The Venezuelization of America

The New York Times, the ‘paper of record,’ recently wrote a piece called, “Venezuela, Once an Oil Giant, Reaches the End of an Era.” The article, though 1,800+ words long, mentions only in passing the country’s “gross mismanagement” of the economy, instead placing much of the focus on the impact of U.S. sanctions. Though indeed the U.S. sanctions were undoubtedly devastating, the Venezuelan government, which has micro-managed its economy into oblivion, hasn’t done its country many favors. Widespread political corruption, seizure of businesses, and driving out anything with a whiff of private enterprise certainly played no small part in turning the once-wealthy nation into South America’s “Hey, at least we’re not [fill in the blank].” Hyperinflation, price controls, and barely symbolic minimum wage raises: “It’s a repeat of the never-ending cycle that we’ve been entrapped for so many years now,” says Venezuelan Christian K. Caruzo, “except now it comes with a twist: The ongoing coronavirus pandemic that has disrupted everyone’s lives and has greatly exacerbated those three heads of the socialist hydra. “The added novelty,” Caruzo adds, “if it can be called that, is that the mandatory masks visually cover your astonishment (or lack thereof) when something you bought last week is suddenly twice as expensive.” But, as it’s said… If you can’t convince someone of their mistakes, make very similar mistakes, but double down X1,000 and really show ‘em how it’s done. (Or something like that.) The Slow Venezuelization of America  “Yesterday,” our macro maven Graham Summers pointed out, “the U.S. PPI and Core PPI (two key metrics of inflation) recorded a 0.4% increase in inflation for the month of September. This sounds like a very small move until you consider that it was largely due to just one component (food inflation) surging 1.2% over the same time period.” Even 1.2%, to the untrained eye, doesn’t sound like a big deal in the grand scheme, especially given what’s happening elsewhere in the world. (Unless, of course, you’re already finding it difficult to put food on the table… which is, of course, tragically, true for millions of Americans.) Whatever the case, this trend, Graham says, should be on everyone’s radar. “Because,” he writes, “according to the Fed’s own research, food inflation is the single best predictor of future inflation in the U.S. And a 1.2% increase in a single month for food prices across the board (not just one area like meat or dairy) is a BIG deal.” Point blank: “higher inflation is seeping into the financial system.” Despite what it looks like on the surface, the markets aren’t completely asleep at the wheel. “Which is why,” Graham points out, “gold has erupted higher against every major currency (the $USD, the Euro, the Swiss Franc, and the Japanese Yen).” And why wouldn’t it?  After all, central banks and policy makers have gone NUCLEAR in their money printing in the last six months. One strangely-worded CNBC headline from August says it all:  The ballooning money supply may be the key to unlocking inflation in the U.S.

The Least Important Election… Ever? Along this vein, John Rubino of the Dollar Collapse blog recently penned a piece on why he believes the upcoming election is the least important election of our lifetimes. Of course, 99.99% of those who read it will vehemently disagree — so much so, it could even spark another one of those screamy TikTok videos — but Rubino’s point was this: No matter who gets into office, we’ll be faced with financial turmoil on a level beyond what can reasonably be controlled, let alone turned on its heels in four years. “The pandemic,” he wrote, “turbocharged a process of hyper-financialization that was already underway, and now whoever is in charge next will have no choice but to keep bailing out everything in sight with tens of trillions of newly created dollars. “This,” Rubino suspects, “will shift the pressure from bankrupt states and insolvent companies to the currency. Prices will start to rise as the dollar falls. And the fears of today’s voters will seem in retrospect like quaint fantasies from a simpler and embarrassingly naïve time.” And that’s when the true “Venezuelization” of America could occur. Right, wrong or indifferent… You might find the conclusion of Rubino’s piece a tad more agreeable than the premise:

THINK THE PRECISION OF EGYPTIAN ARTIFACTS BELONG TO THE EGYPTIANS? THINK AGAIN!

Brian Kolfage Build The Wall

THEY ALL LIED! Patriots,  I’ve never stolen a thing in my life, and to be accused of such heinous crimes infuriates me. The SDNY & liberal media claim that I bought a boat, a SUV, and home improvements with donor money! THEY 100% LIED!  So many people have discriminated against me and assumed that because I’m disabled that I can’t be successful. It’s downright disgusting.  My boat was ordered custom from the factory in October of 2017, well over a year before the GoFundMe even started.  The boat arrived in Destin, Florida from the factory in October 2018, still months before the GoFundMe. I have proof of everything by my dated Instagram posts, talking about the boat that I ordered and the pics from the factory of it being built. The leftwing media and SDNY LIED! The media and the SDNY had one goal, ASSASSINATE my character in the news to America in order to shutdown the wall building. And now you’re seeing just how wrong they are.  Here’s the facts on the “luxury SUV” as they stated. I’ve owned Land Rovers ever since I lost my limbs. I bought my first one in 2007 new from the dealer and have owned 3 total now. This is not some new “lifestyle” as they dubbed it. There’s a clear history and thank God for social media, because I posted my vehicles there and have dated time stamps. How about that golf cart you heard all about in the media? Yup that was bought in 2015. You can start to see things are not adding up.  But there’s more. In the indictment they claimed I paid for “home improvements”. The only major improvements I made to our home was in 2017-2018 with a pool and covered patio addition and our home was built in 2016.  Again, nearly 2-3 years prior to the GoFundMe.   If the media and our judicial system can lie about this, you know damned well everything else is lie!  This was a political hit job from the beginning to assassinate our characters just before the election in order to make Trump look bad. The politically corrupted investigators painted a story that I had begun living an abnormally “lavish life” after starting the GoFundMe to build the wall. But in reality, it was the exact opposite! Go look at my Instagram. I was living the best life before the wall project. Since beginning the project, I stopped taking vacations, I neglected my family time, I busted my ass working hard to do something our own government could not achieve in 30 years and we did it in 6 months. WE BUILT THE WALL! And for that I’m being targeted now.  These people are looking to General Flynn, but Americans are now aware of their corruptness. I’ve been blown up. I’ve been through way worst. I’m not going to stop fighting against this injustice. The storm is coming. God Bless,  The Kolfage Family

