I’ll be glad when this election cycle is over. I haven’t voted yet, although early voting is open in my state and I plan to vote sometime this week. The political ads in this hotly contested GA senate race, between Warnock and Walker, haunt me on TV and online. Everywhere I turn there are ads for both. This is a politics post of sorts.
I am sick of being bombarded by political ads.
There’s always this argument people on both sides make about how this election is the most important election in our lifetime. Republicans are blabbing about how only Republicans in charge of Congress can save our country, while Democrats are blabbing about how only Democrats in charge of Congress can save our democracy. Whatever… I’ve been listening to this partisan claptrap for decades now and neither side has done much except spend, spend, spend. The US national debt is over 30 TRILLION dollars.
America is entering into a serious economic crisis, largely self-created, and all our politicians talk about is more programs for this and more programs for that. They also rant about how “the other side” is destroying America. The thing neither side in Washington does is slash wasteful spending or programs.
Rather than write about the inside baseball Washington politics though, I’ve been thinking about how the overall “global” Great Reset launch is going. Facets of that Great Reset are starting to impact hard in Europe and here in the US. Russia and China are dealing with a severe economic downturn too and although they aren’t embracing the WEF Great Reset plan, their own efforts to establish themselves as the alternative to the US dollar are not going smoothly. It seems like economic upheaval will be worldwide for the foreseeable future.
I’ve also been thinking about how this green-energy transformation might get derailed faster than anyone imagines. Honestly, I expect major corporations and banks to bail on this endeavor, if they start facing stiff resistance from consumers and start losing a lot of money. I expect them to be trying to regroup quickly, just like they’ve been doing since the COVID mitigation policies imploded. Public confidence in the COVID policies, which large corporations pushed as hard as Dem politicians, has crashed. Both Dem politicians and corporate America appear to be backpedaling and trying to distance themselves from the Dem COVID messaging. Far left corporate zealots like Bill Gates will likely cling to the Dem policies, but if it drives their consumers away and/or they start losing a lot of money, many others corporate boards won’t.
It’s one thing for small businesses to flounder and fail, but major corporations and big banks aren’t going to let social-engineering destroy their bottom line. While we’re likely in for a lot of upheavals and chaotic times, I just don’t think this unholy marriage of political and corporate power, that now works together to force political and social change in America, is between two equal entities. Corporations create jobs and wealth, while politicians create nothing – they’re parasites on the public and especially on big political donors. I can’t see major banks and corporate boards being the passengers on the Titanic who passively went down with the ship.
Just as Democrats have pretty much run from COVID this campaign cycle and even the most ardent BLM “defend the police” politicians are pretending they’ve always supported the police, I expect, in the not too distant future, they’ll be pretending this forced green-energy transformation wasn’t their policy. I expect many big banks and big corporations to jump from the green-energy/ESG ship in the not too distant future, as public outrage over the economy tanking grows and runaway inflation begins to seriously impact their own bottom lines.
Will Republicans in charge or Democrats in charge be better? Well, being a conservative, I would automatically answer: Republicans. However, at this point, I’m sick to death of all the politicians in Washington and more concerned about who is my state’s governor, which is a bulwark against federal overreach. I am thankful our founding fathers embraced federalism. Brian Kemp is an easy vote for me here in GA. Warnock v. Walker, well, I hate the binary choice arguments, so I won’t know for sure if I will just leave it blank on my ballot or swallow my conscience and vote for Walker… all so Republicans might gain control of Congress and not do all the things they promise… as usual. The devil’s advocate argument is Schumer and the Democrats have demonstrated they are more than willing to ram through all of the far-left policies without batting an eye. Choices, choices…
I am posting this video, but I’ve been reading, COVID-19: The Great Reset, by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret and taking notes, so I’m going to add some thoughts to this Will Cain explainer, which does a decent job explaining some of the major policy objectives in The Great Reset and laying out some historical perspective.
COVID-19: The Great Reset was written by Klaus Schwab, a German economist, engineer, founder and chairman of the World Economic Forum and Thierry Malleret, a French economic, investment banker, and founder of the The Global Risk Network at the World Economic Forum in July 2020. It’s important to keep this in mind, because their book lays out historical parallels to other pandemics and events, then their theorizing and predicting on how the unprecedented massive pandemic-related disruptions (especially economic ones) to all aspects of life around the globe would impact life afterwards. Then they put forth plans to not let the pandemic crisis go to waste. They planned to take charge of the post-pandemic chaos and be ready with plans for how to reshape the world to their vision of a more equitable, just, sustainable world.
So, let’s start with what is the World Economic Forum (WEF)? The WEF is one of the most influential international, non-governmental foundations in the world, that lobbies and advises governments, businesses and the influential elites of the world. The WEF was founded in 1971 by Klaus Schwab and is funded mostly by mega-rich companies (5 billion US dollars or more turnover-type mega-rich), who are members of the WEF and get invites to the annual meeting of the world’s elites in Davos, Switzerland.
“Next to Davos, the organization convenes regional conferences in locations across Africa, East Asia, Latin America, and India and holds two additional annual meetings in China and the United Arab Emirates. It furthermore produces a series of reports, engages its members in sector-specific initiatives[3] and provides a platform for leaders from selected stakeholder groups to collaborate on multiple projects and initiatives.[4]“
Here’s a link to the WEF Global Risk Report 2022, where the WEF ranks the top risks facing the world, both short term, 0-2 years and long-term, 10-year. The pandemic fall-out impacted their 0-2 year risk report:
“Beyond environmental concerns, other top risks include livelihood crises, the erosion of social cohesion, and an uneven pandemic recovery. The report warns that the risks of growing social gaps will continue to be exacerbated by the pandemic, and experts caution that the global economic recovery will likely be uneven and potentially volatile over the coming years.”
