Questioning The Official Story About Official Stories: A Role for Citizen Investigations

Posted on December 28, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Time Hayward

Official stories, according to the official story about them, are (nearly) always true. The ‘nearly’ gets mentioned just because, on rare occasions, an official story is acknowledged to have been wrong, as, for instance, with Iraq’s falsely alleged weapons of mass destruction in 2003. But that’s considered an exception to the rule, and to extrapolate from it to a more pervasive mistrust is to be foolish, ill-informed or even a dupe of hostile propaganda. In fact, diagnosing what is wrong with sceptics about official stories, and proposing ways of curing or otherwise dealing with them, are now becoming a growth industry in the media and academia. So we hear a lot about how dissenting from official narratives is to fall victim to ‘conspiracy theory’ or ‘disinformation’; and dissenters may be diagnosed as needing re-education or even psychological help. As for the dissent itself, this is increasingly subject to censure and censorship.

However, a major question is left unaddressed: What is it that’s supposed to make official stories so credible?

The assumption is that official stories are produced by people with relevant expert knowledge, so disputing them is a product of ignorance; and since experts have credentials, experience and the backing of competent institutions, rejecting their expertise is unwise or even delusional. Also assumed is that official stories are generally produced and disseminated in good faith.

But are those assumptions generally warranted? In probing their grounds we are brought to question whether the official meta-story, as we may call it, overstates reasons for automatically accepting official stories and underestimates the competence that members of the public can bring to independent inquiries.

Why Believe Official Stories?

No serious thinker would suggest that an official story should be believed just because it comes from officials. Indeed, use of the very expression ‘official story’, in practice, tends to imply that there is also some alternative story that does not have the backing of officials but might be more credible. We know, too, that many societies from various times and places have maintained order by invoking all manner of mythological stories, ideological stories, and blatantly discriminatory stories. Sometimes this has meant denying, suppressing or persecuting as heretics people engaged in rigorous intellectual questioning of officialdom.

A more plausible reason for believing official stories has been set out by the philosopher Neil Levy (2007). He points out that we all know most of the things we know in life because we have learned them from others: our direct personal experience of the world is extremely limited compared to the expanse of our general knowledge and the intricacies of our more specialist understandings. We rely on the testimony and good faith of others in almost everything we do, so just to live a normal life in society we trust a wide range of institutions and social arrangements. To doubt their general dependability would contradict the tacit assumptions that get us through life and would render inexplicable how even a tolerably well-ordered society could ever be possible.

The force of that consideration is strong, but not absolute – and how strong also depends on what kinds of communication we are referring to as official stories. It is strongest if one uses the term to refer to all public communications that emanate from an official source. In actual usage, however, that is not how the term ‘official story’ is normally understood. We don’t regard it as an ‘official story’ that to get a passport you need to submit an authenticated photograph of yourself; we don’t regard it as an ‘official story’ that in UK cars are to be driven on the left; and nor do we these days regard it as an ‘official story’ that smoking is bad for our health. By far the greater part of public pronouncements, like these, are simply taken to state how matters stand. When the distinctive term ‘official story’ occurs, it is typically in contexts where a public pronouncement has met with scepticism. So, for example, whereas we seldom nowadays hear the rationale for mandating wearing seatbelts in cars referred to as an ‘official story’, because there is no longer serious dissent, recent claims that the rationale for mandating mRNA injections against SARS-Cov2 was substantially comparable to that for seatbelts encountered resistance: the ‘official story’ about the benefits and safety of the mRNA injections has been subject to criticism from some sections of medical and scientific communities.

Of course, the mere fact of scepticism in some quarters does not mean that a given official story is necessarily mistaken, but it does highlight how an official story is not just an uncontroversial statement of how matters stand. It leads thoughtful people to look more closely at the nature of authority claimed for an official story.

Are There Experts in Expertise?

The authority claimed for official stories derives, as Levy explains, from the fact of being produced by ‘people socially acknowledged as the relevant experts on a topic’ (Levy 2022). Relevance here is understood in terms of knowledge and experience relating to the salient subject matter. However, certain people might officially be appointed as relevant experts, on other bases, such as known affinities with the organisation’s mission. So it is possible for designated experts to support an official story while a number of other people with materially relevant knowledge and experience take a quite different view.

Even among designated expert advisers, however, achieving an authoritative consensus on the kind of matter that official stories relate to is not straightforward. This is for reasons similar to those involved in giving policy advice (see e.g. Grundmann 2017). Insofar as an official story appeals to a scientific basis, it should be borne in mind that findings of science – a process of open, collaborative and progressive inquiry – have a provisional status, with all scientific statements being in principle corrigible. This means that a scientific adviser’s confidence can never be completely unconstrained or unhedged. Zeynep Panuk (2021) refers to a ‘paradox of scientific advice’ that arises from the difficulties of basing decisions on scientific knowledge that is almost always uncertain and subject to disagreement. Panuk cites experience of how overconfident scientists in advisory committees may suppress dissent so as to present a consensus view, only to find that its implementation had unfortunate or even disastrous consequences. Recent experiences of overconfident pronouncements on ‘The Science’ during the Covid pandemic have furnished further examples (Miller 2022; Nelson 2022).

The kind of controversy for which an ‘official story’ comes into play will not normally reduce to some specialist detail of basic science, or even a collection of these, but will concern a situation involving many factors – including those pertaining to social organisation, human action and decision-making. Such situations are similar to those where policy advice is sought from scientific experts (SAPEA 2019 Ch. 2; Martin et al 2020). Official stories are seldom if ever straightforward statements of scientific opinion on a single well-defined scientific research question: they typically relate to situations where many interacting variables may not all be clearly disaggregable. There is in principle no necessary reason why an independent and unofficial grouping of investigators with materially relevant expertise might not be as well-suited to an inquiry as an official grouping. In fact, challenges to official stories can sometimes draw on impressive constellations of expertise.

Citizen Investigations

If the official meta-story may overestimate the dependability of designated expert advice, it may also underestimate the investigative competence of ordinary citizens. For challenges to official stories can be mustered not just by isolated individuals, caricatured as ‘doing their own research’ while ‘reading things on the internet,’ but by well-informed collaborative groups. These can be better able to track truths than independent individuals: ‘the superiority of the group over the individual does not require that one member has the right answer prior to deliberation: group deliberation may enable the aggregation of the genuine insights of several members and the rejection of the false hypotheses of some of the same individuals.’ (Levy 2019: 316)

Furthermore, if it is the case that ‘[g]roups of individuals who are strangers to one another are better at tracking truths than groups of individuals who have a shared history’ (Levy 2019: 318) then this is an advantage of groups comprising people who come together in cyberspace from all walks of life and may have little or no biographical information about those they connect with. Citizens doing their own research sometimes start their own Wikis, or form groups on Reddit, or informally deliberate via Twitter or Telegram. Sometimes they create investigative collectives offline.

It was from participating in chatrooms, for instance, that the now much-feted organisation Bellingcat originated: its founder, Eliot Higgins, a gamer-turned-investigative-citizen, would review copious amounts of war footage from his sofa in Leicester and discuss his observations in chatrooms. The work of his investigative collaborative has come to be ‘commended in the global media and by global agencies such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.’ (Nguyen and Scifo 2018: 377) Impressed by the methods of ‘open source intelligence’ (D’Alessandra and Sutherland 2021), curators of official stories in the West – particularly those relating to geopolitical issues involving Russia – have bestowed accolades on Bellingcat, along with generous funding and encouragement.

So, there is precedent for treating citizens’ investigations as authoritative. Other groups of citizen investigators, that do not receive any funding, have mounted significant challenges to some of the West’s own official stories. Thus, directly countering Bellingcat, on occasion, is the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media which has earned the confidence of whistleblowers rather than officials (OPCW 2020).

Aside from the benefits of collaboration, the reality of serious dissent in the digital sphere is that it can involve myriad critical individuals with significant independent claims to epistemic authority in their professional fields and who exhibit judicious awareness of both their own limitations and the value of others’ insights. For instance, challenging various official narratives are whistleblowers who include scientists, diplomats, intelligence officers, and various state or corporate employees. Challenges come too from professionals with relevant specialist expertise across fields like medicine, architecture, engineering, pharmaceuticals, and a gamut of others. Also worth highlighting are those journalists with previous careers in mainstream media organisations who found they could only maintain their professional integrity by becoming independent.[1] When a group of people independently deliberating together can include, for instance, a former head of a nation’s armed services, a UN weapons inspector, a senior diplomat, an intelligence officer, a world leading International Relations expert and a seasoned war correspondent, the insights they generate regarding situations relevant to foreign policy may well be no less sound than those informing the official story.[2] Indeed, in virtue of their freedom from institutional constraints, they may be more reliably informative for the public than the official story.