Trump does not have the power to fire Fauci but he DOES, CAN and SHOULD DO THE FOLLOWING!

Dr. Anthony Fauci has become a mad scientist. The publicity-drunk bureaucrat has exposed himself as both massively deceitful and historically ill-equipped to lead a U.S. government health agency.

For quite some time, rational-minded observers of the COVID-19 pandemic have been calling for the firing of Fauci, the public health panic salesman who has been embedded in the U.S. federal bureaucracy for an astonishing 52 years, and has served atop the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for 36 years. He is the highest paid federal employee in America.

Dr. Fauci launched himself into the spotlight earlier this year when he convinced the president to temporarily embrace lockdowns (a concept first brought to the forefront in Wuhan, China) and other restrictions as a remedy to the pandemic. Fauci and his colleague, Dr. Deborah Birx, brought purported epidemiological models to the president’s attention in the form of a hostage negotiation, promising that millions of people would die if the president did not sound the alarm and call for restrictions immediately. 

The president, regrettably, followed the advice of the government scientists, and unsurprisingly, the models did not accurately predict the trajectory of the pandemic. They were catastrophically wrong. The “cure” presented by Fauci and Birx was a poison pill that ensured widespread economic and societal calamity, and we are still dealing with the ramifications of their COVID “cures,” now many months into our pandemic response.

Given his historical failures, which led to the suffering of millions, many have been calling for the immediate dismissal of Dr. Fauci, who continues to fill what seems to be the majority of his daily schedule with cable news appearances. Fauci has, for months now, continued to mislead the American people by serving up healthy doses of fear, hysteria, and pseudoscience. 

In the private sector, Fauci would have been shown the door many months ago. But this is not the private sector. Fauci works in the big, bloated federal bureaucracy. In the land of government, the act of firing someone for poor job performance, or something even worse, pretty much does not exist.

As a federal bureaucrat, Fauci cannot be fired. The laws on the books since 1978 have made that crystal-clear. Fauci is an untouchable. It’s as simple as that.

Without a passed bill in congress reforming the protections of the administrative state, Fauci will do what he pleases without repercussions. Just 0.15 percent of federal employees are fired each year. Now you know why they call the federal bureaucracy “the permanent state.” You have a better chance of dying with COVID (which has an estimated 99.8% recovery rate) than being fired as a federal bureaucrat.

Think of Dr. Fauci as a member of a teachers union, but one with even more protections. If the president wanted to fire Fauci, he would have to ask one of Fauci’s superiors in the Department of Health and Human Services umbrella to launch administrative action against him. This would set off an endless itinerary of meetings, hearings, and back and forths with government lawyers.

The process would ultimately take years, and it would in all likelihood result with Fauci being exonerated. Despite the fact that Fauci has become a mad scientist, whose advice has destroyed millions of American families, there is no chance the process would work out in favor of firing Fauci.

I understand that there’s a lot of politics in play, given that we have an election in 5 weeks.

Here’s what the president can do:

The president can boot Fauci off of the White House COVID-19 task force. He can also issue a public rebuke of Fauci, and list all of the ways that the NIAID chief has been historically corrupt and incompetent in his role. Hopefully, the president waits no longer than the day after the election to complete this objective. The good news is that it appears the president no longer values Fauci’s advice. He has hired the brilliant Dr. Scott Atlas as his personal COVID adviser.

Dr. Fauci turns 80 in late December.

Let’s hope, for the sake of the health of 330 million Americans, that he considers retiring when that milestone arrives.

Regards

In This House. uh, huh.

The next time you see one of these “In this house, we believe” signs in your neighborhood, there’s a pretty good chance that despite what the sign in front of their house advertises, inside, it’s very likely they’re some of the most intolerant people you’ve ever met.

What “In This House We Believe” Really Means: An America Divided Into Victim Categories, Open Borders, Violence To Achieve Our Goals and Pure Hatred For Anyone Who Gets In Our Way

14 Ways to Be Civilly Disobedient in the Face of the Corona Ban

Let’s face it, these corona shelter-in-place orders are illegal and ineffective. Politicians, however, aren’t just going to back down over such a grandiose idea. They need to be pushed. The bigger the government mistake, the harder it is to kill. And the corona bans need to be killed if they are going to die.

Case in point, even the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, more than two weeks ago, acknowledged that the hasty and heavy-handed corona ban may have backfired, saying “If you re-thought that or had time to analyze that public health strategy, I don’t know that you would say ‘Quarantine everyone.’” Yet the corona ban remains firmly in place in New York.

Sometimes fell swoops work to enact change, other times a general change in attitude might get the job done. With the corona bans needing to be killed, here are a few ways to exert pressure.