The WEF is a group of self-selected elites, who think they should run the world. Rather than get fearful or hysterical when hearing about “The Great Reset,” I think leaders and concerned people opposed to The Great Reset plans would do better to think of ways to build a better mousetrap, so to speak, for dealing with the very real post-pandemic problems. Republican leaders run around repeating lame catchphrases, but so far I’m not seeing any ideas or policies to deal with the problems, only reacting to the left’s policies. Democrats on the other hand have been ramming through policies and legislation pushing the global climate change agenda, regardless how disastrous or destructive to Americans’ lives and to American prosperity. Just yesterday, Rep. Jason Crow, a Democrat, gave a speech asserting that climate change is the largest national security threat facing America: https://video.foxnews.com/v/6309536032112#sp=show-clips. I don’t like using all FOX News clips or all one news organization as a source, but I can’t locate the tweets I saw yesterday of Rep. Crow’s statement.
Democrats are fully-committed to the WEF policies, as are many wealthy Republicans, who may not be broadcasting that, because it’s politically-damaging to them when conservatives and most Republicans are opposed to the climate change agenda. The reason many wealthy Republicans go along with the WEF policies, is because that’s the entry pass to making big money in America.
In America, I believe, bolstering federalism in every way we can, can put the brakes on federal control over our daily lives and the encroachment of globalist policies that erode not only our personal freedoms, but even worse will crush small businesses, small farmers, and the middle class. Certainly, Democrat-controlled cities and states will advance the initiatives laid out in The Global Reset plans, but if more and more states and Americans pushback against these policies and come up with other ideas and ways to deal with the very real post-pandemic problems, perhaps America won’t go the way of countries, that will likely start to become a line of dominoes falling (like Sri Lanka), as the global food and fuel crises intensify.
The post-pandemic world has left many large systems we took for granted faltering, teetering, and some are already collapsing. The Great Rest crowd has plenty of global policy initiatives, but what Americans opposed to those initiatives should focus on is creating policy initiatives and streamlined plans, that allow Americans to weather the storms as the global systems begin collapsing all around us. Federalism, where our federal government has limited enumerated powers, with all other powers residing to the states, offers Americans a thin layer of protection that other governmental systems lack. On a personal level this could take the form of start building your own support network of family, friends and like-minded people, to share and help each other with supplies, services, figuring out alternatives and more local sources for goods and services.
At each level in America, from small town, to county, to state and then networking across America, creating less cumbersome and more flexible systems to keep America functioning could start creating more resilient communities, who aren’t waiting for Washington or some Davos-connected elites to advise us to eat bugs or just get used to shortages. Highly-motivated individuals can act without the chains of bureaucracy dragging them down. Small flexible systems can innovate, adapt and be more resilient than complex global systems. Certainly, wherever the global systems remain working, we should continue to take advantage of that, but getting some back-up smaller systems functioning quickly can help prevent mass panic and total chaos.
The global elites have been planning for how to reshape the world as post-pandemic chaos impacts, but so far the people opposed to those plans only react. It’s way past time for Americans who don’t want their daily lives controlled by The Great Reset plans to start planning and organizing ways to counter that and to do some reshaping of their own lives. If you don’t like the Davos crowd’s plans, start working to change it. America was founded by brave individuals, who forged their own path, not by the rich elites sitting in London, who were trying to micromanage the colonies from afar. Don’t wait for Washington or “experts” to tell you what to do and not do.
Update: We’ve been hearing about ESG scores a lot, and with Sri Lanka’s government collapsing, many news reports mentioned that Sri Lanka had a near-perfect ESG score of 98.1 So, what is an ESG score and who determines ESG scores?
An ESG score is a investment risk rating of companies and governments on environmental, social and governance issues. A high score makes you a good investment risk and a low score a bad risk. The idea of an ESG framework is being advanced to assess individuals too, so individual people could be given a social credit score.
MSCI, of which Morgan Stanley is the largest shareholder, manages and asses the ESG ratings. So, if you’re wondering why American companies have jumped on board the environmental, far-left social agenda, and the COVID mitigation bandwagon, well, this is why. Investment prospects depend on them falling in line, just as governments around the world jumped on board the ESG train, for the very same reason. This agenda is being driven by the wealthy elites around the world, not by some crackpot activists taking to the streets. In fact, I suspect much of the street theater global protesting on climate change and gender politics is funded by people and organizations with ties to the WEF crowd. The hyped fear of companies being cancelled by online activists masks the real drivers of the ESG agenda and the insidious advance of how this “woke agenda” has permeated major corporations, academia and how the environmental and social justice language has spread so rapidly in our institutions and in corporate America. I believe corporate America and the elite class in America’s institutions are pushing this. It’s a top-down movement by the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world masquerading as a movement of the people.
It sure looks like the World Economic Forum of self-selected elites want to (and do) run the world – literally.
Considering the many unforeseen consequences of our Covid mitigation efforts, like dire economic problems, massive social upheaval, huge spike in suicides and drug overdoses, it’s worth asking if the Amish approach of dealing with Covid racing through their community worked better. It’s important to note that many people, some with science and medical bona fides too, predicted many of these dire consequences, but were loudly rebuked. Some even faced efforts to silence them in the public square of social media.