If serious challenges to official stories have become more prevalent in recent years, as they arguably have, this is likely due in good part to the sheer extent to which mainstream media have excluded the voices of experts who, maintaining their professional integrity and independence in the face of sometimes considerable hostility, have continued to articulate their challenges to official stories. Attentive members of the public notice this – just as they notice when the force of the state is brought to bear on those who bring to light its lies and malfeasance, and not only in high profile cases like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Katharine Gun or Julian Assange.

Part of the official meta-story currently is that the internet and social media are being flooded by targeted disinformation that is misleading and confusing people. However, from another perspective one might see that thanks to digital communications citizens can become aware of arguments developed by other experts which are suppressed by protectors of an ‘official story’. An example would be the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) (2020), advocating an approach to dealing with the Covid situation characterized as ‘focused protection’ instead of the officially promoted lockdown approach. Lay persons may not be able to adjudicate first hand between recommendations from the GBD and the John Snow Memorandum (2020), which defended lockdown, but they can understand enough to know that the latter does not command an unproblematic consensus such as would be rational simply to defer to. Members of the public can assess the trustworthiness of expertise and official stories without a high level of technical knowledge, as science studies scholars have shown (Yearley 2005; Hess 2012).

People understand that if a view is suppressed rather than openly addressed and rebutted the reason might be that it cannot be rebutted. If an attentive public observes that dissent is simply treated as inadmissible, and especially if those formulating it are subject to smearing or censorship, then there is a corresponding diminution of public trust in the orthodox view.

Tension At The Heart of An Official Story

If the claim that the authority of an official story derives from an expert consensus can be questionable, something more certain is that an official story is asserted with the kind of authority that comes with power. People may defer to an official story not because they necessarily find it credible but out of a prudent concern to avoid the costs of dissidence. Those with power can also incentivise wider media of communication to stick to the narrative. This difference between epistemically earned authority and politically declared authority is a tension at the heart of official stories. Understanding it helps explain why we find a good many journalistic and scholarly studies of the supposed pathologies of dissident citizens and rather little reflection on the real nature of the authority of official stories.

Today we find a welter of studies of online ‘disinformation’ that trace webs of connection across cyberspace seeking to link influential dissenting accounts on social media with bots and trolls associated with malign actors. These communications are said to be engaged in strategically. That is, their aim is to persuade the public to accept a pre-established story rather than to allow people to determine, through open deliberations, what the most credible story is.

Yet this is exactly what the promulgators of official stories themselves do. Regardless of whether the content of a given official story is reliable or not, the form of an official story – in virtue of fulfilling its official function – is that of a strategic communication. Its communication, as official, is presented as a matter not for deliberation but for public acceptance. It is not submitted to public scrutiny with an implicit invitation for critical feedback. It is not up for discussion. It is communicated not to advance debate but to settle it.

This is the inherent tension in an official story: its assertion of epistemic authority depends on an implicit claim that it can be backed by processes of deliberative reasoning, but the pronouncement of an official story as a settled opinion curtails any such process.

What this means in practice has been illustrated, for instance, in the situation arising with the UK Government’s Covid response, which professedly aimed to ‘Follow The Science’ (Stevens 2020). This notion can only ever be ‘a misleading oversimplification’ of what it means to base policy on science (Abbasi 2020), and when UK government ministers claimed to be ‘guided by the science’, what they meant in practice was being guided by their scientists: ‘Ministers formed strong relationships with key scientific advisors, relied on evidence from their Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), and ignored or excluded many other sources.’ (Cairney 2021) Thus a policy of public communications was decided on the basis of a selective interpretation of scientific findings. But more than this, instead of caution in the face of uncertainty, a policy of robustly promoting a particular view involved the use of psychological operations of a kind more normally associated with a war effort than with public health advice (Sidley 2021, 2022).

Unfortunately, as that example also showed, the defence of an official story against criticism can include counter-measures taken to smear and discredit dissenters. This is never an edifying approach, but is especially troubling when it involves discrediting serious critics who have their own credible claim to epistemic authority. This was illustrated in the case of the eminent scientists who signed the Great Barrington Declaration. They were widely vilified not only in the media but even by other academics, for pointing to certain established principles of epidemiology – including those developed over the two preceding decades of pandemic preparedness planning – that were being set aside and overridden by policy-makers on the basis of modellers’ projections in favour of a ‘zero-covid’ strategy (Ioannidis 2022). This vilification involved not only overt smearing but also something more insidious, namely, the pre-emptive dismissal of their views – notwithstanding their impeccable academic pedigree – as too far ‘beyond the pale’ to warrant serious consideration (HART 2022).

This situation showed that the other institutions of civil society, including the media and academia, which the official meta-story claims provide critical scrutiny, can in fact simply amplify official strategic communications. Thus the organisations that Levy recommends we rely on as guarantors of the authors of official stories can in reality see it as their responsibility to promote and defend the official story rather than question it. Public perceptions that this is the case are accompanied by a deficit of trust in the media and institutions more generally.

The official meta-story blames ‘conspiracy theorists’ and other critical questioners for this lack of trust. But perhaps that gets things the wrong way round.

Conclusion

Trust is something that has to be won, and, if betrayed, it can be lost. As the public’s trust in official stories diminishes, the official meta-story looks to blame this on ‘conspiracy theorists’ and other ‘disruptive influences’. Perhaps a more credible story about official stories would include serious reflection on how they might be made more transparently trustworthy.

Meanwhile, it is reasonable to suggest that each serious challenge to an official story should be assessed on its merits. This does not mean being swayed by extravagant contrarian hypotheses, since these should be treated with even more caution, and, when appropriate, summarily rejected. It does mean being duly aware of how the presumption in favour of official stories is necessarily defeasible. That is the case not just because any story may prove to be mistaken, even in all good faith, but also because we know that any organisation with politically-conferred authority is liable at times to come under political pressures that may, in certain circumstances, override scruples of honesty.

References

Abbasi, Kamran. 2020. ‘Covid-19: politicisation, “corruption,” and suppression of science’. BMJ; 371:m4425, 13 November: doi:10.1136/bmj.m4425

Cairney, Paul. 2021. ‘The UK Government’s COVID-19 Policy: What Does “Guided by the Science” Mean in Practice?’ Frontiers in Political Science 3. 15 March.https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpos.2021.624068 DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2021.624068

D’Alessandra, Federica and Kirsty Sutherland. 2021. ‘The Promise and Challenges of New Actors and New Technologies in International Justice’. Journal of International Criminal Justice, 19(1): 9–34. https://doi.org/10.1093/jicj/mqab034

Great Barrington Declaration. 2020. https://gbdeclaration.org/

Grundmann, Reiner. 2017. ‘The Problem of Expertise in Knowledge Societies’. Minerva 55, 25–48 (2017). https://doi-org.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/10.1007/s11024-016-9308-7

HART [Health Advisory and Recovery Team]. 2022. ‘The crushing of dissent throughout the covid era’, 8 October: https://www.hartgroup.org/the-crushing-of-dissent-throughout-the-covid-era/

Hess, David J. 2012. Science Studies: An Advanced Introduction. New York: NYU Press.

Ioannidis, John P. 2022. ‘Citation impact and social media visibility of Great Barrington and John Snow signatories for COVID-19 strategy.’ BMJ Open 2022;12:e052891. doi:10.1136/ bmjopen-2021-052891

John Snow Memorandum. 2020. https://www.johnsnowmemo.com/

Levy, Neil. 2007. ‘Radically Socialized Knowledge and Conspiracy Theories’, Episteme 4(2): 181-192.

Levy, Neil. 2019. ‘Due deference to denialism: explaining ordinary people’s rejection of established scientific findings’. Synthese 196: 313-327.

Levy, Neil. 2022. ‘Do Your Own Research!’ Synthese 200: 356. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03793-w

Martin, Graham P., Esmée Hanna, Margaret McCartney and Robert Dingwall. 2020. ‘Science, society, and policy in the face of uncertainty: reflections on the debate around face coverings for the public during COVID-19’. Critical Public Health 30:5: 501-508, DOI: 10.1080/09581596.2020.1797997

Miller, Ian. 2022. Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates.

Nelson, Fraser. 2022. ‘The lockdown files: Rishi Sunak on what we weren’t told.’ The Spectator, 27 August: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-lockdown-files-rishi-sunak-on-what-we-werent-told/

Nguyen, An and Salvatore Scifo. 2018. ‘Mapping the Citizen News Landscape: Blurring Boundaries, Promises, Perils, and Beyond.’ In Journalism, edited by Tim P. Vos. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.