Contact Your Favorite Closed Businesses, Ask Them Not Only To Re-Open But To Sue The City and State

Imagine this: local government asked them to shut down their livelihood for no good reason. You are asking them to protect their livelihood with every good reason. Some consider it poor form to act against the government. To the contrary, it’s wonderful behavior to tell your government to quit being so boneheaded when it is being boneheaded.

It’s certainly being boneheaded.

Send a personalized email to every closed business that you currently miss. Tell them what you miss about them and why. Tell them what a farce this corona ban is and why. Ask them to sue the city and state imposing a ban on them. Offer to help them find a lawyer.

If you need ammunition to describe the farce: 1.)this is illegal (you can’t be stopped from assembling with others, worshiping, or doing business with others), 2.) all services are essential , 3.) “essential worker” is a term which hauntingly evokes memories of the worst of the human experience, and 4.) for the utilitarians: this ban is not working: based on publicly available data from a large Oregon hospital, based on data from Italy about who gets it: the elderly and infirm (99% of those who died in Italy had other illnesses that predisposed them to die), and based on data from China collected by international research teams on how it is spread (85% through people sharing households, not through schools, businesses, or similarly casual contact – household contact is the driver of the epidemic).

Oh, and evil Florida – un-shuttered for two weeks longer than New York – has 13x fewer corona cases than New York in full lockdown.

David Stockman writes: “The infection rate in New York is 13.4X higher than Florida’s, while New York’s hospitalization and death rates are 21X and 22X higher, respectively.”

With so many potential variables in place, obviously it’s not the lockdown that’s the effective variable. The lockdown doesn’t work against corona. Researchers have known that for years. Far from being data-driven, there’s a great deal of uncertainty around the effectiveness of many of these dramatic interventions taking place. One must wonder: “If proven data is not driving these heavy-handed measures, then what is?”

Your email is intended to get your favorite businesses to quit participating in this farce and to re-open.

If at first they aren’t warm to the idea, keep bringing that up to them.

Get Your Church Re-Opened For Easter

Get your pastor on the phone and ask him if there will be a church service on Easter. Do that everyday. Get your church council on the phone. Get everyone who you normally talk to in your congregation on the phone. If the church opens, they don’t have to attend church. No one is forcing them. But if the church stays closed, it harms those who want to attend, perhaps even feel a need to attend during these dire days. Those are the people church is most there for: those who need it.

To be courageous is among the roles of the church in society. “If no courage flows from faith then there is no living faith,” wrote a brave clergyman to me this past week.

It is cowardly to keep the church doors closed, especially in a time when the steadfast nature of the church is most needed in the face of such great anti-religious, secular pressure. Somewhere there is a Marxist laughing at the folly of Christian pastors lining up to be the first to virtue signal loudest by closing their churches down most dramatically.

Get your church re-opened by Easter – April 12 – as Becky Akers inspirationally calls believers to do. There are certainly dozens, probably hundreds, maybe even thousands of congregations across the country meeting in violation of the illegal local orders.

Some are meeting in open defiance of the illegal lockdown orders. Some are meeting in their sanctuaries behind closed doors. Some are even said to be meeting in homes, like Bethany Slavic Missionary Church in California.

Early Christians met in secret and were persecuted by both friend and foe. The courage being shown by some Christians today will serve as a source of pride for ages. The cowardly will want to sweep what took place in these months under the rug.

If they don’t re-open, get some friends together on the front steps or in the parking lot. Please celebrate the resurrection in a way worthy of being called glorious.

Eventually Pastors will open their doors to their parishioners who congregate outside each Sunday.

Get Your Favorite Restaurant To Serve You Speakeasy Style

David Hathaway paints a picture of what happens when heavy-handed politicians ignore market pressures: black markets arise.When a very much in-demand mug of beer was deemed illegal, speakeasies arose. When a sit-down meal is deemed illegal, expect restaurants to do the same. The more people who ask for this service, the more likely it is to occur, until even the cops are doing it in the face of the rules that even they know are silly.

There’s a reason a group like Oathkeeprs exist. Plenty of the people enforcing the law know how rotten the law is.

Lead Small Rebellions

Encourage those around you to ask questions. Laugh at the municipal “park ranger” when they come up to you and inform you that there might be viruses on park benches. Undermine their sense of pride in what they are doing. Encourage strangers around you to listen in and join. During regular times, I would say encouraging strangers is a bad approach since at least 3/4 of those around you are likely to offer the Nuremberg defense: “Leave the park ranger alone, they are just following orders.”

But right now those people are at home watching Fox, CNN, and the rest – getting their fill of fear porn and having their daily talking points downloaded to them.

The people who venture out into public, at this moment, are overwhelmingly people who aren’t falling for it. The lockdown has done you the favor of showing you who half of the troublemakers in your neighborhood are: they are the ones who leave the house. And they don’t believe what they are being fed. Open up the door to conversation, exchange contact info, get memorably disobedient together, and you might have a lifelong liberty chum that you might never have met any other way.

Need even more indication that you’re talking to a friendly: They didn’t don the obligatory fear mask starting on April 3, 2020, when the government started the top-down national fear mask movement.

Make Friends

To the last point: Take the risk of getting to know the people who venture out. Before you part ways, simply ask “How can I keep in touch with you?” For the moment, phone number and email seem to be more censorship resistant than social media. Send them this article. Invite them along on your acts of civil disobedience.