The Amish continued working, kept their families and communities together, while caring for the sick, like they had always done. They attended church services and continued their lives as normally as possible. Our liberal media went all in on selling the “trust the science” spin effort being pushed by the liberal elite crowd in Washington and liberal bastions of academia.
The Amish didn’t deny Covid existed, they just chose to work together as a community, like they always do, rather than try extreme social mitigation efforts our national health experts sold, because China was doing lockdowns and mass masking. There were even Democrats in early March 2020, who were embracing Iran releasing prisoners due to Covid spreading through some overcrowded prisons and they could no longer maintain those prisons.
Democrats crammed that prisoner release approach into the CARES Act, which was passed on March 27, 2020 and are still pushing that these prisoners, released due an emergency situation, be allowed to serve their sentences at home. The speed with which our ‘health experts” and some elected officials embraced Covid mitigation efforts being tried in other countries, especially despotic regimes, still boggles my mind.
What was “scientific” about rushing to embrace China’s or Iran’s mitigation policies? These Covid policies infringed on civil liberties, destroyed many Americans ability to earn a living, restricted families from being by the side of dying loved ones in hospitals, forced schools to close, prohibited church services in places of worship, and even interfered with funeral services across the country?
None of these mitigation efforts worked to “slow the spread” or “stop the spread.” In fact, even the vaccines haven’t slowed or stopped the spread – that’s the truth. So, the selling pitch shifted to the vaccines lower your chances of getting seriously ill, if you contract Covid. There has sure been a lot of Covid policy goalpost moving.
Are we just supposed to forget all of this happened and move on? Or are we still allowed to ask questions and expect a bit of accountability of our elected officials and government health officials?
Many times a lot of Americans take a “who cares what happens in some far off country” attitude. The Chinese full lockdown story is important to everyone, not just the Chinese people and I’m going to give a few reasons why. This post is some current news on that situation and some review of Covid social mitigation policies and news reporting (more like mass media social conditioning efforts) since 2020. I’ll follow this post with some positive posts on things we all have the power to do, not just to survive tumultuous times, but to learn to thrive in not only the best of times, but in the worst of times too.
The Chinese government’s total lockdown of Shanghai has been getting a great deal of attention in the news media and generating some viral videos in the past few days:
The situation in Shanghai is scary. Reports of millions struggling to feed themselves, elderly unable to access medicine, videos of small riots breaking out circulating on social media. Many households relying on inadequate govt food deliveries. pic.twitter.com/bW1ixaTu7O
What the?? This video taken yesterday in Shanghai, China, by the father of a close friend of mine. She verified its authenticity: People screaming out of their windows after a week of total lockdown, no leaving your apartment for any reason. pic.twitter.com/iHGOO8D8Cz
Here’s analysis by Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, on the medical side of information coming from Chinese officials one word – “implausible” referring to China reporting only one severe case and no deaths from this outbreak:
"Right now you have about 23 cities in China under some form of lockdown covering about 200M people. It appears they've lost control of this in #Shanghai. There's many more infections than what's being reported. The data coming out of there is implausible," says @ScottGottliebMD. pic.twitter.com/HRE7LzJ5CL
The lockdown in Shanghai has created a ripple effect, as some ships have been diverted to other Chinese ports. A few paragraphs into this story it’s clear China’s lockdown isn’t only causing a problem with unloading and loading ships:
“A shortage of port workers at Shanghai is slowing the delivery of documentation needed for ships to unload cargoes, according to ship owners and traders. Meanwhile, vessels carrying metals like copper and iron ore are left stranded offshore as trucks are unable to send goods from the port to processing mills, they said.”
On a cable news report yesterday I heard mention that the lockdown in Shanghai has also created massive panic-buying across China, as people have become fearful of food shortages spreading.
This all brings me back to the weeks before Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and our news media went all-in on Ukraine reporting and completely dropped the coverage of the Trudeau government in Canada imposing vaccine mandates on truckers crossing the US-Canada border, the Trudeau government crackdown on a trucker’s protest, and President Biden also imposing a vaccine mandate on truckers crossing the US-Canada border and the US-Mexico border.
I think all of these extreme Covid mitigation policies world-wide, that hamper free movement of people and goods, have proven both ineffective at “stopping the spread” of Covid and even worse have turbo-charged economic chaos, globally, for the foreseeable future. Once the Ukraine situation attracts less media focus, I suspect we’ll be back to dealing with our own US government creating more of the same Covid policies and programs that inflicted economic hardship on millions of Americans since 2020.
The news media hype seems to play on our emotions and push us to become invested in the emotional aspect of these videos, by dramatizing the “little people vs. the evil, big Chinese government (and yes, it’s an evil regime without question). The human rights abuse aspect does matter. Chinese people yelling from being locked inside their apartment buildings for two weeks looks horrifying, but it’s important to remember that the same Dems and liberal mouthpieces who bought into these draconian Chinese-inspired Covid policies in 2020 were still pushing them just a few months ago in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK, and in America. Dr. Fauci hailed the extreme Australian lockdowns. The liberal American news media were still pushing these policies, but now want to sensationalize the horror of Chinese people in Shanghai dealing with a full two-week Covid lockdown, so far.