OPCW [Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons]. 2019. ‘Report Of The Fact-Finding Mission Regarding The Incident Of Alleged Use Of Toxic Chemicals As A Weapon In Douma, Syrian Arab Republic, On 7 April 2018.’ OPCW Technical Secretariat S/1731/2019: https://www.opcw.org/sites/default/files/documents/2019/03/s-1731-2019%28e%29.pdf

Panuk, Zeynep (2021) ‘COVID-19 and the Paradox of Scientific Advice.’ Perspectives on Politics 20(2): 562-576. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592721001201

SAPEA [Science Advice for Policy by European Academies]. 2019. Making sense of science for policy under conditions of complexity and uncertainty. Berlin: SAPEA. https://doi.org/10.26356/MASOS

Sidley, Gary. 2021. ‘A Year of Fear.’ The Critic 23 March: https://thecritic.co.uk/a-year-of-fear/

Sidley, Gary. 2022. ‘Britain’s unethical Covid messaging must never be repeated.’ The Spectator 6 February: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/britain-s-unethical-covid-messaging-must-never-be-repeated/

Stevens, Alex. 2020. ‘Governments cannot just ‘follow the science’ on COVID-19’. Nature Human Behaviour 4, 560: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0894-x

Yearley, Steven. 2005. Making Sense of Science: Understanding the Social Study of Science. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

[1] This is the case, for instance, with Jonathan Cook (formerly of The Guardian), Chris Hedges (formerly with the New Yorker), John Pilger (award-winning documentary film maker), and the late Robert Parry who founded the independent outlet Consortium News.

[2] This is to characterize part of the composition of the Berlin Group 21 that has produced the Statement of Concern relating to whistleblowers from the OPCW. See https://berlingroup21.org/ and associated press release: https://www.einnews.com/pr_news/538579944/leading-international-voices-call-on-opcw-and-its-scientific-advisors-to-allow-all-douma-investigators-to-be-heard

I Know Why Can’t We Fix Homelessness

Posted on December 27, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Peter Van Buren

Source: We Meant Well

“What stands out for visitors?” I asked our guide during a Honolulu Chinatown tour with my out-of-town guests. “Always the same, the homeless. Even Mainlanders from big cities like San Francisco and New York are surprised how many we have here. I’m waiting to see how the Japanese and Korean guests respond when they start traveling again.”

You can’t miss his point. During our brief walk through Chinatown’s markets we saw a disturbed man dressed only in his underwear touching himself, several seriously street-worn people begging, and watched the fire department respond to a prone homeless man who was dead or simply drugged into paralysis. When someone in our party needed the toilet, the shopkeeper apologized for having to keep it locked to prevent misuse by vagrants. Many places simply had signs saying “no public toilet.” Despite some great tasting food, it was hard to keep up a holiday spirit. Same for when we passed the tent cities and parks overtaken by homeless along a drive on the Windward side.

The numbers only begin to tell the story. Pre-COVID, there were an estimated 6,458 homeless in Hawaii. The Big Island saw the biggest jump in homelessness from 2019-2020, a 16 percent increase. On Oahu the homeless population is up 12 percent. San Francisco before COVID counted over 8,000 homeless persons, and while COVID-era numbers are hard to pin down, one measure is overdose deaths among the homeless, which have tripled. New York has the highest homeless population of any American metropolis, close to 80,000 and growing. The number of homeless there today is 142 percent higher than it was 10 years ago, and currently at the highest level since the Great Depression. Some 3,000 human beings make their full-time home in the subway.

Estimates for the United States as a whole run well over half a million people living homeless. The number shoots up dramatically if one includes people living in their cars, people on their way to exhausting the good will of friends who offered a couch, and those who slide in and out of motels as money ebbs and flows. Some 21 percent of American children live in poverty, homeless or not. In the end nobody actually knows how many people are living without adequate shelter except that it is a large number and it is a growing number and there is nothing in line to lower it, only to find new ways to tolerate it.

We have in many places already surrendered our public parks and libraries. The hostile architecture of protrusions and spikes which make it impossible to sleep on a park bench are pretty much sculpted into the architecture of the city, markers of the struggle for public space. The idea even has its own Instagram account. A security firm offers tips: restrict access to sidewalk overhangs protected from inclement weather, remove handles from water spigots, and keep trash dumpsters locked. If things get too bad, the company, for a price, will deploy “remote cameras with military-grade algorithms capable of detecting people in areas they shouldn’t be in.”

Keep in mind that all of these homeless people coexist in a United States whose wealthiest citizens have their own spaceships. NYC alone is home to 70 billionaires, more than any other American city. New York is also home to nearly one million millionaires, more than any other city in the world. How is it that the nation’s wealthiest city and poorest city are the same place?

All the solutions seem to fail. There are not enough shelters we are told but even when more shelters are built the homeless are too paranoid to move in,or the shelters become too dirty, too dangerous, chaos compacted, so the transition from an encampment to supportive housing isn’t easy. In ravaged San Francisco, one out of 10 of the city’s already existing supportive housing units are empty, with the director of the Department of Homelessness (!) placing the blame on individuals. So the homeless problem becomes a mental health problem which becomes a drug and alcohol problem which becomes a public health problem. Our society will not force people into care, and it will not deport the homeless against their will to desert camps. Instead we simply do nothing absent throwing a few bucks into food programs as an expedient over stepping around too many bodies in the street. Meanwhile nobody asks why nothing seems to work.

When you look at history with enough perspective you see very little happens without cause and effect. Things are connected. Casualty matters more than randomness. Answering the question of what to do about homelessness requires first answering the question of why we have the problem in the first place. Because while homelessness exists elsewhere in the developed world, you simply do not see it at pandemic proportions in equally-developed nations across Europe, and certainly not in the economic superstates like China, Japan, Singapore, et al. Scale and size matter and America wins on both. Why?

Because the American economic system requires homelessness. That’s why we can’t solve homelessness; no matter how much solving you do the system just makes more.

The Democratic arguments over raising the minimum wage are a smokescreen. As long there is a minimum wage and businesses do not have to compete for workers, there have to be homeless people. Think of the homeless as run-off, the unfortunate but necessary waste product of an economic system designed to exploit workers for the benefit of space-traveling overlords. The homeless — no wagers — are the endpoint of an economic spectrum dominated by the minimum wagers, people whose salary and hours, and thus whose chance at lifetime wealth status, are capped by agreement between the government and industry.

Until slavery ended, human beings were considered capital, just like stock today. Now we’re “human resources” so everything’s better. Bringing up race hides the real story of how long this has been going on and how deep a part of our way of life it is. The line between controlling someone with a whip and controlling someone through ever-lower wages gets finer and finer over time.

This is what “systematic” means: a system of public-private sector agreements codified as laws which push workers into a cesspool as grab-and-go disposable labor. Those who sink end up homeless. Those who tread water are guaranteed a life of maybe just enough, their place in society fixed for others’ goals, never their own. It also assures the sales of drugs, alcohol, and lottery tickets as the working poor try to convince themselves all this can’t be true. Can it?

The next step is clear. The working poor are allowed to exist at survival levels only because they are in jobs too expensive or difficult to automate. You think there are a lot of homeless now? Wait until self-driving vehicles click in and another job category simply disappears, leaving drivers and delivery people nowhere to go (there are more than 3.5 million truck drivers in the U.S., making driving one of the most popular occupations.) Same for fast food and other service jobs. Soon enough AI and/or remote online learning will make live teachers an expensive luxury for the children of the wealthy.

If you wanted a clever term about why we have and ignore and can’t address the homeless problem, you could call it systemic inequality in tune with the times’ nomenclature. A system designed to exploit will always exploit too much at its edges. It is supposed to, in order to keep driving the center downward, from 1950s middle class to 2022’s working poor.

But in the near term the issue isn’t confronting the reality of inequality, it is navigating the society it has created, much as my tour guide directed us around the homeless nests in Chinatown so we could sample the dim sum at leisure. “Don’t make eye contact” was some of his best advice.

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Feverishly Racing Toward Our Own Destruction…

Posted on December 26, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Michael Snyder

Source: End of the American Dream

We are careening directly into an abyss of war, pain and misery, and our leaders are thunderously applauding as it happens. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy came to Washington this week because he wanted more money, and our politicians in Washington definitely did not disappoint him. Even though we had already given Ukraine far more money than the rest of the world combined, our politicians agreed to give him another colossal mountain of cash. On some level, we all have to respect Zelenskyy’s skills as a con man. Even though he has banned the main opposition party in Ukraine, and even though he has banned all television stations that were critical of him, and even though he just banned an entire ancient Christian denomination, our politicians continue to worship him like some sort of a pop music star. Zelenskyy has become an extremely oppressive dictator that has set himself up to rule Ukraine for as long as he wants, but members of Congress from both parties continue to hail him as a “champion of democracy” that deserves our unquestioning support.

What makes this so dangerous is that Zelenskyy has been trying very hard to pull the United States into his war with Russia.

Throughout 2022 the U.S. has been getting increasingly involved in the conflict, and at this point we are “providing most of the funding, most of the equipment, most of the ammunition, most of the high level intelligence and much of the training” for the international army that is fighting the Russians in Ukraine.

In other words, we are essentially a direct participant in the war.

For years I have been warning my readers that there would be a war with Russia, and now it is here.

If we had rational leaders in Washington, they would be trying to end this conflict before the nukes start flying.

But instead, they are pledging to give Zelenskyy whatever he needs for as long as it takes to defeat the Russians.

