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The Empire Of Lies Breaks Down: Ugly Truths The Deep State Wants To Keep Hidden https://t.co/l4vS1mOfP9
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 21, 2021
The Empire of Lies Breaks Down: Ugly Truths the Deep State Wants to Keep Hidden
By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
America is breaking down.
This breakdown—triggered by polarizing circus politics, media-fed mass hysteria, racism, classism, fascism, fear-mongering, political correctness, cultural sanitation, virtue signaling, a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of growing government corruption and brutality, a growing economic divide that has much of the population struggling to get by, and militarization and militainment (the selling of war and violence as entertainment)—is manifesting itself in madness, mayhem and an utter disregard for the very principles and liberties that have kept us out of the clutches of totalitarianism for so long.
In New York City, for example, a 200-year-old statue of Thomas Jefferson holding the Declaration of Independence will be removed from the City Council’s chambers where it has presided since 1915. Despite Jefferson’s many significant accomplishments, without which we might not have the rights we do today, he will be banished for having been, like many of his day, a slaveowner. Curiously, that same brutal expectation of infallibility has yet to be applied to many other politically correct yet equally imperfect and fallible role models of the day.
In Washington, DC, a tribunal of nine men and women spoke with one voice to affirm that the government and its henchmen can literally get away with murder and not be held accountable for their wrongdoing. The Supreme Court’s latest rulings are yet another painful lesson in compliance, a reminder that in the American police state, “we the people” are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to ‘serve and protect.”
All across the country, from California to Connecticut and every point in between, men and women who have worked faithfully and diligently at their jobs for years are being terminated for daring to believe that they have a right to bodily integrity; that they should not be forced, against their conscience or better judgment, to choose between individual liberty and economic survival; and that they—and not the government, or the FDA, or the CDC, or the Corporate State—have dominion over their bodies. Conveniently enough, this COVID-19 pandemic has created yet another double standard in how “we the people” navigate this country: while “we the middling classes” are subjected to vaccine mandates and denied even the right to be skeptical about the origins of the COVID virus, let alone the efficacy of the so-called cure, the government, corporations and pharmaceutical companies have been shielded from liability with blanket immunity laws that ensure we are little more than guinea pigs for their questionable experiments.
And then in Pennsylvania, a man traveling on a commuter train harassed, assaulted and then raped a woman over the course of 40 minutes and more than two dozen train stops while fellow travelers, watching and filming the attack, did nothing. Not a single witness called 911. Not a single bystander intervened to help the woman. Despite the fact that the man was outnumbered and could have been overwhelmed by those on the train, no collective effort was made to ward off the attack. Only when it was too late, when the damage had been done and the train had pulled into its last stop, did police show up to intervene.
There is an allegory here for what is happening to our country and its citizens, who have also been waylaid by a madman (the Deep State), stripped of their safety nets (their rights undermined and eroded), and savaged out in the open by a fiend (the American Police State and its many operatives—the courts, the legislatures and their various armies) that is devoid of humanity while those not in the immediate crosshairs watch safely from a distance without making a move to help.
This is madness, yet there is a method to this madness.
This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.
Remember, authoritarian regimes begin with incremental steps: overcriminalization, surveillance of innocent citizens, imprisonment for nonviolent—victimless—crimes, etc. Bit by bit, the citizenry finds its freedoms being curtailed and undermined for the sake of national security. And slowly the populace begins to submit. MORE.
The Chicago Marxists and Woke Political Followers are Fracturing Western Society, Paving The Way For Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping to Expand, LOOKhttps://t.co/wJXXlXqAId
— TheLastRefuge (@TheLastRefuge2) October 23, 2021
The Chicago Marxists and Woke Political Followers are Fracturing Western Society, Paving The Way For Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping to Expand
Via The Conservative Treehouse
When the Australian government began beating their citizens in the street for leaving their houses and protesting against severe lockdown rules, I said –somewhat tongue in cheek at the time– to watch Vladimir Putin (Russia) and Xi Jinping (China) trigger U.N. security council sanctions against the Australian government for human rights abuses.
The point I was making earlier was to highlight a danger. If Western governments continued to devolve into totalitarian regimes, global autocratic leaders will take the opportunity to exploit vulnerabilities created by such open undemocratic hostility toward the principles of freedom.
Putin, Xi and the Mullahs in Iran can easily enlarge their global influence if citizens in formerly free democratic nations react to western COVID mandates by rightly and appropriately rebuking their national and regional leadership.
CONSIDER– What population inside a western democracy is going to want to fight Russian or Chinese geopolitical aggression when they view their own national leaders through the same totalitarian prism?
Think about it carefully, because we are at this inflection point.
Ex. If China takes military action against Taiwan, and the leaders of France, Germany, the U.K, Australia and the United States want to do something about it, their internal credibility accounts are overdrawn. Western populations writ large will not support those requests, because the citizens no longer view those leaders through the prism of freedom, liberty and democracy. This is the current situation. This is the danger western leaders ignored when they jumped into their totalitarian COVID mindset.
