Joe Biden has announced that he is dropping out of the presidential race.
He endorsed Cacklin’ Kamala Harris as his successor.
For those inclined towards Schadenfreude, the next few months of political news should prove richly entertaining.
The serialization of Paul Weston’s book about the COVID-19 scam (most recent chapter here) has made me ruminate on the official mendacity that has been the main feature of whole deadly process. We were lied to about how dangerous the disease was. We were lied to about its origin. We were lied to about the PCR testing regimen that putatively detected infection with the disease. We were lied to about the effectiveness of the measures used to mitigate and contain it.
And above all we were lied to about the safety and effectiveness of the alleged “vaccine”, the experimental mRNA treatment intended to mitigate the effects of infection with the Wuhan Coronavirus.
Most of the liars who told the official lies could fall back on some sort of plausible deniability, no matter how flimsy, to allow themselves to evade responsibility. “Mistakes were made,” “We didn’t know that at the time,” “It was judged to be the best course of action, based on the available data,” etc.
But that wasn’t the case with the promise that the “vaccine” was safe. There is no plausible deniability for those who confidently asserted the safety of the experimental mRNA treatment.
The vax was not proven to be safe. That was obvious to me from the moment I first heard the government’s reassurances. It didn’t require any special scientific or medical knowledge to determine the falsity of statements that the vax was safe. All that was needed was common sense and the ability to think.
If you look at the history of the development of vaccines prior to the mRNA treatments, you’ll discover that a new vaccine typically takes at least five years, and sometimes ten or even fifteen years, before it is fully tested and approved for use. That’s due to a requirement that clinical trials show the new vaccine’s long-range adverse effects — out as far as five years — remain within acceptable limits.
The clinical testing of the mRNA “vaccines” went on for at most a few months before the treatments were given an emergency use authorization (EUA). In order to get around its own regulations, the government could only issue an EUA, because the requirements for general approval had not been met. It was on the basis of that EUA that millions upon millions of people were injected with an experimental new treatment — making them unwitting test subjects in the largest clinical trial in history.
Now that we’re more than three years in, the results of that clinical trial don’t bode well for the mRNA treatment ever being granted full approval for general distribution. The mountain of evidence for the harm caused by the vax just keeps getting higher and higher, with no end in sight. However, from the point of view of the health authorities and the pharmaceutical companies, it doesn’t really matter, because just about everybody who might decide to take the vax has already been injected with it. Massive amounts of money have been transferred from government coffers to Big Pharma’s bank accounts. Additional lucrative mRNA vaccines for new, improved diseases are in the works, so the future looks rosy for Pfizer and Moderna.
In summary: we were lied to about the vax. But not everybody was actually lying — that is, when they said the vax was safe, they thought that what they said was true. Ordinary citizens thought the vax was safe because their doctors told them it was safe, and they trusted their doctors (that trust has now been severely eroded, but that’s a different story). I assume some of those doctors actually believed it themselves, because they trusted the WHO, CDC, NIH, etc. There’s no excuse for not thinking it through in a similar manner to what I described above. But then, most people, including doctors, have never really learned to think.
Way up at the top of the medical food chain, however, people were lying. Scientists and clinicians who had been trained in the development of vaccines and then moved into the highest levels of administration knew all too well that the experimental mRNA treatment intended to mitigate the effects of infection with the Wuhan Coronavirus could not be said to be safe. But they said it was safe anyway.
They were LYING.
I’m thinking specifically of Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, and Rochelle Walensky, but there were many others. They looked the camera in the eye and told the viewing public that the injections they were pushing on them were safe, but they knew it wasn’t true. They knew as well as I did that the safety of the treatments was not yet proven.
But they don’t care. They don’t have to care; they’re Big Medicine.
The following report by Clare Lopez was published earlier this month by Sharia TipSheet.