The situation in these Chinese videos doesn’t look any different than Australia’s lockdowns, which lasted 107 days. That’s the truth. Here’s a BBC report from October 11, 2021, Covid Australia: Sydney celebrates end of 107-day lockdown. The liberal American news media (which is most of the American news media) didn’t all rush to Australia to cover the lockdown protests there and in fact, it seemed they were downplaying the protests and avoiding covering them much. There were videos that emerged on social media and in the news, like this story: EXCLUSIVE: WARNING – DISTRESSING CONTENT: Elderly man collapses to the ground after being arrested for ‘failing to wear a face mask’ while walking in a park – as his desperate partner screams for help, from September 2021. When things happening in the free world of the west look indistinguishable from policies being carried out in China, that’s like a glaring red warning light to me. Two weeks into China’s latest lockdown and the media is hysterically hyperventilating about people starving to death and 107 days of Australia’s lockdown insanity and the American news media barely talked about it at all. The real question remains why on earth liberal democracies in the free world ever bought into the Chinese Covid lockdown policy in the first place???
This reminded me of how the American liberal news media in the beginning of the Covid lockdown social mitigation experiments tried to con us into docilely accepting government Covid lockdowns as an exercise in good citizenship and a show of virtue demonstrating we care about other people. I was very worried about Covid in March of 2020, because I believed my husband had Covid in late January 2020 when he got sick and had acute respiratory failure. I fell in line with social mitigation effort for about a month, but kept wondering what the follow-on plan was. I quickly came to believe all of these social mitigation efforts were political power grabs, not science and that is what I believe to this day. Here’s Italy in March 2020 – remember all the singing:
Funny juxtaposition between their news angle in Italy 2020 and China 2022, but I feel certain the Covid craziness isn’t over anywhere in the world. The economic fall-out from these disastrous social mitigation policies will continue to impact and grow. When you add in the war in Ukraine with the uncertainty with what happens there and the global economic fall-out that will have on agriculture and global commerce, well, the world seems to be pushing full-steam ahead toward some Titanic-level hitting an iceberg events.
If you follow the news and pay attention to what’s happened since Covid social mitigation policies took hold, well, nothing has really returned to the pre-Covid days, even if you took off your mask long ago. The shortage situations never resolved to pre-Covid, the economic fall-out from those policies is still reverberating around the world. Even in many red states remnants of those policies remain – like wearing a mask in some school districts, wearing a mask in the doctor’s office or hospitals, with airlines, etc. Not a single state in America is an all-red or an all-blue state, so there are plenty of people within every state with opposing views, especially on Covid policies. The Covid turmoil is not behind us and many people who opposed masks and/or vaccine mandates and/or vaccines are still fuming about the the social mitigation policies and angry at the liberals who pushed those programs. On the other side, there are liberals, especially in the news media, who are still true-believers in all of the Covid social mitigation policies, would support and promote them again in a heartbeat and who loathe Americans who don’t believe in all of those mitigation policies and rituals like masking between eating bites of a meal on a plane and total lockdowns.
This divide in America won’t be easily bridged and it’s important to remember it goes way deeper than just the Covid mitigation policies. These divides speak to not only differing political beliefs in America, but to an array of cultural issues where Americans break down into two hostile camps. It seems like people in the middle or who aren’t ideologically invested are disliked by both sides, but pulling more people away from the partisan extremes is our only hope to weather the coming storms. We need more people who will work together, not more people ready to fight over everything.
Finding any ways to unite us will be hard, but I remain hopeful it’s not an impossible quest to find some common ground and then build upon that. Unfortunately, it seems like the people with the largest megaphones focus on getting people riled up or spreading a whole lot of fear. America desperately needs some calm, positive leaders. In my next post I’ll talk about that more.
Do you ever see news stories where you feel like there’s a gaping hole in the information presented? When the Covid-19 pandemic started our health and government officials and a compliant news media propelled many news stories that stoked fear among people and that led to a great deal of complacency among the American people. Most Americans, according to polls, initially bought into into an array of social mitigation efforts and went along with them without demanding more information.
For most of America, people have moved past Covid-19 and it’s not even on their radar as a concern, being replaced with rising gas prices, talk of war, and warnings of looming food shortages, but we should think about all those social mitigation efforts, which pushed actions that we were told were based on “science.” The scientific research does not support them, but many of our political leaders still will use that “unprecedented” pandemic emergency as a model for future emergencies.
The Canadian truckers protest and the Trudeau government’s extreme reaction, citing a national emergency as the justification to begin freezing Canadian citizens bank accounts, fell to the wayside as a major international news story when Russia invaded Ukraine.
February 26, 2022 – Some countries remove Russia from SWIFT and begin targeting Russia’s Central Bank.
It seems certain the the international crisis with Russia invading Ukraine and the need for a response from the West to that crisis superseded draconian domestic measures intended to intimidate Canadians opposed to Trudeau’s new COVID vaccine mandate pertaining to truckers crossing the US-Canadian border – which was the reason those Canadian truckers were protesting.
While the news media here in America has become all about Ukraine 24/7, Covid-19 and the social mitigation craziness aren’t gone. Even more concerning is too many Americans seem happy to just forget all about the government actions and even corporations acting as a surrogate White House enforcement force to impose social mitigation rules on millions of Americans. No one seems to want to look back, study what worked, what didn’t work, and more importantly why these policies were imposed on Americans.
Certainly it’s understandable that Russia invading Ukraine raised the specter of world war and even nuclear war, when Russia ventured into nuclear saber-rattling, but the pandemic craziness isn’t gone and it’s important to start seriously thinking about what happened, to prevent media-generated mass panic disarming our ability to resist government overreach again.