In a clear example of how autocrats can exploit this self-inflicted vulnerability, check out this speech during a plenary session of the 18th annual meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club in Sochi, by Russian President Vladimir Putin (h/t Rebel News):
Vladimir Putin:“We look in amazement at the processes underway in the countries which have been traditionally looked at as the standard-bearers of progress,” Putin said. “Of course, the social and cultural shocks that are taking place in the United States and Western Europe are none of our business; we are keeping out of this.”
“Some people in the West believe that an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, ‘reverse discrimination’ against the majority in the interests of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family and even gender, they believe that all of these are the mileposts on the path towards social renewal,” said Putin, elaborating on the cultural decline of the west in the name of social justice.
“Listen, I would like to point out once again that they have a right to do this, we are keeping out of this,” Putin continued. “But we would like to ask them to keep out of our business as well. We have a different viewpoint, at least the overwhelming majority of Russian society — it would be more correct to put it this way – has a different opinion on this matter. We believe that we must rely on our own spiritual values, our historical tradition and the culture of our multiethnic nation.”
“The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness,” he added. “Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead.”
“The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all,” Putin continued, and highlighted the similarities between woke progressives to the Soviet revolutionaries who took over Russia.
“It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already,” he said. “After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.”
“This, I believe, should call to mind some of what we are witnessing now,” he said. “Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices, which we, fortunately, have left, I hope, in the distant past.”
“The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past — such as Shakespeare — are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward,” he said. “The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood, memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause, but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into ‘reverse discrimination’ that is, reverse racism,” noted Putin, who apt went on to describe the woke obsession with race and gender.
“The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin colour,” said Putin in reference to Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech.
“I specifically asked my colleagues to find the following quote from Martin Luther King: ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by their character.’ This is the true value,” he said.
“However, things are turning out differently there,” he added. “By the way, the absolute majority of Russian people do not think that the colour of a person’s skin or their gender is an important matter. Each of us is a human being. This is what matters.”
“In a number of Western countries, the debate over men’s and women’s rights has turned into a perfect phantasmagoria. Look, beware of going where the Bolsheviks once planned to go — not only communalising chickens, but also communalising women. One more step and you will be there,” Putin warned.
“Zealots of these new approaches even go so far as to want to abolish these concepts altogether,” he said. “Anyone who dares mention that men and women actually exist, which is a biological fact, risk being ostracised.”
Putin then remarked upon the transgender activist movement and widespread efforts to erase femininity and womanhood.
“‘Parent number one’ and ‘parent number two,’ ‘birthing parent’ instead of ‘mother,’ and ‘human milk’ replacing ‘breastmilk’ because it might upset the people who are unsure about their own gender. I repeat, this is nothing new; in the 1920s, the so-called Soviet Kulturtraegers also invented some newspeak believing they were creating a new consciousness and changing values that way. And, as I have already said, they made such a mess it still makes one shudder at times,” he said.
“Not to mention some truly monstrous things when children are taught from an early age that a boy can easily become a girl and vice versa,” said Putin, remarking on childhood gender transitions and the embrace of non-binary identities to the exclusion of parents. “That is, the teachers actually impose on them a choice we all supposedly have. They do so while shutting the parents out of the process and forcing the child to make decisions that can upend their entire life. They do not even bother to consult with child psychologists — is a child at this age even capable of making a decision of this kind? Calling a spade a spade, this verges on a crime against humanity, and it is being done in the name and under the banner of progress.” MORE.
California Drove Truckers Out of Business. Now Store Shelves Are Empty – Frontpagemag https://t.co/Z1e2bR3CEH
— Daniel Greenfield – "Hang Together or Separately" (@Sultanknish) October 22, 2021
California Drove Truckers Out of Business. Now Store Shelves Are Empty
Via FrontPage Magazine
After a long cross-country flight, I made it out of LAX and into an Uber. I wasn’t in the mood to talk, but the driver was. And hearing that I was a journalist, he wanted to tell me a story. I’ve heard a lot of stories over the years, but this may have been the most important one I let go.
He hadn’t always been driving an Uber at 11:30 at night. Not all that long ago he used to have his own business with 7 trucks before he was bankrupted by California’s insane regulations.
I listened, but didn’t pay enough attention. The impact of California’s Democrat legislative supermajority on truckers was just another data point alongside what was happening to freelancers of all kinds and a lot of small businesses. Stories like this were everywhere and there was little interest in them even in conservative circles outside the tarnished golden state.
Back then we still lived in a world where you could walk into a thousand stores with fully stocked shelves. People ordered from Amazon and expected its burgeoning last mile delivery service to make products magically appear overnight. Just in time inventory systems were more efficient and any day now products would be delivered by self-driving cars or aerial drones.
2020 and 2021 have given this Big Tech fantasy world and the rest of us a good kicking.
The massive supply chain mess that’s leaving stores empty and orders unfulfilled doesn’t have a single point of failure, but dozens of them. China’s energy shortages, the overhyped predictive powers of Big Data, the fragility of the global economy, fuel costs, and welfare state worker shortages are all players. But California’s truck bans are a key link in the great failure chain.
While I was riding home that night, California trucking companies were going bankrupt at a rapid rate. Few outside the industry were paying attention or understood what that might mean.