Women Under Sharia
Iranian President Dead, but Islam’s Abuse of Women Very Much Alive
by Clare M. Lopez
“Iranian Women Celebrate the Death of President Raisi ‘We Freely Dance and Celebrate on Your Dirty Grave’”, by Margaret Flavin at Gateway Pundit, May 20, 2024
“BBC Documentary ‘Nika’s Last Breath’ about 16-year-old Nika Shakarami’s last moments before being raped and murdered in Iran” by Dr. Rich Swier, May 1, 2024.
“A year ago, she drank battery acid to escape life under the Taliban. Today, she has a message for other Afghan girls” by Hilary Whiteman, Anna Coren, Abdul Basir Bina and Javed Iqbal, at CNN, June 30, 2024
“The Sexual Assaults on October 7 Omitted From the White House Fact Sheet” by Hugh Fitzgerald at Front Page Magazine, July 10, 2024
“Arifwala man kills divorced niece in the name of ‘honour’” at English.aaj.tv/news, July 8, 2024
“Nothing Compensates for the Stolen Years’: The Afghan Women Rebuilding Shattered Dreams in Iran” by Stefanie Glinski at The Guardian, July 4, 2024
Well, I woke up today, and the reports on Butler fiasco just got worse and worse. The evidence for (at best) massive, unbelievable incompetence on the part of the Secret Service keeps coming in, to the point that the Director Chick, a diversity hire named Kimberly Cheatle, has found it expedient to blame local law enforcement for allowing a marksman with a high-powered rifle to gain access to a rooftop with a clear line-of-sight shot at Mr. Trump’s head:
According to MSN:
The Secret Service said local police were supposed to secure the rooftop from which gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump.
The federal agency noted the area was outside its designated perimeter for protection.
Local Pennsylvania police officers were responsible for securing and patrolling the factory grounds of American Glass Research, situated approximately 130 yards from where Trump spoke on Saturday, Secret Service representative Anthony Guglielmi said, according to the New York Times.
The Secret Service was assigned to oversee the area where Trump’s rally was held, while local police were brought in to support those efforts and ensure security outside the rally site.
Additionally, CNN reported that one of two local counter-sniper teams was supposed to cover the building where the gunman was positioned.
Neighbors living near Butler Farm Show Grounds claimed they never received visits from any law enforcement agencies, local or federal, in the days before or during the rally despite expecting such security measures as part of the operation, according to the New York Post.
The Secret Service said that relying on local law enforcement for support is a common practice when managing event security.
OK, support by local law enforcement, that’s fine. But depending on them to make sure that a crucial rooftop is clear — that’s not their job; it’s the Secret Service’s job.
So now we have the unseemly spectacle of the director of the Secret Service blaming local law enforcement for her agency’s failure to do its job. Which means that they DELEGATED crucial parts of that job to other actors, which in turn violates the statutory definition of their task. Their job is to protect the president, not to delegate the task to someone else.
Even if the local cops messed up, the responsibility for any failure to protect may be laid solely at the feet of the United States Secret Service.
In a normal, rational political system, Ms. Cheatle’s color coordinated epaulettes would already have been ripped from her uniform, and she would have been forced into immediate retirement while being stripped of her pension. She would be lucky to avoid prosecution for dereliction of duty, or whatever the charge would be for the head of a civilian agency.
But it gets worse.
According to The Daily Mail (hat tip Conservative Tree House), there was no Secret Service sniper stationed near Thomas Crooks’ roosting spot because the slope of the roof was considered too steep:
In his customary pithy fashion, Mark Steyn asks the pertinent question:
Let’s cut to the chase — the US Secret Service: In on it? Or just totally crap?
He then provides an excellent (and witty) analysis of what we know so far about the fiasco at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Excerpting it wouldn’t do it justice; go over and read it yourself.
The thing is, more news about the shooter on the roof has been coming in all day since Mr. Steyn posted his notebook item, and none of it makes the Secret Service look any better. First there’s this story from NBC News (hat tip Vox Day):
Rooftop Where Gunman Shot at Trump Was Identified as a Security Vulnerability Before Rally: Sources
The rooftop where a gunman shot at former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally was identified by the Secret Service as a potential vulnerability in the days before the event, two sources familiar with the agency’s operations told NBC News.
