuits filed after the election; Trump and his supporters lost them all. The election was stolen? What nonsense. It’s all “delusional thinking” and irrational conspiracy theory. Case closed.
Well not quite.
The American Bar Association (ABA) has published a list of the legal filings that challenged the results of the 2020 election and a summary of the court findings in each case. It makes for very interesting reading.
The most important lesson to be drawn from these case summaries is that the bulk of them have (almost) nothing to do with the alleged evidence concerning voter and election fraud. And the reason for this is reasonably clear. Fraud is itself an extremely difficult legal matter to litigate; along with any relevant empirical evidence, the legal concepts of due diligence and “intent” would have to be fully explored. Moreover, any determination of election and/or voter fraud would have required (at a very minimum) a so-called “evidentiary hearing” where the court would take testimony under oath from expert witnesses; accept and evaluate properly supported affidavits; evaluate any relevant election data analysis, and explore the murky issue of “intent” (by elected officials and others) at some length. To my knowledge, none of this process or analysis occurred in any systematic manner in any of the 65 post-2020 election challenge cases.
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So what were these cases really about? My reading of the summaries convinces me that the courts were concerned almost exclusively with what are termed “procedural issues” and not with the actual substance of what would constitute election fraud. For example, the so-called issue of “standing” is procedural. Does a particular plaintiff have the legal right to bring this action? If the answer is “no” then the entire case is summarily dismissed. (This happened in several of the challenge cases). This, of course, is a perfectly appropriate ruling but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue of substantial fraud one way or the other.
In another one of the 65 cases, the judge actually asked why the plaintiff could not have filed suit before the election regarding some alleged problem in the way the voting process was likely to be administered. “Too late now” the judge said, in effect. Case dismissed. One judge actually asserted that any complaints about the legitimate certification of the election (in Georgia) were all now “moot” since “the election results… had already been certified.” But the issue of “certification legitimacy” was the very concept that the plaintiffs were challenging! Unbelievable.
Along the way, they secured funding to increase, arm, and expand the scope of federal agencies—an Imperial Guard for Washington elites to remind red states who is truly in charge.
It was the display of a weak regime projecting strength at a time of mass unpopularity and rising polling numbers of political opponents in pivotal midterm elections.
Last night Joe Biden was propped up behind the presidential seal in front of historic Independence Hall and gave the most provocative and divisive speech in modern American history. With the site of the signing of the Declaration of Independence cloaked in an ominous blood red, Biden sputtered his way through an attack on “insurrectionists” he labeled as threatening American democracy, political norms, and the rule of law.
The optics of the event were likely the idea of a proud Biden staffer, fresh off receiving a $10,000 subsidy to their student loan debt, leaning into the “Dark Brandon” aesthetic that has become popular among regime loyalists on Twitter. To Americans outside of this Very Online echo chamber, the imagery drew connotations of sinister authoritarian regimes ranging as Nazi Germany, the Empire of Star Wars, or the fascist regime of V for Vendetta.
The substance of the speech supported these comparisons. It was the display of a weak regime projecting strength at a time of mass unpopularity and rising polling numbers of political opponents in pivotal midterm elections.
None of this is a surprise.
As I noted after the chaotic 2020 election, the federal government faced a threat it has not seen in over a hundred years. Concerns over the integrity of the 2020 election struck at the core of the institution’s democratic legitimacy. The result was a Biden inauguration fortified with thousands of national guard members that the Democrat Party didn’t trust with ammunition.
The path the Biden administration took could have gone one of two ways. The regime could have fallen back on the power of moderation, restoring the isolated Washington uniparty by staffing the executive branch with prominent Republicans who always preferred the Clintons and Bidens over Trump—even if the smart ones refused to say so explicitly—while pursuing a standard policy agenda of foreign intervention, reckless spending, and fortifying the supremacy of the federal government over state control. These policies would have continued American decline but could have served to lull Americans to pre-Trump apathy by reminding them that federal elections have no real consequences for Washington.
Instead, the Biden regime doubled down on the excesses of the Obama era, attacking hot-button issues such as gun rights, tying state funding to public school promotion of child mutilation and sterilization, and leveraging their control over large corporations to censor political opponents and mandate covid vaccinations of employees. Along the way, they secured funding to increase, arm, and expand the scope of federal agencies—an Imperial Guard for Washington elites to remind red states who is truly in charge.
Governments have lost control of the narrative that they are in control of events. Everyday I wake up to another instance of outrageous censorship from some ‘social media’ company blocking or banning someone for no apparent reason.
And another mask is ripped off revealing the ugly totalitarians underneath.
It begins with legitimizing de-platforming people like Alex Jones and social media companies like Gab. Because some speech is too free. These are people supposedly too fringe to be suffered.
So it’s easy to whip up some public support for censorship of them alongside a one-sided media bombardment of justify their silencing to a large swath of people. Read the rest of this entry »
The U.S. backed a coup in Venezuela that has failed. And President Trump was the architect of it. This is a farce surrounding an intrigue contained within a tragedy.
What has happened in Venezuela is tragic. Nicolas Maduro is a comical figure straight out of central casting for a South American leader of a junta. But it has been the U.S.’s designs on Venezuela’s oil and gas reserves (the largest proven in the world as of 2017) that is the real story behind this week’s events.
For anyone still harboring doubts as to who Trump truly is Venezuela should end them. Trump’s Energy Dominance policy is at the core of his foreign policy. And he will do whatever it takes to secure that policy and deliver a long-standing order to the U.S. and European oligarchy to gain control over Venezuela.