Be A Messenger Of Truth To Those Around You

Agitprop is everywhere. Lies are all around. Just be a listening voice with a few carefully selected facts and you will almost certainly beat the agitprop within your circle of friends. That can be as easy as being a reliable source. Not everyone will want to hear about it, but there are a lot of people who know that something isn’t right, and just identifying them is half the battle.

Ask People “Have You Run Your Own Numbers On This?”

A gadfly I know has brilliantly asked this question to anyone who thinks they know the whole story. If someone thinks they know the whole story about corona, chances are they are both wrong and partisan. I don’t mean politically partisan, I mean more interested in who is speaking than in the veracity of what is being said.

Curiosity is necessary around such quick developments and around a situation we are assured is so “novel.” Pretending to know the whole story in a moment like this is pure deceit. A question like “Have you run your own numbers on this, yet?” opens up that path to curiosity.

If they haven’t, encourage them to go to the CDC website and to see who gets harmed by corona, what age groups, what co-morbitidies. Or go to Italian government data and run the numbers or to publicly available data from Oregon. World Health Organization corona data has notably been deemed too full of errors to be considered reliable.

Honestly, no data is completely reliable in the midst of a fast-moving ongoing crisis. It is field data that requires relatively uninformed apples-to-oranges comparisons, that will take years to process. However, even looking at the CDC data can help people to get past the headlines and the fear and to feel empowered to dive into the data with a sense of curiosity, rather than being told to passively listen fearfully to anyone claiming to be an expert.

Call The Police And Complain

I’m not talking about snitching on your neighbors for living their lives. I’m talking about calling the police to complain about the police. Give them an earful. Any corona nonsense you see from the police call it in. Did the police approach people correctly social distancing and harass them? Get their badge number and call it in. Did the police tell people following the law to move along? Get their badge number and call it in. Or ignore the badge number and just call it in anyway. Innocent bystanders can be very powerful. Did you read a news report you didn’t like? Find that sheriff’s number and call it in. Don’t be apologetic about it either. Demand that the police be on their best behavior during these tense times.

This police department – (818) 878-1808 – as an example, probably deserves a phone call for the sheer hypocrisy of violating the pointless rule of the week, “social distancing,” by coming in close contact with and arresting a man who was paddle-boarding in the middle of the ocean, nowhere near anyone. With behavior like that, clearly this isn’t about a virus anymore. This has grown into something so much more ugly.

That doesn’t change the practical fact that no one likes to be complained to. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. If the good people are complaining more than the snitches, the police will sooner sit on their hands than to go out and engage in provocative behavior that will just bring more paperwork and hassle.

Go Outside To the “Closed” Parks & Beaches

If cautious mothers across the country can go out and try to keep life as normal as possible for their 15-month olds by maneuvering around barricades and entering parks, many others have little to fear from doing so. Reason is not yet dead. Pushing on the periphery at which reason must fight, protects reason.

Don’t Wear A Face Mask

Face masks are tradition. They aren’t a data-based intervention. Not only are they ineffective, they are frightening to people. Their well-established limitations are demonstrated in this 2016 article, written before face masks curiously became a hot-button political issue.

Having a masked face – like that of a bank robber – pop into your field of vision multiple times daily is like sounding an alarm multiple times daily that something is very wrong. I’m not sure who that could possibly help.

If you wear a face mask write something on it like “All Lies” or “Corona Hoax.”

Say “Whatever, Man”

US News reports “Officials Losing Patience with Corona Scofflaws”. Associated Press reports “California Losing Patience With Those Violating Stay At Home Orders.” Timothy Williams reports “What I observed was Californians losing patience with ‘officials’ and their ‘orders.’”

“As Tom Luongo recently noted, we will defeat the tyrants not by marching through their institutions, nor by violent resistance, but simply because a growing plurality are tuning them out.”

Williams quips: “Wouldn’t it be a delightful irony if Californians led the fight against statism with a collective ‘whatever, man.’”

There are things about California worthy of derision, but the dismissive “whatever, man,” is a beautiful example of dispassionate civil disobedience in a moment that badly needs emotional de-escalation and escalation of rational thought.

Disobey

To disobey is the imperative. As Gary Barnett writes “Once any country’s people succumb to obedience, all that is left is slavery.” As Henry David Thoreau writes “Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.” If there is one thing you do during your day, please let it be to disobey.

Be Sure To Smile A Little Each Day, Please

This is the worst thing that has happened to America in decades, it promises to be worse than 9/11. Corona is not the worst thing. The corona response is the worst thing.

Millions will die, and untold numbers of lives will be ruined, because of the corona communism in place. Kevin Ryan takes a cursory glance at the death toll of the corona response and attributes at least 2 million additional American deaths to government that would not have taken place had government not intervened.

If you take a moment once or twice a day to smile at the absurdity of it all, you’ll probably be in a better thinking frame of mind than if you just seethe in anger at the utter stupidity of it all and the human misery that’s been needlessly caused. Clear thinking is better than seething.

And while this is not guaranteed, perhaps it would also be good to smile once or twice a day at the real possibility of what happens next. This could all backfire in the faces of the experts who got us into this mess. This could be an event that doesn’t bring us down the road of “V for Vendetta,” but brings us toward greater liberty.

My hunch is that this will backfire. But only time will tell.

The bad lessons of the last century, the Century of the Great State (1917-2017), during which many millions died at the hands of socialists and other collectivists, is being repeated in this horrific first test of this new era.

The intellectual battle currently taking place is vital and will help dictate how future, similar battles will turn out. It is not a physical battle. It truly is a battle for hearts and minds. Western intellectuals are so notably out of touch, that it will be a surprise if this crisis ends in anything other than reduced trust in and reduced influence for the political and intellectual classes.

