Trump 2.0: Causes for Great Concern!, Part 2

By Steven Yates

April 4, 2025

[Author’s disclaimer: the opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are solely those of its author, and should not be attributed to NewsWithViews.com, its editorial staff, or any other NewsWithViews.com writer.]

[Not a contribution to “Is Liberalism Dead? (In All Forms)” obviously. Lord permitting, Part 5 will appear soon.]

Part 1.

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of the age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” —Ephesians 6:12

Trojan Horse for Technocratic Post-Liberalism?

Allowing Elon Musk to run amuck.

Returning to His Muskiness: as noted in Part 1, he’s a technocrat. Technocrats believe in governance by scientific/technological “experts” using “scientific management,” and that common people aren’t smart enough to direct their own paths in life.

One of their adages is “Move fast and break things.”

Silicon Valley is a hotbed of technocracy: Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen (author of a tract called “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”), Sam Altman of OpenAI, just about everyone in the top echelons at Google; the list goes on and on. One of their thought leaders gets billed as a “computer philosopher,” Curtis Yarvin.

Musk exemplifies — wearing a black instead of red hat, in Gothic lettering — not MAGA but “Dark MAGA” which despite the term has nothing to do with Making America Great Again. There’s not enough space to explore the Dark Enlightenment properly here as such a discussion would take us too far afield. Suffice it to say, these people do not just believe that liberal democracy is finished, they want to replace it with a marriage of unified technocracy and neoliberal privatization, in which the CEO would be the equivalent of a monarch. Sounds very much like the technofeudalism I’ll be discussing next week.

They would privatize federal agencies such as Social Security and probably run them for profit just as healthcare in the U.S. is run exclusively for profit.

Consider Social Security. Around 73 million Americans receive social security benefits. The average payout is around $1,800/mo. The agency handles around 9.5 million new claims per year. Under DOGE direction it has now cut thousands of jobs, conducted a restructuring which will make it harder to apply for benefits. This in addition to struggling with a notoriously difficult-to-navigate website which recently crashed four times in a 10-day period due to server overload. The agency is closing regional offices in compliance with DOGE demands even while new rules require recipients to show up in person to verify their identities to make changes to their accounts. There are elderly recipients who would find such visits very difficult to make.

DOGE, let us remember, is not even a real government agency. Trump and Musk created it unilaterally. It nominally answers to Trump but has been run entirely by His Muskiness.

What he and his Gen Z proteges are doing could very easily interfere with existing benefits for millions of people who depend on them for basic necessities.

These people either know Hegelian dialectic as well as any Marxist or are following it organically: crisis-reaction-response. Create a crisis, allow the crisis to provoke a reaction, and those move in with the solution that was wanted all along.

For Social Security to fall into chaos would therefore constitute a crisis, one of such magnitude that by itself it could destroy this administration’s credibility and capacity to govern further.

For protests that could easily turn violent would be the reaction — as millions of ordinary Americans would suddenly be unable to pay their bills.

The response: His Muskiness privatizes the system and runs it for profit, which means that we could expect Social Security, or what remains of it, to look like a health insurance corporation, with no more accountability to beneficiaries. This would accord with neoliberal thinking that government screws up everything it touches, but what is privatized turns to gold!

I suppose it does if you’re a billionaire oligarch.

Candidate Trump promised not to touch Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid!

I know, I know: fraud. There probably is some. The agency is far from perfect. It does need substantial reform, because otherwise it will face insolvency in the near future, or so we are repeatedly told (how long in the future appears to depend on whom you ask; if there are roughly 73 million Social Security recipients, roughly 185 million people are paying into it.).

The DOGE team has made the implausible claim that millions of dead people were receiving benefits: including “nearly 1.5 million 150-year-olds” and some “over the age of 200”!

The Social Security Administration is 90 years old this year. Such a person would have had to have been over 100 when the system was set up. This doesn’t make sense. Use logic, people. Allegations of Social Security fraud are very unlike those of voter fraud. Voter fraud might be made possible by not requiring ID to vote. A Social Security account begins with your ID; your Social Security number is, after all, for all practical purposes, a national ID number.

Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — a former Wall Street CEO and yet another billionaire technocrat — said in a recent podcast that those who call Social Security and complain when their monthly benefits don’t show up on time are the ones most likely to be “fraudsters”!

In what parallel world is that an evidence-based or even a logical claim?!

When I see names and details, specific allegations against whoever is receiving this money, arrests made, convictions, I’ll take more seriously the claim that millions of “fraudsters,” presumably descendant of long-dead beneficiaries, are receiving Social Security benefits.

The best thing that could happen, in my humble opinion, is an end to the unholy alliance between Trump and His Muskiness. It might be useful to remember that His Muskiness and other billionaires will never need Social Security. Millions upon millions of Americans or ordinary means do rely on it for basic necessities of life, whether anyone likes this or not.

Donald Trump and Zionism.

Finally, we come to the most dangerous question this article asks:

Does Trump serve Israel / Zionism?

I’d hoped I’d never have to ask this. I’ve tried to avoid it. But further avoidance is now impossible.

A lot of leftists and liberals claim that Trump serves Putin. This is as stupid today as it was back in the days of the Russia-collusion hoax (which Jeffrey Goldberg included in the Signal-gate screw-up had a hand in spreading).

But maybe all the Putin-fearmongering is a purposeful distraction from what’s really going on. It wouldn’t be the first time.

A case can be made, based especially given the administration’s firebreathing hostility to campus protests against Israeli actions in Gaza, that Trump serves Israel and promotes Zionism, everything else being window-dressing (including America First! and Making America Great Again!).

Consider how deferential he was to Israel’s president Benjamin Netanyahu during the latter’s recent visit — to the point of holding his chair like a common servant.

Zionism begins with the idea that the beginning of the End Times would be marked by the restoration of Biblical Israel in the Middle East, and that today’s Israel is the recreation of the Biblical Israel. I’ve never seen the slightest evidence for the latter of these. Zionism also maintains that those skeptical of this are by definition antisemitic. Zionists believe we entered the End Times when Israel was created in the 1940s. They drew strength from the Nazi Holocaust and the persecution of Jews more broadly.

Thus a war against “antisemitism” that has violated free speech rights and rights to due process, as I observed in Part 1. The climate of fear is probably more palpable today than it was when the wokesters were fully in charge! Arguably this is worse than wokeness! Because Zionism has more money and power back of it than wokery had.

Nearly all the above-named technocrats of the Silicon Valley billionaire class are Jewish, after all. AIPAC and the ADL (the latter created in 1913, interestingly the same year the Federal Reserve was set up) have long been two of the most powerful organizations in the country. If a politician gets on AIPAC’s wrong side, then come next election the organization will fund a “more reasonable” opposition candidate.

Worse is how the lion’s share of the Evangelical Christian community has been pulled into Zionism, including seminaries, via dispensational theology furthering the idea that God is about to whisk believers off the world in the “rapture.”

The only marginally visible exception to this who comes to mind is Chuck Baldwin, who has been warning for years about Zionist infiltration of Christian institutions.

This is all deeply troubling since I’d like to think I can identify with the Evangelical community. But as long as this is going on, I can’t!

What I voted for was securing America’s national borders, which included deporting as many illegal immigrants as possible who entered the U.S. under Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’s watch.

I did not vote to deport anyone who is in the U.S. legally, with a green card or one of several legitimate visas such as the H-1B visa that allowed Elon Musk (born in South Africa) to enter, live, and start businesses in the U.S. Nor detain on spurious grounds those trying to enter the country legally.

I voted for an American, not Israel. I did not vote for Zionism. I most definitely did not vote to continue the present Israeli policy in Gaza. My understanding is that the reason the Houthis of Yemen began attacking ships was because the Israelis made a cease fire agreement with Hamas and then broke it.

How long will it be before U.S. citizens find themselves detained and charged with the “hate speech” crime of “antisemitism” because they criticize the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, especially if they call it what it is: mass murder, which has included very young children who have been deliberately targeted, their brains blown out, by IDS agents who afterwards laughed about it. Does anyone honestly think Palestinian children are working for Hamas?

These people are clearly psychopaths.

Possibly worse!

I’ve found myself wondering if something demonic is involved here. I’ve never taken very seriously claims about “International Jewry.” Even if there is such a network, I don’t think it is autonomous. If it exists, it answers to those higher “principalities and powers” in accordance with Ephesians 6:12 quoted above and which I’ve put into a frame of reference here (see also here).

Summation.

I’d worked under the assumption that putting an end to the four-year dumpster fire of “Sleepy” Joe Biden and DEI candidate Kamala Harris whose loss last November would enable us to turn a corner.

We’ve turned a corner all right, but not the corner we needed to turn!

I did not vote for a technocracy ready to institute the North American Union I thought we exposed and stopped back in the days of Bush the Younger (technocrats would call it the North American Technate)!

Don’t look to the Democrats, who remain clueless since they can’t give up the things that cost them last November’s election: lying about the real economy, hiding Joe Biden’s cognitive decline for almost four years, continued attachment to identity politics, and their irrational obsession with “transgenders.”