I bring this up because the lockdown idea was touted in 2020 by many prominent US health officials as an effective social mitigation strategy based on hyping that China was doing it and it was working. Let’s look back to 2020:
As COVID-19 spread rapidly across China, authorities took an aggressive stance to fight the coronavirus. They were slow to respond to the outbreak—at first suppressing information and denying that it could spread between humans even as it did just that. But, as case numbers skyrocketed, Beijing went to extraordinary lengths to fight the virus, identified at COVID-19, in a campaign Chinese President Xi Jinping has described as a “people’s war.”
The most dramatic, and controversial, of the measures was the lockdown of of tens of millions of people in what is believed to be the largest quasi-quarantine in human history.
Less than two months after the lockdown went into effect, it appears to be working, at least according to Chinese health officials, who announced on Thursday that the country had passed the peak of the coronavirus epidemic. They reported just eight new cases of the virus the same day, the lowest number since they began publicly releasing numbers. At the same time, cases of COVID-19 across the world are skyrocketing.
Let’s move from China’s 2020 lockdown/Covid Zero approach to right now in China:
The COVID-19 outbreak in China’s largest metropolis of Shanghai remains “extremely grim” amid an ongoing lockdown confining around 26 million people to their homes, a city official said Tuesday. https://t.co/wmZCTvEVsipic.twitter.com/92an7w4C78
From the 2020 Time story I quoted the most important line is: “Less than two months after the lockdown went into effect, it appears to be working, at least according to Chinese health officials, who announced on Thursday that the country had passed the peak of the coronavirus epidemic.”
What’s not known is how many people in China really died from the initial COVID-19 outbreak and how many have died since then. That’s been one of those gaping holes in the reporting since the beginning. The larger question now is why on earth did our government and health officials embrace a social mitigation policy trusting in “according to Chinese health officials” in the first place? Can it happen again in America?
With the war in Ukraine, it may move from a 24/7 news story that galvanizes new media time and resources to a regional conflict, as Americans lose interest in the story and other domestic news attracts more attention, plus as we move closer to fall, national elections, with control of Congress in the balance, partisan political news will dominate in our news media. Covid, showing every sign of being a virus that spreads in waves, will likely hit again and there will be American government and health officials clamoring for more social mitigation efforts and assuredly our American news media can shift on a dime to inciting Covid-panic once more.
Instead of just going along with this politically expedient “time to move on” effort to put Covid out of our minds, I feel certain, the same officials, pundits and media who pushed the Covid hysteria since 2020 will reemerge when another Covid wave hits in the US and they’ll be repackaging all of their made in China social mitigation lockdown ideas again.
Today I read this Matt Taibbi piece, A Tale of Two Authoritarians, which delves into the post 9/11 security measure overreaches and the many similarities to government “social mitigation pandemic measures. Taibbi doesn’t cater to partisan political sides, but instead just lays out the chronology of new security measures since 9/11 and how those American government overreaches expanded since then. He writes about the Pelosi 1/6 event and the reemergence of Dick Cheney:
“Seeing leading Democrats nuzzling the man George W. Bush called “Iron Ass” summed up the essential problem of the ordinary person trying to find a political home in this landscape. Even if you find the Trump phenomenon troubling, his opposition is not only authoritarian, but organized and armed with the intellectual tools to understand and appreciate how the technological elimination of democracy might be achieved in the 21st century.”
“We’re living through a period where an unpleasantly likely outcome for the ordinary American is the invocation of emergency powers to eliminate basic rights. From which side is that threat most likely to come? The pattern during Trump’s presidency was hyping the Russian menace to justify increased surveillance and censorship. Russia has since been switched out in favor of two new emergency bugbears. The first is the rise of “domestic terrorism,” and if you don’t think Cheney-style democracy-canceling is on the minds of officials heading into the next presidential election, you haven’t been reading the growing pile of articles quoting military types advertising their preparations for counter-coup in 2024.”
“The second emergency of course is the pandemic, which ought to have been exhibit A in Trump’s uninterest in being a dictator — he could have legally invoked all sorts of powers and did not. Instead, it’s become part of a widening propaganda campaign designed to enlist the wine-cave MSNBC set behind full-blown Big Brother governance.”
I wish I had even a tiny bit of Taibbi’s writing ability, but I don’t, so I recommend you read his piece a few times and then think about the issues he raised. He highlighted concerns about the new medical security state efforts that so many Democrats and government health officials have promoted since the pandemic began. He mentions Julian Assange and although I have never been sympathetic to his situation, I do admit that after 9/11, while having some concerns about the Patriot Act and many of the military actions, I still largely supported GWB and trusted our “experts” in intelligence and our military.
I grew up trusting authorities and I had a belief that there were mostly people with expertise, sound judgment, and most of all good character serving in public positions than there are. I was definitely too trusting and believed in public servants actually nobly serving the public interests.
When President Obama came along, he expanded on many of the Bush era Global War on Terror efforts and there were reports of more and more drone strikes in multiple countries, I began to wake up to the abuses of power. There were few clear answers from the Obama administration and Congress, whether controlled by Democrats or Republicans, has failed to rein in any of the post-9/11 emergency powers and instead there’s a willingness to expand these powers in Washington and zero ability to effectively do any true oversight or demand any accountability.
When the pandemic happened, once again, I believe that initially I was way too willing to trust the medical experts that were rolled out and a large part of my trust was that I believed these government health officials were non-political and dedicated to public health. Silly me. Plus from both sides of the aisle, Republicans and Democrats had nothing but praise for Dr. Fauci and other health officials. I was too trusting again, that’s for sure, as we are now approaching two years into pandemic politics and seemingly endless efforts by liberal (mainstream) media, Biden officials, Fauci and CDC quacks, plus Democrat officials across America to incite fear, hysteria, impose new rules and to never let go of their failed pandemic policies (some of which began at the beginning of the pandemic and were approved by the Trump administration).