Unfortunately, I would expect more hysterical outcries like this largely manufactured crisis as the Western intellectual class struggles to be heard and to maintain relevance.

The apparent waning influence of the Western intellectual class that has brought about this crisis, is a cause to smile.

It can be no surprise that collectivists care not for the harm that they do. That is their nature. Reality is their enemy. Humanity is their enemy. Individuals are their enemy. Truth is not the goal. Clearer thinking or better comprehension of reality is not the goal. Their ideas and those who ascribe to them are their allies. Those are replayed in broken-record fashion with minor cosmetic changes. If you need any more proof of this, merely look at the effects of this thinking writ large across the Century of the Great State. Collectivists have proven what will come when society is left in their hands. It is the duty of individuals to prevent oneself from being so oppressible by the collectivists.

Courage Is Contagious

Show courage. Do not give into evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it. Call things as you see them. Ask the simple questions. Let others see you do it. Your courage will be contagious.

Chicago’s Mayor Blames American Freedom?

Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago is presiding over a marked increase in the number of murders in her city. By July 2020, there had been more murders in Chicago than there were in all of 2019. In response, Lightfoot has geared up and taken the fight to … Indiana?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Lightfoot claims that the rise in violence is the fault of everyone other than herself, the city’s council and the people who live in the city she governs. “We are being inundated,” she complains, “with guns from states that have virtually no gun control, no background checks, no ban on assault weapons—that is hurting cities like Chicago.”

Is it now? 

There is, in fact, no such thing as a state that has “virtually no gun control,” because there are thousands of federal gun-control laws on the books and because federal law applies to all states equally. There are, however, states that do a better job of getting out of the way of their citizens’ freedom than Illinois. And yet, it is nigh on impossible to determine how this is relevant to Chicago’s rising crime rates. Most firearms used in crimes in Illinois are bought in Illinois, not elsewhere. Democrat-run states, such as California and New York, also border states with fewer gun-control laws, and they have managed to avoid Chicago’s fate—as, for that matter, have the states that Lightfoot blames. Besides, nothing in America’s patchwork quilt of gun-control laws has changed in recent months. If loose gun laws are to blame for the recent increase, as Lightfoot insists they are, then why weren’t those same laws to blame last year? Or the year before? Or the year before that? It couldn’t be, could it, that city officials’ decision to tolerate lawlessness while vilifying the police has led to bad outcomes?

As for Lightfoot’s reference to states that have “no ban on assault weapons,” it is hard to know where to begin. As the statistics clearly show, the rise in murders in Chicago has had precisely nothing to do with so-called “assault weapons,” which are used so infrequently in crimes that the FBI does not keep distinct statistics on their use. 

In recent years, the percentage of murders in Illinois that were committed with rifles of all types—that is, not just those that are arbitrarily deemed “assault weapons”—was one. One percent. That, clearly, is a tiny number—especially when compared to knives and hands and fists, which accounted for around 10% of all murders in Illinois—and yet, astonishingly, it represents a larger number of murders committed with rifles than is the case in the “loose” states about which Lightfoot is complaining. Here, as ever, the monomaniacal focus on “assault weapons” yields nonsense all the way down.

What is happening in Chicago is, indeed, a disgrace. But it is a disgrace of Chicago’s own making. Lori Lightfoot’s party has been running the show uninterrupted since 1931, and, during that time, the city has developed a longstanding and well-deserved reputation for crime that stands independently of the states around it. That reputation is not Indiana’s fault. It is not Wisconsin’s fault. It is not Kentucky’s fault. And it is not the fault of the Second Amendment, which was almost entirely ignored by the city until 2010.

If this terrible situation is to be fixed, Mayor Lightfoot will be obliged to look a little closer to home. She might start by addressing the city’s dismal record of prosecuting straw purchasers; she might agree to ignore the more fashionable among the policing nostrums currently percolating around the nation; and, instead of lobbing unfounded opprobrium their way, she might ask her neighboring mayors what they’re clearly doing right. 

Cancel Culture’s Warriors Want You Silenced

In a sadly predictable plot twist, The New York Times’ Editorial Board’s activists turned on their own to drive out a few voices who still dared, ever so carefully mind you, to follow their intellectual honesty away from the politically correct orthodoxy of the far left.

Neither James Bennet, now former editorial page editor of The New York Times, nor Bari Weiss, now former op-ed staff editor for The Times, were ousted for publishing honest opinion pieces about guns—can you even imagine that? What happened to them is, nevertheless, a telling example of how anything honest pertaining to Second Amendment rights, or about how to actually make America even safer, is increasingly being discouraged, shunned and outright banned from coverage by the mainstream media—and by many in Hollywood and by those running the major social-media companies. 

The “cancel culture” they are leading is a cancer within the left that has stymied rational conversation between people who happen to have different views. Unsurprisingly, this thought cancer is now attacking its host. The far left, in fact, now thinks that merely speaking to a person with a pro-freedom perspective is corrupting—an idea cultivated and spread by humanities departments in elite academic institutions.

As this was being written, Bret Stephens, an opinion columnist for The New York Times who came from The Wall Street Journal in 2017, is considered to be the last “moderate” writing for The Times’ opinion section. But this isn’t even so when it comes to the Second Amendment, as soon after joining The Times, Stephens wrote a column titled “Repeal the Second Amendment,” as if to let his new colleagues know he is willing to sell out even the fundamental basis of liberty to make it in the mainstream media. He began the column with the line: “I have never understood the conservative fetish for the Second Amendment.” 