When Zelenskyy visited Washington this week, the White House literally rolled out the red carpet for him.

White House rolling out the red carpet for Zelensky visit. #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/s7OvkL6Njd
— Andrew Leyden (@PenguinSix) December 21, 2022

To see such an honor bestowed upon a cruel foreign dictator that is ruthlessly oppressing anyone that opposes him should nauseate all of us.

And when Zelenskyy arrived to deliver his speech to a joint session of Congress, he was greeted with a standing ovation.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (@ZelenskyyUa) receives a standing ovation from lawmakers as he enters the House chamber to address a joint meeting of Congress.

Watch the address: https://t.co/uffYxMEh24 pic.twitter.com/ZOx055StbB
— CSPAN (@cspan) December 22, 2022

It isn’t just the Democrats that have fallen for Zelenskyy’s act.

At this point, Mitch McConnell says that showering Ukraine with money should be our “number one priority”…

“Providing assistance for Ukrainians to defeat the Russians is the number one priority for the United States right now according to most Republicans. That’s how we see the challenges confronting the country at the moment.”

Thankfully, there are still at least a few voices of reason that can see exactly what Zelenskyy is trying to do.

One of them is Tucker Carlson.

According to Carlson, it is absurd to give a foreign tyrant so much money when we have so many pressing needs here at home.

Tucker Carlson: Zelensky shows up to DC looking like a strip club manager and demanding money. Our aging leadership class will give him billions from our crumbling economy pic.twitter.com/aIvgiQvkJ0
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) December 22, 2022

But no matter how hard Zelenskyy oppresses his own people, our politicians are going to continue to shower him with more money, and that is because Zelenskyy has done an amazing job of positioning his war as the most important “current thing”. I really like how John Nolte made this point in one of his most recent articles…

Zelensky has brilliantly — brilliantly! — positioned himself to be The Thing Through Which The Establishment Proves Its Purity.

That means the only questions anyone dares ask about Zelensky and Ukraine are…

Who can give Ukraine the most money?

Who can give Ukraine the most weapons?

Who can give Ukraine the most praise?

Who can lick Zelensky’s boots the cleanest?

Zelensky is getting everything he wants and more, including America flirting with nuclear war. Why? Because he was savvy enough to crack the code of the shallow, insecure, conformist idiots we elect and reelect as our leaders.

Nolte is quite right.

And once a con man has identified a “golden goose”, he is just going to keep coming back again and again.

So even though we have already given Ukraine more money than everyone else combined, it will never be enough to satisfy Zelenskyy.

"We are grateful for [the United States’] support, but it is not enough. It is a hint — it is not enough.”

—Zelenskyy pic.twitter.com/YXuP540Fjr
— PepperPeep (@PepperPeep) December 21, 2022

In addition to cold, hard cash, the U.S. also continues to give the Ukrainians some of our best military equipment.

The Biden administration just agreed to send Patriot missile systems to Ukraine, and that represents another huge escalation.

The Biden administration will send to Ukraine the most advanced air defense weapon in its arsenal, the Patriot missile system, officials said Wednesday, marking the most significant addition to American military support for the government in Kyiv in months.

Meanwhile, the Russians continue to escalate the conflict as well.

In fact, it appears that the Russians have been very busy moving tanks into position for another major offensive campaign from the north.

T-80BV tanks spotted in #Belarus. Preparations for a new offensive on #Kyiv from the north. pic.twitter.com/JGi3Rlq73y
— Igor Sushko (@igorsushko) December 20, 2022

Tanks in Belarus are seen moving from Polonka train station towards Brest. pic.twitter.com/sZbDZLvefC
— NOELREPORTS 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 (@NOELreports) December 21, 2022

If both sides just keep escalating matters, we will eventually reach a point where somebody crosses a line that will never be able to be uncrossed.

We have been pushed to the brink of nuclear war, and the Russians are getting ready to officially deploy their new Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missiles in January…

Putin said on Wednesday during a meeting with military chiefs that he aimed to deploy his terrifying RS-28 Sarmat missile – nicknamed Satan-2 – in January.

The world-ending missile can blast targets at almost 16,000mph – meaning it has the potential to obliterate the UK 1,600 miles away in just six minutes.

Sadly, the quote that you just read is not an exaggeration.

Each Sarmat can reportedly carry up to 15 independently-targetable nuclear warheads.

That means that one missile goes up, and 15 warheads come down.

And each one of those warheads can instantly wipe out an entire major city.

The Sarmat is the most advanced intercontinental ballistic missile in the entire world by a wide margin, and we have no way to defend against them.

So maybe we should think twice before getting into a nuclear war with Russia.

Unfortunately, our leaders seem to have gone completely mad at this point, and of course our leaders in Washington are simply a reflection of what has happened to the rest of our society.

https://twitter.com/ClownWorld_/status/1605770134269804545

When Ronald Reagan described the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire” in the 1980s, he was quite correct.

But since that time just about every form of evil that you can possibly imagine has absolutely exploded in our own nation.

So are we “the baddies” now?

Sadly, most Americans will not even entertain that question.

And our leaders are just going to continue to push us toward a nuclear conflict that could ultimately mean the end of our society once and for all.

Yes, Jesus Would Have Been Branded a Domestic Extremist Today

Posted on December 25, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone, when the kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their flocks, the work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among the people, to make music in the heart.”—Howard Thurman, theologian and civil rights activist

The Christmas story of a baby born in a manger is a familiar one.

The Roman Empire, a police state in its own right, had ordered that a census be conducted. Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary traveled to the little town of Bethlehem so that they could be counted. There being no room for the couple at any of the inns, they stayed in a stable (a barn), where Mary gave birth to a baby boy, Jesus. Warned that the government planned to kill the baby, Jesus’ family fled with him to Egypt until it was safe to return to their native land.

Yet what if Jesus had been born 2,000 years later.

What if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, Jesus had been born at this moment in time? What kind of reception would Jesus and his family be given? Would we recognize the Christ child’s humanity, let alone his divinity? Would we treat him any differently than he was treated by the Roman Empire? If his family were forced to flee violence in their native country and sought refuge and asylum within our borders, what sanctuary would we offer them?A singular number of churches across the country have asked those very questions in recent years, and their conclusions were depicted with unnerving accuracy by nativity scenes in which Jesus and his family are separated, segregated and caged in individual chain-link pens, topped by barbed wire fencing.

Those nativity scenes were a pointed attempt to remind the modern world that the narrative about the birth of Jesus is one that speaks on multiple fronts to a world that has allowed the life, teachings and crucifixion of Jesus to be drowned out by partisan politics, secularism, materialism and war, all driven by a manipulative shadow government called the Deep State.

The modern-day church has largely shied away from applying Jesus’ teachings to modern problems such as war, poverty, immigration, etc., but thankfully there have been individuals throughout history who ask themselves and the world: what would Jesus do.

What would Jesus—the baby born in Bethlehem who grew into an itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist, who not only died challenging the police state of his day (namely, the Roman Empire) but spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, and pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire—do about the injustices of our modern age.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked himself what Jesus would have done about the horrors perpetrated by Hitler and his assassins. The answer: Bonhoeffer was executed by Hitler for attempting to undermine the tyranny at the heart of Nazi Germany.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn asked himself what Jesus would have done about the soul-destroying gulags and labor camps of the Soviet Union. The answer: Solzhenitsyn found his voice and used it to speak out about government oppression and brutality.

Martin Luther King Jr. asked himself what Jesus would have done about America’s warmongering. The answer: declaring “my conscience leaves me no other choice,” King risked widespread condemnation as well as his life when he publicly opposed the Vietnam War on moral and economic grounds.

Even now, despite the popularity of the phrase “What Would Jesus Do?” (WWJD) in Christian circles, there remains a disconnect in the modern church between the teachings of Christ and the suffering of what Jesus in Matthew 25 refers to as the “least of these.

Yet this is not a theological gray area: Jesus was unequivocal about his views on many things, not the least of which was charity, compassion, war, tyranny and love.

After all, Jesus—the revered preacher, teacher, radical and prophet—was born into a police state not unlike the growing menace of the American police state. When he grew up, he had powerful, profound things to say, things that would change how we view people, alter government policies and change the world. “Blessed are the merciful,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and “Love your enemies” are just a few examples of his most profound and revolutionary teachings.

When confronted by those in authority, Jesus did not shy away from speaking truth to power. Indeed, his teachings undermined the political and religious establishment of his day. It cost him his life. He was eventually crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be.

Can you imagine what Jesus’ life would have been like if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, he had been born and raised in the American police state.

Consider the following if you will.

Had Jesus been born in the era of the America police state, rather than traveling to Bethlehem for a census, Jesus’ parents would have been mailed a 28-page American Community Survey, a mandatory government questionnaire documenting their habits, household inhabitants, work schedule, how many toilets are in your home, etc. The penalty for not responding to this invasive survey can go as high as $5,000.