As corruption continues to spread among our federal governmental institutions, it’s becoming more and more disturbing to realize, not only how corrupt so many of the touted “experts” are, but how whenever anyone now gives glowing accolades about any revered official in Washington or that some official is respected by both sides of the aisle, it’s like a signal for me to put up my guard and be wary that we’re in for another snow job. It’s like when James Comey, the former director of the FBI, hailed Peter Strzok and other high-level FBI officials caught up in the efforts to spy on the Trump campaign and spread the Trump-Russian Collusion spin lies, as highly respected career professionals. As information trickled out, those career professionals turned out to be highly-partisan, liars and most definitely not adhering to any sort of professional behavior.
Twitter gets dismissed by most people as just ridiculous social media, but by following hundreds of journalists, pundits and politicians, and watching the interactions I came to realize why Trump relied on Twitter to wage his one-man spin war. He flipped Dem and liberal media spin cycles constantly with just a few tweets and that ability is why Democrats and powerful liberal elites were so desperate to try to muzzle Trump.
However, the more disturbing people on Twitter were retired generals, who joined with Democrats and liberal media to tweet their rage and anger about Trump and some, like General Michael Hayden, tweeted frequently to undercut Trump’s decisions. It was shocking to watch a retired general and former CIA director engage in berating, petty name-calling, and actively trying to undermine a sitting President of the United States. Hayden wasn’t alone, as former Obama CIA director, John Brennan, also spent many hours engaged in the Twitter spin war against Trump too.
When I tried to explain to my sister, who doesn’t use social media, about the importance of Twitter, she repeatedly has dismissed this, as just social media garbage and she points out that most Americans aren’t on Twitter and that’s true. However, the ones who are the big players in the news media, in politics and especially in the partisan messaging operations (they set the narratives in the news media) are all on Twitter a whole lot. This small group of elites, who dominate the politics Twitter space, are the ones who drive the mass media spin war, especially news media.
The social media efforts to silence people started in 2018 on Twitter with Alex Jones and Jones is an easy person to loathe. He spouted all sorts of crazy conspiracy theories. It was easy to dismiss his being banned from Twitter, but then the banning continued and last year Trump was banned after 1/6. Trump’s a lightening rod, he tweeted all sorts of lies too, but then more and more people who challenged the liberal Covid orthodoxy began to be banned. The liberal big tech, politically-motivated social media purges have escalated and they all go in one direction – those who challenge the liberal/Dem narratives.
Once again, while most people on the right didn’t care about Alex Jones being banned, as the bans continued, on YouTube, Bret Weinstein, a evolutionary biologist, who raised some concerns about Covid vaccines, had his YouTube channel demonetized and I believe a few of his videos were removed from YouTube too.
A week ago, Dr. Robert Malone, a prominent virologist, was banned from Twitter for ostensibly spreading “Covid misinformation.” Videos where Malone was interviewed by other YouTubers have been removed too.
Sitting Congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a flame-throwing, Trump-supporter from GA, was banned from Twitter a few days ago.
Matt Walsh, a right-wing political commentator was suspended from Twitter today, for apparently some transgender language infraction. Walsh, upon his return to Twitter, tweeted:
I would like to sincerely apologize for the reckless comments that got me suspended. I now realize that biology doesn’t exist, science is a myth, men are women, women are men, penises are vaginas and vaginas are penises. It all makes sense to me now. I regret the error.
We’re heading into some disquieting and disturbing times. Everyone who uses social media or online platforms should realize that at any moment their online presence can be wiped out and they can be silenced across multiple social media platforms. Plus efforts for new social media platforms that aren’t controlled by the liberal big tech giants keep getting derailed at every turn.
Another disquieting thing I’ve noticed is beyond the efforts to silence opposing views, around the world, especially the Western world, there have been large protests against Covid lockdowns and rules, but you see very little liberal (mainstream) media news coverage of these protests. You’d think with Omicron being the hottest topic (besides 1/6), there would be a lot of news coverage of the large anti-Covid rules protests.
I’m going to end with this quote from Taibbi’s piece, which sums up the real stakes with this new era of trying to silence certain “undesirable” people on social media:
“Professionals” do make errors, about everything from terrorists to viruses. In fact, a fair number of the people seeking this enhanced authority are dumber than average. You don’t have to like Donald Trump to recognize the dire threat represented by a clique of mediocrities with just enough brains to use their offices to organize the criminalization of their opposition.”
The sad part with all this phony mask drama and virtue-signaling hyped via mass media every day is millions of Americans were deliberately lied to and manipulated by our top health officials. The damage and fall-out from the mask fearmongering will linger long after this pandemic has outlived its usefulness as a partisan political weapon.
JK sent me this Attkisson report about how the Amish in Lancaster, PA dealt with COVID last year. It raises some interesting questions about the extreme social mitigation efforts pushed by our federal health officials and government vs. the Amish sticking to their deeply held religious beliefs on the importance of work, family, and community.
After facing having my husband bed bound on home hospice care through last year, I can understand the Amish determination to avoid hospitals and risk not being able to have friends and family visit. I felt that way too and am glad I kept my husband at home. The Amish leader Attkisson interviewed explained how giving up everything they believe would have been worse than death and I can respect that viewpoint completely. When you click on the story, the video is a bit over 5 minutes long:
The past few years have been the hardest years of my life. I’ve written about my husband’s long-term illness in other posts and about his death in March of this year, but I want to write about some care decisions along the way, especially vaccines.
