GOV/MIL Leftists Call For New "Secret Police" Force To Spy On Trump Supporters (AN ABSOLUTELY MUST-READ THREAD)

The Equality Act's Attack on Religion Is Really about Private Property Rights

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04/08/2021Ryan McMaken

With the introduction of the Equality Act of 2021—and its passage in the House—the Democratic Party and its allies continue the now well-established tradition of using “antidiscrimination” and “public accommodation” laws to continue the attack on the private sector and private institutions once somewhat insulated from regime control.

Historically these laws, acts, and court rulings—found initially in the Civil Rights Act of 1964—focused largely on regulating hiring and the provision of services at private institutions. These legislative and judicial acts regulate how private owners of restaurants and hotels—and a wide variety of other private establishments—enter into verbal or written contracts with potential employees, clients, and customers.

Initially, these mandates focused on regulating how business provide services to religious minorities and what the Canadians call “visible minorities”—i.e., non-whites. The laws began with just regulating private for-profit "public carriers" and organizations known to provide "public accommodation" of basic necessities.

The Equality Act, however, greatly expands these federal powers. First, the Act continues to expand the groups that are considered “protected” groups, most notably LGBT groups. Second, while older provisions tended to target run-of-the-mill businesses, the Act now expands federal power in order to regulate religious institutions, as well. The Act moves to ensure that fewer and fewer Americans will be able to exercise the free exercise of religion as a means of avoiding federal mandates. The Act also expands federal control over medical institutions and employees.

It has become clear that these laws are a fruitful and convenient vehicle—from the policymaker’s perspective—to advancing federal control over all of private life. As time goes on, expect lawmakers to turn again and again to these laws as a means of expanding government control of private organizations of every size, shape, purpose, mission, and religion.

What Is the Equality Act?
How exactly does the Equality Act expand regime control over the private sector? It redefines which organizations are subject to "public accommodation" laws, and it adds new interest groups that private sector institutions will be forced to service in a manner to the regime's liking. For instance, the act would make it discriminatory to deny certain medical procedures to transgender persons:

[t]he Equality Act would force hospitals and insurers to provide and pay for [sexual transition] therapies against any moral or medical objections [raised by medical personnel]. It would politicize medicine by forcing professionals to act against their best medical judgment and provide transition-affirming therapies.

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The Act goes well beyond only medical institutions:

The text of the bill explicitly includes … “any establishment that provides a good, service, or program, including a store, shopping center, online retailer or service provider, salon, bank, gas station, food bank, service or care center, shelter, travel agency, or funeral parlor, or establishment that provides health care, accounting, or legal services.”

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Notable among these is the expansion to “shelters” which include domestic violence shelters. Under the Equality Act, these organizations would be required to house males self-identifying as women in shelters alongside abused women.

The inclusion of salons is also notable, since—as was exhibited by the notorious Jessica Yaniv case in Canada—public accommodation mandates would likely erase the ability of salons to limit waxing services to women only. Naturally, as in the Yaniv case, the employees at these institutions could potentially be forced into waxing men’s genitals provided those men identify as women.

The Act also could easily be interpreted as a blanket ban on refusals to perform abortions:

The Equality Act bans discrimination on the basis of “pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition,” and courts and the federal government have interpreted “related medical condition” to mean “abortion.” It is, therefore, quite conceivable that courts could soon interpret the Equality Act as requiring private insurance and government health-care programs to fund abortion.

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The Abolition of Religious Exemptions
But perhaps most central to the Act are its provisions to reduce exemptions for religious persons and institutions. Historically, federal law and federal court decisions have in many cases noted that religious institutions—if the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights is to mean anything—must be able to behave in ways that are compatible with religious belief. Thus, in some cases, a church or other religious organization can refuse to hire persons who espouse ideology or behavior that stands contrary to a religious group’s beliefs. Similarly, in some cases, a religious doctor or nurse could have found some protections under these provisions for refusing to perform religiously objectionable medical procedures such as sex reassignment surgery or abortions.

This has always been rather weak tea in terms of limiting federal powers, since it restricts private discretion to only those acts that are religiously motivated.

Moreover, government agents themselves—i.e., government judges—have also often arrogated to themselves the power to determine if a discriminatory decision fits under any known religious category. In other words, the government will tell you if your legal defense can be defined as a religious defense. Moreover, as the Masterpiece Cake Shop case and similar cases have shown, even religious objections fail to provide much in the way of protection from these legal mandates.

Nevertheless, even these few and weak loopholes are too much for backers of the Equality Act which is designed to further restrict religious freedom:

University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock has warned that the Equality Act would “crush” religious dissenters. “It goes very far to stamp out religious exemptions…. It regulates religious non-profits. And then it says that [the Religious Freedom Restoration Act] does not apply to any claim under the Equality Act. This would be the first time Congress has limited the reach of RFRA.

This is not a good-faith attempt to reconcile competing interests. It is an attempt by one side to grab all the disputed territory and to crush the other side.”

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If the Act passes, we should expect an avalanche of lawsuits against religious schools and similar institutions that attempt to hire only employees who reflect the organizations' missions.

A Doorway to Widespread Regulation of Private Life
This was to be expected. The public accommodation provisions have long served as a doorway for federal regulators to enter and manage the daily minutiae of private life and the private sector. The expansion of these powers under the Equality Act is only the next logical step. After all, this body of law has always constituted a direct assault on the private sector and the institution of private property, bringing more and more of private life under the watchful eye of government bureaucrats. It has provided an excuse for government regulators to investigate, fine, sue, and otherwise harass and destroy business owners in a wide variety of ways. For those business owners who cannot afford a legal defense, there is no recourse.

Naturally, this is all to the benefit of the regime itself. As Ludwig von Mises has noted, private property is an institution that is absolutely central and essential in limiting government power and in providing some small realm of freedom beyond the reach of the regime's coercion. Like market institutions and the family, religious institutions are themselves within the private sector and a key part of what the early laissez-faire liberals called "society." Society represents those noncoercive institutions that are to be contrasted with the state and its mandates, imposed under threat of fines and imprisonment. All else being equal, it's a good thing that religious organizations have been able to exercise discretion in "discrimination" even if these same freedoms were denied to others.

Some freedom—what some might call loopholes—is preferable to no freedom.

But that was never enough for the advocates of the Equality Act, and they're now moving faster in the wrong direction. The small bit of freedom carved out for religious institutions is being reduced further and religious institutions are likely to soon be considered more or less indistinguishable from long-beleaguered commercial organizations.

The Answer Lies in Private Property
But what we can we do about the problem of private sector discrimination that's truly designed to disadvantage some specific minority group? Ironically, the answer lies in protecting private property.

For those of us who are concerned about increasing access to goods and services for minority groups—ethnic and otherwise—it is most effective to combat the regime's restrictions on private sector activities and lower barriers to entry in the marketplace. The legal public accommodation edifice is largely built on the idea that firms headed by bigots will be able to establish partial or total monopolies that can dictate to consumers who can buy what. In a reasonably free economy, however, this is extremely unlikely. As I have shown in the past, we can find many examples of much-discriminated-against Japanese Americans and Latinos—and in other groups that have built up ethnic economic enclaves—rushing to provide a responsive economic foundation of goods and services built around the needs of their group. If our goal is to broaden and expand services—and those who can count on them—the last thing we need is an ever more repressive legal regime built on the constant threat of lawsuits and fines for organizations that run afoul of the regime's ideological preferences.

On the other hand, it is unlikely that the backers of the Equality Act are actually motivated by securing economic prosperity for constituents. Rather, this is about settling political scores—carving out privileges for certain interest groups at the expense of other interest groups. In other words, it's a culture war. And that means maximizing the regime's ability to dole out favors and punishments.

Endocrine Society Scientific Statement: ‘Two Sexes,’ Male and Female
6,141 ClaudioVentrella
DR. SUSAN BERRY8 Apr 2021760

The Endocrine Society, an international organization of over 18,000 endocrine clinical specialists and researchers, has released a scientific statement that asserts there are only two sexes — male and female — and that biological sex is measurable and is to be differentiated from gender identity.

The society explained in a press release that “biological sex is often confused with gender in our society,” and asserted:

The two sexes are differentiated as females, who have ovaries and produce eggs, and males, who have testes and produce sperm. In mammals, females typically have XX chromosomes and males typically have XY chromosomes. All sex differences in the zygote, or fertilized egg, stem from harboring two different sex chromosomes. Both sexes have all classes of reproductive hormones such as estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone, albeit at different levels. Differences in sexual development may result in a person’s biological sex not aligning with these traditional definitions.

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“Sex is a biological concept,” the Endocrine Society said in the statement itself, published at Endocrine Reviews, and added:

Gender [sic] is often misused as a synonym for sex—for example, when filling out forms for various activities, we are routinely asked to check a box labeled “gender,” but the only available options are boxes labeled “M” and “F.” But sex is not the same thing as gender and using these terms as equivalents obfuscates differences that are real and important in society in general and biomedical research in particular.

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Idaho-based endocrinologist Dr. Will Malone, clinical adviser to the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), tweeted about the new statement:

The society said in its press release regarding its new scientific statement on sex, that biological differences between males and females “affect virtually every aspect of medicine and biomedical research,” and must be “studied thoroughly to improve public health.”

“When we understand the ways sex differences operate at baseline in health, which can either worsen the course of a disease to amplify differences in health outcomes, or protect against it, we can more effectively prevent and treat medical conditions,” said Aditi Bhargava, Ph.D., of the University of California, San Francisco, and chair of the writing group that authored the Society’s
Scientific Statement.

The Endocrine Society’s Scientific Statement highlighted three areas of biological differences between males and females:

Imaging has found anatomical and volume differences in the brains of women and men, but these differences do not reveal any functional differences between the sexes. Heart and kidney diseases present differently in women and men. Although twice as many women as men report stress-related diseases, few studies are designed to explore mechanisms that highlight both similarities and difference between the sexes.

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In March, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) released a statement and accompanying video (above) that underscored that, as an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), it “expects that sex as a biological variable will be factored into research designs, analyses, and reporting in animal and human studies.”

NIH said it expects studies to be designed to include biological sex as a factor, and for sex-based data to be collected, analyzed, and reported and published.

CNN’s Lemon: Tucker Carlson Is Mainstreaming ‘White Supremacist Propaganda to your Neighbors’

PAM KEY9 Apr 2021454

Video on website 5:02 min

CNN anchor Don Lemon said Friday on his show “Tonight” that Fox News host Tucker Carlson was mainstreaming “white supremacist propaganda to your neighbors and your family members.”

Lemon said, “We got to talk about what’s happening over on the propaganda network, the Fox propaganda network. I don’t concern myself of what the other guys are doing. But let me tell you why I am doing this because this is the mainstreaming of white supremacist propaganda to your neighbors and your family members, and it is coming from Tucker Carlson who is promoting the so-called replacement theory. Theory is really too good a word for it. It’s a lie. The lie that liberal elites are plotting to replace the white population with immigrants of color.”

In a video from Fox News, Carlson said, “I know that the left and all the little gate-keepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement.’ If suggest that the Democratic Party trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots with new people, more obedient voters from the third world. But they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening actually. Let’s just say it that is true.”

He added, “This matters on a bunch of different levels, but on a basic level, it is a voting rights question. In a democracy, one person equals one vote. If you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. So every time they imported new voters, I become disenfranchised as a current voter. Everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it. ‘Oh, the white replacement theory.’

No, this is a voting rights question. I have less political power because they’re importing a brand new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that? The power that I have is an American, guaranteed that birth is one-man and one-vote, and they are diluting it. Why are we putting up with this?”

Lemon said, “What is he talking about? A lot of talk about diluting the political power of the current electorate, which is mostly white people. The white votes should not be diluted. That’s what he’s saying. He’s talking about voting rights, one person, one vote. He’s twisting those concepts for his own end. What ends are those? to fuel up the audience with a false sense of grievance, grievance outrage to justify voter suppression based on anger, fears and lies and insecurity and racism.”

Is A Cultural Revolution Brewing In America?

SATURDAY, APR 10, 2021 - 04:10 PM
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The lesson of China's Cultural Revolution in my view is that once the lid blows off, everything that was linear (predictable) goes non-linear (unpredictable).

There is a whiff of unease in the air as beneath the cheery veneer of free money for almost everyone, inequality and polarization are rapidly consuming what's left of common ground in America.

Though there are many systemic differences between China and the U.S., humans in every nation are all still running Wetware 1.0 and so it is instructive to consider what can be learned from China's Cultural Revolution 1966-1976.

China's Cultural Revolution was remarkably different from the Party's military-political victory of 1949. Where the political revolution was managed by the centralized hierarchy of the Communist Party (CCP), the Cultural Revolution quickly morphed from a movement launched by Mao into a decentralized mass movement against all elites, including Party and state elites which had been sacrosanct and untouchable.

The Cultural Revolution is not an approved topic in China today, and that alerts us to its importance.

Although ostensibly launched by Mao (as part of his 1966 purge of Party rivals), the Cultural Revolution very quickly devolved into a decentralized, semi-chaotic movement of Red Guards, students and other groups who shared ideas and programs but who acted quite independent of the Party's central leadership. (In systems language, semi-chaotic dynamics are emergent properties.)

If you examine Mao's statements that supposedly launched The Cultural Revolution, you'll find they're not much different from his many pronouncements in the 1950s and early 1960s, none of which sparked a violent national upheaval.

The Cultural Revolution cannot be traced back to Mao's control or plans; rather, Mao served as the politically untouchable inspiration for whatever measures the local cadres deemed necessary in terms of advancing (or cleansing) the people's revolution.

The important point here is that the Cultural Revolution was not controlled by the political authorities, even as they maintained control of the Party and central government hierarchy in Beijing. But this was nothing more than an illusion of control: the forces of the Cultural Revolution had broken free of central command and control, even as the Red Guards expressed their loyalty to Mao and the principles of the Party as the politically approved cover for their rampage.

That's the irony of Cultural Revolutions: the authorities cannot claim it is a political counter-revolution because the cultural revolutionaries proclaim their loyalty to the ideals and principles the authorities claim to be upholding.

Cultural Revolutions in effect claim the higher ground, eschewing political influence for direct action in the name of furthering the ideals which the authorities have abandoned or betrayed.

Given the fragmentary nature of The Cultural Revolution, the history is equally fragmentary-- especially given the official reticence.

A recent academic book, Agents of Disorder: Inside China's Cultural Revolution, provides granular detail on the fragmented, decentralized, rapidly evolving dynamics of the movement:

"(The author) devoted decades to examining the local records of nearly all of China's 2,000-plus county-level jurisdictions. He found that factions emerged from the splintering, rather than the congealing, of class-based groups. Small clusters of students, workers, and cadres struggling to respond to Mao's shifting directives made split-second decisions about whom to align with. Political identities did not shape the conflict; they emerged from it. To explain this process of identity formation, he offers a theory of 'factions as emergent properties' and suggests that similar dynamics may characterize social movements everywhere."

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In other words, groups modified their alliances, identities and definitions of "class enemies" on the fly, entirely free of central authorities. Factions splintered, regrouped and splintered again. In the chaos, no one was safe.

Those who lived through The Cultural Revolution are reticent about revealing their experiences. Even in the privacy of their homes in the U.S., their voices become hushed and their reluctance to give voice to their experiences is evident.

The unifying thread in my view is the accused belonged to some "counter-revolutionary" elite --or they were living vestiges of a pre-revolutionary elite (children of the landlord class, professors, etc.)--and it was now open season on all elites, presumed or real.

What generates such spontaneous, self-organizing violence on a national scale? My conclusion is that cultural revolutions result from the suppression of legitimate political expression and the failure of the regime to meet its lofty idealistic goals.

Cultural revolutions are an expression of disappointment and frustration with corruption and the lack of progress in improving everyday life, frustrations that have no outlet in a regime of self-serving elites who view dissent as treason and/or blasphemy.

By 1966, China's progress since 1949 had been at best uneven, and at worst catastrophic: the Great Leap Forward caused the deaths of millions due to malnutrition and starvation, and other centrally planned programs were equally disastrous for the masses.

Given the quick demise of the Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom movement of open expression, young people realized there was no avenue for dissent within the Party, and no way to express their frustration with the Party's failure to fulfil its idealistic goals and promises.

When there is no relief valve in the pressure cooker, it's eventually released in a Cultural Revolution that unleashes all the bottled-up frustrations on elites which are deemed politically vulnerable. These frustrations have no outlet politically because they're threatening to the status quo.

All these repressed emotions will find some release and expression, and whatever avenues are blocked by authorities will channel the frustrations into whatever is still open.

A Cultural Revolution takes the diversity of individuals and identities and reduces them into an abstraction which gives the masses permission to criticize the abstract class that "deserves" whatever rough justice is being delivered by the Cultural Revolution.

As the book review excerpt noted, the definition of who deserves long overdue justice shifts with the emergent winds, and so those at the head of the Revolution might find themselves identified as an illegitimate elite that must be unseated.

I submit that these conditions exist in the U.S.: the systemic failure of the status quo to deliver on idealized promises and the repression of dissent outside "approved" (i.e. unthreatening to the status quo) boundaries.

What elite can be criticized without drawing the full repressive powers of the central state? What elite will it be politically acceptable to criticize? I submit that "the wealthy" are just such an abstract elite.

To protect itself, a repressive status quo implicitly signals that the masses can release their ire on an abstract elite with indistinct boundaries--a process that will divert the public anger, leaving the Powers That Be still in charge.

But just as in China's Cultural Revolution, central authorities will quickly lose control of conditions on the ground. They will maintain the illusion of control even as events spiral ever farther from their control. The falcon will no longer hear the falconer.

In other words, once the social pressure cooker valve gives way, then the unleashed forces soon grasp that there are few limits on what they can criticize as long as they do so within an implicitly approved narrative--for example, "the wealthy" hoarded wealth and power and so it is just to claw it back by whatever means are available. Since the government failed to do so, the people will have to do so.

The extreme inequalities of wealth and power that are now the dominant dynamic in America are heating the cultural pressure cooker, and when the pressure can no longer be contained, then being recognized as wealthy will shift very quickly from something desirable to something to avoid at all costs.

The lesson of China's Cultural Revolution in my view is that once the lid blows off, everything that was linear (predictable) goes non-linear (unpredictable, fragmented, contingent, emergent, prone to extremes, uncontrollable). If America experiences a Cultural Revolution, the outcome won't lend itself to tidiness or predictability.

To use an analogy from previous blog posts, if the pendulum is pushed to an extreme, when it's released, it will reach an equivalent extreme (minus a bit of friction) at the opposite end. That could be an unexpected but entirely foreseeable Cultural Revolution.


Those who claim that can't happen in America are safely outside the pressure cooker, protected by a delusional confidence that since I'm doing great, everyone is doing great. Since real political agency is no longer allowed, then the pressure will find release outside the political system. It's just Wetware 1.0 running defaults few recognize.
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Of related interest:
The West's Descent into 'Cultural Revolution' 1/18/19
Can't Get You Out of My Head (2021) - Part 1 of 6-- Adam Curtis documentary series which includes extensive footage and commentary on China's Cultural Revolution.
Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change (book)
Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World (book)
Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege (book)

A Nation Primed To See Racism In Everything Will Think Only About Race

Americans are now trained to see racism everywhere, even where it doesn't exist.


By Tristan Justice
APRIL 9, 2021

One high school in Oregon postponed a vote last week on whether to change its mascot from the Trojan to the Evergreens over concerns the imagery of lush timber was racist.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett High School, named after the prominent black activist and journalist who documented lynching in the post-Civil War era, was considering a mascot change to adopt a symbol more representative of its connection to the community. Board members complained, however, that evergreen trees would conjure up imagery invoking the brutal execution of African-Americans.

“I think everyone comes with blind spots and I think that might’ve been a really big blind spot,” said Director Michelle DePass at the school board meeting.

The episode is emblematic of how the country has come to see race, viewing minorities deemed oppressed by the woke left as fragile special-interest groups that Americans must hold a religious commitment to buttress in the moral righteousness of “antiracism.” Everywhere, Americans are explicitly reminded of the racial inequities among minority groups as evidence of their inherent racism and the nation’s irredeemably racist past — and present.

Starting at an early age, Americans are barraged with statistics and anecdotes, about everything from income to health status, that are always broken down by race to highlight disparities that victimize minorities and define their destiny as one determined by racist circumstance over personal responsibility. This ideology of abject victimhood taught in classrooms, newsrooms, and boardrooms after being bred for an entire generation on left-wing university campuses has now produced a nation dangerously constrained by a toxic obsession with race.