Perhaps it could be said that Stephens should read a little more American history, and that he should get out into America just a little bit to see and feel the liberty he wants to extinguish, but that misses the point. Stephens may or may not know all of that; regardless, he is weakly selling out for a check and for false status in the hierarchy of a dishonest newspaper.

The Times, meanwhile, is still a flagship leading the left. It is read by politicians, by the media elite and by academics. What it publishes—and doesn’t publish—affects many of the narratives the mainstream media adheres to with blinding, fingers-in-their-ears banality.

This includes issues related to guns. 

John Lott’s experience with The Times is a clarifying example. Lott, the founder and CEO of the Crime Prevention Research Center and the author of More Guns, Less Crime and other books, is forever trying to get his research to every audience. This has made him a glutton for progressive punishment. In 2018, he pitched The Times an opinion piece on how background checks disproportionately deny gun purchases to law-abiding minorities. 

“The fact-checking and editing lasted three months, with dozens of emails back and forth. One Times employee wrote me: ‘Sorry they made you jump through fiery hoops…,’” says Lott.

Incredibly, Lott got his opinion piece into the pages of The Times; well, it was more a shadow of his article than the actual thing, as they “watered it down into meaninglessness,” says Lott. 

After it ran, one Times staffer emailed Lott: “Everytown [the anti-gun group launched by Mike Bloomberg] and others, have let us know how displeased they are that we ran your piece.” Another Times employee confided in Lott that they had received 75,000 “angry” emails the day after his article ran. Lott soon heard that gun-control groups had organized email and telephone campaigns to pressure The Times into firing the staff who were involved in running his opinion piece.

The next Sunday, The Times tried to quell the criticism by running an editorial calling Lott a “disreputable economist best known for misusing statistics to suit his own ideological ends.” 

“In my case, the orchestrated outrage by gun-control organizations probably had its desired effect. It will be a long time, if ever, before The New York Times publishes another of my opinion pieces,” says Lott. 

Lott explains that “unfortunately, this is a pattern I have seen over and over again at different news outlets; for example, after an organized backlash a couple years ago, The Hill will no longer run my pieces. After publishing 33 of my op-ed submissions without a single refusal, The Hill has since rejected the next 103 pieces, many of which were subsequently published in reputable publications.”

One member of The Hill’s staff privately told Lott that the owner just didn’t want to deal with all of the anger generated by activists regarding his columns. Lott says that editors at places from the Los Angeles Times to the Chicago Tribune have told him similar stories about them being pressured into not running pro-Second Amendment content. Cancel culture, especially when it comes to the truth about guns, is resulting in a lot of censorship.

Bari Weiss, the former staff editor and writer for The Times opinion section, published a public letter on why she had to leave what she loudly characterizes as a toxic work environment. She said she experienced “constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views” and an environment where she said “self-censorship has become the norm.”

“What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selectivity,” she wrote in a lengthy resignation letter, which she posted to her personal website. “If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.”

Publications like The New York Times claim to defend classical liberal values, but today, free speech only applies in their pages to speech they like. Anything honest related to guns in America, according to them, just isn’t news that’s fit to print. 

District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871. This started CENTURIES BEFORE 1871 however. CENTURIES.

It was February 21, 1871 that the 41st US Congress sold out the Republic. On this date, Congress passed an Act titled: “An Act To Provide A Government for the District of Columbia.” Also known as the “Act of 1871.” Congress, illegally acting on it’s own behalf, created a separate form of government for the District of Columbia. Congress realizing that our country was in severe financial difficulty, cut a deal with the international bankers, in the process incurring a debt to those bankers. The international bankers were not about to lend our floundering nation any money without some serious stipulations. So, they devised a brilliant way of getting their foot in the door of the United States and thus, the Act of 1871 was passed.

Behind The Shadow

When President Kennedy was assassinated, the guy arrested for the crime didn’t live long.

That’s because Lee Harvey Oswald was almost immediately murdered by Jack Ruby, who walked up in front of press, police, and witnesses and just shot Oswald dead.

Ruby then ‘conveniently’ died of lung problems and cancer while in prison…

…and we’ll most likely NEVER know the truth of what really happened.

If that sounds eerily familiar to you, that’s because you’ve been watching, listening and reading the news… and I need to talk about this disturbing reality!

By now, you’ve seen the memes about Jeffrey Epstein.

This wealthy socialite is rumored to have been running an underage sex ring for the rich and powerful.

Politicians, entertainers, other rich people… there are COUNTLESS people who could be in trouble if it comes out who used Epstein’s services.

So of course, Epstein too, ‘conveniently’ committed ‘suicide’ in his cell after he was caught… and, just by coincidence, the guards were asleep and the cameras weren’t working.

Riiiight.

A judge who had just signed on to take an Epstein-related case, Esther Salas, had her family targeted by an assassin.

That guy, dressed as a FedEx driver, walked up to her door and shot her son and her husband.

THEN he as well ‘conveniently’ committed suicide!

Sound familiar?

The fact is, powerful people are right now pulling the strings of our government, and they’re the ones who make these ‘accidents’ and ‘coincidences’ happen.

PERIOD!

There are very powerful books that explain how these things work, like Behind The Shadow, and what these authors have written will just absolutely flat-out blow your mind, but because the public so incessantly blows off conspiracy conversation, the truths never will out.