At the moment I see nothing ahead but trouble!

Do I want to continue chronicling it?

That will depend on the response (if there is one) to this article, which I’m aware could get me into trouble. (I live overseas. Will my passport be flagged the next time I try to enter the U.S.? My wife is a foreign national with a foreign passport and a visa waiver. Will she be detained and taken who knows where???)

Part of me wants to retire from all this and be done with it!

Another part of me can’t take his eyes off the ongoing debacle! We’ll see.

So I’ll end this by asking again, What would really Make America Great Again? How do we put America First?

I’ve addressed the former previously. (Did anyone read it?)

Restore a Christian worldview. Separate it clearly and specifically from Zionism, which is fundamentally a secularist, materialist movement outside of actual Judaism (not to mention Christianity).

Further the moral idea that all human persons have intrinsic value because they were created in God’s image (Gen. 1:26-27). See what happens….

Restore Constitutionally limited government which, as founding father John Adams observed, “was made only for a moral and religious people.”

Recognize the spirit of community that built the country into a desirable place to be.

Do not institute economics-über-alles ideologies such as neoliberalism which instead of recognizing intrinsic value, throw human beings to the wolves when they cease to make money.

Instead, teach financial literacy, so people can manage their money instead of being managed by money. Teach them the difference between needs and wants, and how expert marketers routinely blur the two to get sales. Teach them what’s been done to the currency, the reason why a decent apartment that rented for perhaps $100/mo. or less back in the 1970s now rents for over $1,500/mo.

Do not discriminate against people on the basis of race or class or sex or class or physical appearance. We’re all human, and we’re all doing the best that we can.

In foreign policy, stop fighting Israel’s wars, proxy wars against Russia, and otherwise interfering in the affairs of other nations. Recognize that others are in a better position to resolve their own problems than we are, because of differences in history, tradition, and culture.

Don’t be a global bully. Instead, be an example. America had a chance to do this after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We couldn’t have blown it more spectacularly!

All of these things would Make America Great Again!

Above all, don’t allow the country to fall the rest of the way into the hands of unaccountable money-hungry, power-hungry technocrats: arch-materialists all.

Sadly, though, with Ron Paul long retired and turning 90 this year, at this moment I don’t see a single person on the horizon who both commands sufficient influence and has the money to further these goals nationally.

Which means we have no choice except to further them locally, in our own lives.

Marcus Aurelius, Stoic philosopher, from his Meditations: “You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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Have you been victimized by “phishing expeditions”? Learn the signs, what to do and what not to do! This and other content not available here on my Substack publication Navigating the New Normal. Consider subscribing; while more and more Internet content is disappearing behind paywalls and is littered with ads, Navigating the New Normal remains free and ad-free.

Steven Yates is a (recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored three books, more than 20 articles, numerous book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and hereticl notions, including about academia itself.

In 2012 he moved to Chile. He married a Chilean national in 2014. Among his discoveries in South America: the problems of the U.S. are problems everywhere, because human nature is the same everywhere. The problems are problems of Western civilization as a whole.

As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

Is Liberalism Dead (In All Forms)?, Part 4

By Steven Yates

March 29, 2025

Neoliberalism’s meteoric rise in the late 20^th century; it’s decline and fall in our era.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3,

“In an ideal free market resting on private property, no individual can coerce any other, all cooperation is voluntary, all parties to such cooperation benefit or they need not participate. There are no “social” values, no “social” responsibilities in any sense other than the shared values and responsibilities of individuals. Society is a collection of individuals and of the various groups they voluntarily form.” —Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” (NYT, 1970)

“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies and cuts through to the essence of the evolutionary spirit.” —Gordon Gekko, Wall Street (1987)

“The case for free trade is based on the British economist David Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage — the idea that each nation should specialize in what it does best and trade with others for other needs. If each country focused on its comparative advantage, productivity would be highest and every nation would share part of a bigger global economic pie.

“However, when Ricardo said that free trade would produce shared gains for all nations, he assumed that the resources used to produce goods — what he called the factors of production — would not be easily moved over international borders. Comparative advantage is undermined if the factors of production can relocate to … a relatively few countries with abundant cheap labor. In this situation, there are no longer shared gains — some countries win and others lose…. [T]oday’s vital factors of production — capital, technology and ideas — can be moved around the world at the push of a button….

“This is a very different world than Ricardo envisioned. When American companies replace domestic employees with lower-cost foreign workers in order to sell more cheaply in home markets, it seems hard to argue that this is the way free trade is supposed to work. To call this a jobless recovery is inaccurate: lots of new jobs are being created, just not here in the United States.” —Paul Craig Roberts and Chuck Schumer, “Second Thoughts on Free Trade” (NYT, 2004)

“Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?” —George Monbiot, “Neoliberalism — the Ideology at the Root of All Our Problems” (The Guardian, 2016)

“The purpose of the corporation is not merely to enrich shareholders. The greatest grift in contemporary economic life is the neoliberal idea that the only purpose of the corporation and the only responsibility of executives is to enrich themselves and shareholders. The new economics must and can insist that the purpose of the corporation is to improve the welfare of all stakeholders: customers, workers, community and shareholders alike. Greed is not good. Being rapacious doesn’t make you a capitalist, it makes you a sociopath. And in an economy as dependent upon cooperation at scale as ours, sociopathy is as bad for business as it is for society…. Neoliberal economic theory has sold itself to you as unchangeable natural law, when in fact it’s social norms and constructed narratives based on pseudoscience.” —Nick Hanauer, “The Dirty Secret of Capitalism” (TED Talk, 2019)

Classical liberalism and homo economicus may have been “out” in most of academia, but they didn’t disappear. Their defenders — in economics, business, or their small corner of the intellectual world — doubled down. Sadly, they did so without considering factors, none of them political-economic in nature, that got secularized classical liberalism into trouble. Instead, they invented neoliberalism, elevated utility-maximization and monetization to the status of divine principles, and told us There Is No Alternative.

What Is Neoliberalism? How Did It Originate?

Neoliberalism refers to a range of policies that emphasize free markets, privatization, globalization, and minimal state intervention. To many conservatives this sounds ideal. Do we not want reduced government spending, deregulation, and greater individual economic freedom? Neoliberalism retains a role for government: maintaining the infrastructure deemed necessary for markets to flourish; serving as enforcer of, e.g., trade agreements; and protecting intellectual property rights. It has no quarrel with concentrations of wealth if these are seen as enhancing market efficiency. It tends to dismiss worries about regulatory capture of governmental agencies.

Neoliberals emphasize globalization more than classical liberals did, encouraging economic integration. Borders, they say, are impediments to unfettered free trade and migration. They have zero patience with the cultural conservatism of those who see disruption when their communities are colonized by peoples who don’t identify with or respect their national traditions, don’t speak their language (or speak it poorly), and so are unlikely to assimilate.

It is fair, I think, to say that neoliberalism promotes globalism as a general outlook. Its condemnation of “protectionism” notwithstanding, it doesn’t reject state protections of economic activity. These tend to favor big enterprises and automatically work against small, family-owned businesses. It hastens Schumpeterian creative destruction via technological change and says that if for whatever reason you don’t adapt, your resulting poverty is your fault. It oversees the migration of power from national governments to international organizations with “soft law” accords that serve global corporations with no loyalties except to money and power.

Numerous authors contributed to the development of these ideas. Many were bankrolled by wealthy interests.

The first was Friedrich A. Hayek, whose primary influence came through his landmark book The Road to Serfdom (1944) which criticized state-directed central planning. He and fellow Austrian Ludwig von Mises argued that government intervention in the marketplace invariably caused economic dislocations. These led to more intervention until freedom was destroyed and de facto socialism instituted.

Mises and Hayek were two leading lights of the Austrian School of Economics. The Austrians try to derive all economic science from a single axiom, that man acts (defining action as the use of means to achieve ends). They see this as axiomatic because its denial is self-contradictory. A denial that man acts would be an action (of a linguistic-conceptual sort, using language to achieve communication). This form of reasoning is called apriorism. It marks the Austrian School as Second Stage in the sense of Part 1. Empiricist economists who go off data (e.g., Third Stage Keynesians and monetarists) predictably reject apriorism as pseudoscientific.

Hayek created the Mont Pelerin Society in the late 1940s. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe called this group the Neoliberal Thought Collective in their illuminating anthology. Their membership included Karl Popper (author of The Open Society and Its Enemies from which George Soros derived the name of his huge operation), George Stigler, Michael Polanyi, and of course, Milton Friedman who would be their U.S. protégé, selling the ideas based at the University of Chicago. There were 33 other founding members (39 in all). In addition to economics they drew on philosophy of science, and on history. The Mont Pelerin Society grew to a membership of hundreds, representing 17 nations.

The Mont Pelerins worried about the spread of collectivism (see Part 3). As Europeans their context was the post-war reconstruction of shattered economies, government-based central planning being a temptation to short cuts.