Under this doctrine, anything and everything must be vetted by 21st-century standards of cultural acceptance to root out the poisonous racism. This obsession, however, is the root of American demise. A nation primed to think only about race will only think about race.

Americans are now trained to see racism in everything, even where it doesn’t exist. Trees are racist. Hiking is racist. Your cereal box is racist. Your depictions of Santa Claus and Jesus are racist. Claiming otherwise to any of it is also racist.

Minorities are trained to see themselves as hopelessly oppressed and facing endless aggressions at every turn. Every slightest impolite infraction can earn the morally indignant condemnation as racist, wrecking the perpetrator as a villain responsible for deep personal trauma. The so-called trauma, however, is merely a preconception inculcated by years of woke indoctrination.

None of this is to say racism doesn’t exist. Americans can and should recognize there are racial tensions that need to be addressed. The radical obsession with defining every aspect of the modern culture through the exhaustive lens of “antiracism,” however, has only led tensions to new heights while deceiving millions of well-meaning Americans who are terrified of the racist label and roping them into the effort. And “antiracism,” weaponized by the political left to pursue political ends through intimidation of their opponents, has stifled debate, driven division, and merely created a different kind of racism.

The debate over voter ID requirements included in the recent Republican-passed Georgia voting bill provides a perfect illustration of today’s racism infecting woke corporatists and the Democratic Party, which claim — in the name of antiracism of course — that mandated identification requirements for ballot access are too difficult for minorities to comply with.

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1379826356846882821
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And then there’s affirmative action and the push for reparations, endorsed by the Democratic Party, which claims minorities aren’t capable of achieving of the American dream without white saviors and billions in special assistance.

Race relations under the mandated lens of antiracism aren’t getting any better.

On that, nearly all Americans agree. According to Gallup, in 2008, the year Americans elected their first black president, 70 percent of white adults and 61 percent of black adults said race relations were either “very” or “somewhat good.” Only 46 percent of white adults and 36 percent of black adults said the same in 2020.

If last year’s radical acceleration of antiracism in the culture war has taught us nothing else, it’s that the colorblind approach was likely the right one. The opposite has shown to be an aggressive form of racism featuring the bigotry of low expectations cloaked in the moral righteousness of social justice.

Fascism 2.0

Kevin Grieve
|
Posted: Apr 09, 2021 12:01 AM

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.


Source: AP Photo/Mary Altaffer

The Left and the Democrats have become a secular trinity of evil. The final addition has been their hijacking of corporate America to do their bidding and represents the merging of three strains of evil that we thought had been left to the ash heap of history in the 20th century: Fascism, Nazism, and communism.

The combined market capitalization of the Fortune 500 is over $32 trillion, represents two-thirds of GDP, and employs over 25 million people. Instead of remaining neutral, these companies are openly attacking half of the country and our founding principles. Elite and privileged CEOs, instead of serving to their broad-based, pluralistic, and diverse customer base, incoherently and ignorantly pontificate about their customers’ racism, sexism, and “deplorableness.”

MLB, Coke, Delta, and Home Depot CEOs all decided it was going to help their bottom line profits to virtue signal their fake indignation and disapproval of Georgia’s democratically elected legislator and Governor that passed new voter integrity laws. In protest, NYC-based Baseball commissioner Bob Manfred, who is paid $11 million per year, moved the All-Star game from predominately black Atlanta to predominately white Denver. Newsflash, in polarized American politics, nearly 80% of the US population support voter ID laws. Did these CEOs forget that an ID is required to board a Delta flight, check into a hotel, pick up your will-call baseball tickets, and buy beer at baseball stadium? Manfred will not be impacted by the move but the small businesses in Atlanta will lose $100 million in revenue. Odds are against Manfred relinquishing his exclusive membership at August National Golf Club that hosts the Masters golf tournament in protest; because that would require a personal sacrifice.

We saw how Amazon, Google and Apple conspired to “de-platform” a direct competitor, Parler. At the time, free speech social media company Parler had surged to be the #1 downloaded app. Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter have decided to become the arbiters of free speech: Amazon engages in digital book burning of conservative authors, Facebook shadow bans conservative posts, while Twitter bans conservative influencers including President Trump who had 80 million followers and earned 75 million votes in the 2020 election, the most of any Republican president.

In January, over 60 companies, including Bank of America, Mastercard, and Goldman Sachs announced their adoption of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) sustainability metrics in partnership with the World Economic Forum. Part of the collectivist “global reset” to push radical Left-wing agendas which will destroy capitalism, kill free markets, and eliminate our freedom and sovereignty.

Yesterday, in a likely violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, United Airlines announced that 50% of its new pilot hires in the next five years will be women or people of color; all done under the moniker of diversity, equity, and inclusion which is really another way of saying inequality, discrimination, and mediocrity.

In uber-liberal California, Proposition 16 (institutionalizing racial quotas and preferences) was defeated by voters this past November by 57% to 43%. Having flown over two million miles during my business career and having been in United’s top tier Global Services loyalty and rewards program, I can “safely” speak on behalf of my fellow passengers and say to United’s CEO that we prefer their pilots to be selected and trained based upon aptitude and not a superficial and immutable physical characteristic. Woke corporations like Coke train their employees to be “less white.” Cigna, one of the nation’s largest health insurers, used critical race theory in its training and told employees to not consider white men in hiring decisions.

Nazism was obsessed with race as are the Democrats. Hitler adopted Democrat’s Jim Crow laws, his brown shirts emulated the Democrat founded KKK, and his Final Solution was an extension of Margaret Sanger’s racial purity ideology.

Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda-machine is emulated by today’s Corporate media which serves as the megaphone for the Democrat party. Corporate media is partisan, activist, and lacks any modicum of objectivity. The Corrupt corporate media recklessly divides the “melting pot” that is America into divisive racial and gender identities. By June of last year, American corporations had pledged over $1.7 billion to Marxist and racist BLM. BLM, Antifa and the “mostly peaceful” George Floyd protesters engaged in vandalism that was the worst in US history with $2 billion in property damage.

Biden’s $2.6 trillion infrastructure plan is corporate cronyism on steroids. Janet Yellen’s proposed minimum global corporate tax is anti-competitive and would lead to global stagnation. Corporations’ endorsement of the $15 minimum wage would lead to higher unemployment and disadvantage small businesses. Big Tech CEOs endorse universal income right off the pages of the communist playbook to create more dependency on the government, destroy the middle class and upward mobility, remove market incentives, and crush America’s entrepreneurial spirit.

The co-opting of corporations to enforce the totalitarian and un-American agenda of Democrats and the global elite should be a wake-up call to the GOP.

Time for Republicans to realize that Big corporations are the enemy and should be treated as such. No more subsidies for companies that outsource American jobs and support open borders. Severe penalties for companies that discriminate by race, gender, or sexual orientation. No more favorable regulatory treatment of social media companies that engage in censorship.

It Begins: Financial Giant Merrill Lynch Assigns “Environmental, Social and Governance” (ESG) Scores to Rate Customers Just Like the Chinese Communist Party (VIDEO)

By Jim Hoft
Published April 11, 2021 at 9:09am


In 2018 Google helped the Chinese Communists develop a social credit scoring system. The scoring system, first announced in 2014, rates China’s one billion citizens based on their behavior and associations.

Already, nine million people with low scores have been blocked from buying tickets for domestic flights and trains.

As horrible as this sounds the Silicon Valley tech giants are using a similar system here in the United States.

It is clear these tech giants are colluding to target certain prominent conservatives.

And Facebook is using offline behavior to factor into their scoring system.
In 2019 Breitbart’s Allum Bokhari revealed that Facebook is using a similar social credit scoring system on Americans.

This is no surprise to those who have noticed the growing intolerance by big tech to conservative thought leaders and publishers.

Justin Haskins discusses the new Merril Lynch “ESG Customer Scores” with Glenn.

But it’s not just the tech giants.

Now financial giant Merrill Lynch is assigning an Orwellian Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) score to their customers.

Justin Haskins from The Heartland Institute joined Glenn Beck last week to discuss this shocking new development in the US financial world.

View: https://youtu.be/Jw__d7V9Blg
10:29 min

TINHORN FLATS – The Symbol of Modern Day America Against Tyranny

By Joe Hoft
Published April 11, 2021 at 11:50am

This is the symbol of modern-day Americans against tyranny. America is standing up against this communist onslaught.

One American is standing up against tyranny. He’s becoming the symbol of America.

The Conservative Treehouse brought this to our attention. Here is what they shared:

Tinhorn Flats is the oldest bar in Burbank. In March of 2020 they shut down in compliance with state guidelines. They reopened in November 2020, and when the second lockdown was announced their defiance began.

Burbank authorities first cited and fined Tinhorn Flats. Lucas refused to pay and stayed open. Burbank authorities cut their utilities. Lucas brought in generators and stayed open. Burbank authorities red tagged his restaurant and locked the doors. Lucas cut the locks and reopened. Burbank authorities boarded up the doors and ‘red tagged’ again as unsafe. Lucas sawed off the boards and reopened his business. Burbank police then arrested Lucas. Lucas made bail and was released.

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Regular protests then began to support Lucas. Burbank authorities came back and replaced the boards (thicker w/ security nails). Lucas sawed off those boards and reopened business. Burbank police then arrested Lucas the second time. Lucas made bail and was released.

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Burbank authorities again replaced the boards on the doors and added sand bags; (police later announced that anyone moving a sandbag would be arrested). Lucas removed the sandbags. Lucas was arrested, made bail and was released.


Today the city of Burbank installed fences around the property…. the battle continues.

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Peter Duke tweeted about Tinhorn Flats:



Here are supporters of Tinhorn flats:

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1381078254145048579
.56 min

More supporters with shirts saying Commies aren’t cool:

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1381078118207647744
.38 min

Where are our police?




Here’s a discussion by Peter on the subject Tinhorn Flats:

Peter Duke Reframes Reality @peterdukephoto (Periscope video 1:03:15 min)
This is the state of America.

Tucker Carlson: Gun Control Is Not About Guns – It’s About Who Controls The Country (VIDEO)

By Mike LaChance
Published April 11, 2021 at 6:14am

Joe Biden and the Democrats are pushing gun control despite the fact that it is an unpopular issue. Why would they do such a thing?

Tucker Carlson offered an airtight explanation on his show this week.

Tucker suggested that it’s really all about who controls the country, and he makes a compelling case.

Here’s a partial transcript, via FOX News:

Tucker Carlson: Biden wants to take your guns, but leave criminals with theirs

Nothing the Democratic Party advocates for is more dishonest than gun control. Everything about that specific issue is false. Most policy debates aren’t like that, and we try to be honest about it. No matter how passionate you are about a position, you can still sort of see what the other side is talking about.


You might deeply dislike taxes, for example, but you can still acknowledge it’s fair to charge people for the services they receive from government. The other side isn’t crazy, they’ve just arrived at a different number than you did. You can hate abortion (and we do) and still understand (again, if you’re being totally honest about it) why a scared pregnant teenager might be tempted to have one.

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Gun control is not like that. Gun control is entirely fraudulent…Anyone who tries to restrict your legally owned firearms is not trying to make America safer. The point is to disarm you and strip you of your autonomy, your power, your right to self-defense. Gun control is not about guns. Gun control is about who controls America. Is it the population, as in a democracy, or does all control go to a small group of authoritarians, as in an oligarchy? Those are the stakes in the gun control debate. It’s not about guns, it’s about who runs the country.Watch the video below:

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1380362284866867204
9:30 min

That is a perfect analysis.

Americans have to stand up and say no to Biden and the Democrats.

Cross posted from American Lookout.

Why Biden is Erasing America

Kevin McCullough
|
Posted: Apr 11, 2021 1:25 PM

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.


Source: AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

Not even a full four months into office and President* Biden is desperately attempting to erase America.

This isn’t like his former boss’ “fundamental transformation” style of change. No President* Biden is racing at blinding speed to destroy every vestige of our representative republic.

Which in itself is a bit brilliant because those who aren’t paying attention believe he is incapable of doing anything faster than eating his lunch time jello.

He’s attempting to undo American accountability in elections through his support of HR1. He’s attempting to undo our economic foundations with massive printing (read that: devaluing) of our currency. He’s attempting to destroy free enterprise and job growth with coming massive tax increases. He’s attempting to take away individual liberties with proposed mask mandates, and desired lockdowns. He supports any attempt to end the Senate filibuster—in order to push through horrific laws by the thinnest margins ever attempted. He’s attempting to overwhelm our security at our borders by encouraging 100’s of 1000’s of unverifiable persons of unknown origins to cross our borders without scrutiny nor penalty. He wants the police weakened. He is pledging to take guns away from law abiding owners. And he wants to pervert the justice system so dramatically that the Constitution becomes unrecognizable.

Friday was his latest strategic ploy. By signing what seems as though might be his 500th executive order, he officially commenced a process to attempt to “reform the Supreme Court.”

His basis for why?

Because the judicial system is “out of whack.”

Which I can only presume is very technical language for, “my executive orders appear to be headed for trouble once they are challenged.”

This is a legitimate worry to someone who is illegitimately writing laws as a dictator and expecting the plebs to kneel in obedience. One of his predecessor’s most pronounced accomplishments was placing hundreds of originalist jurists at every level of the federal courts.

Shockingly President* Biden’s former boss had left hundreds of vacancies open, and President Trump plugged the holes in a little over three years.

The left witnessed how quickly the progressive agenda can be stopped in a healthy constitutional republic. It’s why they exploited the CoVid19 crisis to change election standards by any means necessary in swing states. And it’s why they are calling every election reform attempting to bring transparency and integrity back to the process as “racist.”

They literally have nothing else.

They didn’t win the state assemblies in 2020. They lost seats in the House of Representatives. They lost Gubernatorial seats. And they only gained the Senate by relying on the same faulty election system in the State of Georgia that had corrupted the Presidential race only a handful of weeks earlier.

President* Biden and the puppet master who controls him knows it is a short runway to 2022. America has too many checks and balances in the way she was created. Therefore erasing America, by erasing that transparency, accountability, and integrity is the only option to create the top down government controlled dream they’ve always thirsted for.

Short of a violent overthrow, the removal of the checks and balances is the fastest way forward. And unlike Cuba & Venezuela—Americans own in excess of 300,000,000 firearms.

He may talk slow, genuinely appear confused and dazed, but beneath the Mr. Magoo act is a machine keenly aimed at and doing away with everything we hold dear.

It is time that Americans who truly cherish the God-given freedoms we’ve always enjoyed engage. Get active. Refuse to roll over. Defend the integrity of the good.

I pray daily that we still have enough will power to turn the tide.

But no one can say they weren’t warned.

They are attempting it in plain sight.

Every single day!

Canada sends over 200 federal police officers to ‘guard’ church shut down for Covid violations
The police state is here.

by Lorie Wimble
April 11, 2021



When GraceLife Church near Edmonton, Alberta, Canada was fenced off on Wednesday for violating Covid rules, it was assumed there would be protesters coming out on the first Sunday since the closure. Knowing this, the Canadian government took no chances. They sent over 200 officers from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to “guard” the church from… something.

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1381335392541151233
.45 min

Two layers of fencing were already erected by the government to prevent entry following repeated violations of Covid rules. The church was raided on Wednesday, prompting conservative and Christian media reports. Mainstream media in both Canada and the United States largely ignored the plight of church leadership and their members.

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1379804106324389899
.56 min

According to Alberta Health Services, the church was closed after repeated violations of their rules designed to protect people against Covid-19. But as many have pointed out, areas where there are stricter lockdowns have seen no benefits in efforts to prevent the disease from spreading.

Today, April 7, 2021, Alberta Health Services (AHS) physically closed GraceLife Church (GLC) and has prevented access to the building until GLC can demonstrate the ability to comply with Alberta’s Chief Medical Officer of Health’s (CMOH) restrictions.

For several months, AHS has attempted to work collaboratively with GLC to address the ongoing public health concerns at the site. Steps taken prior to physically closing the site include:

• An order issued by AHS on December 17th, 2020, requiring GLC to comply with CMOH restrictions.
• A Court of Queen’s Bench Order obtained on January 21st, 2021, requiring GLC to comply with the previous order.
• A Closure Order issued on January 29th, 2021, requiring closure until compliance with the restrictions was attained.
• On March 27, 2021, AHS sent a letter to Pastor Coates providing him with information on the continued spread of COVID-19. Last week, AHS invited Pastor Coates to meet virtually to discuss the risks presented by COVID-19, however the church has not provided any dates to meet.

A crowd gathered early Sunday morning with reports ranging from 200-500. But the mammoth law enforcement presence was a show of force intended to intimidate anyone who thought to try to enter the church.

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1381293805442199552
.57 min

Undaunted, some of the protesters took to the fence to dismantle it.

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1381308395349712897
.19 min

Other protesters called for their allies to stop taking down the fence, leaving it as a symbol of the persecution they were experiencing at the hands of tyrannical government and overly ambitious law enforcement. At one point, the crowd started chanting “leave the fence” just as law enforcement rushed over.

The Covid police state is rearing its ugly head in Canada, the United States, and most other nations around the world. It seems that churches are being targeted regularly. To date, no strip clubs have been raided and fenced off for Covid violations.

Biden Is Radically Transforming America Far Faster Than Obama Dreamed

BY TYLER O'NEIL APR 10, 2021 8:31 PM ET

AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

Joe Biden may have been something like a moderate, once. As a senator, he defended the Hyde Amendment, which protects pro-life taxpayers from footing the bill for something they consider to be murder. Senator Biden also voted for the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in 1993. Even as late as 2003, Biden voted for a bill to prohibit partial-birth and late-term abortion. Biden did indeed work with Republicans to pass legislation. In 1987, Biden condemned Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s scheme to pack the Supreme Court to support the New Deal.

Alas, that Joe Biden is nowhere to be found in the White House. Biden now opposes the Hyde Amendment and supports H.R. 5, the Orwellian “Equality Act,” which explicitly suspends RFRA’s protections in order to grant special rights to LGBT people. Biden now leads a Democratic Party that will brook no dissent on abortion and he nominated abortion extremist Xavier Becerra — who defended a law forcing pro-life pregnancy centers to advertise for abortion and who targeted the Little Sisters of the Poor after Trump saved them from the Obamacare contraception mandate — to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Biden nominated an openly transgender official who supports the chemical castration of children — for a key medical role!

Biden rushed executive orders to reverse Trump’s policies on everything from immigration to Title IX. Biden refused Republican attempts to pass a clean COVID-19 relief bill and a clean infrastructure bill, preferring instead to support the bills laden with Democratic wish-list items. Finally, Biden has grotesquely lied about Georgia’s new election integrity law, calling it “Jim Crow on steroids” and encouraging Major League Baseball to condemn the state. When MLB pulled the All-Star Game out of Georgia, costing the state millions, MLB cited Biden in its statement, even though Biden later insisted he did not support boycotts.

Yet arguably the most tragic and most destructive move Biden has made centers on the Supreme Court. During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden danced around whether or not he would “expand” the Supreme Court, packing it with leftist justices in order to erase the originalist gains under President Donald Trump. On Friday, he issued an executive order creating a commission to study “Supreme Court reform” — likely the first step toward packing the Court.

This move may seem moderate. After all, Biden didn’t just immediately try to pack the Court. He ordered a commission to compile arguments “for and against Supreme Court reform.” Yet the commission’s members tilt significantly to the legal and political Left, as The Wall Street Journal editorial board explained.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) warned that Biden’s “faux-academic study” is a “direct assault on our nation’s independent judiciary.”

“So anyone who was surprised by the creation of a commission on packing the Supreme Court simply hasn’t been paying attention,” McConnell said. “This faux-academic study of a nonexistent problem fits squarely within liberals’ years-ling campaign to politicize the court, intimidate its members and subvert its independence.”

Superficially, it seems that Trump has successfully gotten conservatives confirmed to the Supreme Court. In reality, however, Trump selected justices who would apply the clear meaning of the Constitution and the laws passed by Congress, as understood at the time. Trump did not seek out activist justices who would write conservative ideas into the Constitution — that’s exactly the kind of activism Trump and his allies sought to prevent.

Democrats, however, see the Supreme Court as a kind of super-legislature, using the Constitution as a tool to drag history forward. They look back on Roe v. Wade (1973) — which struck down state laws on abortion — and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) — which unilaterally redefined marriage — as positive steps toward progress rather than gross abuses of the Supreme Court’s power. Democrats supported the Court inventing new “rights” out of whole cloth because those rights involved abortion and same-sex marriage. The end justified the extremely unrepresentative means.