The building, owned by a glass research company, is adjacent to the Butler Farm Show, an outdoor venue in Butler, Pennsylvania. The Secret Service was aware of the risks associated with it, the sources said.
“Someone should have been on the roof or securing the building so no one could get on the roof,” said one of the sources, a former senior Secret Service agent who was familiar with the planning.
Understanding how the gunman got onto the roof — despite those concerns — is a central question for investigators scrutinizing how a lone attacker managed to shoot at Trump during Saturday’s campaign event.
[…]
Investigators will want to examine the Secret Service’s site security plan for the rally, said Cangelosi, the former Secret Service agent. He expects they’ll discover one of two things: Either officials failed to make an effective plan for keeping potential shooters off the building Crooks fired from, or officers on the ground failed to execute the plan.
“I don’t like making any assumptions, but it does look like some mistakes were made, that this was preventable,” said Cangelosi, now a lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
Although it’s common to task local law enforcement agencies with patrolling outside an event’s security perimeter, Cangelosi said, the ultimate responsibility for ensuring that all vulnerabilities are covered rests with the Secret Service. [emphasis added]
This is absolutely clear: The ultimate responsibility for ensuring that all vulnerabilities are covered rests with the Secret Service. Which means that even if local law enforcement screwed up, the Secret Service is responsible for the catastrophic failure that led to President Trump’s Van Gogh ear, a dead fire chief/hero, and two other gravely wounded civilians.
Responsibility, yes. But is it accountable?
One may be forgiven for doubting that anyone with a high level of authority will be held to account. This is, after all, Washington D.C. we’re talking about.
I’ve heard various panjandrums of the Biden administration express their confidence in Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, a diversity hire par excellence. I’m not sure what their confidence is based on — it seems to me that there are two possibilities: either (1) Ms. Cheatle is as massively incompetent as her subordinates who botched the Butler rally, or (2) she has no real control over her agency, and those subordinates acted without her supervision.
Neither of those is a good look.
Chances are, however, the congressional hearings and “independent” investigation will run their course, and Kimberly Cheatle will be given only the mildest of reprimands before being shunted off into some other well-paid high-level sinecure. That’s the way Washington works.
And new black marks against the Secret Service just keep coming in. According to the Pittsburgh TV station WPXI (hat tip Conservative Tree House), local law enforcement were aware of the presence of the man on the roof half an hour before the shooting started:
With yesterday’s assassination attempt on former President Trump, we’ve arrived at a hinge of history. It’s a chaotic moment, in a mathematical sense — impossible to reliably predict what will come next. The differential equations describing the current flow of events have no exact solutions, and the successive approximations have not yet converged on a new basin attractor.
I can’t possibly keep up with the rapid flow of new information, so I won’t be live-blogging any of this.
For the best coverage, I recommend (as usual) Vlad Tepes. Scroll down to the comments for new updates, which he has been adding fairly frequently.
Simplicius has posted some very good site diagrams from Butler, including maps and aerial photos with lots of useful annotations, better than anything else I’ve seen. He also closes his post with these remarks:
It’s clear things are on the brink for the globalist deepstate as they see no further way to tread water without simply eliminating all ascendant resistance leaders; their backs really are against the wall. We are entering a time of great troubles but also great hope, because given their desperation levels it’s clear the final battle is approaching and a grand turning point or realignment is almost upon us.
The big question is whether the Secret Service was guilty of gross incompetence, or something much worse. I don’t have any opinion yet on the matter, but these data points should be noted:
| 1. | A building whose rooftop provided a clear sniper shot at the stage was left outside the security perimeter, and had no Secret Service agents on top to guard it. | |
| 2. | The former president’s security detail had repeatedly requested additional security from the Department of Homeland Security, but was denied it. | |
| 3. | The Secret Service sniper team on the rooftop opposite the gunman had him in their sights, but did not squeeze off any shots before he winged the candidate and killed a bystander. | |
| 4. | More than one eyewitness reported that they had seen the man on the roof and attempted to alert law enforcement and/or the Secret Service, but to no avail. |
Make what you will of those facts.