Though ultimately embracing the above-mentioned creative destruction, they were troubled by another core idea in Joseph A. Schumpeter’s classic Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (orig. 1942). Schumpeter’s view: contrary to classical Marxism, capitalism would be undone not by its failures but by its successes. It had produced great wealth and was not impoverishing the proletariat. But this led to leisure — especially among children of the new bourgeoisie. They would grow up with expectations capitalism could not satisfy.

There’s an implicit argument here that prosperity and leisure, absent direct consciousness of what made them possible, make for soft and undisciplined youth unable to accept the demands of the marketplace. No teenager, supported by the “bank of mom and dad” and excited by thoughts of becoming a sports star, a rock star, an actor or actress, an astronaut, whatever, awakens in the morning thinking, “I can’t wait to grow up and sell insurance policies.” This, Schumpeter thought, would render capitalism less palatable over time. It would push populations leftward.

Schumpeter’s view, following the footsteps of the New Deal, was that a critical mass would democratically vote their way into socialism by supporting candidates advancing fundamentally socialist ideas. This would be unstoppable. “Can capitalism survive?” he asked at the beginning of his discourse. His answer: “No, I do not think it can.”

The Neoliberal Thought Collective wanted to counter such tendencies, and they pushed their views assertively. Milton Friedman published Capitalism and Freedom (1962), intended as a decisive statement of free market principles and a defense of privatization and free trade. In many respects, this was a Road to Serfdom for Americans. Friedman would publish the article quoted at the outset in 1970. He used the word neoliberalism openly in additional writings, developing further the idea that business has no “social responsibilities” beyond obeying the law. He would popularize this in books such as Free to Choose (1980) written with his wife Rose, and an accompanying video series.

It was the start of the Thatcher era in the U.K. and the Reagan years in the U.S. Neoliberalism gained in influence, pursuing policies the Mont Pelerins had championed: tax cuts, deregulation, free trade, globalization, and opposition to communism/socialism. After the Soviet Union fell, leaving a unipolar world with the U.S. as the world’s sole superpower, these went into overdrive.

Neoliberalism: What Went Wrong?

Neoliberalism, like its forebear, relies on homo economicus as a first postulate: we are self-interested utility-maximizers: free trade maximizes self-interest. It’s all voluntary. No one enters into a trade from which he doesn’t expect to benefit.

As we’ve noted, this doesn’t fit human nature. We do try to maximize utility and we do trade, of course, but there is much more to being human. A political economy that neglects our need for community, belonging, validation, and love, not to mention our sense of the difference between right and wrong, cannot stand indefinitely.

It’s a commonplace that neoliberal economics created massive inequality via what I’ve called welfare-statism in reverse: a structural distribution of wealth upwards. Financialization of the economy contributed to this. Money printing debauched the currency, causing massive inflation (what’s being inflated is the money supply) and the well-documented state of affairs in which the cost of living rises while wages remain mostly stagnant.

Add to this Paul Craig Roberts’s target: outsourcing well-paying manufacturing jobs to cheap labor countries, destroying American industrial capacity, hollowing out communities in the U.S., and causing the middle class earlier capitalism had created to spiral downward. Generation Z (born from 1997 to 2012, well after these effects had begun exacting their toll) is understandably resentful and greatly worried by the prospects of being unable to find the stable, long-term employment their Boomer and Gen X parents had. In practice, neoliberalism served up a “services economy” replacing real jobs with “gigs,” as well as hundreds of hustlers exploiting economic insecurity and offer “opportunities” most of which didn’t exist: many were, and are, outright scams. The adage applies that what looks too good to be true, probably is. Think of MLM.

Neoliberals deny the reality of market failure. Their claim is that blaming the market when things go awry can be compared to stumbling and falling and then blaming gravity. This assumes, of course, that the marketplace is akin to physics.

The problem: there clearly are market failures, understood as a market either not meeting the needs of buyers for any number of reasons or delivering perverse and harmful consequences.

Consider the healthcare industry (go here for more details), in which profitability has clearly replaced health as a primary driver. Today, especially in the U.S. which has maintained an exclusively for-profit model (and where neoliberals speak darkly of “socialized medicine”), you don’t have a healthcare industry, you have a sick care industry. Chronic illnesses “managed” with pharmaceuticals are far more profitable than actual cures. Health insurance, too, has become a racket, in which people who aren’t doctors deny claims resulting in people dying from preventable causes when real health care becomes unaffordable. Hence Luigi Mangione, and his transformation into a folk hero by those who, on some level, have figured this out.

Or consider the war industry, in which the production of weapons makes enormous sums for their manufacturers and contractors, despite the destruction wrought, usually on a population of anonymous expendable foreigners, when the weapons are used in a major city.

Consider finally private prisons. The facility saves money (i.e., is more profitable) from feeding prisoners low quality food, so they end up malnourished; or die from treatable conditions because again, medical care affects the facility’s bottom line. Don’t commit crimes, some will retort. Response: those convicted of crimes, even heinous ones, are still human beings. Second response: with money a top priority in the legal profession as well, and many of those accused unable to afford decent legal representation, is anyone out there so naïve as to believe everyone imprisoned for a crime is really guilty of the crime?

An even more serious accusation against neoliberalism, though, holds that by concentrating wealth and power it enabled the wealthy to become more powerful than any government, because they could buy a servile political class. We have studies such as that of Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page showing that oligarchy is a better term for what emerges from neoliberal economics than democracy, because policy reflects what the wealthiest interests want, not the desires of the less moneyed.

Peter Turchin, whose book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration (2023) I discussed previously, argues compellingly that this kind of arrangement is destabilizing. First, it brings public immiseration. Its “wealth pump” (Turchin’s term for what I’ve called redistribution of wealth upward) throws previously prosperous populations to the wolves when, as noted, their increasingly meager wages can’t keep up with the cost of living. Second, it overproduces aspiring elites, i.e., well-educated professionals competing for a limited (or diminishing) number of well-salaried positions. This provokes resentment and eventual revolt by those sufficiently resourceful and well-positioned to become counter-elites, who turn against the system they tried to join or were once members of. They then work to undermine the system; if they are successful, the result threatens state breakdown.

These three factors in how neoliberal economics destabilizes societies are especially acute if there’s a sense among the “losers” that the “winners” cheated, that their gains are due not to genuine merit but skill in gaming the system.

Narrative Collapse.

Cultural Marxism had its Achilles heel. As late twentieth century philosopher Richard Rorty observed in his worthwhile book on the American left, Achieving Our Country (1999), and as we discussed in Part 3, it throws the proletariat to the wolves if they are white, male, straight, and Christian — Rorty, a man of the left, would never have put it that way, of course!

He all but predicted Donald Trump’s rise (pp. 89 – 91; see my attempt at a comprehensive discussion of Rorty’s views here). He foresaw the consequences of cultural Marxism’s neglect of real human beings with real economic struggles, as well as their struggles in the face of the disruption of their communities by mass migration.

The cultural narrative, that diversity is our strength, has now collapsed.

The economic narrative driving globalization — that it would make us all prosperous — also collapsed. It was clear not long after the turn of the millennium that it had done nothing of the sort, and would not do anything of the sort.

Together with financialization it was making the rich richer, and that was all you could say about it. That’s why we got an Occupy Wall Street, however impotent this movement turned out to be.

Finally, the warfare state narrative driving so-called American Exceptionalism — that the U.S. both can and should bring “democratic institutions” to the rest of world, at gunpoint if necessary, echoing Wilson’s call to keep things safe for the “rules-based liberal international order” — had collapsed.

Thus the rise of Donald Trump who despite being a complete outsider in the sense of never having held public office before, had surprisingly little trouble obtaining the GOP nomination.

Then he upset Hillary Clinton, whom the elites and “experts” favored. I don’t think Trump himself expected to win.

Trumpism is Not Liberal.

But Trumpism a not a restoration of classical liberalism.

I think it is a sign that secularized classical liberalism has run its course.

Trumpism is illiberal. Trump is a counter-elite in Turchin’s sense. What do we mean, illiberal? Hungary’s Viktor Orbán is also described using that term.

Illiberalism rejects the above narratives as delusional. It does not trust “experts” who peddle The Science (think: Tony Fauci, who lied about gain-of-function research enhancing the infectious nature of coronaviruses and over two years of lies and efforts to suppress the idea that the coronavirus that causes covid was leaked from the Chinese lab).

Illiberalism tries to expose how the decisions of the pseudo-meritocracy at the top are completely out of touch with the needs and desires of the general population.

It joins conservatism in favoring traditional opinions and practices, even if this means repealing supposed rights of, e.g., biological men to enter women’s locker rooms.

Illiberalism will turn to charismatic “strongmen” who say things like, “I can fix this!” if only because there seems no one else able to get the job done.

Hence the fear of “authoritarianism” by those totally unused to having their power questioned or being cast aside (as they were in 2016, and again in 2024).

Elites who favor the “rules-based international order” see it unraveling. They fear illiberalism. But truthfully, illiberalism is not the problem (and I fear that Trump is not a systematic enough thinker to have figured out what the real danger facing us is).