Democrats Give Away the Game: They Want the Supreme Court to Unilaterally Amend the Constitution

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As Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) noted, America has roughly 330 million people. “It’s really, really difficult to have those 330 million Americans reflected in nine members of a Supreme Court. It’s still really hard to have them reflected in 100 senators and 435 representatives. That’s doable, especially when those people are elected,” he said. The Supreme Court is not a super-legislature, making laws that reflect the will of the people. Rather, the Court is to apply the laws as written to specific cases.

Biden once paid lip service to the integrity of the Supreme Court. In 1987, he cited a report from the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1937, when FDR threatened to pack the Supreme Court in order to force the justices to rubber-stamp the tremendous abuse of power that was the New Deal. As Biden noted, the committee argued that “the integrity of the Court meant more than the agenda of the president.”

The 1937 report condemned FDR’s move as “an invasion of judicial power such as has never before been attempted in this country. … It is essential to the continuance of our constitutional democracy that the judiciary be completely independent of both the executive and legislative branches of the government.”

“It is a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of free people in America,” the report concluded. Biden read that quote,

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1380589751846068225
2:15 min

Ironically, Biden cited this report in his condemnations of Robert Bork, President Ronald Reagan’s Supreme Court nominee in 1987. Biden presided over the Senate Judiciary Committee during the campaign to destroy Bork, whose nomination failed. Ultimately, Reagan nominated Anthony Kennedy instead — the notorious “swing” justice who wrote the Court’s opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges.

Biden would also help orchestrate the “high-tech lynching” of Clarence Thomas.

To some degree, Biden was a ruthless partisan operator, even then. Yet as president, Biden has gone over the deep end, not just ramming a far-Left Democratic agenda through Congress with razor-thin majorities but actively moving to fundamentally transform the Supreme Court. It seems as though Biden — whom President Barack Obama apparently relegated to the background — is determined to make his legacy even more radical than Obama’s.

Joe Biden may be the most partisan president in American history, and he’s gunning for the Supreme Court, just like FDR did. It is high time everyone stopped pretending this president is in any way “moderate” or a “uniter.” Instead, he’s fundamentally transforming America faster than his old boss could have dreamed — and the legacy media is still on Biden’s side.

How Bellingcat Launders National Security State Talking Points into the Press

For a self-proclaimed citizen journalism outfit, an alarming number of Bellingcat’s staff and contributors come from highly suspect backgrounds, including high-level positions in military and intelligence agencies.

by Alan Macleod
April 09th, 2021

AMSTERDAM — Investigative site Bellingcat is the toast of the popular press. In the past month alone, it has been described as “an intelligence agency for the people” (ABC Australia), a “transparent” and “innovative” (New Yorker) “independent news collective,” “transforming investigative journalism” (Big Think), and an unequivocal “force for good” (South China Morning Post). Indeed, outside of a few alternative news sites, it is very hard to hear a negative word against Bellingcat, such is the gushing praise for the outlet founded in 2014.

This is troubling, because the evidence compiled in this investigation suggests Bellingcat is far from independent and neutral, as it is funded by Western governments, staffed with former military and state intelligence officers, repeats official narratives against enemy states, and serves as a key part in what could be called a “spook to Bellingcat to corporate media propaganda pipeline,” presenting Western government narratives as independent research.

Citizen journalism staffed with spies and soldiers
An alarming number of Bellingcat’s staff and contributors come from highly suspect backgrounds. Senior Investigator Nick Waters, for example, spent three years as an officer in the British Army, including a tour in Afghanistan, where he furthered the British state’s objectives in the region. Shortly after leaving the service, he was hired by Bellingcat to provide supposedly bias-free investigations into the Middle East.

Former contributor Cameron Colquhoun’s past is even more suspect. Colquhoun spent a decade in a senior position in GCHQ (Britain’s version of the NSA), where he ran cyber and Middle Eastern terror operations. The Scot specializes in Middle Eastern security and also holds a qualification from the U.S. State Department.

None of this, however, is disclosed by Bellingcat, which merely describes him as the managing director of a private intelligence company that “conduct ethical investigations” for clients around the world — thus depriving readers of key information they need to make informed judgments on what they are reading.



Bellingcat fails to inform its readers of even the most glaring conflicts of interest
There are plenty of former American spooks on Bellingcat’s roster as well. Former contributor Chris Biggers, who penned more than 60 articles for the site between 2014 and 2017, previously worked for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — a combat support unit that works under the Department of Defense and the broader Intelligence Community. Biggers is now the director of an intelligence company headquartered in Virginia, on the outskirts of Washington (close to other semi-private contractor groups like Booz Allen Hamilton), that boasts of having retired Army and Air Force generals on its board. Again, none of this is disclosed by Bellingcat, where Biggers’s bio states only that he is a “public and private sector consultant based in Washington, D.C.”

For six years, Dan Kaszeta was a U.S. Secret Service agent specializing in chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and for six more he worked as program manager for the White House Military Office. At Bellingcat, he would provide some of the intellectual ammunition for Western accusations about chemical weapons use in Syria and Russia’s alleged poisoning of Sergei Skripal.
Kaszeta is also a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank funded by a host of Western governments as well as weapons contractors such as Airbus, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Its president is a British field marshal (the highest attainable military rank) and its senior vice president is retired American General David Petraeus. Its chairman is Lord Hague, the U.K.’s secretary of state between 2010 and 2015.


A Bellingcat article covering the alleged poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a story covered heavily by the organization. Alexander Zemlianichenko | AP

All of this matters if a group is presenting itself as independent when, in reality, their views align almost perfectly with the governments funding them. But yet again, Bellingcat fails to follow basic journalism ethics and inform readers of these glaring conflict of interests, describing Kaszeta as merely the managing director of a security company and someone with 27 years of experience in security and antiterrorism. This means that unless readers are willing to do a research project they will be none the wiser.

Other Bellingcat contributors have similar pasts. Nour Bakr previously worked for the British government’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office while Karl Morand proudly served two separate tours in Iraq with the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division.

Government and intelligence officials are the opposite of journalists. The former exist to promote the interests of power (often against those of the public) while the latter are supposed to hold the powerful to account on behalf of the people.

That is why it is so inappropriate that Bellingcat has had so many former spooks on their books. It could be said that ex-officials who have renounced their past or blown the whistle, such as Daniel Ellsberg or John Kiriakou, have utility as journalists. But those who have simply made the transition into media without any change in positions usually serve only the powerful.

Who pays the piper?
Just as startling as its spooky staff is Bellingcat’s source of funding. In 2016 its founder, Eliot Higgins, dismissed the idea that his organization got money from the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) as a ludicrous conspiracy theory. Yet, by the next year, he openly admitted the thing he had laughed off for so long was, in fact, true (Bellingcat’s latest available financial report confirms that they continue to receive financial assistance from the NED).

As many MintPress readers will know, the NED was explicitly set up by the Reagan administration as a front for the CIA’s regime-change operations. “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” said the organization’s co-founder Allen Weinstein, proudly.

Higgins himself was a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, NATO’s quasi-official think tank, from 2016 to 2019. The Atlantic Council’s board of directors is a who’s who of state power, from war planners like Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell to retired generals such as James “Mad Dog” Mattis and H.R. McMaster. It also features no fewer than seven former CIA directors. How Higgins could possibly see taking a paid position at an organization like this while he was still the face of a supposedly open and independent intelligence collective as being at all consistent is unclear.


Bana Alabed, an outsoken anti-Assad child activist, promotes Bellingcat at an Atlantic Council event. Photo | Twitter

Other questionable sources of income include the Human Rights Foundation, an international organization set up by Venezuelan activist Thor Halvorssen Mendoza. Halvorssen is the son of a former government official accused of being a CIA informant and a gunrunner for the agency’s dirty wars in Central America in the 1980s and the cousin of convicted terrorist Leopoldo Lopez. Lopez in turn was a leader in a U.S.-backed coup in 2002 and a wave of political terror in 2014 that killed at least 43 people and caused an estimated $15 billion worth of property damage. A major figure on the right-wing of Venezuelan politics, Lopez told journalists that he wants the United States to formally rule the country once President Nicolas Maduro is overthrown. With the help of the Spanish government, Lopez escaped from jail and fled to Spain last year.

Imagine, for one second, the opposite scenario: an “independent” Russian investigative website staffed partially with ex-KGB officials, funded by the Kremlin, with most of their research focused on the nefarious deeds of the U.S., U.K. and NATO. Would anyone take it seriously? And yet Bellingcat is consistently presented in corporate media as a liberatory organization; the Information Age’s gift to the people.

The Bellingcat to journalism pipeline
The corporate press itself already has a disturbingly close relationship with the national security state, as does social media. In 2019, a senior Twitter executive was unmasked as an active duty officer in the British Army’s online psychological operations unit. Coming at a time when foreign interference in politics and society was the primary issue in U.S. politics, the story was, astoundingly, almost completely ignored in the mainstream press. Only one U.S. outlet of any note picked it up, and that journalist was forced out of the profession weeks later.

Increasingly, it seems, Bellingcat is serving as a training ground for those looking for a job in the West’s most prestigious media outlets. For instance, former Bellingcat contributor Brenna Smith — who was recently the subject of a media storm after she successfully pressured a number of online payment companies to stop allowing the crowdfunding of the Capitol Building insurrectionists — announced last month she would be leaving USA Today and joining The New York Times. There she will meet up with former Bellingcat senior investigator Christiaan Triebert, who joined the Times’ visual investigations team in 2019.

The Times, commonly thought of as the United States’ most influential media outlet, has also collaborated with Bellingcat writers for individual pieces before. In 2018, it commissioned Giancarlo Fiorella and Aliaume Leroy to publish an op-ed strongly insinuating that the Venezuelan state murdered Oscar Perez. After he stole a military helicopter and used it to bomb government buildings in downtown Caracas while trying to ignite a civil war, Perez became the darling of the Western press, being described as a “patriot” (The Guardian), a “rebel” (Miami Herald), an “action hero” (The Times of London), and a “liberator” (Task and Purpose).

Until 2020, Fiorella ran an opposition blog called “In Venezuela” despite living in Canada. Leroy is now a full-time producer and investigator for the U.K.-government network, the BBC.

Bad news from Bellingcat
What we are uncovering here is a network of military, state, think-tank and media units all working together, of which Bellingcat is a central fixture. This would be bad enough, but much of its own research is extremely poor. It strongly pushed the now increasingly discredited idea of a chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria, attacking the members of the OPCW who came forward to expose the coverup and making some bizarre claims along the way. For years, Higgins and other members of the Bellingcat team also signal-boosted a Twitter account purporting to be an ISIS official, only for an investigation to expose the account as belonging to a young Indian troll in Bangalore. A leaked U.K. Foreign Office document lamented that “Bellingcat was somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation itself, and by being willing to produce reports for anyone willing to pay.”

Ultimately, however, the organization still provides utility as an attack dog for the West, publishing research that the media can cite, supposedly as “independent,” rather than rely directly on intelligence officials, whose credibility with the public is automatically far lower.

Oliver Boyd-Barrett, professor emeritus at Bowling Green State University and an expert in the connections between the deep state and the fourth estate, told MintPress that “the role of Bellingcat is to provide spurious legitimacy to U.S./NATO pretexts for war and conflict.” In far more positive words, the CIA actually appears to agree with him.

“I don’t want to be too dramatic, but we love [Bellingcat],” said Marc Polymeropoulos, the agency’s former deputy chief of operations for Europe and Eurasia. “Whenever we had to talk to our liaison partners about it, instead of trying to have things cleared or worry about classification issues, you could just reference [Bellingcat’s] work.” Polymeropoulos recently attempted to blame his headache problems on a heretofore unknown Russian microwave weapon, a claim that remarkably became an international scandal. “The greatest value of Bellingcat is that we can then go to the Russians and say ‘there you go’ [when they ask for evidence],” added former CIA Chief of Station Daniel Hoffman.

Bellingcat certainly seems to pay particular attention to the crimes of official enemies. As investigative journalist Matt Kennard noted, it has only published five stories on the United Kingdom, 17 on Saudi Arabia, 19 on the U.S. (most of which are about foreign interference in American society or far-right/QAnon cults). Yet it has 144 on Russia and 244 under its Syria tag.

In his new book “We Are Bellingcat: An Intelligence Agency for the People,” the outlet’s boss Higgins writes: “We have no agenda but we do have a credo: evidence exists and falsehoods exist, and people still care about the difference.”

Yet exploring the backgrounds of its journalists and its sources of funding quickly reveals this to be a badly spun piece of PR.

Bellingcat looks far more like a bunch of spooks masquerading as citizen journalists than a people-centered organization taking on power and lies wherever it sees them. Unfortunately, with many of its proteges travelling through the pipeline into influential media outlets, it seems that there might be quite a few masquerading as reporters as well.

Feature photo | Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins talks to the press at College Green in London, October 9, 2018. David Mirzoeff | PA Wire | Alamy

EXCLUSIVE: Republican Attorneys General Plan To Create Legal Roadblocks For Biden Agenda

Alex Wong/Getty Images


THOMAS CATENACCIREPORTER
April 10, 20212:53 PM ET

• Republican attorneys general are determined to mount numerous legal challenges against President Joe Biden, creating a formidable roadblock to the president’s agenda.
• “When you step in on day one and start issuing edicts and executive orders like King George, I and a lot of other conservative Republicans are going to start having problems,” Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
• In less than three months since President Joe Biden was sworn into office, Republican states have waged war on his agenda, suing the administration on climate change, energy, immigration and taxation policy.

Republican attorneys general are determined to mount numerous legal challenges against President Joe Biden, creating a formidable roadblock to the president’s agenda.

In less than three months since President Joe Biden was sworn into office, Republican states have waged war on his agenda, suing the administration on climate change, energy, immigration and taxation policy. But the conservative attorneys general who started filing the lawsuits in March said they aren’t done yet and expect to continue challenging the administration in court.

“We are sharpening the pencils and filling up the inkwells,” Louisiana Attorney General and former Republican Attorneys General Association Chairman Jeff Landry, who is leading two of the ongoing lawsuits against the Biden administration, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Landry said there will be plenty of legal action and success in court against the president and his administration.


Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry is joined by other Republican attorneys general at a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 22, 2020. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen said Republican attorneys general believe that with a gridlocked Congress, states are the last line of defense for Constitutional rights. The attorney general added that he will continue to focus his efforts on Biden’s reliance on executive action, which the president has used to forward several key policy items.

“When you step in on day one and start issuing edicts and executive orders like King George, I and a lot of other conservative Republicans are going to start having problems,” Knudsen said in an interview.

“State attorneys general are coming into their own and realizing they can be an effective pushback against an overreaching executive,” he said.

In his first 11 weeks, Biden has outpaced his immediate predecessors in issuing executive actions, according to The American Presidency Project. Biden has signed 38 executive orders compared to former Presidents Donald Trump, Barack Obama and George W. Bush who signed 23, 18 and 8 orders respectively during their first 11 weeks in office.

Biden signed more executive orders in his first two days in office than Trump signed in his first two months, according to The Economist.


Miles of unused pipe, prepared for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, sit in a lot on Oct. 14, 2014 in North Dakota. (Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

In March, Knudsen led a coalition of 21 states to sue the Biden over his executive order revoking the federal permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline. Weeks earlier, Montana joined forces with Arizona, filing a lawsuit against the president over his executive order blocking deportations.

Landry, meanwhile, has led legal challenges against Biden over his executive order banning new oil and gas leases on federal lands and his orders that have allegedly contributed to immigration authorities releasing criminal illegal immigrants into the U.S.

“Democrats are basically hell bent on overreaching, overspending, over-regulating,” Landry said. “All things that have detrimental long term effects on job creation, and overall stability for the country.”

And last week, West Virginia led a group of 13 states challenging the Treasury Department over an American Rescue Plan provision prohibiting states from cutting taxes after accepting coronavirus relief funds.

“The Biden administration has already gone much further than Barack Obama. The Obama administration would sometimes pause on various topics and really be very sensitive to the public relations appearance,” West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey told the DCNF. “Biden is going a lot further across the board.”

“Frequently people talk about separation of powers between the three branches on the federal side: the executive, the legislature and the judiciary,” he continued.

“But there’s also a critical need to ensure that the states don’t get run over by the Feds.”

Both Morrisey and Knudsen told the DCNF that they expect to soon challenge Biden’s recent spate of executive actions targeting gun violence in court.


U.S. President Joe Biden (3rd L) meets with (L-R) Director of the National Economic Council Brian Deese, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen during the weekly economic briefing in the Oval Office at the White House on April 9, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Amr Alfiky-Pool/Getty Images)

Over the last four years, Democratic attorneys general led an unprecedented blitz against Trump’s policies, filing hundreds of lawsuits. The Trump administration suffered defeat in nearly 80% of the 207 cases brought against it in court, according to The Institute for Policy Integrity.

A large majority of the cases challenging the Trump administration accused the president of violating the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), The Washington Post reported. The 1946 law mandates that federal agencies provide sufficient reasoning for rules and regulations they put in place.

But Republican attorneys general have now turned the tables, accusing Biden of violating the APA. The first lawsuit filed against Biden in March accused him of violating the APA when he declared there were “social costs” of continued greenhouse gas emissions in a January executive order.

“They didn’t like the Trump administration violating APA,” Landry told the DCNF. “But they were quick to violate the APA, as soon as Biden became president.”

In addition, regulatory experts said the Biden administration is in for “rough sailing” when it comes to the potential lawsuits it may face, according to the Wall Street Journal. Because it is expected to continue issuing numerous regulations, the administration will be more vulnerable to challenges.

The White House, though, is reportedly gearing up for the onslaught of court battles, spokesperson Mike Gwin told the WSJ. Gwin said the administration has a “firm legal footing” while Republican attorneys general have reiterated that they are prepared to win these cases.

“I’m not interested in filing lawsuits just for the sake of a headline,” Knudsen told the DCNF. “We wouldn’t file these things if we didn’t think there was a legitimate violation and a legitimate chance of winning in court.”

“I file cases because it’s the right thing to do and I think someone’s rights have been violated,” he continued.

Joe Biden’s Trojan horse presidency
by Brad Polumbo
| April 10, 2021 07:00 AM

Joe Biden was elected president after a campaign rooted in rhetoric emphasizing unity, moderation, and compromise. But with every day that passes, the veneer of centrism that got him elected over rivals such as Sen. Bernie Sanders becomes more distant of a memory.

Simply put, it sure seems like “moderate Joe” was a thin facade used to usher an ultra-progressive agenda in the backdoor. It resembles a Trojan horse: the famous hollow wooden horse, secretly filled with soldiers, that was given by the Greeks to the Trojans during the famed Trojan War. Once taken inside the impenetrable walls of Troy, Greek soldiers burst out of the horse and opened the gates to let in the besieging army.

Biden’s centrist facade got him in the door, and now the liberal hordes are taking over his administration. On Friday, the White House announced a commission to study the idea of packing the Supreme Court, an idea that would constitute a partisan assault on the judiciary as we know it and erode the rule of law.

This flirtation with radicalism is just the latest development in a series of extreme Biden administration policy overhauls that make former President Barack Obama seem like a conservative in comparison. For example, the president has embraced a federal $15 minimum wage, a job-killing policy rejected even by then-candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016, and even tried to force it through as small businesses were struggling to survive amid the pandemic.

And Biden’s early approach to spending makes the New Deal pale in comparison. He has utterly discarded any semblance of fiscal restraint he ever had as a senator, throwing caution to the wind to push through a $1.9 trillion partisan COVID-19 “stimulus” package that, adjusted for inflation and population, is twice the size of the Obama-era bailout and slightly larger than former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.

To make the extreme nature of this spending even more apparent, consider that Biden immediately followed this plan up with a plan for at least $2.25 trillion more in so-called “infrastructure” spending. To put that gargantuan figure in context, it’s an additional $15,701 per federal taxpayer on top of the $6 trillion-plus we’ve already spent over the last year.

Of course, less than half of this “infrastructure” money is actually transportation infrastructure spending. From $20 billion blown out on “racial and environmental justice” to $175 billion for electric vehicle subsidies to hundreds of billions for public schools and public housing, it’s a "Green New Deal"-style partisan spending blowout masquerading as unobjectionable transportation legislation.
Add this up, and just in the first few months of his presidency, Biden has passed or proposed spending equivalent to double the New Deal. So much for centrism, huh?