According to The New York Post, the shooter has now been identified as Matthew Crooks. However, that may not be the final word, because there are uncorroborated reports that it was different guy named Maxwell Yearick. I assume that there are massive amounts of disinformation being injected into the media and the web by players that have a vested interest in pushing the narrative in one direction or another.
The MSM is, of course, useless. Legacy media outlets went out of their way to avoid using the word “assassination”, and even delayed reporting “gunshots” for as long as they could.
And then there the many example of prominent politicians and media people calling for Trump to be liquidated, with varying degrees of explicitness. Keep an eye on Vlad’s place for those, but they are all over the place on other sites.
I expect Conservative Tree House to have extensive coverage today, and WRSA is a great place to keep up with the memes.
Feel free to leave further links in the comments. If you paste a quote that is at all controversial, please include a link showing where you got it.
Below is a BBC interview with an eyewitness to tonight’s attempted assassination of former President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Many thanks to Vlad Tepes and RAIR Foundation for uploading this video (originally from Twitter):
A recent report from a Pittsburgh TV station:
Former President Trump Rushed Offstage After Gunfire Erupts at Butler Rally; Shooter, Bystander Dead
BUTLER, Pa. — Secret Service swarmed the stage as former President Donald Trump was speaking Saturday afternoon at a rally in Butler after gunshots rang out over the crowd. The Butler County district attorney told Pittsburgh’s Action News 4 that two people, the shooter and a bystander, are dead.
Trump could be seen being led offstage to a vehicle by his security detail. It appeared that Trump had been injured, with Associated Press photos showing blood coming from the right side of his face near his ear.
A spokesperson for Trump said, “President Trump thanks law enforcement and first responders for their quick action during this heinous act. He is fine and is being checked out at a local medical facility. More details will follow.”
Trump was less than 10 minutes into a speech when he reached for his head and then ducked behind the podium for cover. The crowd began to scream and cover their heads.
Surrounded by the Secret Service, the former president eventually stood back up, pumped his fist and was escorted from the rally.
Hat tip: Vlad Tepes.
Electoral fraud is a venerable tradition in these United States, with a history going all the way back to the founding of the Republic.
With control of the public purse, representative government provided lucrative opportunities for both elected officials and the corporations that did business with them. Baroque levels of corruption became the norm, and public policy was devised to maximize profits for all involved while concealing the dirty deals behind a scrim of public rectitude.
Controlling the outcome of elections was essential for the smooth operation of the political machinery, in order to make sure that lucrative enterprises continued to generate lucre for everyone involved. The political cartoon below by Thomas Nast features William M. “Boss” Tweed, the head of Tammany Hall and the most powerful man in New York City in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Boss Tweed was able to guarantee results through an elaborate patronage network, lavish bribery, and his control of the ballot-counting process.
So how has the ballot-counting process evolved in the century and a half since the heyday of Boss Tweed?
There is widespread concern among elite opinion-makers that the current electoral process poses a threat to Our Democracy™. One of the most recent public figures to sound the alarm is Rob “Meathead” Reiner, according to Variety:
“It’s time to stop f***ing around,” Reiner wrote. “If the Convicted Felon wins, we lose our Democracy. Joe Biden has effectively served US with honor, decency, and dignity. It’s time for Joe Biden to step down.”
Whether Joe Biden steps down or not, it’s obviously important to elect the Democrat, whoever that might be. Our Democracy™ is in danger if voters are allowed to vote for the wrong candidate (in this case, Donald Trump). With so much at stake, we must do whatever it takes to ensure the election of the approved candidate.
In my previous posts I highlighted the role that propaganda and the suppression of dissent play in this process. But these alone are not sufficient to guarantee the desired outcome — hence the imperative to control the voting process itself.