This danger, I will argue in my concluding Part 5, is that capitalism is evolving into — may have already evolved into — not socialism but what I’ll join Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek economist, author, and former Syriza Party finance minister, in calling technofeudalism. For an informal preview, go here.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4,

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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Have you been victimized by phishing? Find out how to avoid such scams on Steven Yates’s Substack publication Navigating the New Normal. Consider subscribing to receive content not available here.

As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

Is Liberalism Dead? (In All Forms), Part 3

By Steven Yates

March 18, 2025

Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4 ,

Secularized classical liberalism proves to be unstable. Why?

Because while homo economicus was better off materially than he’d ever been before, he struggled with deep dissatisfaction. Modern art, modern literature, modern philosophy, modern music, all reflect to some extent a degree of dissatisfaction with industrial civilization and our anonymity within it. Some (especially the young) cast about for something more, had little trouble finding it, and this made the system as a whole vulnerable to infiltration by alien ideologies. That makes probing such ideologies essential to answering: is liberalism dead?

Left “liberalism.”

Reviewing: an advancing society of homo economic calls for the disciplined restraint of personal passions, the willingness to live by rules not created by oneself, social trust that depends on such rules being honored most of the time, and respect for institutions that pass the test of time. These include marriage and family, religion, property, a work ethic.

The twentieth century tore these apart.

Its philosophers (positivists and materialists all) disdained religion as outmoded superstition. They deconstructed ethical judgments as expressions of emotion or attempts at control. They privatized morality and “scientifically” destroyed the basis for controlling sexual passions (think: Kinsey reports, soft-porn empires such as that of Hugh Hefner who was a Kinsey disciple, today’s performers such as Miley Cyrus who cavort about on stage nearly naked).

Feminists hammered the family as “oppressive to women.” Many blacks denounced the work ethic as “acting white.”

What resulted owes more to Marxian collectivism than anything coming down to us from Frederic Bastiat or John Stuart Mill. Marx opined that collectivity is our true essence and that class interests dictate our consciousness. What happened to homo economicus? He was simultaneously collectivized and privatized. We’ll explore the first of these below; the second, in Part 4.

From John Locke to Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Marx/Engels.

We should distinguish the British idea of freedom from the Continental idea of freedom. British philosopher John Locke outlined the former in his Second Treatise of Government (1690s). Paraphrasing: freedom is the freedom of the sovereign, self-owning individual to take action, acquire property, etc. Locke’s view is Cartesian. We’re blank slates (tabula rasas) at birth. What is free, owned, and acts, is one’s private autonomous intellect (explored in Part 2) which became homo economicus.

A few decades later, French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau outlined a different sense of freedom. His Social Contract found freedom in the individual subordinating his private will to the “general will” of the body politic. One who refuses can be “forced to be free.”

The “general will” is the will of the collective — a group of intellects or Cartesian homunculi somehow merged into one. Collectivism grew on the Continent even as Mill outlined secular classical liberalism in On Liberty (late 1800s).

The Hegel/Marx/Engels axis rose.

Classical Marxism: Dialectical Materialism.

This story has been told many times, so I will try to be brief. Marx and Engels held that the drivers of civilization were economic: your need to produce the means of your survival is a primary encirclement around your entire existence. Class arrangements surrounding how this happens condition your experience of the world and your consciousness.

Society is divided primarily into those who own the means of production (bourgeoisie) and those who own only their labor (proletariat). The state serves the former. Institutions such as the church rationalize these arrangements and mesmerize the proletariat into accepting their lot as God’s will. Hence Marx’s rejection of religion as “the opium of the people.”

Before Marx came German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel had distinguished lordship (Herrschaft) from bondservice (Knechtschaft). More commonly: masters and slaves.

In Marxian jargon, the former became the bourgeoisie; the latter, the proletariat.

Marx got his materialism from Ludwig Feuerbach. Materialism denies the Transcendent (i.e., God), and in Marx’s/Engel’s hands, the materialist theory of history proposed that civilizations are shaped by conflicting material (economic) interests — in which an immiserated class of Knechtschaften rises up and overthrows the Herrschaften and establishes new arrangements.

Hegelian dialectic: thesis generates antithesis, and out of the ensuing clash comes a new synthesis.

Historically: feisty incipient bourgeoisie strangled feudal lordshop and invented capitalism, based on private ownership of the means of production (given state protection in the form of property rights) and capital accumulation. The bourgeoisie would become as bad as feudal lords had been. This would immiserate the proletariat, setting the stage for violent overthrow by a proletariat vanguard.

Capitalism first must become globally dominant, so that no society escaped the bourgeoisie’s greedy clutches. It would then be overthrown in nation after nation, region after region. That proletariat vanguard would establish socialism, rooted in Continental collectivism. Lockean private ownership of the means of production would be abolished.

This process, to include subversion of capitalist states from within as well as incursions from without, would continue until socialism was universal. Since the state protected capitalist institutions, e.g., private property, and since socialism had abolished these, the state’s material raison d’être would end and it would “wither away,” leaving Communism. The End of History!*

Classical Marxism fails.

Not a single nation or region followed the Marxian trajectory. We know this. I feel embarrassed bringing it up.

Bolsheviks such as Lenin sang Marx’s/Engels’s praises but established brutal dictatorships. Under Stalin, actually existing communism murdered at least 36 million people. When communism came to China, the psychopathic Mao Zedong killed at least twice that many.

But wherever capitalism advanced (U.K, U.S.), material conditions of the proletariat improved by leaps and bounds. Many sought to join the bourgeoisie, and did so through consistent hard work, thrift, and thinking generationally (they might not make it but their children would).

All one seemed to need to succeed under capitalism was a product other homo economici (relabeled consumers) wanted and could pay for. Quite unlike Bolshevism and Maoism, no one had a gun at anyone’s head. Capitalism placed demands on people, but it didn’t mass murder them.

This was particularly true where the Christian worldview remained intact: God, family, that work ethic.

What were self-respecting Marxist “theoreticians” to do???

Cultural Marxism and “Critical Theory”; uprooting Christianity.

Seeing their worldview as wrong wasn’t an option. They were too ego-invested in it. So they reinvented it!

The Frankfurt School did the heavy lifting. Another figure to consult is Italy’s Antonio Gramsci. The former operated out of Frankfurt, Germany, at the Institute for Social Research founded in 1923. In the 1930s their efforts bore fruit. They wanted to understand why there was factionalism within leftist movements, why Bolshevism had failed to deliver Utopia, and why Germany had turned to Nazism. Being Jews, they fled their home country for the U.S. where they found academic positions in places like New York University and the New School for Social Research, also in New York City.

There, they formulated critical theory. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“Critical theory” refers to a family of theories that aim at a critique and transformation of society by integrating normative perspectives with empirically informed analysis of society’s conflicts, contradictions, and tendencies. In a narrow sense, “Critical Theory” (often denoted with capital letters) refers to the work of several generations of philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School. Beginning in the 1930s at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, it is best known for interdisciplinary research that combines philosophy and social science with the practical aim of furthering emancipation. There are separate entries on influential figures of the first generation of the Frankfurt School – Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), and Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) – and the leading figure of the second generation, Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929).

In a broader sense, there are many different strands of critical theory that have emerged as forms of reflective engagement with the emancipatory goals of various social and political movements, such as feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and postcolonial/decolonial theory. In another, third sense, “critical theory” or sometimes just “Theory” is used to refer to work by theorists associated with psychoanalysis and post-structuralism, such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida (see these separate entries as well as the entry on postmodernism).

Unglaze your eyes. Let’s see what we can sort out.

Focus first on emancipation (or emancipatory). Leftists love such terms. They are fancy words for freeing some group. In what sense?

Consider: the Frankfurt School combined philosophy and social science, and later, gave rise to “feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory….”

Recall Rousseau and the submersion of the individual consciousness into the collective, and you should get the idea.

“Emancipation” is freedom from the autonomous self from capitalism and its demands, in favor of submersion of one’s individual will into that “general will,” whose mouthpiece is that vanguard we mentioned? There was, however, a problem. A big one!

As Max Weber had shown in his major work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (early 1900s), economics is not the primary driver of capitalist civilization.

A (mostly Protestant) Christian worldview is. That work ethic yet again, automatically embraced in the marketplace.

In Marxian jargon, bourgeois class consciousness infected the proletariat. And — egads! — it was Christian!

The problem for classical Marxists was that political economy is downstream from culture.

Thus cultural Marxism: prioritizing culture over political economy and beginning that “long march through the institutions” to capture and de-Christianize the culture.

Critical theory sought ways of doing this, looking for “structures of domination” unnoticed by those immersed in them, and so in “false consciousness” made acceptable through the hypnosis of religion. Only if cultural Marxists could expose all this could they ruin capitalism.

They retained Marxian class consciousness, which saw homo economici as experiencing, thinking, acting — and voting — with class, not as autonomous selves. Emancipation occurs within group identity, freedom being voluntary subordination of self (Rousseau).

False consciousness also explained anyone in an “oppressed group” who went off message, got out of line, refused to follow the vanguard. Those infected with false consciousness had to be purged, or as we’d say today, canceled.