Biden’s campaign rhetoric about moderation, unity, and compromise was, if one believed it, refreshing and encouraging. But after the first few months of this administration, it’s clear that it was all smoke and mirrors — a Trojan horse masking a man who has been co-opted by a sweeping liberal agenda.

‘WE WILL NOT COMPLY’: The City of Burbank put up a chain-link fence to keep Tinhorn Flats from opening

Posted at 8:28 pm on April 11, 2021 by Greg P.

Just to update you on the insane story of Tinhorn Flats Saloon & Grill out in Burbank, California, the city has now put up a chain-link fence to keep the restaurant from serving food and drinks:

Oh, so when THEY want a wall THEY get a wall?

This move comes after Lucas Lepejian, the owner of the restaurant’s son, was arrested for a 3rd time for daring to sell food without the proper permits:

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From NBC Los Angeles:

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The fence was erected around the business at 2623 W. Magnolia Blvd. to prevent the owners of Tinhorn Flats Saloon & Grill from reopening with unsafe conditions due to a court-approved shutoff of electricity and a preliminary injunction granted Friday to prevent the restaurant from operating without a County Health Permit and City Conditional Use Permit, said Burbank police Lt. Derek Green.

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The demonstrations have continued for several days, and crowds of dozens of demonstrators have strained police resources, especially during busy weekend nights, Green said.

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Celebrity attorney Mark Geragos is representing the restaurant and there was some hope that tensions would have calmed down since indoor dining is opening up again in the county:


But nope:


From this update on Instagram it’s pretty clear that the city is out of line:

Couple things to keep in mind for perspective-

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1. We only opened outdoors to customers during the lockdown. We never served inside.
2. Employees followed all mask rules.
3. Even after our CUP was “taken away” we still followed every rule on the CUP and Health Permit.

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THIS TYRANNY HAS NEVER BEEN ABOUT PUBLIC SAFETY…IT IS ONLY ABOUT FEAR AND CONTROL. WE WILL NOT COMPLY.

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We’ll keep you posted.

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View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnJvbqz1Nlg
3:52:17 min
Burbank Tin Horn Flats Protest
•Streamed live on Apr 10, 2021


WYSIWYG Tv

ENOUGH! Restaurant Owners and Patrons SCREAM at Government Mask Enforcers to “Get Out!” After They Lecture on Masks

By Jim Hoft
Published April 12, 2021 at 9:31am

A group of customers and patrons at a restaurant in Barrie, Ontario north of Toronto, were interrupted by maskers who came in to harass the establishment.

The encounter ended with the patrons screaming at the two in masks to “Get Out!”

You gotta love the little girl cheering in the background.

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1381041584205131781
1:56 min

Here is the same video with captions.

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1381304359955271683
1:56 min

There was also a rally this past weekend in Barrie against the tyrannical lockdowns.

Senator Hawley Unveils ‘Trust-Busting’ Plan To Rein In Big Tech.

• APRIL 12, 2021
• NATALIE WINTERS

Senator Josh Hawley unveiled a new proposal that would strengthen anti-trust laws in dozens of U.S sectors such as tech, media, and banking.

“This country and this government shouldn’t be run by a few mega-corporations.” [The Republican Party] has got to become the party of trust-busting once again. You know, that’s a part of our history,” the Missouri Senator told Axios.

Hawley’s “Trust-Busting for the Twenty-First Century Act” would ban mergers and acquisitions by firms with a market cap greater than $100 billion, lower the threshold for prosecution under existing laws, replacing the prevalent “consumer harm” standard with one that prioritizes “the protection of competition,” require companies that lose federal antitrust lawsuits to “forfeit all their profits resulting from monopolistic conduct,’ and allow the Federal Trade Commission to designate and regulate “dominant digital firms” in different online markets.
“Hawley’s plan is more than a salvo against Silicon Valley. Its rules on mergers, for instance, would cover dozens of U.S. giants in virtually every economic sector, from banking and health to retail and media,” Axios adds.

Piss off, Burbank…
Posted by Kane on April 12, 2021 1:02 pm

Burbank officials erect fence outside restaurant that defied Covid mandates

The fencing was put up Saturday outside of Tinhorn Flats Saloon & Grill in Burbank after a court ordered the establishment’s electricity be shut off, according to an NBC Los Angeles report.

The eatery has racked up nearly $50,000 in fines since the start of the pandemic for violating public health orders, allowing outdoor dining at a time when the practice was banned by the county, according to the LA Times.

Burbank arrests owner, puts fence around Tinhorn Flats to preserve government supremacy

If you thought this had anything to do with health or Covid-19, you haven't been paying attention.
by JD Rucker
April 12, 2021



There have been zero reported instances of people being forced to go to Tinhorn Flats Saloon & Grill against their will. But judging by the City of Burbank’s reactions to the longstanding business’s desire to stay open, one would think owner Lucas Lepejian had gone door-to-door with a shotgun in hand to drive the people of Burbank to his bar where they would catch Covid-19.


Of course, chances are strong any such person would recover quickly if they even showed symptoms at all. That’s the narrative that’s buried within the fearmongering from the authoritarians who are using Covid-19 as the excuse to solidify authoritarian control. This is all about Big Government keeping the piece of the freedom pie they stole when we started “15 Days to Slow the Spread” over a year ago.

Lepejian has been arrested for a third time. His legal defense fund is here. A fence has been erected around his establishment to prevent them from committing the “crime” of serving food and beverages to hungry and thirsty people, a people who could once consider themselves free. Today, they are not. They are beholden to the City of Burbank and the State of California. At least that’s what the city and state want residents to believe.

From NBC Los Angeles:

The fence was erected around the business at 2623 W. Magnolia Blvd. to prevent the owners of Tinhorn Flats Saloon & Grill from reopening with unsafe conditions due to a court-approved shutoff of electricity and a preliminary injunction granted Friday to prevent the restaurant from operating without a County Health Permit and City Conditional Use Permit, said Burbank police Lt. Derek Green.

The demonstrations have continued for several days, and crowds of dozens of demonstrators have strained police resources, especially during busy weekend nights, Green said.

Celebrity attorney Mark Geragos is representing the restaurant and there was some hope that tensions would have calmed down since indoor dining is opening up again in the county:

Hope fell like a rock when Burbank Police took steps to secure the premises. It’s like a scene from an old WWII movie. The Nazis are there, guns in hand, to pass down judgment in the most draconian fashion allowable right now.

Other restaurants are open now that the lockdown orders have finally been lifted. But Tinhorn Flats committed the unthinkable crime of standing up for their constitutional rights and opposing a counterproductive lockdown that has been demonstrated time and again to be ineffective. This is about retribution. They are making an example of a business that stood up to their self-declared authoritarian powers.

This should make you angry. Very angry. It doesn’t matter if you live in Burbank or anywhere in California. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or Democrat, conservative or progressive. Tinhorn Flats did absolutely nothing wrong other than run counter to a destructive agenda. If anything, they are the heroes in this whole ordeal. They are the ones who fulfilled our duty as Americans to stand up to unconstitutional overreach by government.

The people who are saying are saying they should have just complied would have been the people defending England during the Revolutionary War.

Cowardice is the greatest tool used by authoritarians like the City Council of Burbank. They rely on the fears of the citizens who put them in office in order to maintain their control over our lives. This is why it’s so important to them to destroy Tinhorn Flats. Anything less than complete annihilation will not suffice in their grand plan to establish that THEY control our lives, not us.

An excellent write-up at Conservative Treehouse tells us the timeline of events:

Tinhorn Flats is the oldest bar in Burbank. In March of 2020 they shut down in compliance with state guidelines. They reopened in November 2020, and when the second lockdown was announced their defiance began.

Burbank authorities first cited and fined Tinhorn Flats. Lucas refused to pay and stayed open. Burbank authorities cut their utilities. Lucas brought in generators and stayed open. Burbank authorities Red tagged his restaurant and locked the doors. Lucas cut the locks and reopened. Burbank authorities boarded up the doors and ‘red tagged’ again as unsafe. Lucas sawed off the boards and reopened his business. Burbank police then arrested Lucas. Lucas made bail and was released.

Regular protests then began to support Lucas. Burbank authorities came back and replaced the boards (thicker w/ security nails). Lucas sawed off those boards and reopened business. Burbank police then arrested Lucas the second time.

Lucas made bail and was released. Burbank authorities again replaced the boards on the doors and added sand bags; (police later announced that anyone moving a sandbag would be arrested). Lucas removed the sandbags. Lucas was arrested, made bail and was released.

Today the city of Burbank installed fences around the property…. the battle continues.

Tinhorn Flats is every business in America and Lucas Lepejian is every American. The City of Burbank is telling all of us that totalitarian control is our near-future fate. If we do nothing, that fate is sealed and ready to be delivered.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBborXknX3s
10:57 min

‘Just like China’: Police at Canadian church force Christians UNDERGROUND

•Apr 12, 2021


Glenn Beck

Founder of Rebel News, Ezra Levant, joins Glenn to discuss the recent religious persecution taking place in Canada. He describes the new, armed police presence surrounding GraceLife Church in Edmonton, Alberta, and how it not only encouraged hundreds of protesters to stand with the church in support but forced congregation members UNDERGROUND to worship as well. What’s happening is eerily similar to what occurs everyday in China, Levant says, and it MUST stop.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hehKN-UQ5Is
14:06 min

'I've NEVER seen something like this': CEO meeting PROVES The Great Reset is UPON US

•Apr 12, 2021


Glenn Beck

Business leaders and CEOs from some of the world’s largest corporations recently met during a Zoom meeting to discuss how together they can fight “election integrity laws,” like the voting law recently passed in Georgia. Glenn says he’s NEVER seen something like this. He explains how this government/corporation partnership is not only proof of fascism, but it is also demonstrative of how our lives will be under The Great Reset: government and large corporations will work together to set the rules, and the freedoms of the individual American will be squashed...

Woke-a-Cola: How To Destroy A World-Leading Brand In 60 Seconds

TUESDAY, APR 13, 2021 - 05:00 AM
Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, 'n Guns blog,

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase, “Get Woke, Go Broke.”
In the curious case of Coca-Cola, going woke may be the single biggest branding mistake in the history of marketing.


In late February a whistleblower came forth with screenshots, posted on YouTube, of slides from Coke’s internal ‘diversity training’ course urging its employees to quote, “Be less white.”

And by ‘less white’ they mean subservient. They don’t mean be more sensitive.
When this happened, I immediately said to myself, “Scratch ever buying another Coke product off my list.” Not a moment’s angst or energy went into it.
“Be less white?”
“Drink no Coke.”

Why? Because choosing not to buy a Coke on the rare occasion I buy a soda anymore is an easy one. Sugar (or aspartame) and water in and of itself isn’t anything to get excited about, it’s the association of Coca-Cola with a past positive experience that is.

And they just told me I’m a bad person because of the heritage of my birth.
Not a positive, relationship-building experience.

Now I know that Critical Race Theory hustlers think they can immunize themselves and their real agenda with rhetoric, justifying their racism and hoping they’ve conditioned enough of us into feeling guilty to allow the inversion of society where blacks are in power and whites are not.

While words certainly have power, nothing has more power than action. This incident sparked an enormous controversy which has yet to die down.

But it wasn’t one that made headlines for more than one news cycle. And yet, millions of people made the same effortless decision I did.

Immediately Coke went into damage control and pulled the training course, issued statements that it wasn’t true and all the typical backpedaling a cowardly management team does when caught insulting a core customer base.

You would think they would have learned from the NFL. But, no, sadly. In their quest to be all things to all people, if I’m being generous, Coke will quickly find themselves hated by everyone.

Hated by whites for telling them they’re bad people. Hated by the race baiters for sucking up to their fragile white overlords.

I’ve spoken to dozens of people who work in modern corporate America and Coke isn’t the outlier, but rather the norm. And the backlash against this race hustling isn’t just coming, it’s here.

For some companies, they can survive a mistake like this because their business doesn’t depend on brand loyalty.

Take airlines, for example. When planning a trip is the choice of airline at the top of your priorities? Or are flight availability, timing, proximity to home and about a hundred other things far more important than the particular company operating the plane?

Of course not. Air travel is one of the most heavily regulated and, by extension, homogenized industries one can think of. Choosing an airline is like choosing a brand of gasoline. Air travel is a commodity and the most convenient one will most likely determine your shopping preference.

But what is Coca-Cola’s business based on if not its brand?

It’s the alchemy of Coke’s secret formula and its marketing which imbues Coke with its profit engine.

Famously, Warren Buffett owns a big position in Coke precisely because it had a bullet-proof brand, what he calls, in investing terms, a moat around its business.

And with three little words they just torched more than a century of brand nurturing that has been the standard by which such things are measured.

Business schools use Coke’s brand maintenance as a primary case study in how to do it right.

Soon, it will be the primary case study on how to do the exact opposite. That is, when we’re allowed to teach such things again.

So, what possessed them to think they could turn on 70+% of Americans already sick to the gills of the anti-white rhetoric coming at them from every angle and not drain that moat?

Arrogance? Maybe. Incompetence mixed with mandated virtue signaling is a better bet.

Like I said at the outset I didn’t give this much thought when it first happened more than a month ago. But something happened the other day that got my attention.

My private boycott of Coke wasn’t something I thought much of until I went to my local CVS to buy a Diet Pepsi…

… and found that I couldn’t because there were none in the cooler.

Right next to it was the coke cooler… stocked to the gills.

I live in North Florida, practically Georgia, which is literally Coke Country. Remember, Atlanta is Coke’s headquarters. And in my small town there wasn’t a Pepsi to be bought?

Needless to say, I chuckled knowing that Donald Trump – 2021’s version of Lord Voldemort – may not be allowed in the public communications space but his words still have tremendous power.

He said boycott Coke and my conservative North Florida town said, “Yes, sir.”
Companies like Coke don’t get it. Their management, just like our politicians, live in bubbles too far removed from their customers to have any sense for what they’re feeling. And Trump voters feel marginalized.

The free market is a brutal thing. It’s unforgiving and uncompromising. Every seller on Ebay lives in fear of the dreaded negative feedback. So does every Uber driver. Marketing people know that for every hundred positive comments one negative one will depress sales.

It’s why a restaurant that gives you great service a dozen times in a row is forever on your ‘avoid list’ after one bad meal. Don’t get me started about my personal war with Subaru, Netflix and General Motors.

When the barrier to your choice of one product over another is low, there’s no reason to have brand loyalty if that brand doesn’t 1) satisfy your needs or 2) treat your money with respect. Branding is all about identifying with your customer, telling them that buying this product will not just improve your life but make you the kind of person you want others to see you as.

And Coke just told seven out of ten Americans they’re scum.

Brand creation takes a lifetime to create and a minute to destroy.

Brand destruction of this type is happening all across America right now. I wrote recently about Patreon’s willingness to join the Big Tech censorship brigade but it’s everywhere.

From Disney’s movies to Major League Baseball all the uniquely American things we could find common ground on despite our political differences are under direct attack.

Critical Race hustlers are culture warriors obsessed with destroying anything and everything beautiful. They are Leninists never content with what they’ve achieved and will not stop until they have poisoned everything we’ve ever held dear.

Amplifying a race war between whites and blacks by turning every institution of culture into a hotbed of fabricated conflict built on false dichotomies has been their modus operandi for generations.

Companies like Coke think they can bargain with these folks, that there is a limit to their behavior.

But there isn’t. Coke has committed the critical sin. The race hustlers won this round.

If Pepsi is smart they’ll fire their entire Diversity Division tomorrow, and put on a third production shift at the market rate for labor.

If they don’t then they too simply want to go broke.

Biden Moves to Revive Obama Plan to Federalize Suburban Zoning Regulations
BY MARK TAPSCOTT

April 12, 2021 Updated: April 12, 2021

Buried in the nearly 18,000-word White House Fact Sheet on President Joe Biden’s proposed $2.3 trillion “American Jobs Plan” infrastructure bill is one paragraph that could turn the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) into a zoning commission for suburban America.

“For decades, exclusionary zoning laws—like minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking requirements, and prohibitions on multifamily housing—have inflated housing and construction costs and locked families out of areas with more opportunities,” the fact sheet claims.

“President Biden is calling on Congress to enact an innovative, new competitive grant program that awards flexible and attractive funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to eliminate such needless barriers to producing affordable housing.”

The anti-exclusionary zoning law proposal, the nomination of former Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) as HUD secretary, and his signing of an executive order on housing discrimination, are key parts of Biden’s fulfilling a 2020 campaign promise to reinstate a controversial Obama administration program known as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH).

Less than a week after her confirmation by the Senate as HUD secretary, Fudge was asked about reinstating AFFH and, in response, she told White House reporters that the Biden administration is moving forward with such plans.

“We are looking at it. Certainly, we know that fair housing is, in fact, the law of the land, and we want to use every tool that we have. I think that the prior administration did roll back some fair housing tools that we have. So, we’re looking at how we can go back and make those better and get them re-implemented, if possible,” Fudge said.

The Obama AFFH conditioned receipt by local and municipal officials of billions of dollars of federal assistance on their acceptance of a HUD-approved plan to eliminate zoning policies defined as discriminatory.

The Biden AFFH revival goes several steps further by providing specific examples of what it considers discriminatory zoning and creating billions of dollars in new HUD grant programs as incentives for local and municipal officials to submit to federal supervision of their decisions. A former Fudge House colleague, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), has just such a proposal for a new HUD grant program.

That approach, according to the Ethics and Public Policy Center senior fellow Stanley Kurtz, is nothing less than a prescription to federalize zoning functions that for centuries have been the prerogative of officials closest to residents of the neighborhoods most directly affected.

“Biden’s plan rips the heart out of local zoning authority. What, if anything, remains when the Biden administration is done won’t matter, because de facto control over the suburbs will have passed to the federal government,” Kurtz told The Epoch Times on April 12.

Kurtz believes the ultimate goal of advocates of the Biden plan is to eliminate single-family suburban neighborhoods entirely and to replace them with densely packed urban high rises.

But he expects the plan to become a political liability for Biden.

“The Biden administration’s plan to kill off single-family zoning will receive a great boost if the Senate changes its rules on reconciliation,” Kurtz told The Epoch Times.

He was referring to a recent Senate parliamentarian’s decision that may enable Senate Democrats to gain passage of the massive Biden jobs plan with no Republican votes.

“But once Americans wake up to the plans of Biden and the Democrats to end suburban single-family zoning, the political blowback will be fierce. Whether before the infrastructure bill is passed, or after it begins to take effect, the Democrats will face a political reckoning for their overreach,” he said.

Kurtz warned in a previously published analysis of Biden’s AFFH planning that it will prompt a flood of litigation by nonprofit advocates against local and municipal officials.

“There’s more danger in store for America’s suburbs in Biden’s current proposal than meets the eye, however. If I were administering Biden’s various federal housing programs, I would sucker well-off suburbs into accepting grants on lenient terms,” Kurtz wrote.

“The trick is that once a jurisdiction accepts a HUD grant, it has to sign a statement promising to ‘affirmatively further fair housing.’ Now that Biden is going to revive the old Obama-Biden AFFH rule, that pledge can be used by activist nonprofits or the administration itself to sue localities for failing to meet the outrageously expanded definition of that term set forth in Obama’s AFFH.

“It was suits like this that dragged Westchester County, New York, through years of federal control and torment. Just the threat of such suits intimidated Democratic officials in Dubuque, Iowa, into surrendering their city’s self-rule to the Obama administration.”

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6TmoEvg3Ww
12:02 min

SHOCKING video shows Canadian police ARRESTING reporters

•Apr 13, 2021


Glenn Beck

Ezra Levant, founder of Rebel News, joins Glenn to describe the footage he and his team captured of Canadian police ARRESTING Rebel News reporters during a protest in Montreal. The protest, Levant says, was peaceful. But that’s not all — the officers also made remarks about the 'Jew’ reporters and then demanded entrance to their boat without a warrant. Levant warns: Americans MUST take note of what’s happening in Canada and protect our First Amendment rights…because if we don’t, this could happen HERE, next…

The Truth About Attacks On Asians

WEDNESDAY, APR 14, 2021 - 01:42 PM
Authored by Larry Alexander via AmericanThinker.com,

Recently, there has been a drumbeat of expressed concern by the left — the Democrats and their ever faithful messengers, the press — over a rise in hate crimes committed against Asians. The shooting in Atlanta, in which six of the nine victims were Asian women, brought on a rush to declare this an anti-Asian hate crime. It turned out, however, that the fact that a majority of the victims were Asians had nothing to do with the shooter's motivation. More recently, the brutal attack, caught on video, of a man shoving an elderly Asian woman to the ground, kicking her several times, and shouting "you don't belong here" was, indeed, a hate crime. So leftists were palpably anxious to declare it a symptom of their go-to faux bogey, white supremacy. But the facts revealed that the anti-Asian assailant was a black man and a convicted murderer (of his mother!) out on parole. (It is inconvenient for this perfidious white supremacist narrative that blacks have committed a sizeable number of the assaults against Asians.)