My husband, as my regular readers know, had late stage COPD and normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH). He was diagnosed with COPD in 1999 and NPH in 2012, although he had the symptoms of NPH from around 2006-2007, when he started walking with a strange side-to-side gait and falling frequently. Along the way significant short-term memory problems became apparent too.
The initial VP shunt in his ventricle drained the fluid from his ventricle and he regained some mobility, walking with a walker, but his short-term memory problems never improved and continued to worsen.
In 2018 he was hospitalized with sepsis and the neuro-surgeon did shunt revision surgery, after my husband recovered from sepsis and spent two weeks in a rehabilitation hospital, to regain his strength. He never regained much mobility and that declined steadily, as did the memory problems.
In Dec. 2019, the neurosurgeon told me that some NPH patients develop symptoms very similar to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. My husband had both, with increasing dementia and tremors in his right hand and right leg. He was mostly wheelchair-bound by 2019 and needed assistance with all basic care.
In late January 2020, our son got a very bad upper-respiratory infection and had a lot of difficulty breathing, but he refused to go to the doctor. And shortly thereafter my husband got sick, coughing and lots of lung congestion. His primary care doctor prescribed antibiotics and a steroid. A few days later, things declined much more and my husband was very weak, I could hear his chest rattling even a few feet away, but he didn’t want to go to the ER. He fell forward off of his chair onto the floor. My son helped get him into the wheelchair and I took him to the ER.
My husband had acute respiratory failure. He had received his flu shot and was up to date on his pneumonia vaccine too. Yes, I’m one of the countless people who believe it was Covid, before the date of the first verified case in the US, but that’s not the point of this post – it’s about vaccines. My husband was in very poor health for a long time and any respiratory infection in his condition was potentially life-threatening.
After a few days in the hospital, my husband was discharged on home hospice and there began probably the most challenging experience of my life – full-time caregiver to someone who is completely bed-bound.
My husband “survived” that infection, but he never recovered to even the level of function, where he had been before that infection. He would have a few days, occasionally even a few weeks of appearing better, followed by days or weeks where he slept most of the time and I’d think he was close to the end. The hospice nurses monitored his condition and told me these ups and downs are common with hospice patients. This went on for 13 months.
I had no idea what hospice care actually does, since most people I had known who opted for hospice care died very quickly. The doctor did not expect my husband to survive very long either, with the condition of his lungs. During those 13 months, my husband had several infections and was prescribed antibiotics. The hospice nurse told me that while antibiotics won’t change the outcome of his condition, treating infections relieves suffering and helps keep him comfortable.
My husband’s hospice provider also administered flu vaccines to patients who wanted them. I had them give my husband the flu vaccine, because although I knew my husband was going to die, I wanted him to die as painlessly as possible and having the flu is awful, especially for someone who already has a debilitating lung disease. If Covid vaccines had been available and recommended for hospice patients, I would have talked to my husband’s hospice team and had him receive a Covid vaccine, for the very same reason..
If you ever watch someone in acute respiratory failure, you would want to do everything you can to prevent that.
Luckily, the overwhelming majority of people who receive the Covid vaccine can just go about their lives. It’s free and easily accessible all over the country.
There’s so much politicization of everything pertaining to Covid. There’s also information and misinformation overload in our digital age. I’ve listened to experts talk about spike proteins and all sorts of potential long-term risks with the Covid vaccines.
I’ve listened to some experts minimize risks too, making it sound like there are absolutely no potential serious side effects., but here’s my opinion about “risk” when it comes to medications and especially vaccines.
The evidence of vaccines literally changing the world and saving millions of lives is overwhelming.
Yes, I know, the Covid vaccines are experimental. When my doctor prescribes FDA-approved medications, I still read the warnings on the medication and many have a lot of serious potential adverse reactions, that are rare. I take that into consideration and almost always opt to take them, because I trust my doctor’s advice and because I think about the risks vs. benefits. Life isn’t risk-free, it’s about weighing options. There seems to be a pervasive mass Covid hysteria, I think, mostly because of the unknown nature of Covid and compounded by political and media fear-mongering, that’s creating unnecessary fear and panic reactions, that impede people’s ability to calmly assess, not only the risk, but the potential benefit.
I received the Moderna vaccine in March (2nd shot in April) and have not for a moment regretted that decision. I had more anxiety with radiation treatments many years ago, and although years later I had some long-term problems from the radiation treatment, they were not life-threatening and the alternative was I probably wouldn’t be alive today, if I had not had those 8 weeks of radiation treatment.
In America, we all have the right to decide for ourselves on medical treatments, but I urge anyone on the fence to talk to their doctor and discuss Covid vaccines. I do know someone with a serious medical condition, whose doctor recommended he not get the vaccine and we should all respect that some people will opt not to get the vaccine.
I am completely opposed to mandatory masking, mandatory lockdowns and absolutely against mandatory vaccines. I am against all of the surveillance state type tracking of social distancing monitoring being tried in several countries and I am completely against vaccine passports and these corporate efforts to punish, silence, and now even force employees to get vaccinated or be fired. What I refuse to do though, is look at vaccines through a political lens and I hope many conservatives, Republicans, and MAGA supporters resist the urge to diss vaccines to “own the libs.”