Christianity being the major source of false consciousness, de-Christianizing culture by marginalizing Christians was the imperative. As they marched through the institutions of arts, music, entertainment, and education at all levels, cultural Marxists furthered whatever would portray Christians as mean, ignorant, backward, dogmatic, hypocritical, evil, or stupid. Eventually they infiltrated Christian institutions themselves: seminaries.

They drew on Freudian psychoanalysis, the so-called “social gospel,” “higher criticism” of Biblical texts, evolutionary psychology, whatever else was at hand that might prove useful in discrediting the Christian worldview among thought leaders and weakening its hold over the culture even among young and impressionable Christians.

Hijacking Dr. King’s dream; from equality to equity.

Cultural Marxism had inadvertent help because of the worst blunder in America’s past: slavery.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s cultural power (in addition to personal charisma) was his appeal to a transcendent moral order rooted in the Christian worldview. He’d begun as a theologian, after all. His call to extend equal opportunity to all Americans, opposing racial discrimination, could be seen as an extension of this: an appeal to that merging of classical liberalism and Christian values.

He was not calling to turn the tables on white people. He wanted them on board, and his effort was working. Civil rights and voting rights legislation could not have been passed without the support of a lot of well-intentioned white people, a few of whom sacrificed greatly for the cause.

Cultural Marxists hijacked Dr. King’s dream in the mid-1960s.

Herbert Marcuse penned his short essay “Repressive Tolerance” (1965). Anyone who desires to know where differential treatment favoring blacks against whites (eventually women against men, and other politically-designated oppressed groups against their “oppressors”) came from, this essay is the best place to begin.

Cultural Marxism played up the idea of black Americans being behind white Americans for structural or systemic reasons, the long arm of slavery’s influence, and not just individual acts of discrimination. Thus, calls for equal opportunity, nondiscrimination, equality under the law, etc., would continue to “privilege” whites.

Freedom of speech would have the same effect.

The call for equality had to be altered, and free speech curtailed. Thus the start of political correctness, long before anyone called it that.

Thus the replacement of equality with equity in official jargon. DEI, after all, doesn’t stand for diversity, equality, and inclusion; but diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Now you know why.

Equity assumes that due to the absence of a level playing field — something that has never existed, anywhere, under any arrangements — some must be given preferential favors in the present to bring about “genuine equality” in the future.

Displaced whites? As the saying goes, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.

Collectivism by nature sacrifices some for the perceived good of the whole.

Cultural Marxists thus used the supposed legacy of slavery to widen rather than heal existing divisions between blacks and whites. They encouraged the study of this legacy in pseudosubjects like “Afro-American studies,” and used myriad other devices to encourage resentment against whites (and white guilt).

Nothing widens divisions more than the perception that some are getting government freebies at the expense of others.

Divided populations, moreover, are easier to bend to the will of those interested in power. Groups look angrily at one another instead of the power-hungry.

A turning point was the Griggs v. Duke Power Supreme Court decision (1971) which shifted the meaning of racial discrimination from actions taken by individuals to politically unacceptable outcomes.

Then came the view that if nonfavored whites criticized such moves, they were motivated by racism. “Liberals” maintained this as loudly as possible. Many still do. They also maintain that those who don’t see “systemic racism” are blinded by their “white privilege,” i.e., their collective racial (false) consciousness.

See how this works?

Gender ideology.

Arguably, classical liberalism was on life support. Its reach was limited to a few think tanks. Cultural Marxism had marched through the major educational institutions and became a dominant force among the young who had no idea of its history or what had come before

Now, something else quite interesting began to happen. Products associated with the new consciousness became marketable. Corporations, smelling money to be made, got on board.

This is why corporations embraced DEI.

For by this time, the now-prevalent mindset had been extended to women, even if statistically, by the late 1990s single career women were doing better economically than single men who were even then losing ground.

Their marching orders: don’t speak of sex, a biological category, but gender, a social construct. Judith Butler, an academic philosopher, gave this idea legs in her book Gender Trouble (1990). Similar tomes appeared in other humanities disciplines. Academic feminists described this as “third wave” feminism (the “first wave” gave women the right to vote; the “second wave” called for equal pay for equal work).

Suddenly, gender was all the rage! It spread quickly to the legal profession, journalism, and corporations.

The traditional family was out!

When another then-academic philosopher, Christina Hoff Sommers, read a paper at a normally tame academic conference in the late 1980s entitled “Feminists Against the Family” which criticized “gender feminism,” as called it, the meeting turned hostile, with taunts, catcalls, and a degeneration into near-chaos.

Sommers had gone off message. She’d displayed “false consciousness.” She had to be canceled. During ensuing years, which included publication of her book Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (1994), her life was made miserable. She finally abandoned academia and took a research position at the American Enterprise Institute, one of those think tanks, where (to the best of my knowledge) she’s remained — still writing but without significant influence. Academic philosophers ignore her work.

In the 1990s, homosexuals were pulled in. This occurred via sympathetic depictions of homosexual characters in popular nighttime sitcoms. The march through that institution changed the culture from one repulsed by homosexuality to one fascinated by it.

The fact that Christianity rejects homosexual conduct as immoral drove Christians further to the margins. Worsening the situation was the fact, mentioned above, that discerning Christians realized they couldn’t trust their own dominant institutions. Eventually homosexual “marriage” was mainstreamed by the Supreme Court in Obergefell v Hodges (2015). The mindset had succeeded in subverting American higher education and corporate media well before LGBTQ+ and woke crept into our vocabularies (2010s).

Generation Z (born 1997 to 2012) grew up never knowing anything different!

Other marching orders: despite men’s continued loss of economic ground and their descent into substance abuse, health problems, and suicide, if they grouse about their situations, speak of toxic masculinity, respond with pejoratives like misogynist, or (if they are single and unattached “dateless wonders”) insult them as incels (short for “involuntarily celibate”).

Or just tell them to “man up.”

Transgenderism, the Disappearance of Truth, and the Rise of Leftist Illiberalism.

Where was truth in any of this? There wasn’t any! Truth had been postmodernized, one might say. Recall the Law of Three Stages, or actually, Four Stages (see Part 1)? By the new millennium, more and more films and other popular culture products seemed designed to make us question all our perceptions and beliefs about what’s real (think of 1999’s The Matrix). We were in an amalgamation of Third (modernity) and Fourth Stages (postmodernity).

The apotheosis of gender ideology was transgenderism, which tries to obliterate biological sex. Transgenderism is an extension of gender as a “social construct.” What is “socially constructed” can be deconstructed.

One can then speak of gender “assigned at birth,” in accordance with it’s being something other than chromosomal reality.

Or promote biological males (“transgender females”) participating in women’s sports or entering women’s bathrooms. Or encourage children to question the “gender” they were “assigned at birth” while offering them “gender affirming care” as they “transition” using hormonal treatments, etc.

In this new world order you can be any “gender” you like, and if anyone points out your chromosomal reality, you’ve been “misgendered.”

All of this is highly illiberal, despite its association in many people’s minds with what the Democrat Party calls liberalism. (Though in fairness, even California’s arch-liberal governor Gavin Newsom is now balking.)

Classical liberalism saw the individual as the primary social unit — that Descartes-originated autonomous intellect, itself a construct, becoming homo economicus, making decisions rationally and maximizing utility.

Cultural Marxism identifies us as groups: identity politics. It distinguishes oppressor from oppressed (in alignment with the Hegelian categories). One can identify with more than one oppressed group at a time, enabling complex constructs of oppression: intersectionality, introduced by critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, during those years late 1980s – late 1990s when so much of academia went sideways.

In the cultural Marxist landscape, people don’t make decisions, act, participate in markets, or vote based on individual reason. Rationality is historical and group-situated, not objective or neutral. Treated as an objective source of truth, knowledge, know-how, and moral judgment, individual reason “privileges” the group-situation straight white Christian men (now labeled cisgender men).

Who Is this Individual Person?

I don’t recall how the conversation began. It was back in the 1990s, the decade identity politics first sank its claws into academic culture. I’d given a talk on the brand of libertarian thought I then defended. An English professor engaged me in a private conversation. What he said to me, “Yates, you’re a straight white guy. Take away your whiteness, your masculinity, your straightness, and what’s left?”

When I responded with something like, “Why would I do that? I’m just the thinking person you see standing in front of you, not a set of academic constructs,” he looked at me like I was from outer space.

My response was completely outside his conceptual framework.

There’s no such thing as even the Cartesian rational intellect, to these people, even then.

To stand against the tide of identity politics was to be in false consciousness, or be on the “wrong side of history.”

Such folks must be canceled!

As noted, the problem was that this sold in the marketplace, especially to Gen Z (and it’s no surprise that within Gen Z, a higher percentage than any previous generation identifies in some way as LGBTQ+, or “nonbinary,” or what-have-you)?

It made money. The term: woke capitalism.

This made many of the handful of remaining classical liberals shrug and say, in effect, “To each his own.”

So long as they aren’t bothering me!