Hate crimes against Asians, mainly assaults, have indeed increased in the last year, as has violent crime in general. But even taking the highest estimate of their number I could find, that provided by the left-wing StopAAPIHate, and assuming that all of them were in fact motivated by anti-Asian bias, in absolute terms, the number of such assaults is tiny: 421.

To put that number in perspective, if each of those assaults was committed by a separate person, there would have been only one anti-Asian assaulter per 800,000 people, committing only one such assault in a year. The chance of an Asian suffering an assault at the hands of an anti-Asian bigot would have been considerably less than the chance of being injured taking a bath, and much, much less than the chance of being injured or killed driving a car.


So why is the left so anxious to portray the country as beset by an avalanche of anti-Asian bigotry and violence when the truth is so obviously to the contrary?

There are three reasons.

One reason is power. The left wants Asians to join blacks and Hispanics as reliable votes for Democrats. So it wants Asians to believe what it wants (and has largely succeeded in getting) blacks and Hispanics to believe — namely, that Republicans and their voters are white supremacists who despise them. Although this is a lie, and a big one, when it comes to blacks and Hispanics, it is perhaps an even bigger lie when it comes to Asians. Nonetheless, it has worked to some degree, even with Asians, and so the left keeps repeating it. (One reason it has worked to the extent it has among Asians is that assimilated, non-immigrant, young Asians, anxious to join the ranks of the elite, realize that the elite are now besotted with woke views of race.)

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The second reason is embarrassment. Asians are, as a relative matter, the most successful group in America. Their average income exceeds that of whites. Yet many Asians came to this country with little wealth, and few spoke English. Moreover, when they came, they often were the victims of discrimination — and in the case of the Japanese, internment for several years. Yet despite these handicaps, and without governmental solicitude, they have managed to succeed and surpass even whites.

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It is no secret how this happened. As a group — and obviously there are individual exceptions — Asians are committed to and exemplify the three core bourgeois values of strong families, hard work, and devotion to education. And their achievements demonstrate that commitment to these values is a path to success far superior to reliance on government largesse. Asians' success thus embarrasses the left, which stresses government programs, and downplays cultural values, as essential to upward mobility. Inflating the perils facing Asians thus draws attention away from the success Asians have achieved and the cause of that success, and it attempts to convey the false impression that Asians, despite their cultural values, are oppressed rather than successful.

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The third reason is deflection. There is anti-Asian discrimination in America, but one of its main sources is a principal bastion of the left: elite universities. Asians are discriminated against in seeking admission to Harvard, Yale, and other elite schools. For example, it is four times more difficult for an Asian to get admitted to Harvard than for a black with comparable high school grades and test scores. And the left is urging the same discrimination against Asians in admission to elite public high schools. So the left wants attention to be drawn away from its own anti-Asian discrimination and focused instead on the minuscule incidence of anti-Asian assaults.

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Power, embarrassment, and deflection. These are the reasons the left wants you to believe, contrary to fact, that Asians are in constant danger of bigoted attacks.

We Are Now Entering Full-Blown Tyranny In The Western World

TUESDAY, APR 13, 2021 - 11:10 PM
Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

If we accept what they are doing to us now, they are just going to keep pushing the envelope. Over the past 12 months, authorities throughout the western world have used the pandemic as an excuse to impose Orwellian measures that we never would have accepted during normal times. They are promising us that these measures are just “temporary”, but the pandemic has already been with us for a year and there are no signs that it is going away any time soon. If those governing us are willing to go to such ridiculous extremes during a relatively minor pandemic, what are they going to be willing to do once things start getting really crazy?



Watching the events that have unfolded at a church in Edmonton in recent days has been a breaking point for me emotionally.

Last Wednesday, the RCMP received global attention when it put up a three layer fence around GraceLife Church in an attempt to keep people out.

I don’t know why they decided that one fence would not be sufficient.
Apparently having Christians gather together is so dangerous that three fences were needed.

Needless to say, this draconian move made a lot of headlines, and on Sunday approximately 400 Christians gathered to protest at the church. Most of them were just singing hymns or reading the Bible, but when a few of them started tearing down one of the fences, 200 heavily-armed riot police moved in.

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1381361461189091333
.45 min

I would expect to see this sort of a scene in communist China, North Korea or Iran.

This sort of thing was never supposed to happen in Canada.

Out of 4.4 million people living in Alberta, there have only been 2,013 deaths, and about half of those were among people 80 years of age or older.

If it isn’t safe to go to church, why are hordes of Canadians allowed to circulate through retail establishments every single day of the week?

If churches should be shut down, you would think that Wal-Mart, Costco and Canadian Tire should be shut down too.

But they aren’t shut down.

All over the western world, we are being promised that life will finally go back to “normal” once the pandemic is over, and they are telling us that the vaccines will end the pandemic.

But that isn’t happening. Cases are on the rise again, and thousands are still getting sick even though they have been “fully vaccinated”.

And now Pfizer and Moderna are publicly admitting that their vaccines only provide about six months of immunity…

According to new research from Pfizer and Moderna, it looks like COVID-19 immunity will last at least six months in fully vaccinated people, though studies are ongoing. In a statement released by Pfizer-BioNTech on Thursday, immunity against the coronavirus is confirmed to last at least half a year for people who have been fully vaccinated with the Pfizer shot.

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Most people that are getting shots think that they now have some sort of permanent immunity, but that isn’t even close to accurate.

Meanwhile, variants continue to emerge around the globe that the current vaccines won’t be effective against at all.

I know that a lot of you don’t want to hear this, but the pandemic is with us to stay.

And that means that the Orwellian measures that are being put in place are with us to stay too.

Over in the UK, one recent survey found that a majority of the British population is actually in favor of a permanent vaccine passport system…

Another disturbing survey has revealed that a majority of British people are willing to accept vaccine passports in order to engage in basic day to day activities, and that they are willing to go along with the digital ID card system PERMANENTLY.

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The London Independent poll, conducted by pollster Savanta ComRes, highlighted the findings, with 56 per cent saying that it would be acceptable to have to prove vaccination or negative COVID status in order to enter a shop.

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Fewer than a third, 32 per cent, said that this would be unacceptable, according to the survey.

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What in the world has happened to the British?

Here in the U.S., researchers are developing an implantable sensor that can tell if you are sick or not. If you do not know about this yet, I would highly recommend watching this 60 Minutes report.

View: https://youtu.be/No5Bz2eHNtA
1:19 min

In Australia, the Orwellian measures that they have instituted during this pandemic have regularly made headlines all over the globe, and now they are considering doing something that is completely insane.

I had a hard time believing this when I first read it. According to an Australian news source, the government is actually considering requiring people to provide “100 points of identification” before they are allowed to access social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram…

The Morrison Government will consider a radical measure to prevent online bullying and trolling, but experts say the proposal would involve serious risks for social media users.

The government is considering forcing users of social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram — as well as online dating platforms like Tinder — to upload 100 points of identification in order to use them.

The recommendation, which has been raised before, is one of 88 recommendations from a parliamentary committee report looking at family, domestic and sexual violence.

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This is the direction that our world is headed.

For a long time we enjoyed an Internet that was relatively free and open, but now that era has ended.

Now tyrants all over the globe are seeing that the Internet can be used as a tool of control, and that should deeply alarm all of us.

Over the past 12 months, the pandemic has been used as justification to advance tyranny by leaps and bounds.

If this is what has happened during a relatively minor pandemic, what is going to take place once a true global emergency comes along?

We should all consider that very carefully, because we are moving into very dark times, and government tyranny is only going to get worse.

DeSantis: Google-YouTube Trying to ‘Serve as a Council of Censors,’ ‘Enforcers of the Narrative’

JEFF POOR14 Apr 202132

Wednesday on FNC’s “Fox & Friends,” Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) slammed YouTube, the online video platform owned by Google, for declining to allow a roundtable hosted by the governor that called into question vaccines, masking and distancing protocols put into place by medical authorities.

DeSantis said based on those actions that Google was not dedicated to the scientific method on these matters.

“Look, when you have the ability to debate people, and you can marshal facts against certain viewpoints, you do that. When you don’t have that, then that’s when you try to fall back on censorship. And so, these are doctors and scientists who have been against the narrative, really, for the past year. And, you know, they’ve been right against lockdowns. They’ve been right about kids needing to be in school. Obviously, Florida followed a lot of their advice, and we’ve had much more success. And so, if what they’re saying is not true based on science, then just show the science that contradicts it.

But Google-YouTube couldn’t do that. What Google-YouTube is trying to do is serve as a council of censors where they’re enforcers of the narrative. And so, the narrative is lockdown. The narrative is mask a 2-year-old kid. The narrative is all these different things we’ve kept hearing. And when people counteract that, their instinct is to pull it down. Very troubling because that’s not what science is about.

Science is always about asking questions, always about raising concerns and trying to get to the right answer, and it’s clear that YouTube and Google are not dedicated to the scientific method.”

April 14, 2021
Defense Department's 'extremists' happen to look exactly like Trump voters
By John Dietrich

The Biden administration is on the offensive against extremism. However, it is having trouble defining the term.

The newly installed defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, has signed a memo ordering several "immediate actions," including military-wide "stand downs," to weed out "extremism" in the ranks of the military. Actions also included a review of and update to the DoD's definition of extremism and a review and standardization of the screening questionnaire — "[t]o solicit specific information about current or previous extremist behavior, and to clarify that any demonstrably false answers provided in response could form the basis for punitive action for fraudulent enlistment." Defense officials said the Pentagon is reversing Trump-era policies that banned transgender people from serving in the military. The Pentagon will also issue new rules that will broaden transgender people's access to medical care and cosmetic surgery to imitate members of the opposite sex. Opposition to these policies may be considered extremist.

Democrats are also calling for the vetting of National Guard members. D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser said, "When you have Guardsmen and women coming from all over the nation at this time, I do think that it is prudent to make sure that they are being vetted and that anybody who cannot pledge allegiance to their missions, and may be pulled by other views, needs not only to be removed from this duty, they need to be removed from the Guard." Rep. Steve Cohen claimed, "The guard is 90-some-odd-percent male ... only about 20 percent of white males voted for Biden. You've got to figure that in the Guard, which is predominantly more conservative — I see that on my social media, and we know it. They're probably not more than 25 percent of the people that are there protecting us who voted for Biden. The other 75 percent are in the class, the large class of folks, who might want to do something." The Associated Press tweeted, "Defense officials tell AP they fear possible inside attack at inauguration and are having National Guard troops in DC vetted."

Throughout the federal government, the consensus is that the greatest threat to the U.S. originates on the right. Former acting secretary of Homeland Security Chad F. Wolf stated, "I am particularly concerned about white supremacist violent extremists who have been exceptionally lethal in their abhorrent, targeted attacks in recent years." Former secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy told the Associated Press, "We're continually going through the process, and taking second, third looks at every one of the individuals assigned to this operation."

The military has depended upon slides from the New York Police Department Intelligence Bureau that listed about two dozen symbols, ideologies, and memes considered "associated with or appropriated by domestic violent extremism."

The list mentioned right-wing items exclusively. There was no mention of Antifa.

Service members are being screened to determine if their political beliefs are considered a threat. NPR reports that "the Marine Corps found 16 cases of substantiated extremism, mostly postings on social media." NPR does not report on the nature of these social media postings.

Using Rep. Steve Cohen's criteria, all Trump voters are suspect. The Defense Department is relying on the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Anti-Defamation League to identify extremist groups. Wikipedia describes the SPLC as a "legal advocacy organization specializing in civil rights and public interest litigation."

It is known for "its legal cases against white supremacist groups, its classification of hate groups and other extremist organizations, and for promoting tolerance education programs." The SPLC provides information about hate groups to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and many other law enforcement agencies. Who could object to this fine organization providing this information? However, there are problems with its choice of extremists.

The SPLC lists conservative Christian groups such as the Family Research Council, the Ruth Institute, and the Alliance Defending Freedom as extremists.

Wikipedia mentions examples of the problems the SPLC has encountered in the past. However, for some reason, Wikipedia neglected to mention that the SPLC put the "Singing Nuns" on its hate group map.

The Department of Defense will be monitoring social media sites to identify extremists. Its concentration on right-wing extremists has caused it to miss extremists in its own ranks. Richard Torres-Estrada was recently appointed chief of diversity and inclusion of America's Special Forces. He was almost immediately reassigned after it was revealed that his social media contained a post where he compared former president Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler.

Deaths and property damage during the summer of 2020 caused considerably more damage than the "insurrection" on 6 January. Yet the targets of the government efforts are almost exclusively on the right. In some corners, Black Lives Matter and Antifa are not considered extremist organizations.


Image via Free Stock Photos.

Merchants of Revolution
California’s ethnic studies initiatives train children in Marxist theory—and opposition to the American system.

Christopher F. Rufo
April 13, 2021

California public schools are embarking on a new experiment: education as social justice. Earlier this year, the state Department of Education approved an ethnic studies model curriculum, and individual school districts have begun to implement programs that advocate “decolonizing” the United States and “liberating” students from capitalism, patriarchy, and settler colonialism.

This will likely come as a surprise to most California residents, who may be familiar with the movement’s euphemisms—“ethnic studies,” “educational equity,” “culturally responsive teaching”—but do not understand the philosophical and political premises of these programs. As the state and many school districts begin to implement the state ethnic studies curriculum, however, details are emerging.

I have obtained documents from one such program, the Santa Clara County Office of Education’s Ethnic Studies Initiative, that paint a disturbing picture of the ethnic studies curriculum and the activists leading the charge. According to the documents and to sources within the district, the Office of Education held a series of teacher-training sessions on how to deploy ethnic studies in the classroom. The leaders, including district staff, an advisor for the state Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, and a professor from San Jose State University, encouraged teachers to inject left-wing politics into the classroom and to hide controversial materials from parents.

According to slides and contemporaneous notes from the session, the Santa Clara Office of Education began the presentation with a “land acknowledgement,” claiming that Santa Clara County and the public school system “occupy the unceded territory of the Muwekma Ohlone Nation, the sovereign nation and original people of the skies, land, and waters.” The premise of this ritual, which has become common in progressive organizations, is that the American government, founded by white settlers, is an illegitimate colonial power that should return the land to the Native American tribes.

Next, Jorge Pacheco, president of the California Latino School Boards Association and advisor for the state Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, presented the movement’s conceptual framework. Pacheco explained that the ethnic studies curriculum is based on the work of Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire, who invented the concept of the “pedagogy of the oppressed,” which holds that students must be educated to understand their oppression and develop the practical skills, or “praxis,” to challenge and eventually overthrow their oppressors. Pacheco acknowledged that the Marxist underpinnings to ethnic studies “scare people away” but insisted that teachers must be “grounded in the correct politics to educate students.”

Pacheco then argued that the United States is a political regime based on “settler colonialism,” which he describes as a “system of oppression” that “occupies and usurps land/labor/resources from one group of people for the benefit of another.” The settler colonialist regime, Pacheco continues, is “not just a vicious thing of the past, but [one that] exists as long as settlers are living on appropriated land.” The white colonialist regime of the United States is a “parasitic system” responsible for domestic violence, drug overdoses, and other social problems. In a related PowerPoint slide, Pacheco presented examples of this oppression, including “men exploiting women,” “white people exploiting people of color,” and “rich people exploiting poor people.”

What is the solution? Pacheco argues that teachers must “awaken [students] to the oppression” and lead them to “decodify” and eventually “destroy” the dominant political regime. The first step in this process is to help students “get into the mind of a white man” such as Christopher Columbus and analyze “what ideology led these white male settlers to be power and land hungry and justify stealing indigenous land through genocide.” Pacheco describes this process as transforming students into “activist intellectuals” who “decodify systems of oppression” into their component parts, including “white supremacy, patriarchy, classism, genocide, private property, and God.”

Teachers must be careful, though: Pacheco and the other panelists suggested that local educators hide this revolutionary pedagogy from administrators and families. “District guidelines and expectations are barriers,” said one panelist.

“[We] have to be extra careful about what is being said, since we can’t just say something controversial now that we’re in people’s homes [because of remote learning].” In addition, teachers must acknowledge that they, too, can become oppressors in the classroom. “Inherently, [it is the] oppressor who sets the rules.”

Teachers must “recognize [their] own privilege and [their] own bias” in order to align themselves with the oppressed and work toward dismantling systems of oppression.

The goal, according to the presenters, is to “develop, pilot, and refine an adaptable and scalable Ethnic Studies program design plan and curriculum that can serve as standalone courses or be integrated into core content areas.” This is already happening. Last month, the California Department of Education approved the statewide curriculum, which will bring the “pedagogy of the oppressed” to schools throughout the state. But for the movement’s leaders, the goal is to go further. At the end of the presentation in Santa Clara, Pacheco argued that schools should start transforming children into “activist intellectuals,” beginning in first grade. “[It’s] never too young,” he said, arguing that educators should be “cashing in on kids’ inherent empathy” in order to reshape their ideological foundations.

This is a dystopian project. As these pedagogical theories make their way into the classroom, California schools will be teaching millions of children to hate their own country. They will be oriented toward the work of “decolonizing,” “deconstructing,” and “dismantling” their own society. The ethnic studies activists grasp the destabilizing nature of their project—and believe that it provides them leverage for their broader political ends. During the Santa Clara presentation, Pacheco and the other instructors provided the audience with a handout quoting Freire: “Critical consciousness, they say, is anarchic. Others add that critical consciousness may lead to disorder. Some, however, confess: Why deny it? I was afraid of freedom. I am no longer afraid!” Though they are coy about their ultimate intention, the ethnic studies activists seek, at a minimum, a moral revolution—and, out of such tumults, political revolutions often follow.

California voters may not realize it, but they have installed a radical movement in the state educational bureaucracy.

[COMMENT: Aboriginal title to land in CA was extinguished by Spain/Mexico BEFORE it became part of the US under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. As part of that Treaty, a tribunal was put into place to hear and validate land ownership claims. A few pueblos were recognized as having title. This is why subsequent "treaties" negotiated with tribes by US agents were rejected as invalid. Reservations/Rancherias were subsequently established by Executive Order by the President. There were two court cases claiming unfairness to the tribes. The US admitted no wrong doing, but did voluntarily pay out nominal amounts to every validated NA in CA.]

OUR GENERATION’S WAR
By Lomez — 1 month ago

THE BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF AMERICA IN A FIFTH GENERATION WARFARE

It is appropriate to begin to understand yourself as a combatant in a war that you may only be dimly aware is being waged. You are in fact operating in the battlespace at this very moment. Consider the implications. Consider that you are marked.

Your self-identification as a combatant, or not, is irrelevant. You have been declared an adversary of the True and Just cause of Democracy. The adversary in this war is a floating signifier anyway, purposefully undefined. Don’t go searching for your name in any database (though you may find it there). The adversary can be anyone, at any time. He is a cipher. The territory under contestation is perhaps even less well-demarcated. As a matter of physical geography, it may be said to not exist at all. And yet we are in it. We are fighting it. The war is on.

Surely, I must mean this in a metaphorical sense. Just as Qanon or Pizzagate or an Alex Jones riff about inter-dimensional reptiloids harvesting adrenochrome in off-world human pod farms is merely a metaphor for a messier, realer, and less grandiose truth — what Oliver Stone charitably describes as the “stories we tell around the campfire of history” — so too to say we are combatants in a war is not a literal fact about our world that can survive the scrutiny of the sober mind.

Take this war framework seriously, not literally, in other words.

But then, maybe the distinction is no distinction at all.

The proclamations of those declaring this war leave vanishingly little room for uncertainty. Their rhetoric is becoming more explicit every day. No one can deny this. Even the soberest mind must acknowledge their increasing belligerence.

“In the aftermath of the insurrection on January 6th…” This is by now a common refrain. Oliver Stone also said — or maybe it was Homer — that every war must start with an event. No doubt they have been waiting a long time to declare their intentions, but now they have finally found their casus belli. When they say that January 6th is their 9/11, this is what they mean. It may seem that the incoherent, spontaneous nature of what happened at the Capitol might vitiate such lofty comparisons. But for the regime, all the better. The ambiguity allows for the widest possible net to be cast over their enemy, as John Brennan would have it, the “unholy alliance” of “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians.”