This requires a multi-pronged approach. The traditional emptying of the cemeteries to produce votes on election day is still part of the effort. But the implementation of the widespread use of absentee ballots and “mail-in voting” — for which we can thank the Wuhan Coronavirus — created an opportunity for ballot fraud at an unprecedented level. The vote-counting process in major cities is controlled by Democrats, with vestigial or non-existent Republican supervision. The Democrat precinct workers — in most cases part of the African-American political machine — are able to ensure that a reliable supply of ballots marked for the correct candidate can be delivered as needed.
The methodology used to produce the necessary results is complex. To gain a better understanding, I highly recommend Conservative Tree House, where Sundance has done extensive research on the intricacies of the ballot-counting process. Here’s an excerpt from a recent post:
I posted on Friday about the consternation expressed by bien-pensants all across the West about dangers to “our democracy”. If you pay attention to what the globalists who claim to represent our interests tell us, the survival of Our Democracy™ requires us to follow the directives of people and organizations that are collectively identified as “stakeholders”. Stakeholders include a fairly large cabal of organizations, political leaders, and representatives of various corporations, NGOs, and charitable foundations. It goes without saying that ordinary voters are not considered stakeholders.
“Stakeholders” is a buzzword that has emerged in the last couple of decades to describe the dirigistes who plan for the future of Our Democracy™. If we were referring to Russia, they would be called “oligarchs”, or further afield in the Third World, perhaps “warlords”. But since these estimable folks are here in the enlightened West, they are simply “stakeholders”.
And we know, of course, that they have our best interests at heart.
The problem is: those pesky voters don’t always understand what their best interests are. When confronted with the difficult issues posed by our advanced technological society, they often make the wrong decisions. That’s why they need the help of those stakeholders, who are better informed about the nuances of our high-tech 21st-century civilization.
On the other hand, it’s important to maintain the polite fiction that the ignorant voters are the ones making the decisions. They’re guaranteed a voice by the universal franchise that was so painstakingly won more than a century ago. It is their right and duty to decide the direction of their affairs via the ballot box.
So what is to be done?
The stakeholders have developed three major strategies for directing the hoi-polloi in their electoral choices.
1. Propaganda
Up until 2016 this was the principal method used to generate the desired result in any given election.
First of all, it’s crucial that the major media be brought under stakeholder control. In Europe and Canada the process is simplified by state ownership of all the major television and radio outlets. In the USA the situation is somewhat more complicated, since most media are ostensibly in private hands. Funnily enough, however, all the major outlets move in lockstep on the most important issues, reliably promoting the line pushed by the stakeholders. Even Fox News is controlled opposition — it is set up as the despised right-wing alternative, yet it never veers far from the acceptable center. And that center has been moving inexorably leftwards since the end of the Second World War.
Various agencies of the permanent administrative state can bring pressure to bear on media outlets to persuade them stick to the preferred narrative. The explosion of official media regulations over the past few decades has guaranteed that every media corporation is breaking multiple laws every day, whether it intends to or not. Selective prosecution is an effective tool to keep the MSM in line. Those who stay within the accepted boundaries are left unmolested, while any outfit that strays too far from the narrative risks being hauled into court and tied up for months or years for violating various FCC regulations. The federal government’s pockets are bottomless, and any media corporation that runs afoul of it will eventually be slapped with a big-time fine, and will have to pay its own legal expenses. So it’s much easier just to stick within well-understood limits.
That’s the stick. The feds can also deploy multiple carrots: subsidies, tax breaks, lucrative contracts, concessions granting exclusive coverage of major public events, etc.
I don’t know all the exact ins and outs of this control system. All I can say with certainty is that the results are obvious: we have compliant media that move in lockstep on every important issue. This was made abundantly clear during the COVID-19 “pandemic”, when all major print and broadcast media simultaneously got with the CDC/NIAID/WHO program and never veered from it. It was uncanny.