Instead of being born in a manger, Jesus might have been born at home. Rather than wise men and shepherds bringing gifts, however, the baby’s parents might have been forced to ward off visits from state social workers intent on prosecuting them for the home birth. One couple in Washington had all three of their children removed after social services objected to the two youngest being birthed in an unassisted home delivery.

Had Jesus been born in a hospital, his blood and DNA would have been taken without his parents’ knowledge or consent and entered into a government biobank. While most states require newborn screening, a growing number are holding onto that genetic material long-term for research, analysis and purposes yet to be disclosed.

Then again, had Jesus’ parents been undocumented immigrants, they and the newborn baby might have been shuffled to a profit-driven, private prison for illegals where they first would have been separated from each other, the children detained in make-shift cages, and the parents eventually turned into cheap, forced laborers for corporations such as Starbucks, Microsoft, Walmart, and Victoria’s Secret. There’s quite a lot of money to be made from imprisoning immigrants, especially when taxpayers are footing the bill.

From the time he was old enough to attend school, Jesus would have been drilled in lessons of compliance and obedience to government authorities, while learning little about his own rights. Had he been daring enough to speak out against injustice while still in school, he might have found himself tasered or beaten by a school resource officer, or at the very least suspended under a school zero tolerance policy that punishes minor infractions as harshly as more serious offenses.

Had Jesus disappeared for a few hours let alone days as a 12-year-old, his parents would have been handcuffed, arrested and jailed for parental negligence. Parents across the country have been arrested for far less “offenses” such as allowing their children to walk to the park unaccompanied and play in their front yard alone.

Rather than disappearing from the history books from his early teenaged years to adulthood, Jesus’ movements and personal data—including his biometrics—would have been documented, tracked, monitored and filed by governmental agencies and corporations such as Google and Microsoft. Incredibly, 95 percent of school districts share their student records with outside companies that are contracted to manage data, which they then use to market products to us.

From the moment Jesus made contact with an “extremist” such as John the Baptist, he would have been flagged for surveillance because of his association with a prominent activist, peaceful or otherwise. Since 9/11, the FBI has actively carried out surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations on a broad range of activist groups, from animal rights groups to poverty relief, anti-war groups and other such “extremist” organizations.

Jesus’ anti-government views would certainly have resulted in him being labeled a domestic extremist. Law enforcement agencies are being trained to recognize signs of anti-government extremism during interactions with potential extremists who share a “belief in the approaching collapse of government and the economy.

While traveling from community to community, Jesus might have been reported to government officials as “suspicious” under the Department of Homeland Security’s “See Something, Say Something” programs. Many states, including New York, are providing individuals with phone apps that allow them to take photos of suspicious activity and report them to their state Intelligence Center, where they are reviewed and forwarded to law-enforcement agencies.

Rather than being permitted to live as an itinerant preacher, Jesus might have found himself threatened with arrest for daring to live off the grid or sleeping outside. In fact, the number of cities that have resorted to criminalizing homelessness by enacting bans on camping, sleeping in vehicles, loitering and begging in public has doubled.

Viewed by the government as a dissident and a potential threat to its power, Jesus might have had government spies planted among his followers to monitor his activities, report on his movements, and entrap him into breaking the law. Such Judases today—called informants—often receive hefty paychecks from the government for their treachery.

Had Jesus used the internet to spread his radical message of peace and love, he might have found his blog posts infiltrated by government spies attempting to undermine his integrity, discredit him or plant incriminating information online about him. At the very least, he would have had his website hacked and his email monitored.

Had Jesus attempted to feed large crowds of people, he would have been threatened with arrest for violating various ordinances prohibiting the distribution of food without a permit. Florida officials arrested a 90-year-old man for feeding the homeless on a public beach.

Had Jesus spoken publicly about his 40 days in the desert and his conversations with the devil, he might have been labeled mentally ill and detained in a psych ward against his will for a mandatory involuntary psychiatric hold with no access to family or friends. One Virginia man was arrested, strip searched, handcuffed to a table, diagnosed as having “mental health issues,” and locked up for five days in a mental health facility against his will apparently because of his slurred speech and unsteady gait.

Without a doubt, had Jesus attempted to overturn tables in a Jewish temple and rage against the materialism of religious institutions, he would have been charged with a hate crime. More than 45 states and the federal government have hate crime laws on the books.

Had anyone reported Jesus to the police as being potentially dangerous, he might have found himself confronted—and killed—by police officers for whom any perceived act of non-compliance (a twitch, a question, a frown) can result in them shooting first and asking questions later.

Rather than having armed guards capture Jesus in a public place, government officials would have ordered that a SWAT team carry out a raid on Jesus and his followers, complete with flash-bang grenades and military equipment. There are upwards of 80,000 such SWAT team raids carried out every year, many on unsuspecting Americans who have no defense against such government invaders, even when such raids are done in error.

Instead of being detained by Roman guards, Jesus might have been made to “disappear” into a secret government detention center where he would have been interrogated, tortured and subjected to all manner of abuses. Chicago police have “disappeared” more than 7,000 people into a secret, off-the-books interrogation warehouse at Homan Square.

Charged with treason and labeled a domestic terrorist, Jesus might have been sentenced to a life-term in a private prison where he would have been forced to provide slave labor for corporations or put to death by way of the electric chair or a lethal mixture of drugs.

Indeed, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, given the nature of government then and now, it is painfully evident that whether Jesus had been born in our modern age or his own, he still would have died at the hands of a police state.

Thus, as we draw near to Christmas with its celebration of miracles and promise of salvation, we would do well to remember that what happened in that manger on that starry night in Bethlehem is only the beginning of the story. That baby born in a police state grew up to be a man who did not turn away from the evils of his age but rather spoke out against it.

We must do no less.

The Conflict In Ukraine Has Evolved Into A War Between The United States And Russia

Posted on December 21, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Michael Snyder

Source: End of the American Dream

Let’s be honest about what is really going on in Ukraine. The United States is providing most of the funding, most of the equipment, most of the ammunition, most of the high level intelligence and much of the training. That makes the United States a direct participant in the conflict. Yes, many other NATO countries are also contributing in various ways, and that makes them direct participants as well. But the mainstream media here in the western world continues to insist that this is Ukraine’s war and that we are just helping them out. Without a doubt, Ukraine has lost an enormous number of soldiers over the course of 2022, but at this point the Ukrainians are really a junior partner in the war. If the U.S. and NATO had not intervened on an epic scale, the war would already be over and Russia would have won. Unfortunately, now that we are so deeply invested in the conflict there is no easy way out, and that has very serious implications for all of us.

So much of the death and destruction that we have already witnessed could have been avoided so easily, and we should be constantly pushing our politicians to find a peaceful way out of this mess before nuclear weapons are used. Back in 2020, I published a book in which I specifically warned that war with Russia would be coming, and a lot of people thought that I was nuts to say such a thing. But sure enough we now have a war with Russia.

And the Russians are very clear about who they are really fighting. Earlier this month, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov boldly declared that the U.S. and NATO are “directly participating” in the conflict in Ukraine…

“You shouldn’t say that the US and NATO aren’t taking part in this war, you are directly participating in it,” Lavrov said in a video call with reporters. “And not just by providing weapons but also by training personnel. You are training their military on your territory, on the territories of Britain, Germany, Italy, and other countries.”

I wish that this wasn’t true.

Sadly, in this particular case Lavrov is quite correct.

Most Americans don’t realize this, but Ukrainian soldiers are being flown into the United States all the time. The following comes from a BBC article about one location in Kansas where Ukrainian officers have been receiving “strategic training”…

Senior-level Ukrainian officers have been studying in the US state of Kansas, thousands of miles from Russia’s invasion and the battlefields of Donbas.

Outside the Fort Leavenworth army base, wheat fields are starting to turn. Wide, open prairie land, with softly rolling hills, stretches for miles, and the sky is huge.

This quintessentially Kansas landscape has become the backdrop for generations of international soldiers, who head to the US base to receive strategic training.

Of course Ukrainians are also being trained in the UK and in other NATO countries as well.

Unless we actually want to be considered direct participants in the war, we should not be doing this.

All of us should also be deeply alarmed by how much money we are giving to Ukraine.

According to the Kiel Institute, as of October 3rd the U.S. had already given 54.43 billion dollars worth of military and non-military aid to the Ukrainians…

Eventually I tracked down a database operated by the Kiel Institute, a German think tank. They have been tracking total military and non-military aid to Ukraine since the beginning of the conflict. Their numbers include all aid from Jan. 24, 2022 to Oct. 3, 2022 (the data is scheduled for an update on Dec. 6).

According to Kiel, the U.S. has transferred military and non-military aid worth $54.43 billion to the government of Ukraine. The database Kiel has maintained is by far the most granular and detailed accounting of what the U.S. government has provided to Ukraine, including descriptions of the individual batches of military equipment. If you’re interested, you can check it out here.