Tag yourself. Not that any of these terms matter. Again, they are floating signifiers. They mean everything and nothing. Importantly, they mean you. They mean me.

Brennan of course is not alone. Just days after he delivered his ominous remarks, his CIA colleague Robert Grenier wrote an op-ed for the New York Times declaring the forces responsible for January 6th — again, never clearly defined — to be regarded in the same terms as ISIS and Al-Qaeda. He spoke of an ongoing “domestic insurgency” and the need to put it down with the same degree of force as his own Counterrorism division applied to jihadists in Afghanistan and Iraq. Stanley McChrystal echoed nearly identical sentiments within the week.

Javed Ali, whose bio reads less like a human being’s than the formless node of the Foreign Policy blob that he is, writing for the Security State rag the Cipher Brief, in an article indicative of the borg-like mass to which he belongs, suggested the “New Right,” which includes the usual litany of conservative bogeymen all the way up to those with such alarming views as, for example, being “pro-2nd amendment,” warrants the creation of Domestic Terrorism laws that would include a domestic surveillance program mirroring the British Security Service to monitor online speech and circumvent Constitutional protections against prior restraint.

These views are exemplary of dozens of more public figures, and many more beyond that, who occupy places of greater and lesser significance in the regime apparatus. And here I do not mean the Biden administration per se, but the constellation of regnant institutions and power centers, the Cathedral if you prefer, the so-called Five Hundred Names, who mostly, admittedly, are only known by the shadow they cast over American life. They regard you as their enemy. Whether by weakness or strength — I believe undoubtedly weakness; their crisis of legitimacy explains all — understand your reluctance to submit to their dictates and perversions as proof of your seditionist intent.

Do not take them seriously; but do take them literally.

FIFTH GENERATION WARFARE
In 2015, in many ways presaging our present conflict, military historian William Lind, writing under the pseudonym Thomas Hobbes, published his novel Victoria, a dramatization of his concept of 4th Generation warfare. Lind imagines a second Civil War fought by a confederation of Everyman guerrillas who take on, and ultimately triumph over the establishment forces that seek to destroy the American way of life.

Lind is forgiven for indulging in a bit of bloodthirsty political fantasy. The world of 2027 he imagines is not a far cry from the one that exists now, if ratcheted up a few notches. A plague of seasonal racial riots, egged on and excused away under the language of oppression, rule the cities. Pedos and rad-fems consort in the universities to strip away the dignity of straight men in exchange for the sheepskin of the diplomas they are required to produce to be allowed gainful employment. The middle class is being squeezed out of existence, their families collapsing under the weight of cultural antagonisms and debt peonage. The state itself is comprised of dead-eyed, vacuous apparatchiks who believe in nothing but their own self-preservation, and they lean on a kind of proto-Woke Capital Cosmopolitanism to do it.

But beyond the morality play, and the heady drama of the fate of Western man, it’s Lind’s attention to the form and processes of war that are most relevant here. In the 4th Generation war everything is muddled and inexact. Military and civilian life merge into a fluid, indivisible state of mind and being. Everywhere is a potential target. There is a kind of atemporality to it, too. Individual battles never clearly begin or end. Much of it is fought in the digital ether. Fixed points of planning and operation become obsolete, too easily identified and subverted.

There are questions about the status of the war itself, and it is often an advantage of the stronger side to plausibly deny there is any war at all.

In the end, Lind resolves these ambiguities in no uncertain terms. His 4th Generation civil war, however abstract and indistinct, eventually reverts to the classic mode. Its wages are measured in lives lost and territory gained. His heroes shoulder their rifles and vanquish their enemies in pools of their own blood. A Christian nation of local, artisanal economies blooms in a Jeffersonian spirit of revitalization. It’s a chilling read, the Minecraft meme brought to life.

But it is in this latter reversion to classic military confrontation where Lind’s map loses touch with the territory we are actually living in. We are not in a war that accommodates armed conflict, nor should we want it to. Let me repeat that for the minders reading this: violence, kids, is not the answer to our current problems.

Rather, some have speculated that what we are living through now is better described as 5th Generation war. A fifth-generation war is one where the ambiguity stands, even more so, but is never quite so manifestly resolved. (This Twitter thread from last October by anon user Reality Gamer provides a useful summary of the concept.)

This war, if we are to adopt the model, which I believe we should — and for which there is much compelling evidence — is fought almost exclusively over ideas. As in Lind’s concept, everything is indistinct, everything is abstracted right up to the point of nonexistence. War and peace, civilian and combatant, battlefield and neutral territory all collapse in a morass of ever-present meta-conflict. The conceptual boundaries between debate, activism, and terrorism are themselves the site of primary engagement. What matters is not who controls the streets in the wake of a clash of forces, but he who decides that the clashes are “mostly peaceful” and their own soldiers just an “idea.”

That is, it is a war over narrative control. Instead of armed battalions, it’s a loose affiliation of entrenched interests — deep-state operatives, media conglomerates, NGOs, lawfare apparatchiks, academics, the many-sided face of globohomo — controlling information networks to shore up their resources and guard against whoever they identify as a threat. These threats and the methods to neutralize them never have to be explicitly stated or shared across the network. In fact, it is better if they aren’t. It obviates the problem of what Edward Luttwack calls the “paradoxical logic of strategy.” Instead, the system, like a black box AI, manages its agenda according to its own hidden processes.

And what is this agenda exactly? To enforce the conditions of consent.

As Darren Beattie has usefully noted, while this agenda has always been in place, the orientation of the propagandists has moved from a persuasion model of consent to a coercion model. In the Before-Times, the pre-history of the Current Year, our consent depended at least on the illusion of private agency. It is true that our televisual masters constructed the shallow fantasies that may have constrained our political vocabulary, and also constructed the stage where these fantasies were managed, but the old propaganda model still allowed for, and even depended upon its audience’s free will to choose the master’s fantasies over alternative ones. There existed, even within the narrowing arena of official knowledge and belief, the collision of competing logics, of competing attitudes and points of view that in their confrontations, however manipulated, however asymmetrical the rules governing these confrontations, could produce a plurality of potential outcomes. The egregore may have been led to water, but it was not yet programmed to drink.

What we are experiencing now is something quite different, the regime on war-footing, no longer confident enough in its own legitimacy to dare put that legitimacy to test. And as is the case for all regimes in such a weakened, sclerotic state, though the strategies and tactics are more diffuse and perhaps less blunt than in eras past, we are treated to the same predictable response: crush dissent, flatten and homogenize the culture, divide and alienate the population from one another, declare a monopoly not just on knowledge and belief, but on the asking of questions themselves. Vaclav Havel, writing on the withering Communist regime of his native Czechoslovakia, described this final desperate effort to coerce the population into consent as the “nihilization of life.”

It’s as apt for our own time as it was for Havel. Consider their broadsides against our cultural past. Consider what they have done to the story we tell about ourselves as Americans. “The story was destroyed,” Havel wrote:

“History was replaced by a kind of pseudo-history… by the kind of artificial activity that is not an open-ended play of agents confronting one-another, but a one-dimensional, transparent, predictable self-manifestation (and self-celebration) of a single, central agent of truth and power.”

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This is what they hope to achieve with the Year Zero event of January 6th, and what we cannot let them.

FORMING THE RESISTANCE
When vast swaths of non-compliant Americans are declared domestic insurgents, it behooves us to conduct ourselves accordingly. This is not to say that whatever might broadly be called the ‘Dissident Right’ ought to assume a defensive crouch, or retreat into passive quietism until the regime exhausts itself. Though we may be in the midst of a 5th Generation war, some of the old rules still apply, and the insurgent, however diminished, however outgunned — metaphorically, of course — has certain advantages he can make use of.

Another war historian, David Gallula, describing the Cold War spasms breaking apart and reforming the global map after World War II, wrote in 1965 what has become the textbook on the nature of insurgencies. Gallula was a man of his time, and most of his examples are superficially outdated, Communist rebels from Greece to North Africa to Southeast Asia asserting themselves with greater and lesser effectiveness throughout the Third World. We are not Communists, and this is not the Cold War, no matter how much our State Department might wish it were so. Nonetheless, Gallula provides a few key insights that broadly apply to our fight, and that we ought to keep in mind as we ask the question of what comes next.

To begin, the site of contestation in the 5th Generation war against our decrepit regime is not firstly the halls of power, certainly not the Capitol building, and not even really the formal political arena at all. Borrowing from Yarvin, I’d echo that Republican electoral victories are not sufficient for breaking the regime until the Republican candidate sees himself as an outsider prepared to tell the regime that it must submit. Still, contra Yarvin, winning political fights is good, where we can get them, and there are ways of engaging in local politics, especially, that may achieve certain desired effects. But ultimately, political victories are downstream of a more fundamental fight, which is winning the support of what Gullala coarsely calls “the population.”

To put it in more accessible terms, the right will win if and only if it can infiltrate the mind of the ‘normie’ and exterminate the parasitic brainworms sucking the life from his better judgment and the resolve to do anything about his rapidly declining prospects.

His relative material comfort, despite the economic headwinds brought on by Corona and the ongoing outflow of resources from the middle-class, make this a difficult, though not impossible sell. The normie must be prodded. The normie must be pulled along. The normie must be given the opportunity and incentive to cross the rubicon into what for him is forbidden, and potentially hostile, intellectual and moral territory. He must be granted the license to self-consciously rebuke the epistemic authorities and expert class he has for a lifetime been conditioned to trust with his self-understanding.

That is, the normie must be given a cause. This cause must exist outside the political paradigm within which he has been accustomed to understanding these conflicts. Scott Alexander is not entirely wrong to propose that Republicans wage a “class conflict” against the strata of elite sense-makers who despise them. It is indeed a righteous cause, and an effective message. He is wrong however that Republicans, as such, ought to do this. No. This is not a partisan conflict against Democrats, though there is much overlap. This is a conflict of insurgents against a failing regime. That is the way it must be framed and its campaigns prosecuted.

I am cautiously optimistic that Americans understand this cause and the nature of their enemy instinctively. There is no denying the rot at the heart of American life, of Western life. There is no denying the ever-presence of the bugman and his sickly designs for us. The energy leaking out against this is everywhere in sight. However misdirected, however frenetic and decoupled from meaningful objectives, a spirit of disobedience obtains. They feel the quickening incursion of the public life into the private, no doubt accelerated by Zoom World and the bright eye of our screens watching and recording our every thought. Americans can feel caught in a straightjacket of preference falsification and coercive moral decrees, the stiltifying HRization of their inner universe. What a bleak and limited existence!

And where they can’t feel it, we must guide them. We must articulate the shape of the enemy so he can see and understand its character. Human life versus pod life. This is an easy choice, but only once you understand it as the nature of the proposition before you.

Finally, as Gullala observes, an insurgent movement in its infancy is necessarily small. It is necessarily weak. It needs time to build. It cannot on day one confront the regime on its turf and presume to use the regime’s own weapons against it.

Again, this is not to advocate for quietism, but rather to recognize the limited usefulness of operating within the domains of social and political activity the regime already controls. You are not going to take back the universities or Hollywood or the news desk. Infiltrate these places and expose them for what they are, but to destroy them rather than to save them.

Before anything else, we must build a culture of our own. Any meaningful insurgency will be downstream from its capacity to imagine. Direct action politics will flail and follow, rather than lead, if it is not tethered to the kind of self-understanding that can only be achieved through art. The regime understands this, if only intuitively, and the ban waves and censorship are an attempt to tear apart the communities where this art can be cultivated and shared. But they are not yet omnipresent. They have not yet, as in Havel’s Czechoslovakia, managed to altogether “nihilize life.” There are cracks still to penetrate. There is, deep in the American soul, a resilience that is not yet extinguished. Build the communities, forge the relationships, online and off, where this resilience can manifest and triumph over the enemy and its machines.

This is how we win.

The ACU Creates A Push Back Against The U.S. Corporate Wokeism Threatening Our Liberty

The American Conservative Union Establishes The Center To Protect Voters and Their Voices

by Jeff Dunetz | Apr 13, 2021 | Culture, U.S. News



I will admit it–I am a big fan of the American Conservative Union (ACU). Not only because they run my favorite political event every year—CPAC, but because they are usually the first to recognize and act against the approaching threats to our freedoms. Their latest action is typical of the way they fight for our liberty.

Anyone who has followed the news since Georgia passed their election integrity law, knows how major corporations have taken steps based on the false cancel culture claims about the bill. ACU protecting liberty.

This isn’t the first time major corporations have used their resources to skew the political discourse toward policies that attack Americans’ freedoms nor will it be the last time. Recognizing those gathering anti-liberty clouds the ACU announced the establishment of The Center To Protect Voters and Their Voices.

On behalf of more than 100 million Americans, The American Conservative Union (ACU) is taking a stand against the increasingly divisive and partisan activism by public corporations and organizations that are caving to “woke” pressure. We will not stand by as half the country gets silenced, canceled, or shamed for resisting this pressure and choosing instead to value beliefs and traditions that are the bedrock of the greatest nation on earth.

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ACU, America’s original conservative grassroots organization, has partnered with corporations and other center-right groups since 1964 to fight higher taxes, burdensome regulations and activist judges. We have worked alongside the business community to preserve free markets by limiting the government’s role in the private sector so for-profit businesses could flourish, provide jobs, and meet their primary goal of creating value for their shareholders.

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But we are in a dangerous time today.

The unprecedented level of anti-Americanism, combined with radical leftist appeasement, makes it necessary for us to tell these activist corporations that their woke politics risk permanently severing the long-standing coalition for limited government between corporations and conservative activists. Some of today’s most prominent businesses that succumb to pressure from the elite media or radical political organizations are the very same ones that leaned on conservatives to help fight socialism in the past.

We have no issue with corporate leaders expressing their positions on cultural questions, but we draw the line when they abuse their power, attack the values of their customers and employees, and advocate for policies that weaken America. Make no mistake, corporations and their leaders should not disrespect the diverse views of their customers and employees by bowing down to the peer pressure from celebrities, prominent business associations, and the radical Left.

We have moved into dangerous territory where highly profitable companies can join forces to inject themselves into whatever social issue of the day is politically expedient, regardless of the impact on everyday Americans. Corporations have taken shortcuts and disingenuously accused election reformers of voter suppression and racism. But not only have they attacked voting rights and spread misinformation on the voting laws, they are also complicit in an unscientific and harmful assault on gender, unborn life, immigration, and energy policy, to name a few. When did we become a country where respectful disagreement is forbidden?

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They have also maligned and silenced large percentages of their own customers and employees who feel differently. These individuals can no longer speak up to express their political, social or religious views because they are now at risk of being fired or publicly shamed.
We will be a voice for those who feel so powerless that they fear the consequences of speaking up.

We will expose the hypocrisy of corporate leaders who are publicly embracing and funding the Left while running companies that would cease to exist if the full extent of the Democrat’s leftist economic policies were implemented. We will demand that leaders of these corporations stop further dividing America by unquestioningly siding with the Left on every cultural or political dispute. Our goal is to encourage the CEOs and Directors of these companies to go back to running their businesses.

We will first demand meetings with CEO’s and board members of egregious corporations and other woke enterprises. If these companies rebuff us, they will suffer the consequences of losing the political support of millions who would gladly advocate for the policies that ensure their profitability. If these companies continue down this dangerous road of separating themselves from their advocates, we will take additional steps to highlight their support of woke politics.

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This is a fight we never expected to have to wage against entities that usually have been allies in economic battles, but we will wage it with all of our resources and talents.

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Thank you ACU, I will support you in this fight.ACU protecting liberty.

Societal Warfare

April 14, 2021
By Jim Cathcart


Commercial Warfare is just the tip of the iceberg. Costco stops carrying “My Pillow” products, MLB boycotts Georgia, Movie producers join them, then Delta and Coca Cola pile on. These are just the headliner instances but Commercial and Societal Warfare is being practiced throughout our society…and it is cancerous.

Most people watch the news or read it on their phones, then they shake their heads in disgust or tell their nearby family or friends how outrageous they think things are. What they don’t realize, however, is that they too are soldiers in this war.

The fact that they aren’t fighting is the problem.

We watch the news and ask, “What good would it do for me to speak up?” We say, “It wouldn’t make a difference.” Oh yes it does and would.

By a small margin of votes like yours, the Democrat candidates took the Senate in Georgia. By a small margin of votes, key counties in swing states went for Biden, or should I say went against Trump. (It’s my observation that almost nobody voted FOR Biden, but lots of people voted AGAINST Trump.)

The media at all levels, international, national, regional and local, have sustained a campaign of bias against conservatism. They claim that “woke” good intentions are their motive, but the reality is that they abandoned their journalistic duty to bring us the truth and instead gave us opinions disguised as truth. We trusted them, but we should have recognized them as soldiers in the ongoing war against us and our freedom.

War used to be physical. It was about real estate, controlling the high ground, capturing the castle, annexing more land. Battles were fought with weapons like knives, arrows, bullets, bombs, diseases, toxins, and destruction. Millions of people were killed so that their countries couldn’t resist. That was mom and dad’s version of war.

Today war is being fought online, in “news” reports, in classrooms, in popular television shows, in movies, through public terror campaigns disguised as protests, through the corruption of public utilities and police departments, in city council chambers, via mayor’s offices and state legislatures, plus in courtrooms.

But, make no mistake, it is a real war. It is as real as the 163 days of non-stop combat my father experienced in the Philippines and on Guadalcanal in World War 2. It just doesn’t look or feel the same.

Policies, regulations and denied essential services can be as devastating as bombs when placed strategically. When you can’t enroll your child in the school of your choice then the only viable option is public school indoctrination or home schooling. When colleges are more bent on teaching “inclusiveness” and “white guilt” than math, English and science, then a university degree becomes a Woke Passport instead of intellectual advancement. When a company is fined for allowing you to not wear a mask in a local coffee shop then commerce diminishes and small businesses struggle to survive.

When it is no longer OK to compliment a person of another gender, or say “man” or “woman”, or notice someone’s skin color, or mention your Christian holiday (as in “Merry Christmas”), or assume that most people are heterosexual, or admire a statue of a long forgotten hero, or name your school after one of America’s founding fathers, then folks, we are in trouble.

Battles are being won and we aren’t even showing up to fight.

As they see that we aren’t resisting in any meaningful ways, they increase the attack. Audacity has become their default mode. The more outrageous it is, the more it tests our resolve and shows our weaknesses. In conventional warfare this would be a feigned attack on the enemy’s fortifications to see how much pressure it would take to overwhelm them and to see how they would defend themselves. If the attack failed, a new strategy would be tried until the vulnerability was found. Then victory would be certain.

In Societal warfare all weapons are on the table. Rumors are weapons and when placed strategically they can weaken the credibility of leaders and cause panic among the followers. If they can control the mainstream news media and slant their comments and observations to show disdain or cynicism toward your enemy’s respected leaders, then the leaders become less effective. Simple comments that are untrue but placed within a broader comment usually go unchallenged. But, as in a courtroom, when the judge says to the jury, “Disregard that last remark.” We know that everyone heard it and considered it. So, a statement like, “In the Trump-inspired Capitol insurrection…”, becomes accepted as if it were based in truth. But the riot at the Capitol was no more an “insurrection” than the outrageous confrontations in the Capitol hallways done by the Left during the Kavanaugh hearings. A handful of paid vandals committed criminal acts on January 6th but most people were just loud, not harmful. And there is no evidence to indicate that the violence that day was inspired or even condoned by President Trump. Nonetheless, a large number of citizens now accept it as true.

President Clinton proved repeatedly that a statement oft repeated becomes accepted. When some Republican initiatives were shown to be more popular than his, he simply started claiming them as his own. After awhile it was assumed he was their author. Today we hear terms that cannot be substantiated but by repetition in mainstream sources they gain acceptance as hard facts. “White privilege” and “Racial oppression”, “Voter suppression”, “Police brutality”, “Male dominance”, “Social justice” all are terms we have come to know and hear daily.

But drill down on any of them and you’ll find scant evidence that it’s worth worrying about. Individual instances, sure, but not “Systemic” causes.

What are we doing to resist these attacks? Have you changed your shopping patterns to boycott offenders? Do you campaign for conservatives in your local community? Do you get out the vote for city council, school board, county commissioner, or local judge races? Do you attend meetings and challenge the new policies and regulations? Do you write to your local, regional, or state representatives? The vast majority of the news we get is national and international. But the biggest affect on our daily life is at the local or state level.