The media control system generally worked well up until 2016. One of the legacies of the Second World War was that people had developed an ingrained trust of their national governments, which were perceived as beneficial institutions. As long as that reservoir of good will was still sufficiently deep, people could be herded and “nudged” into the desired behavior patterns, and would vote for candidates that were considered acceptable. The cherished illusion of the ballot box in Our Democracy™ could thus be maintained without having to resort to obvious coercion and fraud.
During every election the democratic process ran its course. The stakeholders would guide the selection of the candidates, and voters would be allowed to choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. It didn’t matter which one they voted for — both were considered acceptable to the Powers That Be, otherwise the stakeholders wouldn’t have put them in place.
Relentless media propaganda would always demonize one of them as “far right”, however — otherwise the center couldn’t be pushed relentlessly to the left. Statistically speaking, the media barrage had its intended effect: on balance, voters opted for more state control, more socialist policies, and more destruction of traditional cultural practices. And the bright shiny progressive Utopia thus drew ever closer.
Unfortunately for the stakeholders, the usual process got derailed in 2016. Tweedledum and Tweedledee were supposed to be Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. Hillary would have won easily, but it wouldn’t matter if the voters resisted the leftward ratchet and chose the “far right” Jeb instead — the latter was fully captured, and posed no threat to the system.
But Donald Trump upset the applecart. He was not under the stakeholders’ control, and it wasn’t supposed to be possible for him to win the nomination, let alone the general election. When he did, the system was threatened. A tremor ran through the foundations of Barad-dûr.
And Mr. Trump wasn’t the only threat: Brexit also caused the earth to shake under the rules-based order of the West. The ignorant, turbulent voters on both sides of the Atlantic had gone against their programming and made choices they weren’t supposed to make.
The stakeholders closed ranks after 2016 and pulled out all the stops to make sure that nothing similar could ever happen again. In the process they were forced to reveal themselves — they had to step out from behind the curtain and wield an iron fist with its velvet glove removed. It was a salutary moment: what had once been a vague outline in the shadows now stood out sharp and clear, red-eyed and fanged.
People became aware they had been manipulated. As a result, the customary propaganda began to lose its effectiveness. It was no longer so easy to fool the Lumpenproletariat. Different tools for control needed to be selected from the stakeholders’ toolbox, which brings us to…
Below is the ninth chapter in the serialization of Paul Weston’s book Covid-19: All Lies. All Crime. Previously: Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
Covid-19: All Lies. All Crime.
by Paul Weston
Chapter 9: How It Started
This chapter is a little out of kilter. It should have been chapter one, but I wanted to expose the fraudulent reporting and engineering of purported Covid-19 deaths first. Once everyone understands this criminal fraud, every other fraud relating to Covid-19 falls into place.
We don’t know when plans were first hatched to engineer a viral pandemic in 2020. We do know about Event 201 in October 2019, though, which was hosted by Johns Hopkins University and organised by the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Event 201 centred around a hypothetical global outbreak of a lethal virus and the subsequent response by governments around the world. It laid the groundwork for lockdowns, masking, and social distancing. None of these tyrannical measures had been part of pandemic health policies before. All the centuries-old, tried-and-trusted viral pandemic response plans were torn up and discarded in favour of targeting the healthy, rather than quarantining the ill.
On the whole, people don’t want to be locked up at home for the best part of a year and instructed to behave as though they were a lethal danger to all living things. Therefore, they had to be conditioned to obey the New Normal rules and regulations related to Covid-19. In short, they had to be terrorised into compliance.
Enter Neil Ferguson, pandemic modeller extraordinaire of Imperial College London. Ferguson predicted Covid-19 could kill half-a-million people in Britain and two million in America. The international media shrieked these headlines to the world. The politicians gravely warned us we were facing apocalyptic events. The World Health Organisation declared a Global Pandemic. Governments declared national health emergencies. And so began the lockdowns. And so began tyranny.
Neil Ferguson had modelled pandemic scenarios before. In 2005 he predicted two hundred million people could die globally from Bird Flu. In reality, only three hundred people died.