Needless to say, more aid has been authorized for the Ukrainians since October 3rd.

So the grand total is even higher now.

At this point we have actually spent far, far more money on the war than the Ukrainians have.

The Ukraine military is now outfitted with cutting edge equipment and ammunition, but all of that money is being spent in other ways as well.

Vast hordes of international mercenaries have been hired to fight, and your tax dollars are paying for them.

You see, the truth is that the Ukrainian army that existed at the beginning of the war has mostly been destroyed. To replace them, Ukraine conscripted a whole bunch of new soldiers, and they also hired large numbers of mercenaries from other nations in Europe.

Yes, there are some western Europeans and Americans among the mercenaries, but the vast majority of them appear to be from the poorer countries of eastern Europe.

Unfortunately, most of us don’t seem to care that these poor mercenaries are being fed into an endless meatgrinder that is unlike anything that we have seen since the worst days of World War I…

As Russia moved fresh formations to the area in recent weeks, including reinforcements previously in the Kherson region, the fighting in the Bakhmut sector has descended into trench warfare reminiscent of the first world war.

Over the weekend, images emerged of Ukrainian soldiers in flooded, muddy trenches and battlefields dotted with the stumps of trees cut down by withering artillery barrages.

For a moment, I would like for you to consider what it is like to be a soldier on the front lines in eastern Ukraine.

Imagine standing in a muddy trench that is filled up with water up to your waist. Your teeth are chattering like crazy because of the bitter cold, but you don’t dare crawl out of the trench because you are likely to be killed. Your socks are soaked, your underwear is soaked and everything else you are wearing is soaked. Both sides are endlessly shelling one another, and so it is almost impossible for you to sleep. There are dead bodies all around you for as far as the eye can see, and you just hope that you will be able to make it through another day somehow.

At military hospitals all across eastern Ukraine, there is an endless parade of the dead and the wounded. The following comes from the New York Times…

For almost an hour, the stream of Ukrainian casualties in the eastern city of Bakhmut seemed unending: Ambulances, an armored personnel carrier and private vehicles all screamed to a halt, one after another, and disgorged the wounded in front of the city’s only military hospital.

A soldier propped up by his comrades, his face a mass of mangled flesh, walked in the main gate. The dark green stretcher that awaited him was one of several still covered in blood.

Sadly, there is no end to the war in sight.

In fact, both sides just continue to escalate matters. The Ukrainians are now regularly shelling targets inside Russian territory, and the Russians are now systematically going after power and water systems all over Ukraine.

This is going to be an extremely bitter winter for both the Ukrainians and the Russians.

And as this war intensifies, there is a growing risk that someone could eventually use weapons of mass destruction.

Once that happens, there will be no going back.

The Early 21st Century Dystopian Nightmare Reality

Posted on December 20, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Dr. Joseph Sansone

Source: Global Research

Welcome to the early 21st century dystopian nightmare reality where Orwell’s 1984 is no longer fiction, and if you are hearing voices, it could be the government transplanting those thoughts in your head.

If you think your appliances are listening to you, well, you may be right. Truth is treason and fact is fiction.

Freedom is selfish and fascism is kindness.

Killer robots are being deployed and the Malthusian depopulation agenda is being implemented.

An evolution of good old fashion eugenics called transhumanism is being sold as the advancement of the human race, and global technocrats are openly planning to use artificial intelligence to decide which industries to eliminate in an effort to stop economic growth.

The infrastructure for smart cities, the sophisticated prisons of the future, are in place or being employed. The force and coercion of deadly gene therapy shots continues despite the enormous evidence of causing harm. Unimaginably, masks, lockdowns, and vaccine passports, in many places, may be here to stay. Don’t be surprised if the classic film Casablanca is banned because it critiques fascism by highlighting the oppressive government policy of asking for your vaccine passport, I mean, “Your Papers Please”.

The recent reports in San Francisco about the decision to use killer robots to target American citizens suspected of crimes, should be an eye opener for those still looking the other way. This, of course, is just the beginning.

A Chinese company is promoting a ‘new species’ of 5G powered artificial intelligence driven robots to do everything from serving you coffee to pumping gas. However, these robots may be more of a ‘Terminator’ style prototype than a ‘Jetsons’ automated house keeper. The planned future may entail these terminator style robots for law enforcement purposes, or stated more clearly, oppression. Nothing could go wrong here.

As if this absurdity wasn’t enough, according to Aman Jabbi, the sophisticated prisons called smart cities will include street lights that can kill, total surveillance, and forcing people into the Metaverse under a new digital slavery system. Rural and suburban America will be eliminated as humans are herded into these smart cities. According to Jabbi, much of the infrastructure is in place in many areas of the United States, including Florida and Georgia.

A next generation prototype city, called Neom, or ‘the line’, is being constructed in Saudi Arabia. According to Joseph Bradley, Neom’s technology and digital CEO, “NEOM is not about building a smart city, it is about building the first cognitive city, where world-class technology is fueled with data and intelligence to interact seamlessly with its population.”

As frightening as this is, the previously mentioned deliberate plan proposed by the World Economic Forum (WEF), to use artificial intelligence to decide which industries to liquidate in order to stop economic growth, should send a chill down your spine.

That’s right, the WEF is actually proposing that economic growth is bad and that economic growth should diminish.

This of course is to save the planet from the natural phenomenon called climate change. This psychotic, I mean noble goal, is to stop the depletion of natural resources. Of course, this system must be fair, so artificial intelligence will be used to decide who gets to succeed, and who gets to fail. Don’t worry, I’m sure that algorithm will be proprietary information, like the ones used in the voting machines, or the ingredients of those Covid shots.

If you are wondering how long it will take for the self appointed masters of the universe to determine whether all the useless humans are necessary, you need not wait. There are some interesting coincidences that have emerged globally since the introduction of the Covid gene therapy shots. All cause mortality is going up while birth rates are dropping. Evidence is emerging that these shots may be both a biological and technological weapon. After all, those semi synthetic blood clots are normal. No worries, nothing to see here, move it along.

The high priests of knowledge and truth in our society have determined that for our own good, we are not allowed to know the contents of the Covid shots. These same high priests have also protected us from knowing the algorithm in our computerized voting machines. Fortunately, the government and media and big tech have colluded to protect us from free speech and have actively censored information about the dangerous Covid shots, and our fake elections.

Well, you know what they say, a little knowledge can be dangerous…

Pilot programs of a centralized digital bank currency are currently being rolled out. A CDBC has the potential to create a total slave system where your money is not yours, but instead, is more of an allowance based on approved behavior as the algorithm can be tied into your ESG score. Access to normal life activities can eventually be tied to your speech and political views. Or maybe you’ll be allowed to buy food when you get your gene therapy booster.

Eugenics has evolved into transhumanism, where our billionaire Marxists are seeking to live forever while experimenting on the human race. As mentioned in a previous article, this was prophesized by C.S. Lewis in his book That Hideous Strength. Written shortly after WWII, this work of fiction depicts fascist intellectuals seeking to merge humans with artificial intelligence to find a way to live forever and sanitize humanity. Ultimately, the transhumanists were deceived and were in fact communicating with dark entities. Well, we do know the globalists are evil.

The fusion of Malthusian population control cultists and climate change cultists has led to this abysmal thing called The Great Reset. The Great Reset is a “revolution” led by billionaire technocrats

The Great Reset is unrestricted warfare on the human race.

I see a few scenarios where this can go. Most aren’t so good. We can see total control and a prison planet emerge, it could all blow up and civilization collapse, or we could see the emergence of pockets of liberty as we enter the new dark age. The globalists could fail and we see a free planet emerge. Or there could be a fusion of the two extremes. Nothing is certain. Although, I would argue that the only way possible good outcomes can emerge is if there is active resistance at all levels.

In some way, we all signed up for the early 21st century dystopian nightmare reality.

We all have a choice. We can hide and grovel on our knees, or we can enter the arena, and work to stop global genocide, preserve the human race, and the elusive, yet beautiful thing, called freedom.

It is a wonderful time to be alive. We get to slay the dragon, or die trying.

BIDEN Has Handed America Over to the BIODEFENSE CARTEL

Posted on December 19, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Patrick Wood

Source: The 21st Century

On the heels of Biden’s September 12th Executive Order titled The National Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative, I wrote two days later that it “is a complete capitulation of our government to Big Pharma, the biotechnology industry and the entire transhuman cabal that wants to create Humanity 2.0 by changing our genetic structure.”

The Initiative literally opens the floodgates of taxpayer resources and turns over government control to the biotech and Big Pharma industry. Some highlights include:

“We need to develop genetic engineering technologies and techniques to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers; unlock the power of biological data, including through computing tools and artificial intelligence; and advance the science of scale-up production while reducing the obstacles for commercialization so that innovative technologies and products can reach markets faster.”
“bolster and coordinate Federal investment in key research and development (R&D) areas of biotechnology and biomanufacturing in order to further societal goals”
“Building a Vibrant Domestic Biomanufacturing Ecosystem.”
“expand training and education opportunities for all Americans in biotechnology and biomanufacturing.”
“Federal investments in biological sciences, biotechnology, and biomanufacturing to enhance biosafety and biosecurity best practices throughout the bioeconomy R&D enterprise.”