“All politics is local,” said former House Speaker Tip O’Neill, and that’s certainly where it is felt most.

In World War 2 Germany took over France. They marched in by the tens of thousands and occupied the country. They dominated all public functions and even intruded into private life. But, life always finds a way, as Jurassic Park told us. The French Underground, the Resistance, quickly formed and covertly operated for years to assist anyone who might defeat the German occupiers.

That same thing happens anywhere an oppressive regime takes over. A “Black Market” is the first to form, people trade goods that are limited or controlled.
We need to be resisting in all legal, ethical and non-violent ways we can. Even though many of the Left do not operate by legal or ethical standards.

The border crisis or “challenge” is a disastrous situation that was created intentionally with anticipated effects. Any thinking person could predict the surge of invaders and even anticipate their favored tactics. Cartels and other adversaries assemble children by the thousands to overwhelm our system because they know that Americans are sympathetic to children and will abandon their defenses in order to protect kids. That has become their main diversion.

Put the kids up front and on the news, make them helpless, wait for the Americans to rescue them, then quickly get the illegal drugs, gang members and terrorists across the border while they are distracted. It has been working for months now. This was intentionally done through a policy change at the White House on the first day of the Biden administration. Talk about audacity!

Societal warfare is upon us and coming to your street soon. It’s time to join the battle with information, showing up, recruiting others, countering the indoctrination of our kids, electing conservative representatives and local officials, resisting and challenging oppressive policies and rule changes. Don’t elect familiar names or people who simply say good words. Elect people who are willing to stand up and resist the socialist intrusions. Start communicating more than ever. Be heard!

The Forgotten Legacy of Free Speech on the ‘Left’

By Ben Bartee - April 14, 2021

Aside from Bill Maher’s audience – who, as the late Christopher Hitchens once noted before giving them the finger, will “clap at apparently anything” – the “liberals” (heavy on the quotes) in Huffington Post’s social media comments sections represent the single dumbest group of people ever assembled.


In a giant corporate circle jerk, The Huffington Post (HuffPo), previously owned by multinational corporation Verizon Media, is now owned by a combination of Verizon Media and “news” conglomerate Buzzfeed which shamelessly markets itself as “independent media.” The HuffPo/Verizon/Buzzfeed Empire donates heavily to DC Swamp politicians on both sides of the aisle.

It is, in short, Ivy League incest — a very Brooklyn, very upper-middle-class-cosmopolitan white, very woke affair. None of these people’s parents farm corn in Nebraska.


The HuffPo editors’ meeting room, which was later, ironically, criticized in other woke corporate media for not being “diverse” enough.

One glance at the above cringy photo of the HuffPo editorship and you begin to imagine the horrors these people visit upon free speech. To them, censorship is a virtue disguised as fighting the patriarchy or transphobia or whatever. This is the fruit of public education in the United States.

The commenters in HuffPo’s Facebook postings look pretty much the same as their editors — except that they generally weigh +/- 100 pounds more, pose with their masked cat (for COVID safety) in their profile pictures, and superimpose it all over rainbow filters. Because they are allies, as the woke terminology goes.


But allies with whom, to what end?

The empty vassals who follow HuffPo, whom Lenin called “useful idiots,” earn their title. They reflexively and uncritically parrot the fashionable line – even ones that directly contradict the core tenants of true leftist ideology like challenging power and protecting individual rights.

Conversations on social media around corporate censorship with loyal HuffPo followers go like this:

• Reasonable person: Unelected tech giants have too much power and influence in today’s society. Who is Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey to decide who can speak in the public square?
• HuffPo robot: Hate speech is not free speech!
• Reasonable person: Hate speech is, in fact, protected speech in the United States. Regardless, that was not the question. Who are tech oligarchs to decide whose voices are allowed to propagate and whose are silenced?
• HuffPo robot: It’s a private company. The First Amendment only applies to the government. Twitter and Facebook can do what they want. So typical of these entitled white MAGA men. [“like”/”heart” react x10]

• Supportive HuffPo robot #2 comment on thread: Yaaaas slay queen. So sick of these white Trump supporters thinking they can say whatever they want without consequences. “Free speech” is literally code for genocide.

• Supportive HuffPo robot #3 comment on thread: Ignore him. He’s just a white supremacist Russian bot.
• Reasonable person: [for some reason still attempting a good faith exchange with bad faith actors] I’m not a Russian bot or MAGA. You just made that up. The principle of free speech, while only instantiated into law as protection against government overreach, is nonetheless a founding component of Western society. These ideas date back to the Renaissance and before. Freedom of expression is the birthright of every human being on Earth. It is the bedrock of civil society. All rights emanate from free speech; it is the catalyst and prerequisite. [“angry” react x5]
• HuffPo robot: What is Renasence? Is that the new Lil Nas X single? He’s hawt.
• Reasonable person: You are a retarded c**t. [double no-no] [“angry” react x20]
• HuffPo robot: Blocked and reported! [“like”/”heart”/”care” x50]

Then you get a message that looks like this:


Sometimes it’s 24 hours, or 7 days. Other times it’s 30 days. There’s no standard punishment for breaking their nonsensical rules because Team Zuckerberg just makes it up as they go along.

Domestic abusers run on the same modus operandi of arbitrary punishment – to hold the victim in suspense/terror with no rhyme or reason as to the consequences, paralyzed by fear into inaction and submission.

Also, conveniently, in the woke left’s Wonderland world of censorship run amok, somehow the same standards of “private business rights” don’t apply to small business owners who won’t bake a “gender transition cake.”


“Gender transition cakes,” non-issues to normal people, are where SJWs draw a hard line – “you will bake this cake, bigot, or feel the full weight of the law.”

The plaintiff in the latest gay wedding cake controversy — a “transgender lawyer and activist” named Autumn Scardina (dear God in heaven, can such a thing be real?) — brazenly admitted to the Denver Post that she contacted the baker with the sole malicious intent to entrap him into baking a cake he didn’t want to and then to sue him for discrimination when he said no:

“When her lawyer Paula Greisen asked whether the call was a ‘setup,’ she said it was not. ‘It was more of calling someone’s bluff,’ she said.”

What happened to business rights? What happened to “it’s a private company, they can do what they want?”

Perusing Facebook’s Orwellian “Community Standards,” you quickly come to glimpse the depths of the black hole; the corporate left’s “rules” are 100% arbitrary, full-stop. By design, they function solely as mechanisms to enforce standards of behavior designed by unhinged gender studies professors at liberal arts colleges, regardless of how abhorrent they are to everyday, non-indoctrinated Americans.

Anything and everything that challenges the corporate left’s narrative is now “hate speech,” which has no legal definition of any kind in the United States.

Consider the absurdity of Facebook’s “Community Standards” sections regarding “Hate Speech”:

“We believe that people use their voice and connect more freely when they don’t feel attacked on the basis of who they are. That’s why we don’t allow hate speech on Facebook.”

In other words, “nothing means anything”: the nihilistic language of soulless corporate robots attempting to justify immoral impositions of social control on formerly free people. There is no virtue here, no morality — just codified means of control and the raw exercise of power.

This is unfiltered, mindless groupthink, a virus downloaded into human hard drives and regurgitated like Matrix code. This is mass lobotomy, the robbery of individual autonomy.

The good news for the human freedom movement is that the neoliberal corporatocracy has not succeeded in genociding the True North Left — the anti-censorship, pro-free-speech inheritors of the Enlightenment. Despite their ambitions, they haven’t stamped out dissent in totality — not yet.

On the fringes, pirate ship outlets like Aaron Maté at The GrayZone, Glenn Greenwald on Substack, and the Jimmy Dore Show, among other brave few, still fight the power.

The now-underground right and left – the populist, grassroots kind made of normal people who still have consciences – must come together against the predator that is the transnational woke corporate state, which presses its boot on the necks of humanity of all races and nationalities. Ideological infighting is not the way forward for free humanity; unity against ascendant authoritarianism is.

Can The Great "Awokening" Succeed?
BY TYLER DURDEN
WEDNESDAY, APR 14, 2021 - 11:40 PM

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,
We all know that we are living in revolutionary times. The origins, ascendence, values, laws, and future of the United States are all under assault by self-described, though accurately described, revolutionaries.



It is a Jacobin, Bolshevik, or Maoist moment. All aspects of life, well beyond politics, are now to be ideologically conditioned. Everything from kindergarten messaging, cartoons, workplace reeducation, and television commercials to college admissions, baseball games, and the airlines are to be “fundamentally transformed” along racial lines.

Long gone is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of a colorblind society. Gone, at least at the state level, is confidence in the melting pot of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage (although mixed marriages and multiracial children are at an all-time high).

Gone are even the affirmative-action doctrines of proportional representation and disparate impact. (Yet the two mandates were always arbitrarily applied, in the sense that the U.S. Postal Service and the professional football and basketball leagues never paid much attention to racial quotas based on demographic percentages, which apparently only applied to white and Asian “overrepresentation” elsewhere).

Wokeism, however, is essentially tribal. It seeks to identify particular nonwhite constituencies, unite them not by identical class, not by similar skin color, not by collective similar history, not by shared experience, not by mutual cultural affinities, not by longstanding historical alliances, but simply by two premises:

1) Those of the woke collective are either claimants to being “nonwhite,” and thus victims of racism, or they are architects and supporters of the wokeist agenda, and:

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2) they can thereby all either directly leverage reparatory concessions in hiring, admissions, careers, compensation, and general influence or ensure the revolutionary guillotine exempts themselves.

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A cynic might add that much of this new racialism is a product of globalteering, and seeks to cater to huge foreign markets—China especially—by both “looking more like the world,” and delighting America’s critics, while appeasing far less moral audiences and consumers abroad than a perceived shrinking market at home.

Still for the woke revolution to succeed, a number of experiments will have to go its way.

Merit Was Always a Sham?
Wokeism assumes that merit was mostly an arbitrary white construct. Its use was to insist on ethnocentric and culturally exclusionary criteria to ostracize the Other. Otherwise, “merit” had not much relation with real competency.

Is that allegation true? We shall soon see.

But note first that few are saying to keep bar-exam grading static, or SAT minimum scores for admission the same, and thereby instead create a Marshall Plan effort in the inner-city to stop the violence, turn failed schools into stellar academies, and honestly critique single-parent households, illegitimacy, and inordinate criminality—as an effort to ensure African American youth are not just qualified, but better qualified meritocratically than those who are deemed to hold these monopolies.

Instead, take the United Airlines idea that it won’t necessarily train the most qualified would-be pilot candidates. Now it will target applicants by racial groupings and, by fiat, limit white males to 2,500 of 5,000 slots in its pilot-training schools. If a nonwhite applicant has less prior experience with flight, scores lower on a test, or compiled a less than competitive high school or college record, it won’t matter then. These were all always useless benchmarks apparently.

In today’s age of computer-driven avionics, the prerequisite ability to do math, to know something about navigation, to understand computers, or to have the proper temperament to fly a plane doesn’t really matter. The fact that thousands will enter pilot training, and soon aircraft controlling, in part on the basis of their gender or race, will not in any way affect the safety or efficacy of travel.

We will know fairly soon the answers to this woke experiment by two criteria: Will pilot error, whether fatal or incidental, increase? And will our elites, whether in Air Force One, or in their own Gulfstreams, follow suit and hire pilots on the basis of their diversity first, and avionics record second.

We can ditto race-based criteria now used at the corporate and financial level, in high-tech, the military, entertainment, education, and in likely everything from movie roles to book contracts to national awards.

Again, such emphases assume that our current managers, professionals, and directors of the last 50 years were heretofore racists or were hired by racists. Or at least they satisfied artificially constructed high standards that bore little relation to actual skills required on the job.

Or they must no longer enjoy percentages in the workplace simply representative of their demographic percentages, but rather in reparatory fashion become underrepresented rather than just demographically correct.

To sum up, in other words, if there were similar race-based/diversity criteria applied to the current meritocratic NBA, would it matter all that much?

If African American athletes were by protocol and statute kept to between, say, 12-20 percent of the NBA player roster, to reflect the black 12-13 percent of the U.S. population, would it make that much difference?

Would the starting L.A. Lakers five, with one African American forward, one white player, a Latino guard, an Asian center, and a Punjabi shooter be all that less exciting, skilled, or successful a team? Are the current standards that accept or reject an NBA player constructed or weighed to favor African Americans that can be judged by their “overrepresentation”?

In the logic of wokeness, would the resulting appeal of a team—that “looks more like” a multiracial America—make up in diversity, unity, cohesion, equity, inclusion, and appeal what it lost in sheer abilities to make plays, dribble, shoot, rebound, dunk, or block? Were the all-white racialist and exclusionary teams of the 1940s really no different in skill and ability than the purely meritocratic 2021 teams? Of course not.

Again, we are going to find out, and in a number of professions, what happens when traditional meritocratic standards are replaced by woke guidelines.

Some Racism Is Not Racism
Wokeism assumes asymmetry. That is, it assumes, for recompensatory purposes, that the spirit of slavery remains, that the hatreds propelling Jim Crow from 1879 to 2021 are very much alive, that the civil rights movement of “equality of opportunity” of the last 55 years was more or less a noble dud. And the result is wokeism’s doctrine that reparatory bias is not bias. Or if it is, the people will understand, Animal Farm-style, why some discrimination is good and different from other discrimination that is bad or why some prejudice is more tolerable than other prejudices.

If asymmetrical wokeism then operates with a necessary and correct imbalance accepted by most, then there will be nothing wrong. There will follow no backlash, no social chaos, in using race to denigrate others collectively.

There will be nothing wrong in ad nauseam using “whiteness,” “white privilege,” “white supremacy,” and “white terrorists’” in pejoratively stereotypical terms—collectively to apply to all 230 million deemed whites‚ whether the unemployed welder or the part-time junior college instructor or Bill Gates—in a way that it would be terribly wrong to talk pejoratively and collectively in terms of any other group.

If one collates all the things that have been said over the years about whites in general by Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, or Maxine Waters, and yet more recently in more sophisticated fashion by the new generation of racialist-obsessed intellectuals such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, Damon Young, or Elie Mystal, and then switched the terms white to black, would there be any outcry that it was becoming wrong to deductively extrapolate from individuals collective values and beliefs, and then, in circular fashion, reapply them to individuals as an innate trait?

We shall soon discover whether this tenet of wokeism—asymmetrical use of collective stereotyping—is widely accepted by 330 million Americans. We will soon see one of three consequences from this unapologetic woke racial generalizing:

1) The American people are so inured to their hateful origins and history, that they do not mind at all when whites are collectively demonized as enjoying positions they never earned and thus logically should not continue to enjoy.

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Or,

2) Given that no one objects to stereotyping 230 million people, no one objects to anyone stereotyping others on the basis of race, in the manner that once fostered the civil rights movement.

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Or,

3) We will all for survival, as Rwanda, the Balkans, and Iraq teach us, group together by first-cousin affinities and tribes. Recalling Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes, we will freely stereotype, denigrate, and separate from other groups on the premises that our particular generalizations and deductions are the one and only true and accurate typecasting.

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Artur Widak/NurPhoto

Dr. Frankenstein and His Woke Monster
What made a 90 percent white population of the late 1950s and 1960s finally sicken of racial bias? Many things—protests, boycotts, the force of moral persuasion. But three things stand out.

One, segregation and bias were always contrary to the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

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Two, these assumptions of racial prejudice were not predicated on any discernible science, logic, or coherent basis other than tribal bias, hatred, and ignorance.

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Three, racial unfairness robbed the United States of critical talent by ignoring merit and substituting pseudo-scientific tribal affinities.

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Yet by the emerging 1960s did anyone really believe that Perry Como de facto had a better voice than Harry Belafonte or Sammy Davis, Jr., that Sidney Poitier must be a less gifted actor than Frank Sinatra, that Hank Aaron was innately less impressive than Roger Maris, or that Senator Edward Brooke was less competent an American senator than Senator Herman Talmadge? Again, no.

Wokeness is returning to such tribal separation and crackpot categorization on the one assumption that its arbitrary rules will not alienate Americans as they finally did in the past.

So now are we to believe that non-whites can pick the race of their future roommates in colleges without audit or complaint? Farm aid shall be doled out to all except whites? Welfare in Oakland must exclude poor white recipients? Vaccinations will be targeted to non-white groups first? Will 330 million Americans grow to accept that racial typology will govern all state policy—in following a noble and successful historical precedent?

In each mass shooting, we shall broadcast the horror only if the shooter is white and his victims not so, but mute the story if the opposite should be true?

For noble purposes, criminal suspects shall not be identified by race unless they are white? It will be fine in advance to announce the gender and race of a vice-presidential candidate that mostly alone will determine the selection? We will massage data, and suppress or publicize statistics depending on their usefulness to the woke movement?

If blacks are disproportionately responsible for hate crimes against Asian Americans, we will keep still, or better yet nobly lie that whites are.

Such wokeness assumes that the Eastern Europeans never tired of their ministry-of-truth propaganda, that the cynical Soviet citizen never ignored Pravda’s assertions, or that Cubans really believe the Castro communiques.

Wokeness is either unaware of, or unconcerned with, the seething religious, caste, and racial tensions that plague India, or wrecked Lebanon, or unwound Yugoslavia. That is, the woke believe their Byzantine books of race-based exceptions, exemptions, and absolutions will convince 330 million Americans that segregation, or official untruth, are permitted, given historical circumstances and the common good.

But they will not.

Finally, wokeness takes for granted that its elite white Dr. Frankenstein architects will always control the prejudicial woke monster they created—on the assumption that one will never devour its creators. But history suggests ideologies often do just that.

Over the last two weeks, many of America’s most elite colleges seem to have deliberately restricted white admissions to around 30-40 percent of their incoming classes—on the altar of diversity and post-George Floyd wokeness. Yet, not every high-earning, bicoastal white liberal can give $10 million to Yale or Stanford or sire a likely future Major League Baseball star.

For the woke white elite, then, it will be hard to find some exemption from the rules that 70 percent of the population will be artificially recalibrated to 30 percent of the successful admissions.

A white liberal may have said “Who cares?” when hard-working Asians who represent six percent of the U.S. population were deliberately restricted to no more than 30-40 percent of the nation’s “best” colleges. But now? Will he really preen, “Bravo, my super-prepped, hyper-achieving prodigy got rejected at all the good schools and I’m so proud he took one for the woke team?”

Or what happens to the wannabe woke CEO who offered every sort of humiliating “unearned” confession, but nevertheless was still of the wrong color?

Or what will be the mindset of the progressive, white male lieutenant colonel who found that his loud wokeness was mostly useful in preparing him to better understand why he should not be promoted to brigadier general?

It is OK for woke whites to be constantly accused of “unearned privilege” as long as their bicoastal billets were tolerably reduced by just 20 percent due to racial gerrymandering. But does their magnanimity extend to a 30-40 percent white jizyah, that cuts so close to progressive homes?

Will the brilliant actress in a blockbuster classic mumble, if even just privately, that she was the wrong color to be nominated as best actress?

Sure, some may feel that these are elite psychodramas. But for that reason, they will become mostly the angsts of the Left. The liberal white elite class engineered a system of woke racialism that they assumed rested on some sort of unspoken 70 percent white/12 percent black/10 percent Latino/six percent Asian, and two percent “other” formula that would always still leave them plenty of spoils while the unhappy consequences fell instead on Dotty the Deplorable, Charlie Chump, Cliff the Clinger, and Irene Irredeemable. They did not sign up for a 30-40 percent white allotment that cuts into the white woke; that is, the good and the morally superior whites.

So this, too, will be another of wokeism’s greatest tests, when elite writers, professors, actors, lawyers, newsroom grandees, and CEO magnificoes learn that they, too, can be of the wrong color under the new tribal prejudice they fostered.

Wokeism is creating a future group of politically incorrect Trotskyites on a proverbial rendezvous with a Mexican ice ax, given that by birth they will never be woke enough for the new Stalinism.

marsh said:

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Can The Great "Awokening" Succeed?
BY TYLER DURDEN
WEDNESDAY, APR 14, 2021 - 11:40 PM

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,
We all know that we are living in revolutionary times. The origins, ascendence, values, laws, and future of the United States are all under assault by self-described, though accurately described, revolutionaries.



It is a Jacobin, Bolshevik, or Maoist moment. All aspects of life, well beyond politics, are now to be ideologically conditioned. Everything from kindergarten messaging, cartoons, workplace reeducation, and television commercials to college admissions, baseball games, and the airlines are to be “fundamentally transformed” along racial lines.