In 2009 he predicted sixty-five thousand deaths in the UK from Swine Flu. Only a few hundred died. In 2002 he predicted up to fifty thousand deaths in the UK, resulting from eating beef infected with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy — otherwise known as Mad Cow Disease. In reality only one hundred and seventy people died.
In 2001 Ferguson’s Imperial team produced modelling on foot and mouth disease suggesting animals should be culled without evidence of infection. This led to the slaughter of more than six million perfectly healthy cattle, sheep and pigs.
In the past few years the phrase “our democracy” has gained near-universal currency in the West. Politicians and media talking heads continually invoke “our democracy” when urging or discouraging action on this or that significant political initiative. Every crisis is a “threat to our democracy.” Any reformer with a conservative agenda is charged with “attempting to overthrow our democracy”. Major political leaders sound the alarm about the need to “save our democracy.”
But what does saving Our Democracy™ actually involve?
In Ukraine, to cite one example, democracy is saved by not holding elections. President Volodymyr Zelensky’s term expired a while back, but there will be no new elections until the war with Russia is over. Somehow the West managed to hold elections during World Wars One and Two, but the Ukrainians are incapable of doing something similar.
Democracy is also being saved in Ukraine by banning opposition political parties, closing down Russian Orthodox churches, and jailing Mr. Zelensky’s political opponents. Evidently democracy can only thrive in a one-party state where all dissenting points of view are suppressed.
But that’s Ukraine, which is not, strictly speaking, Western. What about the bastions of the Free World that lie further west and across the Atlantic pond?
Opposition to mass immigration is the most frequently cited “danger to democracy” in Western Europe, Canada, and the United States. Those who want to close the borders and stop illegal immigration are identified as “far right” and denounced as “populists”. But populists are political leaders who want to do what is popular, that is, what the people want. Why isn’t that seen as the very essence of democracy? What could be more democratic than the popular will?
Ah, but you don’t understand what real democracy is. Real democracy isn’t about what the people want, but what the people need. Which, unfortunately, they are too stupid and too ignorant to figure out on their own. They need the help of their betters — who are not “populists” — to determine what is best for themselves.
The esteemed worthies who make those decisions are loosely classified as “stakeholders”. The system which uses their inputs and preferences to guide public policy is referred to in WEF-speak as “stakeholder capitalism”. Under stakeholder capitalism, a group of loosely-affiliated policy wonks collectively makes the decisions about what people will produce and consume, where they may live, how they must travel, and what their attitudes must be towards various protected identity groups.
Who are the stakeholders?
Last night’s debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden has fully occupied the memespace of the Internet. Everybody is discussing it, especially the talking heads of the MSM, but also all the pundits and bloggers and social media mavens.
I’m staying away from it as much as possible. One of the main reasons is that it is all so deeply, deeply insane. It’s disturbing, and comic, and demonic, all rolled into one.
I feel like I’m living in a planet-wide madhouse. And if I watch too much of this stuff, I’ll get sucked into the vortex of lunacy myself, and never find my way out.
So I won’t be blogging debate-related matters. There will be items about it in the news feed, and I recommend Conservative Tree House for comprehensive coverage. This post is especially interesting. Power Line is also doing in-depth analysis.
This brief snip from Mark Steyn fully aligns with my own take on what’s really going on:
You have to figure that that’s greatly to the advantage of the Deep State, and that’s why they’d like to keep it that way. It’s quite something to teach the people the lesson that representative politics is just a meaningless joke, third-rate dinner-theatre in which all the faux-combat is an obvious sham. In the Soviet Union, the point wasn’t to persuade you to believe the lie but to force you to live with the lie. Reducing the two-year US election cycle to the same state inflicts an even more brutal humiliation on the masses.
So why weren’t they able, after a week-and-a-half of dosage experimentation, to shoot the stiff enough of the juice to pass him off as being back in his State of the Union top-of-the-game mode?
As my former GB News colleague Neil Oliver observed long ago on The Mark Steyn Show, formulating a useful rule of contemporary politics:
This is happening because they want it to happen.