Unfortunately, while this may be a good justification for leaving one’s neighbors alone, one can’t maintain a functional society on that kind of non-foundation.

At least we’re now seeing plenty of “false consciousness,” as record numbers of blacks and Hispanics voted for Trump last November. Is Trumpism a possible path back to a stable classical liberalism? Or a sign that all the narratives have collapsed, and liberalism (in all forms) really is dead?

*Marxian concepts can account for why the Soviet Union became a brutal dictatorship instead of a haven for proletarians: the Bolsheviks skipped a step in civilizational development. They tried to go directly from an agrarian-feudal economy direction into socialism, skipping the despised capitalist stage. They misgrasped Marx, who never denied that capitalism was essential. His claim was not that it couldn’t produce wealth, only that it couldn’t distribute wealth rationally or justly. It was capitalism’s inequities, immiserating the proletariat, that would lead to its downfall, a necessary step toward actual Communism.

It follows that, on Marxian terms, the Bolsheviks should have been agitating for capitalism, not socialism. Odd as this sounds. But some would come and correct this mistake.

Have you been victimized by phishing? Find out how to avoid such scams on Steven Yates’s Substack publication Navigating the New Normal. Consider subscribing to receive content not available here.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4,

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

Steven Yates is a (recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He has authored three books, two works of fiction, more than 20 articles, numerous book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment, and with an increasing number of essays addressing very fundamental issues relevant to the direction of modern philosophy refused publication in philosophical journals, he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself.

As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

How to Handle Disagreements Constructively

By Steven Yates

March 7, 2025

8 Principles

[Author’s note: obviously this is not a contribution to my “Is Liberalism Dead?” series. This article was done for Medium — link — where my readership is minimal. Since I’d like to think more readers can benefit from these suggestions, I’m offering it here and wherever else it might reach others and help them. Comments or private emails are welcome as always.]

Years ago, when I was still in academia, a senior-level professor and I got into a disagreement via snail-mail (this was the early 1990s), later by email. He began the exchange with a private response to a letter-to-the-editor I’d gotten published. Back in the day, I sent out quite a few of those. I’d guesstimate that around three quarters of them were published.

I responded, standing my ground. He replied. One thing led to another, then to another. Fortunately, the fellow wasn’t at my university. Because what ensued didn’t go well. I’ll spare you the details.

For some strange reason (maybe I’m just a packrat), I saved the correspondence in a single fat folder (maybe two inches thick!). I recently found myself thumbing through it, rereading some of his contributions and some of mine and considering what I could have said and done better. Or at least differently — more constructively.

You see, the guy had gotten some things right; and I had some things wrong. I was too pigheaded to see it. These things happen. I’d like to think I’m a bit more knowledgeable and even a bit wiser now, but who knows? There are still a few things about which my opinions are pretty strong, and when that happens, there’s always the danger of overlooking something important.

The Internet era has made disagreements more ubiquitous, and often more hostile because there is so much online space for anonymous interactions where people will spout things they’d never say to anyone’s face. I don’t think there’s any doubt that social media has divided us and made us more hostile. It’s a design flaw. Social media algorithms show users what they’ve indicated (with their ‘likes,’ etc.) they want to see. So, what they see are posts from people whose views reflect their own.

We end up in echo chambers. Views, conservative or progressive, get more extreme. Those across the political aisle don’t even seem legitimate anymore. Everyone is at risk from this.

Over the past decade or so I’ve received emails, some quite lengthy, from someone who disagrees with me about nearly everything I write (apparently he’s also emailed others whose material also appears on NewsWithViews.com, and it hasn’t gone especially well).

I’ve also had extended conversations and exchanges over Zoom with a fellow whose worldview is very different from mine. I’ve tried to pay attention to the dynamics of our exchanges. Keeping the conversation going despite frustration at times has helped me realize a few things I might not have gained clarity about otherwise.

To give credit where it is due, I got the idea for this article here. My printout of that 2021 article turned up as I went through some old papers and folders, looking for stuff I could toss as I’d not looked at it in years. This piece stuck in my mind. I found myself returning to it and taking notes on it.

The author outlined ways of managing disagreements that made sense.

Like many other things in life, having a few principles in mind before you go into sticky situations might be useful in navigating such situations effectively and constructively. It’s more than agreeing to disagree, although sometimes it is that. But what can we learn from disagreements if we listen, and try to use them creatively?

That article I linked to isolated seven principles. I’ve reordered and expanded the list to eight.

Principle (1): Remember, you don’t know everything.

Obvious, right? But a lot of people, when they put pen to paper, or fingers to email, or mouth to microphone, act like they’re omniscient.

Or when they want to disagree, it’s from that perspective.

Maybe you’ve fallen into this trap.

Start by acknowledging that you’re not omniscient. No one is.

This means there are always things to be learned from the experiences of others, and from whatever thoughts they are willing to share. If someone disagrees with you, maybe it’s because their experiences are different from yours. Maybe they have information you don’t have.

Quoting economist and prolific author Thomas Sowell: “It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.”

Self-awareness helps. Think about just how limited any one person’s experience of the world really is. Unless we’re famous and in a position of great influence which brings hopefully reliable information our way, our world is probably very, very limited, next to the world. Even the most traveled among us have still traversed small paths, inhabited small corners, as opposed to what’s out there. The paths we’ve walked, moreover, may be very different from one another.

Is Liberalism Dead (In All Forms)?, Part 2

By Steven Yates

March 4, 2025

Part 1. Recommended reading before tackling the material below. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

We’ve sketched the background of liberalism, distinguishing two forms of classical liberalism (one Christian, the other secular), and noted the Stages of civilization (in Auguste Comte’s sense) in which classical liberalism developed and began to flourish. There is a sense in which classical liberalism’s Christian form originated as a Second Stage idea, then helped enable the shift to the Third Stage as its successes focused more and more attention on this world and the possibilities of human autonomy.

One consequence is that Christian-backed classical liberalism all but died out. In Third Stage civilization, theism wanes. To the extent it doesn’t die out altogether, as it mostly has in the academic world, it becomes a marginalized societal decoration.

Lastly in Part 1, we noted the dichotomy between those who saw Third Stage modernity as liberating and exhilarating, celebrating achievements past and achievements to come, versus those who saw trouble ahead.

Arguably, the whole thing has now gone sideways. Modernity has accomplishments under its belt that no one disputes: technologies that would have been science fiction to our ancestors. Conveniences and creature comforts they couldn’t have imagined. But as persons we’ve been left isolated, filled with a sense of emptiness (paradoxical as that sounds), in a world filled with vacuous indifference to our very existence, where we risk being thrown to the wolves when we cease to be useful in the economic system (i.e., helping someone richer than we are make even more money). We may be surrounded by luxuries but still feel a sense of foreboding and even dread in our bones. Our mortality scares us; our lives simply bore us.

Some, of course, insist that these are the best times in all of human history to be alive (think of Steven Pinker, or Matt Ridley), with more prosperity, less violence, greater opportunities, and so on. But in a sense that is difficult to put our fingers on, it doesn’t feel real.

What happened?

Will a closer look at the first premises of classical liberalism help us? Let’s find out.

Homo Economicus I. Cartesian Spooks.

Go back first to Second Stage Pure Reason. To its foremost sixteenth century exponent: French mathematician, physicist and philosopher René Descartes. Pivotal figure in the history of ideas.

Troubled by fellow Frenchman Michel to Montaigne’s epistemic skepticism, and by the increasing evidence of culturally diverse worldviews revealed by the incipient Age of Discovery, Descartes sought a permanent grounding for knowledge: permanent in that once grasped, it would be seen to hold true for all peoples, all places, all times, through the sheer force of its logical necessity. (It isn’t clear to me what either man was so anxious about.)

Descartes believed he’d solved the problem with his “Cogito ergo sum.” I think, therefore I am. A phrase drummed into every philosophy student’s head. Descartes saw this as his autonomous intellect speaking, denuded of the five senses, science, God, even mathematics. His Pure Reason would quickly add these all back, but on a very different foundation: that of his autonomous intellect and its capacity, on its own, to discern eternal truth by the “natural light of reason,” he called it, or using “rules for the direction of the mind.”

Autonomous intellect, or mind, confronted the world as a homunculus: a little isle of intellect, inside a body made of something called matter (or as Descartes called it, corporeal substance) surrounded by myriad other objects also made of corporeal substance. The infamous ghost in the machine, in other words. The Cartesian spook inside our heads.

Dualism is the term philosophers use for this idea.

In Cartesian dualism was the seed of classical liberalism, which when it sprouted, transformed the homunculus into homo economicus: a private utility-maximizer, inherently subjective and rationally self-interested, a walking and speaking human calculating device participating in markets, buying and consuming, selling and profiting, looking for quid pro quos and edges — and willing to take short cuts where short cuts were findable. Bastiat would observe, centuries later, in The Law that labor is often painful or just dreary. So we try to maximize our gain with the least amount of effort, and we rationalize this if this happens at others’ expense.