Long gone is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of a colorblind society. Gone, at least at the state level, is confidence in the melting pot of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage (although mixed marriages and multiracial children are at an all-time high).

Gone are even the affirmative-action doctrines of proportional representation and disparate impact. (Yet the two mandates were always arbitrarily applied, in the sense that the U.S. Postal Service and the professional football and basketball leagues never paid much attention to racial quotas based on demographic percentages, which apparently only applied to white and Asian “overrepresentation” elsewhere).

Wokeism, however, is essentially tribal. It seeks to identify particular nonwhite constituencies, unite them not by identical class, not by similar skin color, not by collective similar history, not by shared experience, not by mutual cultural affinities, not by longstanding historical alliances, but simply by two premises:


A cynic might add that much of this new racialism is a product of globalteering, and seeks to cater to huge foreign markets—China especially—by both “looking more like the world,” and delighting America’s critics, while appeasing far less moral audiences and consumers abroad than a perceived shrinking market at home.

Still for the woke revolution to succeed, a number of experiments will have to go its way.

Merit Was Always a Sham?
Wokeism assumes that merit was mostly an arbitrary white construct. Its use was to insist on ethnocentric and culturally exclusionary criteria to ostracize the Other. Otherwise, “merit” had not much relation with real competency.

Is that allegation true? We shall soon see.

But note first that few are saying to keep bar-exam grading static, or SAT minimum scores for admission the same, and thereby instead create a Marshall Plan effort in the inner-city to stop the violence, turn failed schools into stellar academies, and honestly critique single-parent households, illegitimacy, and inordinate criminality—as an effort to ensure African American youth are not just qualified, but better qualified meritocratically than those who are deemed to hold these monopolies.

Instead, take the United Airlines idea that it won’t necessarily train the most qualified would-be pilot candidates. Now it will target applicants by racial groupings and, by fiat, limit white males to 2,500 of 5,000 slots in its pilot-training schools. If a nonwhite applicant has less prior experience with flight, scores lower on a test, or compiled a less than competitive high school or college record, it won’t matter then. These were all always useless benchmarks apparently.

In today’s age of computer-driven avionics, the prerequisite ability to do math, to know something about navigation, to understand computers, or to have the proper temperament to fly a plane doesn’t really matter. The fact that thousands will enter pilot training, and soon aircraft controlling, in part on the basis of their gender or race, will not in any way affect the safety or efficacy of travel.

We will know fairly soon the answers to this woke experiment by two criteria: Will pilot error, whether fatal or incidental, increase? And will our elites, whether in Air Force One, or in their own Gulfstreams, follow suit and hire pilots on the basis of their diversity first, and avionics record second.

We can ditto race-based criteria now used at the corporate and financial level, in high-tech, the military, entertainment, education, and in likely everything from movie roles to book contracts to national awards.

Again, such emphases assume that our current managers, professionals, and directors of the last 50 years were heretofore racists or were hired by racists. Or at least they satisfied artificially constructed high standards that bore little relation to actual skills required on the job.

Or they must no longer enjoy percentages in the workplace simply representative of their demographic percentages, but rather in reparatory fashion become underrepresented rather than just demographically correct.

To sum up, in other words, if there were similar race-based/diversity criteria applied to the current meritocratic NBA, would it matter all that much?

If African American athletes were by protocol and statute kept to between, say, 12-20 percent of the NBA player roster, to reflect the black 12-13 percent of the U.S. population, would it make that much difference?

Would the starting L.A. Lakers five, with one African American forward, one white player, a Latino guard, an Asian center, and a Punjabi shooter be all that less exciting, skilled, or successful a team? Are the current standards that accept or reject an NBA player constructed or weighed to favor African Americans that can be judged by their “overrepresentation”?

In the logic of wokeness, would the resulting appeal of a team—that “looks more like” a multiracial America—make up in diversity, unity, cohesion, equity, inclusion, and appeal what it lost in sheer abilities to make plays, dribble, shoot, rebound, dunk, or block? Were the all-white racialist and exclusionary teams of the 1940s really no different in skill and ability than the purely meritocratic 2021 teams? Of course not.

Again, we are going to find out, and in a number of professions, what happens when traditional meritocratic standards are replaced by woke guidelines.

Some Racism Is Not Racism
Wokeism assumes asymmetry. That is, it assumes, for recompensatory purposes, that the spirit of slavery remains, that the hatreds propelling Jim Crow from 1879 to 2021 are very much alive, that the civil rights movement of “equality of opportunity” of the last 55 years was more or less a noble dud. And the result is wokeism’s doctrine that reparatory bias is not bias. Or if it is, the people will understand, Animal Farm-style, why some discrimination is good and different from other discrimination that is bad or why some prejudice is more tolerable than other prejudices.

If asymmetrical wokeism then operates with a necessary and correct imbalance accepted by most, then there will be nothing wrong. There will follow no backlash, no social chaos, in using race to denigrate others collectively.

There will be nothing wrong in ad nauseam using “whiteness,” “white privilege,” “white supremacy,” and “white terrorists’” in pejoratively stereotypical terms—collectively to apply to all 230 million deemed whites‚ whether the unemployed welder or the part-time junior college instructor or Bill Gates—in a way that it would be terribly wrong to talk pejoratively and collectively in terms of any other group.

If one collates all the things that have been said over the years about whites in general by Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, or Maxine Waters, and yet more recently in more sophisticated fashion by the new generation of racialist-obsessed intellectuals such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, Damon Young, or Elie Mystal, and then switched the terms white to black, would there be any outcry that it was becoming wrong to deductively extrapolate from individuals collective values and beliefs, and then, in circular fashion, reapply them to individuals as an innate trait?

We shall soon discover whether this tenet of wokeism—asymmetrical use of collective stereotyping—is widely accepted by 330 million Americans. We will soon see one of three consequences from this unapologetic woke racial generalizing:


Or,

Or,


Artur Widak/NurPhoto

Dr. Frankenstein and His Woke Monster
What made a 90 percent white population of the late 1950s and 1960s finally sicken of racial bias? Many things—protests, boycotts, the force of moral persuasion. But three things stand out.




Yet by the emerging 1960s did anyone really believe that Perry Como de facto had a better voice than Harry Belafonte or Sammy Davis, Jr., that Sidney Poitier must be a less gifted actor than Frank Sinatra, that Hank Aaron was innately less impressive than Roger Maris, or that Senator Edward Brooke was less competent an American senator than Senator Herman Talmadge? Again, no.

Wokeness is returning to such tribal separation and crackpot categorization on the one assumption that its arbitrary rules will not alienate Americans as they finally did in the past.

So now are we to believe that non-whites can pick the race of their future roommates in colleges without audit or complaint? Farm aid shall be doled out to all except whites? Welfare in Oakland must exclude poor white recipients? Vaccinations will be targeted to non-white groups first? Will 330 million Americans grow to accept that racial typology will govern all state policy—in following a noble and successful historical precedent?

In each mass shooting, we shall broadcast the horror only if the shooter is white and his victims not so, but mute the story if the opposite should be true?

For noble purposes, criminal suspects shall not be identified by race unless they are white? It will be fine in advance to announce the gender and race of a vice-presidential candidate that mostly alone will determine the selection? We will massage data, and suppress or publicize statistics depending on their usefulness to the woke movement?

If blacks are disproportionately responsible for hate crimes against Asian Americans, we will keep still, or better yet nobly lie that whites are.

Such wokeness assumes that the Eastern Europeans never tired of their ministry-of-truth propaganda, that the cynical Soviet citizen never ignored Pravda’s assertions, or that Cubans really believe the Castro communiques.

Wokeness is either unaware of, or unconcerned with, the seething religious, caste, and racial tensions that plague India, or wrecked Lebanon, or unwound Yugoslavia. That is, the woke believe their Byzantine books of race-based exceptions, exemptions, and absolutions will convince 330 million Americans that segregation, or official untruth, are permitted, given historical circumstances and the common good.

But they will not.

Finally, wokeness takes for granted that its elite white Dr. Frankenstein architects will always control the prejudicial woke monster they created—on the assumption that one will never devour its creators. But history suggests ideologies often do just that.

Over the last two weeks, many of America’s most elite colleges seem to have deliberately restricted white admissions to around 30-40 percent of their incoming classes—on the altar of diversity and post-George Floyd wokeness. Yet, not every high-earning, bicoastal white liberal can give $10 million to Yale or Stanford or sire a likely future Major League Baseball star.

For the woke white elite, then, it will be hard to find some exemption from the rules that 70 percent of the population will be artificially recalibrated to 30 percent of the successful admissions.

A white liberal may have said “Who cares?” when hard-working Asians who represent six percent of the U.S. population were deliberately restricted to no more than 30-40 percent of the nation’s “best” colleges. But now? Will he really preen, “Bravo, my super-prepped, hyper-achieving prodigy got rejected at all the good schools and I’m so proud he took one for the woke team?”

Or what happens to the wannabe woke CEO who offered every sort of humiliating “unearned” confession, but nevertheless was still of the wrong color?

Or what will be the mindset of the progressive, white male lieutenant colonel who found that his loud wokeness was mostly useful in preparing him to better understand why he should not be promoted to brigadier general?

It is OK for woke whites to be constantly accused of “unearned privilege” as long as their bicoastal billets were tolerably reduced by just 20 percent due to racial gerrymandering. But does their magnanimity extend to a 30-40 percent white jizyah, that cuts so close to progressive homes?

Will the brilliant actress in a blockbuster classic mumble, if even just privately, that she was the wrong color to be nominated as best actress?

Sure, some may feel that these are elite psychodramas. But for that reason, they will become mostly the angsts of the Left. The liberal white elite class engineered a system of woke racialism that they assumed rested on some sort of unspoken 70 percent white/12 percent black/10 percent Latino/six percent Asian, and two percent “other” formula that would always still leave them plenty of spoils while the unhappy consequences fell instead on Dotty the Deplorable, Charlie Chump, Cliff the Clinger, and Irene Irredeemable. They did not sign up for a 30-40 percent white allotment that cuts into the white woke; that is, the good and the morally superior whites.

So this, too, will be another of wokeism’s greatest tests, when elite writers, professors, actors, lawyers, newsroom grandees, and CEO magnificoes learn that they, too, can be of the wrong color under the new tribal prejudice they fostered.

Wokeism is creating a future group of politically incorrect Trotskyites on a proverbial rendezvous with a Mexican ice ax, given that by birth they will never be woke enough for the new Stalinism.

Click to expand...

Psycho killers.

Corporate Socialism on the Rise in US, Scholar Says
BY PETR SVAB

April 13, 2021 Updated: April 14, 2021

News Analysis
The collective effort by corporate CEOs to push their political views related to a growing number of public issues is putting the United States on a dangerous trajectory, experts say.

In the latest notable example, chief executives of some of America’s largest companies recently put out statements criticizing amendments to Georgia’s voting laws, which expand the state’s voter identification requirements to absentee voting, among other changes.

Major League Baseball officials went as far as moving the league’s All-Star Game out of Atlanta to Denver, apparently in protest of the voter ID requirements.

The executives’ statements seem to have come out of left field. Colorado also has voter ID requirements and fewer early voting days than Georgia. About half the states in the union already have voter ID laws and some states are looking to tighten their rules in similar ways to Georgia. Coming out so strongly against one of them and in such a synchronized manner suggests a specific purpose, but it appears mismatched with the usual corporate lobby.

Where it fits, however, is the current trend of corporations directly imposing themselves on more aspects of public life—not just to influence policy to benefit themselves, but also to herd Americans toward certain political viewpoints and behaviors.

According to Michael Rectenwald, a retired liberal arts professor at New York University and expert on the intersection of socialist ideology and the corporate world, these firms are behaving more and more like government branches.

The trend’s trajectory leads to a de facto fusion of government with a select group of corporations based on shared ideology—what Rectenwald calls “corporate socialism” or “capitalism with Chinese characteristics,” as it closely resembles the totalitarian model of the Chinese Communist Party.

“We are witnessing the convergence of political and economic objectives and the merging of state and corporate functions. Corporations are now acting as state apparatuses to enforce uniparty–state desiderata,” he told The Epoch Times via email.

“This is because under the corporate socialist agenda, these corporations recognize that in order to become or remain favored partners in an economy in which the state picks winners and losers, they best align with the objectives of the state, which is now being run by a singular uniparty.”

The result of this is a “two-tiered economy, with would-be monopolies and the state on top” and the rest reduced to “enhanced, supposedly comfortable serfdom,” Rectenwald wrote in a March 11 essay.

One manifestation of the trend lies in the government and the corporate world adopting “wokeness” as their shared guiding ideology, he argues, referring to the ideology popular on the progressive left, which is based on the quasi-Marxist “critical theory.” The ideology reinterprets history as a struggle between different demographics it labels either oppressors or the oppressed.

“Wokeness is not aimed at the sufferers whose complaints, or imagined complaints, it means to redress. Wokeness works on the majority, the supposed beneficiaries of injustice,” Rectenwald wrote.

“It does so by making the majority understand that it has benefitted from ‘privilege’ and preference—based on skin color (whiteness), gender (patriarchy), sexual proclivity (heteronormativity), birthplace (colonialism, imperialism, and first worldism), gender identity (cisgender privilege), and the domination of nature (speciesism)—to name some of the major culprits. The list could go on and is emended, seemingly by the day. This majority must be rehabilitated. The masses must understand that they have gained whatever advantages they have hitherto enjoyed on the basis of the unfair treatment of others.”

The ideology fits well within the two-tier system of corporate socialism, he says, as it instills “shame, guilt, remorse, unworthiness” in the majority population of Western nations, and thus conditions them “to expect less.”

“Under woke ideology, one will be expected and more likely to forfeit one’s property and rights, because even one’s property and rights, nay, especially one’s property and rights, have come at the expense of others,” he wrote.

He noted that “the draconian lockdown measures employed” in response to the pandemic caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus “just so happen to be doing the work that corporate socialists … want done,” such as decimating small businesses and boosting revenues of corporate juggernauts such as Amazon, Apple, and Facebook.

Another method to reduce expectations works through the hijacking of environmental policy, according to Rectenwald.

While there are pressing ecological concerns such as water pollution and the growing, often toxic, waste from plastics, electronics, and other modern technology, those usually play second fiddle to climate change.

If mainstream climate predictions come true, the world will face problems such as more extreme weather and coastal flooding in the coming decades. The establishment policy response has been to ask Americans and Europeans to tighten their belts.

“If, in the postpandemic era, we decide to resume our lives just as before (by driving the same cars, by flying to the same destinations, by eating the same things, by heating our house the same way, and so on), the COVID-19 crisis will have gone to waste as far as climate policies are concerned,” Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), and his colleague Thierry Malleret write in their book “COVID-19: The Great Reset.”

The book states that “with the economic emergency responses to the pandemic now in place, the opportunity can be seized to make the kind of institutional changes and policy choices that will put economies on a new path towards a fairer, greener future,” which it calls “The Great Reset.”

The more dramatic climate prognostications have been around for many decades, but have proved inaccurate. The current ones indicate that averting the estimated hardships would require eliminating travel and energy production through traditional means of burning coal, oil, and gas. Not just the United States and Europe would have to do so, but notably China, the world’s largest polluter, as well as India, and other populous and developing nations. They refuse to, however, as it would drastically hinder their economic development, pushing vast swaths of their populations back into destitution.

Meanwhile, progressives have increasingly used the issue as a vehicle for the woke agenda, tying climate measures with policies such as minimum wage and expanded employee benefits, which further create barriers to competition and favor monopolization.

The financial establishment has followed with its own woke initiative, setting up an “environmental, social, and governance index (ESG)” to steer capital toward corporations on board with the Great Reset program.

“While this index serves merely as a recommendation at present, indications are that banks, asset managers, and other networked corporate institutions may use the scores as means for squeezing non-compliant, non-woke players out of the market,” Rectenwald wrote.

The most obvious cog in the corporate socialist machine is Big Tech, he’s argued, dedicating his 2019 book “The Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom” to the subject.

“Big Tech stands to gain directly from the Great Reset agenda. This cartel’s attempts to eliminate competing platforms and views are part of its monopolistic consolidation efforts,” he wrote.

“Mainstream and social media players censor all views that run contrary to the promoted, official narratives regarding climate change, COVID, vaccines, systemic racism, transgenderism, and all the other essential narrative elements of the Great Reset. In sum, Big Digital Tech represents the leading edge and the ideological communications apparatus of corporate socialism.”

While Schwab and Malleret portray the Great Reset as accommodated by the natural effects of the pandemic, they acknowledge that it would depend on governments, corporations, and activists taking advantage of the situation to make it happen.

In Rectenwald’s view, “the Great Reset is but a coordinated propaganda and public relations campaign shrouded under a cloak of inevitability.”

Contradiction of Corporate Socialism
To some, corporate socialism may sound like an oxymoron. Isn’t the definition of socialism public ownership of the means of production? Aren’t corporations private entities? That’s indeed the case if socialism equals Marxism, but there were socialists both before and after Karl Marx, each offering their own take on how to best achieve socialism, often disagreeing with each other on whose was the real one.

As Rectenwald pointed out, King Camp Gillette, the founder of Gillette Co., wrote two books on the theme of socialism, arguing that it could be better achieved through a “World Corporation,” which was also the title of his second book.

“Promoters [of incorporation] are the true socialists of this generation, the actual builders of a cooperative system which is eliminating competition, and in a practical business way reaching results which socialists have vainly tried to attain through legislation and agitation for centuries,” Gillette said in the 1910 book.

Even before Gillette, some argued that slavery was the best model for socialism, most closely living up to the maxim, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

People can’t be expected to decide for themselves how much they are able to contribute and what needs they have, the logic goes. There must be an administrative class to make that decision.

While people might scoff at the idea of somebody deciding for them what their legitimate needs are, it appears proponents of the Great Reset are already doing so.

One of the “real examples of a shift in policymakers’ emphasis” is the effort to “sustain future economic activity at a level that matches the satisfaction of our material needs with the respect of our planetary boundaries,” Schwab and Malleret say, explaining:

“The framework resembles a ‘doughnut’ in which the inner ring represents the minimum we need to lead a good life (as enunciated by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals) and the outer ring the ecological ceiling defined by earth-system scientists (which highlights the boundaries not to be crossed by human activity to avoid environmentally negative impact on climate, soil, oceans, the ozone layer, freshwater, and biodiversity).

“In between the two rings is the sweet spot (or ‘dough’) where our human needs and those of the planet are being met.”

The problem is, there may be no dough.

The city of Amsterdam commissioned an analysis of its economy by this method only to find out that it was living far beyond its means as defined by the “earth-system scientists.” At the same time, it was still far from meeting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, which demand things such as universal access to affordable housing, transportation, healthcare, education, and more.

“Residents’ housing needs are increasingly not being satisfied, with almost 20% of city tenants unable to cover their basic needs after paying their rent, and just 12% of approximately 60,000 online applicants for social housing being successful,” The Guardian reported.

“One solution might be to build more homes but Amsterdam’s doughnut highlights that the area’s carbon dioxide emissions are 31% above 1990 levels. Imports of building materials, food, and consumer products from outside the city boundaries contribute 62% of those total emissions.”

The city tried to redeem itself by proposing to source building materials locally and use renewable ones, such as wood, but how could it do enough to reverse the overwhelming overconsumption the analysts accused it of?

And if the West has already eaten its doughnut, what do its majorities deserve in the Reset economy?

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2F3wr3dHWc
48:06 min
Critical Race TYRANNY: The Great Reset of Education | Glenn TV | Ep 100
•Premiered 3 hours ago


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WATCH more Glenn Beck: https://blazetv.com/glenn A virus has escaped the university labs and is superspreading through our culture. It's called critical race THEORY, and what used to be a fringe topic in the academic world is now a dangerous Marxist REALITY infecting our public schools, where students are taught that the U.S. is a “parasitic system” based on the “invasion” of “white male settlers.” Glenn exposes how some teachers are being instructed to “cash in on kids’ inherent empathy” in order to train them to become “activist intellectuals,” starting as early as first grade. CRT is an absolute toxin to America, and Glenn warns that in just one generation, the Constitution, freedom, and true equality will be totally destroyed. Yet any opposition to the spread of this disease is shouted down as racism and bigotry. If critical race theory is not already in your local school curriculum, it will be soon. Joined by Asra Nomani, vice president for strategy and investigations at Parents Defending Education, Glenn arms you with the facts about CRT so you can stand up to this tyranny in your community.