2019 was described as a “bloodbath” for the trucking industry with 640 trucking companies across the country filing for bankruptcy in just the first half of the year. Thousands of truck drivers were left unemployed. Many went into the expanding last mile delivery business, some as contractors for Amazon. But California truckers and businesses had their own special woes.
Two years ago, Governor Newsom signed the Democrat supermajority’s Assembly Bill 5 into law. While AB5 was billed as a crackdown on Uber and Lyft, forcing the companies to treat l freelance contractors as employees, the gig economy companies pushed Proposition 22 so that they were the only ones exempt from the law. (A Democrat judge has since illegally blocked the approved ballot measure while falsely claiming that it was unconstitutional.)
AB5 however was less about Uber than it was about outlawing freelance employees in order to force them into unions. The union power grab inconvenienced Uber and Lyft, but crushed freelance workers in a variety of fields including journalism. One of the fields was trucking.
Over the summer, the California Trucking Association actually went to the Supreme Court to fight AB5 and allow owners and operators to use independent contractors. The CTA listed 70,000 owner operators. In the years since AB5, Ubers have become scarcer and more expensive, which is what the law was actually designed to do, but the consequences to the trucking industry have been far worse albeit invisible to most people until now. While truckers are still protected from AB5, many in the industry are not willing to bet their future on SCOTUS.
AB5 was not only the assault on the trucking industry by California Democrats who were aggressively trying to unionize the industry and to impose environmental regulations on it.
Last year, the California Air Resources Board issued a press release boasting that it had taken a “bold step to reduce truck pollution”. The bold step required switching to electric trucks.
“We are showing the world that we can move goods, grow our economy and finally dump dirty diesel,” Jared Blumenfeld, California’s Secretary for Environmental Protection, sneered.
Jared and California certainly showed the world something.
While the ultimate truck ban was scheduled for 2045, an initial phase-in of 5% to 9% begins in 2024. Last year, California’s DMV began refusing to register thousands of trucks with an estimated 100,000 trucks under threat. With “green” trucks costing $70,000 more, this was a non-starter for already troubled independent owner-operators and even larger companies.
That was part of the plan. MORE.
School systems are working through supply chain issues that have caused them to cut down on giving out certain materials. https://t.co/r8Lp1Dtn3u
— WITN Headlines (@WITN) October 20, 2021
Report: School Children Rationed Forks and Spoons as Supply Chain Crisis Targets America’s Youth
Via Breitbart News
Lunches for school children on Wednesday are reportedly being impacted throughout the nation by President Biden’s supply chain crisis, forcing children to conserve forks and spoons at schools.
“We have the cashiers giving out one per student,” said Lauren Weyand, Craven County nutrition director in North Carolina, about the lack of forks and spoons at available to children at lunch. WITN NBC reported the school system “assures” each student they will not have to eat with their hands.
“I’m kind of just falling into place and kind of making sure that I just have what I need and I don’t end up with two spoons and somebody else doesn’t have something,” Antonio Mitchell, a New Bern High School senior, said.
Weyand added that the county school district is also having difficulty purchasing containers and five-compartment-trays.
The supply chain crisis is also threatening the children’s nutrition. “Before we did not have syrup, we just got syrup a couple days ago,” Mitchell told the outlet.
The school district has begun managing the food shortage by going directly to the manufacturers to buy food instead of working through a distributer. “It has forced us to think outside of the box,” Weyand said, noting that the county is purchasing meat processors and growers to circumvent the Biden’s supply chain.
In New Haven, Connecticut, the “food supply-chain shortage could affect thousands of meals served daily by one of the state’s largest school districts,” the New Haven Register reported.
The school district’s Executive Director for food services, Gail Cairns-Sharry, told the school board’s finance committee this week they are facing massive food shortages. “We are really running into some challenges,” Cairns-Sharry said. MORE.
Support For Climate Change Skyrockets After Computer Models Show It Will Flood California https://t.co/NwzFaXDNHr
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) October 18, 2021
Support For Climate Change Skyrockets After Computer Models Show It Will Flood California
Via The Babylon Bee
U.S.—A new climate model shows that much of southern California will be underwater in the future as a result of uninhibited climate change. These stark images have had a profound effect on public opinion, causing a huge spike in support for climate change.
“You mean, just by driving around in my gas guzzler, I could flood all the homes of those coastal elites?” asked Greg Butler, who lives in rural Kansas. “Cool! Why am I still talking to you? I should be driving!”
“I don’t even believe in climate change,” said Evelyn Klein of Boise, Idaho, “but now I hope it’s real. So what do I do to help it along? Eat more meat? I can do that!”
This pro-climate-change attitude has alarmed many rich, left-wing Californians. “You stupid redneck hicks,” said Hollywood producer Alan Stevenson. “Don’t you understand? You all need to make huge, personal sacrifices or my beachfront property is ruined!”
Still, in middle America, there is a newfound vigor for helping climate change, with everyone trying to do their part. And if someone doesn’t have the time or ability to add to climate change, they can now buy carbon credits — money that goes toward people cutting down trees to help add more carbon to the air.
Check out all of the Bee’s takes on a world gone mad HERE.
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