Bastiat had not been the first to cast doubt on the idea that markets are always beneficent — or, more exactly, their participants would necessarily use them in beneficent ways.

In his famous Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argued not for complete laissez faire as people like Ayn Rand and Libertarians would do in another couple of centuries. He saw the necessity of an encirclement of sensible regulations around business, created and imposed by the state. Why? Because without such outside checks on their behavior, businessmen would collude, form cartels, and fix prices. They wouldn’t maintain genuine free markets.

The situation was worse, of course. Today we know how easy it has been for the superrich to compromise even this system of checks on their power with regulatory capture. But alas, we’re ahead of ourselves.

Liberalism was going sideways. Its drawback is its first premise. Understanding this is why attending to basics — first premises — is always a good idea. We’re not creatures of Pure Reason with autonomous intellects. We have emotions that are integral parts of our personalities, or as Smith’s friend and associate David Hume called them, passions. Hume had little difficulty in show that these, not reason, are the primary drivers of decision-making.

Nor, as others (Thomas Hobbes is an example) believed, are we utterly self-interested. Unless we are hermits, or are isolated, we may have had people around us we cared about so deeply that we would have given our lives for them. It is normal to care about family, friends, others in our vicinity to the extent they will permit it, unless we are narcissists or sociopaths.

Not simply to profit. Not to “feel good about ourselves.” As an end in itself.

Egoism — psychological or ethical — is simply false! Philosophers have refuted it many, many times.

Twentieth Century Storm Clouds.

Classical liberals such as Bastiat had a Christian worldview, as I’ve noted. What I’ve called The Real Great Replacement (of Christendom with materialism), a product of Third Stage thought supplanting that of the Second Stage, scissored the Christian element out of liberalism. By Mill’s time this process was nearing completion, in the intellectual centers anyway.

Mill’s utilitarian ethics again: always try to maximize the greatest good for the greatest number, where good means happiness or pleasure.

Mill had introduced Auguste Comte to the English-speaking world. He’d had Comte’s writings translated into English. His methodology is implicitly positivist: empirical science is the sole determinant of truth about reality.

Thus we can set philosophy aside. It’s major problems are solved, and it remains to use utility maximization to solve societal and technological problems. Economic liberty frees homo economicus! Political freedom leads to democratic institutions (the British monarchy had become a mere decoration, however wealthy!).

Morally: we should not harm others. Not because God had anything to say about it, but because harming others decreases utility. The same is true of freedom of speech and thought. Mill’s criticisms of censorship in On Liberty come down to its interference with the most efficient path to increases in knowledge. Even if a suppressed idea is false, we can learn from taking the trouble to refute it, and this increases epistemic utility (one might call it).

This mindset increases everyone’s prosperity and well-being.

Straightforward, right?

No need to overthink this!

We can be “positive” because the fruits of science and technique were growing by the day, month, year, decade, century. We’d discovered propulsion, electricity, oil refinement, vaccines, and more.

In the 1900s, Third Stage economizers went on to invent and build automobiles, aircraft, refrigerators, freezers, washers-driers, interstate highways, countless other electric-powered devices, and the earliest computing machines. Out of fears (based on Sputnik) that the Soviets had gained an edge, Americans redoubled their efforts at science education in the late 1950s. A decade later, we were in outer space.

To this, we attributed liberal capitalism and its freeing of the human spirit to rise as high and go as far as we were capable. Clearly, by the 1950s, America — its economy the strongest in human history — had achieved heights that were previously unimaginable.

But not all was well in paradise.

Intellectually and educationally, we had begun to drift. This is a story told many times, with many different emphases. With just a few exceptions for those whose ideas proved useful to capitalist utility, intellectualism-for-its-own-sake doesn’t really serve capitalism. Thus government schools never much encouraged intellectual curiosity outside a few well-trod paths.

But outside that rather cloistered world, it was clear that the liberty of old-school liberalism wasn’t bringing benefits equally, or allowing everyone equal opportunities.

Hence civil rights, and women’s liberation, conceivably understood as efforts to apply the same principles to everyone, especially given the dictum that “all men are created equal” updated to include women also created in God’s image (who, after all, created us “male and female”).

Overcoming racial prejudices and sex-based discrimination so that all the homo economici of whatever ethnicity could realize their potential wasn’t going to be easy.

Again, pesky passions got in the way, and there were people who would refuse to employ a perfectly qualified black man to do a job. Or woman.

The executive orders and legislation of the 1960s seemed necessary and justified to those of us who grew up and came of age back then. There were also anti-poverty programs, as we’d never truly stopped being a society of haves and have-nots. We’d increased the size of the haves by creating a thriving middle class, but this wasn’t enough for moral egalitarians.

Very real storm clouds included the war raging in Vietnam toward which a significant fraction of a generation rose up in opposition — for the first time, the effects of war were broadcast into upper and middle class family rooms via that astounding new invention, television! — and there were newer expressions of the liberal desire for maximum freedom such as the sexual revolution and psychoactive drugs.

Sometimes liberation was still seen in economic terms; but in cultural or personal terms, it was more and more “do your own thing” if, in accordance with Mill’s liberalism, you’re not harming anyone.

To some extent, as we’ll see in Part 3 (next week), we were seeing the subtle infiltration of alien ideas and policies into liberalism. But we were also living out the deep contradiction built into secular liberalism itself, keeping in mind that its goal is the total self-authorization and complete personal autonomy of the individual — a residuum of that Cartesian spook inside every person’s head.

[Author’s note: due to the pressure of other work projects Part 3 will not appear until next week. Thank you for understanding.]

Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 ,

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

_________________________

As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

Is Liberalism Dead? Part 1

By Steven Yates

February 28, 2025

“So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the West today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don’t understand how incredibly vulnerable it is.” —Niall Ferguson

What is liberalism? How did it originate?

A specter is haunting Western civilization: the specter of the demise of liberalism — completely, in all forms. What is, or perhaps was, liberalism? What made it attractive. What seemed to make it successful? What has undermined its apparent success? What replaces it? These are themes I wish to explore in this series.

The terms liberal and liberalism have more than one meaning, obviously. To some, liberalism just means what the Democratic Party has been promoting for the past 60-odd years, although I’ve the sense that most liberals in that sense would rather be called progressives today. That’s an indication that the word is somewhat sullied. We’ll see that liberalism in this sense is a misnomer, in any event: “liberals” in that sense aren’t really liberal at all as the idea was once conceived.

Once, long ago, there was classical liberalism, associated with nineteenth century economic thinkers like Frederic Bastiat (author of The Law, Economic Sophisms, etc.) and nineteenth century philosophers like John Stuart Mill (who penned the seminal tracts On Liberty and Utilitarianism).

Classical liberalism promoted free (though not necessarily unregulated!) markets and maximal personal autonomy, still bound by rules against doing harm. Bastiat’s classical liberalism was embedded in a Christian worldview. Law was of God, who created a universe of order — natural law. This encompassed both nature and humanity. Different rules emerged for us because we have free will.

But in general, we either learn and apply the rules governing the world, including the human world, or they automatically work against us. Certain ways of arranging societies are objectively better than others. They get results that sustain us long term. Liberty, as Bastiat saw things, fits the bill. Arrangements that are out of accord with nature, and human nature, fail — sometimes spectacularly. Bastiat criticized socialism as a guarantor of poverty, as it crushed everything that makes it possible for us to climb out of poverty and flourish.

Human flourishing seemed to be the basic goal of an advancing civilization.

To achieve this, the classicals came to champion free speech, the right to practice one’s faith, freedom of assembly, and a right to petition the authorities. They also defended the right to own property, to confront your accuser(s) if charged with a crime (habeas corpus), the right to a fair trial by a jury of one’s peers, and so on. Some of these dated back to the Magna Carta of 1215.

Mill’s worldview and ethics were secular: liberty was good not because it accorded with God’s law or “natural law” but because it promoted utility and the greatest good for the greatest number. Good meant happiness or pleasure. Mill’s ‘greatest happiness principle’ held that actions are right to the extent they increase overall happiness / pleasure and wrong to the extent they do the reverse.

This seemed to suffice for the British Empire which, at the time, spanned the globe.

America’s founders had built their national ideals around constitutionalism with its origins in British political thinking as expressed in such documents as the English Bill of Rights. For liberty were needed clear limitations on government, a division of its powers into separate branches able to check and balance one another, and a further division between the federal government and state governments: federalism, America’s unique contribution to political philosophy.

America’s founders did not speak with a single voice on what worldview to endorse. Some of their statements are explicitly Christian; others, less so; some not at all. What is clear: none trusted concentrations of power. Liberty could only thrive if centralized power could be constrained, and they tried to build mechanisms that could be invoked to constrain it if it ever failed to constrain itself.

Many observers would judge this experiment — it was that, after all — to have failed. Hence the idea of the slow, agonizing death of liberalism.

Let’s look at some additional background. This may be tedious. But I don’t think we can understand what’s gone wrong if we don’t take a substantial look at civilizational development and its overall trajectory.

Auguste Comte’s Law of Three Stages and Liberalism’s Emergence.