If you want to know who’s pulling the strings, you’ll want to read these books and especially the one mentioned.

They’re deeply disturbing.

And it wouldn’t surprise me if ‘they’ found a way to ban them in order to keep people from reading what’s inside because there’s a LOT of stuff that those secretly in power do NOT want you to know.

Defend, Protect —> Survive!

Endemic: Nashville Uprising Incoming?

Nashville’s mayor is avoiding this scandal like it’s the most underwhelming plague in history… but the people of Nashville? No way. Many Nashvillians smell an uprising in their Tennessean midst. But the scandal you’ll come to see isn’t limited to Nashville alone. It’s likely, in some fashion, happening in your state, city, and/or county. Buckle up, Nancy.

“Not For Public Consumption” According to an email chain from June, leaked to the media this week…The coronavirus cases in Nashville’s restaurants and bars were so low that the mayor’s office and the metro health department decided to keep it secret. The email discussion among Nashville’s finest snollygosters pertained to the ridiculously low number of “confirmed cases” emerging from Nashville’s bars and restaurants. Total as of June 30? Allegedly only 22. Contact tracers found that construction and nursing homes were responsible for more than a thousand cases…But from the Broadway strip? Of the thousands of “confirmed cases” in the area, less than 100 could be traced back to the bars and restaurants. You would think this would be good news to our public officials. Nay! Quite the opposite in fact. Upon discovery, Leslie Waller from the health department asked via email, “This isn’t going to be publicly released, right? Just info for Mayor’s Office? “Correct, not for public consumption,” senior advisor Benjamin Eagles shot back. Hmmm…One health official, whose name was redacted, said: “My two cents. We have certainly refused to give counts per bar because those numbers are too low per site. “Gist? For months, the mayor and his (comfortably employed) team have been sitting on this information while local business owners and their employees have struggled, worried themselves to sleep, cried, argued with their spouses over money, and watched as their livelihoods crumbled and withered away. Most bars and restaurants are still operating at 25% capacity while construction crews, strangely, are working at full capacity with a much higher case count. Meanwhile, instead of letting people go back to work, or finding a way to cut public costs in a smart way, Cooper instead raised property taxes by 34% to offset the lost revenue. But it gets worse. Stacy Case of WZTV Nashville released this little bombshell yesterday: “I’ve found some serious flaws with the hospital bed capacity metric though which is keeping many businesses closed six months now.” In short, the metric requires Nashville hospitals to collectively have 20% of beds open before the economy can fully reopen. Nashville resident Matt Malkus, a statistician, was so disturbed by this metric, he and other statisticians formed ‘Nashville for Rational Covid Policy.’ “I’m a life insurance actuary,” Malkus said, “so I crunch numbers all day.” Here’s the rub, a la Case…“If you click on this link and look at the dark blue line at the peak of the light blue section, you’ll notice that’s Covid hospitalizations. The light blue is all other hospitalizations. The yellow is available beds. To fully reopen, Metro government is requiring both blues to dip below the red dotted line.  As you see, that probably wouldn’t happen with or without Covid.” “You take all of the Covid patients away,” said Malkus, “you’re still not going to meet that metric. So, to us, it’s like that’s a bad metric.” “In other words,” says Case, “normal hospitalization rates are keeping huge sectors shut down and thousands out of work like bartender Crystal Eisermann: ‘I’ve dipped into my savings so far. I have probably another month under my belt.’” To recap…Instead of allowing the local economy to (safely and intelligently) open up…Cooper raised property taxes by 34%. He put thousands of people out of work, who are now on the brink — or already there — of being unable to meet rent or pay their mortgages. And NOW to pile on top of all that, he raised property taxes a whopping 34%. These people are evil. These people are satanistic. These people are unholy. And he did so with B.S. data. The BIG problem is this isn’t just isolated to Nashville. It’s all over America, and “we the people” are allowing it to happen. We know a lot about this virus now. We’ve been playing defense for far too long. It’s time to push back and push back freakin’ hard as hell dammit.

The Gloomiest Oracles of America

“The next one will get attention this time,” Bill Gates said with a sly smirk. Melinda just looked at the camera and grinned.

During an interview conducted with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, Gates was talking about the next inevitable pandemic.

It was a pretty cryptic statement which, strangely, the interviewer left unquestioned.

What did he mean? Hard to say.

He didn’t take the time to explain this strange… and harrowing… prediction.

He’s not the only one.

Dr. Fauci says we need to hunker down this fall and winter, and it’s not going to be easy. Things won’t go back to normal until at least mid-2021, when we get a vaccine.

Again, he doesn’t really explain why. Does he know something incredible about the virus that we don’t?

Don’t know.

He didn’t say.

Meanwhile, many American cities have been under siege by protests — some of which have turned violent.

Kamala Harris says of the protests, “They’re not going to stop. Everyone beware. They’re not going to stop before election day in November, and they’re not going to stop after election day.”

What is she basing this on?

She didn’t say.

One might think however it would be prudent then — at that point — to differentiate between the peaceful protests, which are entirely Constitutional, and those that have devolved into violence, riots, and wanton destruction.

(Which are not.)

Though underplayed in the media, the riots were no small deal and incredibly devastating for already-hurting local businesses. For a boots-on-the-ground perspective, someone just compiled all of the videos of the riots around the U.S. into one place.

In total, to date, there are 6,111 videos of the mayhem.

Click here to check out the full archive of riot videos.