In sum, our nation has become the vassal of the biodefense cartel to finance its R&D, build its manufacturing capacity and train workers to fill its factories. What’s wrong with this picture?

The Executive Order required a number of reports to be compiled and submitted to the President on how to implement the Order. Just one month later, the White House released the National Biodefense Strategy and Implementation Plan.

It dovetails perfectly with the Executive Order except that preparation started on the first day of Biden’s presidency. According to the American Economic Association (AEA),

Today, the Biden-Harris Administration fulfills a commitment that President Biden made on his first day in office: to review existing national biopreparedness policies and develop recommendations for how the Federal Government should update them, based on lessons learned from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and other biological threats our Nation faces.

Biden Signs Executive Order Designed to Unleash “Transhumanist Hell” on America and the World

Thus, we can see that this massive transfer of power actually started with Biden’s election and has been orchestrated for theater ever since.

Biodefense Enterprise

The National Biodefense Strategy reveals more details of this Transhuman and Technocratic takeover. One new term that appears 21 times in the document is “biodefense enterprise”.

Enterprise normally applies to a commercial business or corporation, but here it states “the United States will support an efficient and coordinated biodefense enterprise to protect the American People and its global interests.”

In Annex I: Definitions, we get a glimpse of what biodefense enterprise means:

Stakeholders with a role in the prevention, preparedness, detection, response, and recovery from bioincidents (e.g., Federal and SLTT governments, nongovernmental and private sector entities, and international partners).

Stakeholders? Nongovernmental and private sector entities? International partners?

This language clearly reveals that the “biodefense enterprise” is a massive Public Private Partnership where the managing partner is not the Federal Administration, but rather it is the biotech/Big Pharma industry itself!

Biosurveillance

This term shows up 13 times in the National Biodefense Strategy and is clearly linked to the “biodefense enterprise”:

Enhancing the national biodefense enterprise will help protect the United States and its partners abroad from biological incidents, whether naturally occurring, accidental, or deliberate in origin.

It will simultaneously build the U.S. innovation base for cutting-edge countermeasures,biosensors, diagnostics, and biosurveillance information technologies, and advance the biomedical and agricultural industries’ biodefense capabilities.

Again, the document offers a definition:

Biosurveillance: The process of gathering, integrating, interpreting, and communicating essential information and indications related to all-hazard threats or disease activity affecting human, animal, plant, and environmental health to achieve early detection and provide early warning, contribute to overall situational awareness of the health aspects of the incident, and enable better decision-making at all levels.

Thus, biosurveillance will dovetail perfectly into the industry’s already existing plan for digital surveillance, universal health id’s and digital vaccine passports.

If you think existing surveillance is intrusive and a threat to freedom and personal liberty, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Whole-of-Society

I have discussed the “whole-of-government” strategy where the entire structure of Federal agencies is harmonized to a common purpose and objective. This in itself is a dangerous precedent that permits the weaponization of the whole government toward a common objective.

The concept of whole-of-society is a close relative. Here all sectors of society are lined up for a common purpose. What sectors? Humans, animals, plants and ecosystems. Furthermore, it’s top-to-bottom from national all the way down to local enforcement.

Driving down to local communities is the only way to achieve Section 3.1 Domestic Health Capacity:

Increase vaccine uptake rates for all recommended vaccines to over 85% of American population.

A secondary goal is to expand the propaganda machine to reach 80% of the American public, “while also countering and mitigating the spread of disinformation and misinformation.”

Fast Track From Lab-to-Jab

All cautionary methodologies and testing are thrown to the wind. Vaccines will be created within 100 days of virus detection (i.e., a self-declared “pandemic”), mass produced within 130 days, distributed with military efficiency and speed, and injected into:

…at-risk human and impacted animal populations the necessary vaccine quantities to control a nationally or internationally significant biological incident, within one hundred days following authorization or approval.

Not Your Grandmother’s Vaccine

I know there are some readers who are thinking they would like to get vaccines faster to prevent disease.

However, none of this applies to old-school vaccines. Nope. None. This is all pointed toward an endless conveyor belt of mRNA and DNA injections designed to hack your human condition. – you and eighty-five percent of the population, in perpetuity. Biden cleared that up in his original Executive Order:

We need to develop genetic engineering technologies and techniques to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers.

Are you ready? Are you awake to what is taking place here?

I have addressed the whole picture in my new book. Solutions and resistance will not arise without understanding the nature of this evil beast that has come upon us.

The Evil Twins of Technocracy and Transhumanism

Perhaps you can see why I used the word “Evil” in the title of my just-released book. Perhaps you can picture the golden skulls, all ornate and rich looking on the outside, but revealing death underneath.

Indeed, Technocracy and Transhumanism are promoting a future that only holds death and destruction for mankind.

WE ARE TRAPPED IN A TRUMAN SHOW DIRECTED BY PSYCHOPATHS

Posted on December 18, 2022 by Reid Mukai

“Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.” – Aldous Huxley – Letter to George Orwell about 1984 in 1949

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution” ― Aldous Huxley

When I step back from the day-to-day minutia and trivialities flooding my senses from all directions and media devices, it almost appears as if I’m living in a highly scripted reality TV program where the characters and plots are designed to create passions and reactions to support whatever narrative is being weaved by those directing the show. Huxley really did foresee the future as clearly and concisely as anyone could, decades before his dystopian vision came to fruition.

Orwell’s boot on the face vision is only now being initiated because a few too many critical thinkers have awoken from their pharmaceutically induced stupor and begun to question the plotline of this spectacle masquerading as our reality. The mass formation psychosis infecting the weak-minded masses; relentless mass propaganda designed to mislead, misinform, and brainwash a dumbed down and government indoctrinated populace; and complete control of the story line through media manipulation, regulation, and censorship of the truth; has run its course. As Charles Mackay stated 180 years ago, the masses go mad as a herd, but only regain their senses slowly, and one by one.

My recognition that the world seems to be scripted and directed by Machiavellian managers, working behind a dark shroud, representing an invisible governing authority, molding our minds, suggesting our ideas, dictating our tastes, and creating fear, triggered a recollection of the 1998 Jim Carrey movie – The Truman Show. The movie, directed by Peter Weir (Gallipoli, Witness, Dead Poet’s Society), had the surreal feel of Forest Gump, while beckoning the horrendous introduction of reality TV (Big Brother, Survivor), which poisons our shallow unserious society to this day. The plot of the movie focuses on individuality versus conformity, consumerism, voyeurism, reality versus manipulation, false narratives, the truth about the American Dream, and the dangers of surveillance in a technologically advanced society.

Truman Burbank is the unsuspecting star of The Truman Show, a reality television program filmed 24/7 through thousands of hidden cameras and broadcast to a worldwide audience. Christof, the show’s creator seeks to capture Truman’s authentic emotions and give audiences a relatable every man. Truman has been the unsuspecting star of the show since he was born 30 years prior. Truman’s hometown of Seahaven Island is a complete set built within an enormous dome, populated by crew members and actors who highlight the product placements that generate revenue for the show. The elaborate set allows Christof to control almost every aspect of Truman’s life, including the weather. The picture-perfect home, with picket fence and plastic people, is an attempt to convince Truman he is living the American Dream rather than in an inescapable dystopian techno-prison.

To prevent Truman from discovering his false reality, Christof manufactures scenarios that dissuade Truman’s desire for exploration, such as the “death” of his father in a sea storm to instill aquaphobia, and by constantly broadcasting and printing messages of the dangers of traveling and the virtues of staying home. One cannot but acknowledge the plotline to keep Truman under control, obedient, and locked down in his controlled environment, with no escape hatch visible, as exactly the plotline used by our overlords during the Covid scam. Using fear to regulate your subjects is a familiar theme used by those controlling the narrative and pulling the strings behind the scenes of our glorious democracy of dystopia.

The first task was to instill fear into the masses through fake videos, fake medical experts spewing fake “facts”, denying the reality masks, social distancing, and locking down the world did not stop a microscopic virus, while suppressing treatments which were clearly safe and effective (ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine) and forcing Fauci’s remdesivir and ventilators on patients – insuring their deaths. Truman’s life was built upon lies, deception, and fake narratives, controlled by a tyrannical director putting on a show to please his bosses and maximize profits. We are experiencing the same reality today.

Since March 2020 we have been trapped in a dystopian reality show based on lies, deception, and fake narratives about a weaponized virus created in a lab funded by Anthony Fauci and utilized to further the totalitarian Great Reset agenda of Schwab, Gates and their ilk, while maximizing the profits of Pfizer, TV networks and filling the pockets of politicians, shills, and apparatchiks willing to sellout the people of our country for thirty pieces of silver.