Both Republicans and Democrats have politicized Covid, as have many of our public health officials, but the truth is we all need to try to work together as Americans and pull together to get through this Covid challenge a stronger nation.
I don’t know anything about the person who tweeted the above tweet and I have no idea where or when this video was taken, but this little girl’s actions sum up my feelings on all of the COVID-19 rules, hype, politicization, and endless hysteria.
The little girl’s actions especially sum up my feelings about anything both the mainstream media and Dr. Fauci say about COVID-19, at this point. In the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, I trusted they were providing science-based information, yet the more Dr. Fauci has spoken and the more hysteria the media ramped up in the past year, the more it sounds like they’re pushing the Democrat political agenda rather than unbiased medical information.
This doesn’t mean I refuse to believe in science or that I am a COVID denier or against COVID vaccines or that I refuse to wear a mask.
The first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the U.S. was January 15, 2020, with a man in Washington state, who had just returned from Wuhan, China. My husband got very sick around that same time, in GA and my husband hadn’t traveled anywhere, but our son had been sick about week before with the same symptoms. Although my personal situation has no science to back it, it’s not much less suspect than many of the public health pronouncements on COVID-19, which have been tainted with both domestic and foreign political considerations and US public health officials in Washington, who seem too willing to trust Chinese government and WHO information, even as the Chinese government’s lies about the virus have been exposed.
I followed all of the COVID-19 rules and I spent 2020 at home taking care of my husband. I didn’t take any vacations or attend any social gatherings (large or small), I wore a mask in public, I followed the social distancing rules and at first, I trusted Dr. Fauci and the DC public health officials made science-based recommendations. I don’t have any trust in Dr. Fauci or the CDC at this point, but I went ahead and got my first COVID vaccine last month and will get my second shot soon. I still wear a mask in public places and I still follow social distancing rules in those places, even though I strongly suspect that when exploiting COVID-19 fear and inciting hysteria for political advantage reaches the point of diminishing returns for Democrat politicians, we’ll likely learn from the “experts” that there’s no evidence to support that any of these “mitigation” efforts were effective at slowing the spread of COVID-19 and that most of these efforts came with huge health and societal costs.
Whenever COVID-19 numbers in red states don’t conform to bolster the Dem’s COVID spin narrative, that Dem governors’ COVID mitigation restrictions are working magnificently and red state governors, who ended lockdown and mask mandates, are creating a serious public health threat, Dr. Fauci doesn’t ever have any explanation for information and data that runs counter to his belief in imposing more restrictions on people’s lives. He just pivots back to hyping more restrictions, from double-masking to insisting that even fully vaccinated people must still live a very restricted life, controlled by media-induced fear and government-imposed COVID-19 rules.
When this Democrat COVID-19 con game reaches critical mass, sadly our political class, both Dems and their media cohorts, who often seem more like comrades, will still be on Twitter generating the spin attacks that evil red state governors jeopardized public health by lifting COVID-19 restrictions too soon and they’ll still be doubling down, defending their corrupt and destructive COVID-19 “Trust the Science” spin crap show.
Another gloomy forecast is Republicans and Trump-friendly media will still likely be countering the Dem spin crap show with their adopted Trumpian counter-spin crap show, because they’ve bought into that “at least Trump fights the left spin,” as being a viable strategy to defeat the massive Dem/media spin control of mass media in America.
Control of the mass media spin messaging propels the left’s culture war, which relies on mass media spin information war to mold and control public opinion in America
The Trump spin approach remains doomed to fail and will never actually defeat the Dems’ massive spin apparatus, that includes, not only most of the media in America, but also the big tech social media giants, who jumped onboard with becoming the online censors of Republicans and conservatives speech, working to silence Trump-friendly conservative and Republican voices, who gain too much traction or pose any threat to the preferred liberal spin narratives. And now corporate CEOs have jumped into the Dem spin war too.
Trump’s dishonest, bombastic, reactionary spin show provides the Dems endless spin ammunition, while at the same time assures that Republicans and conservatives will stay locked down by Trump’s circular firing squad leadership style, wasting more time on in-fighting than uniting for any common purpose to counter the Dem/mainstream media spin war.
The main reason Trump supporters cite for supporting Trump is “he’s a fighter!” Unfortunately, Trump’s undisciplined and short-sighted outbursts aren’t a winning strategy to defeat a massive, sophisticated, well-organized and funded spin information war, that is only part of a multi-faceted leftist culture war. The left’s culture war ideologues are deeply burrowed into the American education system, they control the Democratic Party agenda, they have powerful support among America’s big tech giants and corporate America, and they control most of mass media political messaging in America.
The COVID-19 spin scare is beginning to lose its effectiveness at keeping the American people fearful and thus compliant to Dem COVID spin power grabs, so the leftist spin message operations have already begun priming the media spin battlefield for pivoting to their next spin “CRISIS” messaging, moving away from COVID-19 onto CLIMATE EMERGENCY… Seriously, the Dems and their liberal media friends are already prepping their media spin battlefield for this pivot:
Scientific American has agreed with major news outlets worldwide to start using the term “climate emergency” in its coverage of climate change. Read our statement about this decision, and the impact we hope it can have throughout the media landscape. https://t.co/ccpALIvpxe
The Biden administration wisely began muzzling President Biden as their COVID preacher, after inauguration, and instead allowed the media gadfly, Dr. Fauci, to assume the role of unofficial COVID czar, so that once he’s no longer useful to their spin messaging, the media will stop their Fauci lovefest coverage and the Democrats can just pivot to ramping up CLIMATE EMERGENCY hysteria.
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