There are other examples.

From all corners of the establishment — from Hillary Clinton and Mark Zuckerberg — we have been getting the same message.

“Election night” is a thing of the past. Welcome to election month.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media has been telling us that a Trump landslide will be a mirage. In the weeks after election night, we will come to find that it’s actually a Biden landslide.

There have been of course, other election predictions.

(Nothing’s changed on that front.)

But there’s a big difference between merely pushing a narrative and pressing repeat….

And predicting an event, then backing it up

Today, along that vein, I turn to another prophecy by futurist George Gilder.

Throughout this pandemic, Gilder’s been taking cues from statistician William Briggs.

Briggs, as you’ll see, is no empty propheteer.

But, alas, though he sees the pandemic has been overblown… even so… his predictions are not always rosy.

Keep calm and read on.

Prophecy: Coronadoom Will Always Be with Us

Today I offer a prophecy that shows an excerpt from Briggs, who answers the latest Fauci panic with knowledge and reason.

Wanna know what caused the wave of the past decade’s “unprecedented pandemic explosions,” of which the coronadoom is one?

Truckers and truck stop prostitution.

Yes. Or so says our very own Anthony “Never Shake Hands Again” Fauci, a fellow you might have seen on television striking various poses.

It’s his (and David Moren’s) scientific idea, stated scientifically in a new scientific paper, that the science says that truck stop prostitution, road-building, and disharmony with nature is causing “unprecedented pandemic explosions”.

Now this disharmony with Mother Earth.

What’s that? You haven’t heard of these “unprecedented pandemic explosions”? Well, they’re diseases like the coronadoom. But before we get to our sins against Mother Earth, we need to understand what Fauci means by “unprecedented.”

Fauci’s contention is that pandemics are on the upswing, which means that, given the intense insane hyper-overreaction to coronadoom, we could soon be in some deep kimchi.

Is it true that communicable diseases are increasing?

Fauci has a chart listing sixteen past pandemics throughout human history, half of which were since 1918. His implication is that these were the only ones worth noting, and that the frequency of mass deadly outbreaks is increasing.

This is not so. NOT FREAKIN’ SO AT ALL DAMMIT!

Wikipedia has a different list with over 250 outbreaks going all the way back to 1200 BC. The most notable of which was the Black Death, which between 1346 and 1353 slaughtered 75 to 200 million … that’s with-an-m people. 

Fauci lowballed his memory of this horror, saying it was only 50 million. Maybe because he wanted to claim an event closer to our time — 1918 ’s Spanish Flu — was “the deadliest event in recorded human history”.

My sons and I used to play “Slug Bug”. When you were the first to spot an old Volkswagen Beetle, you got to whack somebody saying the color. “Slug Bug green!” Chances are you can’t recall the last time you saw one of these cars on the road. But go out now and look for one — actively search. You’ll be surprised at how many “suddenly” appear.

Your surprise is caused by measurement bias. The same is true with disease bugs. If you never looked for them, you never saw them. It is only in the last few decades that active measurements have been taken on the various infectious agents we live with. These searches naively make it seem mass-casualty outbreaks are increasing.

Yet it just isn’t so. Scan that list. In 735, Japan saw an outbreak of smallpox that killed 2 million. The Antonine Plague of 165 sunk 5-10 million into early graves. On and on the bell has rung.

We come now to COVID-19, the coronadoom. It cannot be considered unusual. It will not even join the Disease Hall Of Fame. Asian flu in 1957, which beat coronadoom, killed 1 to 4 million, and the same with 1968’s Hong Kong flu. (Fauci includes neither of these.)

Flu and its complications (like pneumonia) regularly and routinely kills hundreds of thousands to millions worldwide. Each and every year. Even in the presence of vaccines. This has been so throughout history, and there is no reason to suppose it will change in the future.

One thing that has changed has been our perception of disease. We have grown exponentially more fearful, and we now must have somebody to blame.

Fauci thinks “disease emergences reflect our increasing inability to live in harmony with nature.” He says “we now live in a human-dominated world in which our increasingly extreme alterations of the environment induce increasingly extreme backlashes from nature.”

Build one too many truck stops and you “provoke” Mother Nature into an extreme backlash. Like the coronadoom — and the “deadly barrage” of other diseases they found but which didn’t turn out to be so deadly.

Only way out of this, says Fauci, is to placate our great goddess. We need to live “in more thoughtful and creative harmony with nature”. Funny he doesn’t say how we achieve this state of harmoniousness. Except that we need to “begin to think in earnest and collectively”.

My earnest thought, which I’ll add to the collective, is that we must NEVER, EVER AGAIN panic over not-at-all unusual wholly expected common disease outbreaks. 

Panic kills. Panic makes us stupid.

Panic has so benumbed governments that many have taken a zero-tolerance policy on coronadoom. Things will never be the same again, they promise us, until the virus is eradicated! Yet even according to fabulous Fauci himself, this is nuts and may never be.

“That viral genetic descendants of the 1918 influenza pandemic virus are still causing seasonal outbreaks throughout the world, and still killing cumulatively millions of people a century late.”

This is true!

Coronadoom will also, in one form or another, always be with us. If we are going to lockdown and restrict liberties until it “goes away,” we shall do so forever.

So good luck to us all as long as we have governments and stupid socialists to keep pushing this agenda along while those on the right sit wringing their hands, refuse to act and vote and keep refusing to assert themselves that enough is g’damned enough already.

We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take this anymore!