As the Truman Show approached its 30th anniversary, Truman began discovering unusual elements, such as a spotlight falling out of the sky in front of his house and a radio channel that precisely described his movements. He began to awaken to the fact he was nothing but a peculiarity trapped in a cage and constantly deterred from escaping at every turn, for the good of the show. He lived in a scripted world of conformity, where questioning the plot was not allowed, and the masses just played their parts.

This is exactly how a dictatorship without tears uses technology, pharmaceuticals, and psychological manipulation to convince the masses to love their servitude. This is the reality show we have been living in during this 21^st Century dictatorship dystopia of dunces. But this psychological phenomenon is not new to mankind, as Plato described an ancient Truman Show analog in the 4^th Century BC with his Allegory of the Cave. The nature of human beings has not changed across the trials and tribulations of history.

In the allegory, Plato describes a group of people who have lived chained in a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners’ reality but are not an accurate representation of the real world. An enlightened man is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand the shadows on the wall are not reality.

The ignorant inmates do not desire to leave their prison/cave, for it is the only life they know, and they fear reality. The fire and the puppets, used to create shadows, are controlled by artists. Plato indicates the fire is also the political doctrine taught by a nation state. The artists use light and shadows to indoctrinate the masses with the dominant doctrines of the times. Few humans ever escape the cave. Most humans will remain at the bottom of the cave, with a small few elevated as major artists, to project the shadows keeping the masses disoriented, confused and fearful.

“Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst.” ― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

“Most people are not just comfortable in their ignorance, but hostile to anyone who points it out.” ― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

The State is run by an eager group of psychopaths who are hell bent on destroying our civil society and common culture on behalf of globalists attempting to implement their Great Reset agenda, and enforcing it through technological surveillance, mind control through propaganda messaging, and strict management of the daily plot via mainstream media and social media censorship of the truth. As Plato contemplated twenty four centuries ago, most men will remain in their cave, believing shadows presented by their overlords is reality, never questioning their servitude or seeking the truth.

Never has this fact been truer than during this covid pandemic reality show directed by our Christof – mass murderer Anthony Fauci. The willful ignorance of the masses was assumed by the covid controllers who cast shadows of fear and death on the cave walls of the locked down extras in this well-orchestrated reality show. Using a purposefully misleading PCR test to vastly overestimate “cases”, paying hospitals to classify all deaths as covid, and having the propaganda professionals at CNN, MSNBC and Fox showing Covid Death Counters on their screens 24/7 to terrify the masses into compliance was the Covid Show.

Once the fear level was ramped to eleven on the control dial, the producers of this show introduced the miraculous Big Pharma vaccine antidote to save the day. Their script was so believable they were able to convince over 5 billion members of their captive audience to inject themselves with an untested, unproven genetic therapy, that didn’t prevent you from catching, transmitting, getting sick, being hospitalized, or dying from the Fauci funded Wuhan lab produced virus. But, as a dramatic twist to the tale, it seems the “vaccine” causes myocarditis, blood clots, infertility, miscarriages, heart attacks, cancer, and sudden death.

Despite the obvious dangers and failures of these “vaccines”, those bullied into getting jabbed became so comfortable in their ignorance, they were easily persuaded to hate the unjabbed and wish for their deaths. Orwell’s “Two Minutes of Hate” was extended for over a year and continues to this day. Rather than think critically and question why annual flu cases averaged 35 million per year prior to 2020 but dropped to near ZERO during the covid “emergency”, the cave dwellers lashed out in anger at anyone questioning the plot, because to admit they were duped would destroy their self-esteem and decrease their virtue signal credits.

The annual flu didn’t disappear. Covid was the annual flu, with a multi-billion-dollar marketing campaign. This wasn’t a pandemic, but an IQ test, and most people failed miserably. But the critical thinking unvaxxed are still considered the enemy of the state, especially since they have been proven right.

Whether we are trapped in an artificial world produced in a dome, cave, or our current technologically advanced surveillance propaganda state, the goal of those controlling our false reality is to take away our freedoms, crush dissent, keep us ignorant of the truth, and treat us as plebs to be taxed and molded. Christof, whose name is supposed to invoke him being a god-like figure ruling over Truman’s world, declares Truman could discover the truth and leave at any time, while using every diabolical trick to keep that from ever happening, because his show generated revenues exceeding the GDP of a small country.

Truman and ourselves are essentially prisoners in a vast production, and our overlords believe it is their duty to convince us to love our servitude and prefer our cells, because it is financially beneficial to the overlords and their crew.

Our world is not fake, but it is tightly controlled by those running the show. Seemingly random events, plots, and subplots are manipulated to generate specific emotions and reactions by the public in order to achieve the objectives of those benefiting from the various storylines. They are molding our minds and forming our tastes through psychological and technological manipulation of our daily existence. Christof explained why most rarely discover the truth or question the world they live in – “We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented. It’s as simple as that.”

We have allowed men we have never seen to dictate how we live our lives, the choices we make, and which politicians and “experts” to believe, without ever putting in the effort to understand why we are being prodded to do so. We are locked in a self-imposed prison of desires, emotions, and needs through mass media messaging and a constant barrage of advertisements. Conformity and obedience are the desired traits sought by the ruling class, while individuality and skepticism are frowned upon and punished through social ostracism.

We are conditioned from birth to believe what they tell us to believe. Government school indoctrination and mass media misinformation does the trick. Distracted by our techno-gadgets and ignorant of truth is how the globalist oligarchs methodically implement their Great Reset agenda. They are so convinced of the ignorance of the masses they openly proclaim their depopulation and techno-prison schemes with no fear of push back or retribution.

The ending of the Truman Show is a lesson in resistance, persistence, and the strength of the individual, even in the face of a technologically advanced Big Brother state. It offers a message of hope, no matter how powerful our overlords appear to be. Refusing to obey or conform by one individual can inspire others to do likewise. Once Truman ‘awoke’ to his plight as a lab rat in a scripted show, he began to plot his escape. Using a makeshift tunnel in his basement, out of view of Christof’s cameras, he disappeared and forced the suspension of the broadcast for the first time in thirty years.

Christof discovers Truman sailing away from Seahaven in a small boat, as he has overcome the fake conditioning of fear instilled in him by the man who supposedly loves him but traumatized him about the sea by faking his father’s death while at sea. Christof chooses to almost drown Truman by creating a violent storm to deter him from discovering the truth. Ultimately the storm ceases and his boat strikes the wall of the dome.

This is exactly how our controllers treat the ignorant masses. They feed us stories designed to make us fearful and compliant to the exhortations of their paid experts. Paid to lie. Paid to misinform. Paid to persuade people a dangerous concoction is “safe and effective”. The evilness of using Sesame Street characters to convince four-year-old children they need this Big Pharma gene altering toxic brew, even though essentially ZERO children on earth died from covid, is a testament to the greed and malevolent impulses of those in power. Vast amounts of ever-increasing advertising revenue are what kept The Truman Show on the air for thirty years.

The covid advertising campaign will never be topped, as Hollywood stars, top athletes, famous writers, rock legends, supposedly impartial journalists, and all the major networks said SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!! Everyone was for sale, and all they had to do was lie and say the jabs were “safe and effective”. Product placement was the money-making formula for the Truman Show, while hard selling a Big Pharma phony cure over the airwaves 24/7 using the tax dollars of the victims was the final solution of the Great Reset Cabal.

The grand finale is a clash of the philosophies of reality versus false reality, as Truman discovers a staircase leading to an exit door. Christof speaks to Truman, claiming there was no more truth in the real world than in his artificial world, and he would be safe, with nothing to fear, in a world controlled by men invisible to him assuring him they have his best interests at heart. Truman chooses individuality, truth, risk, living a real meaningful life, and seeking honest relationships over a safe existence in a bubble where all decisions were made by others. Truman bows to the audience and exits, leaving Chistof to mourn the loss of his star and the revenue he generated. The ignorant masses watching the show cheer his escape and then ask, “what’s on next?” Plato captured the uncertainty and bewilderment Truman must have felt as he walked into the light.

“Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light” ― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

This world of manufactured dystopian pleasure harkens more towards Huxley’s Brave New World, where pharmaceuticals and conditioning would keep the public seeking pleasure, pre-occupied with trivialities, distracted by materialism, unable to think critically, and reduced to passivity and egoism through the control of messaging by their controllers. Our efficient totalitarian state has gained complete control by convincing the masses to love their servitude and beg for more rules, restrictions, and reduction of liberties in the name of safety and security.

Smart phones, smart cities, and smart streets are nothing more than code for spying on you and controlling you. Truman finally understood his liberty was his to choose and not Christof’s to give. There is a small minority of Americans who are realizing the same thing after two years of totalitarian measures designed to take away our freedoms and liberty. The question is whether enough will exit this tyrannical government produced show to make a difference. The future of mankind literally depends on the answer to this question.

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Category Archives: Technocracy