I’ve elsewhere (see also here) recounted Auguste Comte’s Law of Three Stages, which I’ve augmented by describing postmodernity as a Fourth Stage Comte couldn’t have anticipated. He also calls them states or conditions. Out of a desire for consistence I will stay with Stages.

Reviewing:

The First Stage is “theological and fictitious.” In Comte’s view the First Stage developed from the idea of multiple gods or other supernatural agencies to that of a single supreme being such as Christianity’s God. According to First Stage thought, ultimate knowledge is revealed by this God and has no other reliable source.

In First Stage cultures, there is almost no room for intellectual dissent or autonomous economic activity. “God said it; I believe it; that settles it.” “Your feudal existence is God’s plan for your life, peasant. Accept it.”

For centuries the dominant political institution was the monarchy. The king ruled an agrarian order by divine right. We’re born in sin. The Church told people how to find salvation from sin’s consequences.

The Second Stage is “metaphysical and abstract.” Philosophy thrives in Second Stage environments. While it need not reject God or revelation, the Second Stage presumption is that Pure Reason can discern truth on its own if we use it well.

Philosophers from Plato and Aristotle through Augustine of Hippo, Aquinas, down through Descartes to Kant and Hegel, all developed variations on this theme. Some tried to prove that God must exist. Aquinas thought God had left us “two books”: Scripture and the “revelation” of nature, God’s visible works. This opened the possibility of learning about the Creator by studying the Creation. This made the assumption that since God created us in His image, beings of finite and time-bound rationality as opposed to His infinite and eternal Logos, the universe is intelligible to us. We’ll get some things wrong, but we can use our reason to correct whatever misinterpretations are rooted in direct sense experience.

This notion, percolating through ensuing generations of scholars, seems the most likely impetus for the scientific revolution. We would not have been motivated to do science if we did not think the world is comprehensible. Nor would we have undergone the process of thought that led to the overthrow of the divine right of kings and the idea of personal liberty based on natural law, which was God-given. But the quest for scientific explanations snowballed, and soon it questioned the necessity of a “God postulate.” Materialism appeared.

The Third Stage: “scientific and positive.” Science jettisons Pure Reason, if conceived as able to discern truth independently of experience, and goes empiricist: knowledge is based on sense experience corrected by fallible reason. Science’s unique, self-correcting method becomes the sole arbiter of truth as we test hypotheses about the world, or some part of it, step by step.

Since neither God nor any other transcendent agency could be shown to exist by such means, or the claims of any religion tested, Third Stage thinkers relegated them to history’s dustbin. Their philosophical proofs all devastatingly criticized, Christian thinkers seemed left with weak and unconvincing arguments like Pascal’s Wager, or oddities such as Kierkegaard’s “leap.”

Or just blind, subjective faith.

Naturalistic materialism denies the existence of any transcendent reality, be it God or any other such agency. There is nothing outside this world of space and time, or this life which ends with inevitable death seen as the extinction of one’s personality.

The intellectual world then divided into two loose camps.

The first saw rising modernity as liberating. It drew impetus from essays like Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?” (early 1800s). Its counsel: focus on this world, not some other, and how we can use scientific discoveries, emerging technologies, and improved societal arrangements, so that as many people as possible may live materially better. Freed from the sense of divine wrath awaiting us as punishment for sin, modernized humans could take charge of their lives and societies.

Classical liberals clearly felt at home in this kind of intellectual environment.

The second camp sensed profound loss and grew uneasy. Its authors warned of danger in a world liberated from the transcendent and a divine source for rightness. Think of Dostoevsky’s Ivan in Brothers observing that “If God is dead, everything is permitted.”

These became the earliest forebears of Fourth Stage thinking: “anxious, negative; eventually postmodern and cynical” (my descriptions, to parallel Comte’s of earlier Stages). Drawing variously on Darwin, Marx, Wundt, Nietzsche, Freud, and others, Fourth Stage thinking would plant doubt that we ever transcend history, situatedness, class interests, or ethnicity.

In that sense, Fourth Stage thinking challenges the idea of scientific objectivity, since if human consciousness never escapes historicity, then neither does science — “human, all too human,” like any other endeavor.

Fourth Stage thinking also challenges classical liberalism, because classical liberalism surely depends on such notions. It depends on the idea that we make free choices whether in morality, markets, or both at once.

We need a deeper look at what classical liberalism presupposed, where it was vulnerable, and what the amalgamation of Third and Fourth Stage thought that emerged largely spontaneously in Western industrial civilization presaged, implicitly if not explicitly. We’ll get that in Part 2. And then: what came along to replace it. We’ll consider this in Part 3. Not to worry, we’ll also get to where Trump and Musk fit in here.

Part 1, Part 2,

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

_________________________

Have you been victimized by phishing? Find out how to avoid such scams on Steven Yates’s Substack publication Navigating the New Normal. Consider subscribing to receive content not available here.

As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

What I’m About, Where I’m Going … 2025 Edition

By Steven Yates

January 31, 2025

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.” —attributed to Winston Churchill

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” —Viktor Frankl

“People think focus means saying Yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying No to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. [Success] is saying ‘No’ to 1,000 things.” —Steve Jobs

“Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.” —Nathaniel Hawthorne

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” —Pericles

Every year, early in the year, I try to explain to readers — especially new readers — where I’m coming from. You can read the best version of last year’s edition here. It might be useful to have a look at that before reading this. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

For those forging ahead, I isolated five principles that formed the core values where I’ve been hoping to have some level of impact:

(1) Truth matters.
(2) Freedom matters.
(3) Human connections matter.
(4) The shortness of life matters.
(5) Focus matters.

There’s a core value behind these: the intrinsic value of all human lives. I’ll discuss this at the end.

Expanding on the five: (1) We’re better off knowing what is true than believing falsehoods, to the extent we can know hat is true (it isn’t necessarily easy!). Acting, or designing policy, based on untruth is a path toward grief. But teaching or preaching truth must be qualified. Truth doesn’t necessarily make us happy. As the saying goes, it doesn’t care about our feelings. Still, a lot of people aren’t ready for unpleasant truths. They have a hard time accepting that they’ve been lied to their entire lives. So, it can be useful to go slow and dispense what truth one believes one has in doses. While always testing it. Keeping in mind: future findings or events can always correct present mistakes. One might firmly believe one has the truth and be wrong.

(2) It’s a common adage that most people don’t want to be free. Not really. What they want is safety. They’ll choose safety over freedom every time if given the choice. That said, those who consciously want to be free have to exercise it responsibility. Over the past year I’ve been working toward a concept and practice of responsible freedom. Its principles include: recognize the choices you have; do others no harm; recognize that you’re not God.

(3) Atomization, which I wrote about last year, not only remains a problem but may be worse than it was a year ago. What is bad about atomization is that we weren’t designed for it. We are social beings, starting with familial interaction and going outwards. Atomization is made worse by a social media ecosphere which limits much of our sensory input to screens and presents us with pseudo-connections while siloing us into echo chambers. We’re here to solve actual problems, for ourselves and for others — cooperatively — not fake problems presented by video games. I’m convinced that atomization, enhanced by social media, is a contributing factor to the upsurge of mental illness we’ve seen in recent years. So how do we forge connections? Start with those around you physically, build trust through consistent positive behaviors while avoiding negativity. Get others talking about their lives. Then be patient.

(4) and (5) are the ones I wish to emphasize in the year ahead:

(4) None of us is getting any younger, and we all waste a lot more time than we care to admit. As I observed last year, we are our habits. New Year’s resolutions usually fail. There’s a reason for this: saying something is one thing. Having the systems that will ensure follow-through is another. The first is easy. The second is much, much harder. We’re all works in progress (even yours truly).

And so: (5) Focus. There’s more noise out there than ever before, and so the battle to control your attention has never been fiercer, nor more important. You can try to focus on all the stuff that comes your way, in which case your life will consist of reactions and probably be filled with frustration and anxiety. Or you can choose to focus on just a few things, based on your best idea of leaving a legacy.

What will your legacy be? It doesn’t have to be something that made you famous. A way to approach this is to ask, What would you like to have read, as a eulogy, at your funeral?

For most people, this is an acutely uncomfortable question. I get it. Even most Christians are uneasy with death, as only one Person has ever claimed He came back. But the question can be asked constructively, as a means of reflecting on how we’re spending the days we have and whether we’re doing something constructive or throwing away time we can’t get back — ever.

It’s up to us. We all have a potential legacy. We have to identify, nurture, and grow it to maturity. Most legacies aren’t publicly visible. That’s not the point. The point is to touch others, and leave the corner of the world where you lived a little better than when you found it.

So what will you be remembered for, gentle reader? Will you have founded a business that solves a problem, and in so doing, serves others while earning you a comfortable living? Will you have been a wise and good parent to your children, so that they grow into responsible adults (not having been neglectful, but not “helicoptering,” either)? Will you have been a good husband, or wife; or son, or daughter to your elderly parents when their time comes? Or a good employee or coworker?

All this is legacy material.

As I inch into my late 60s I’ve been thinking about such questions a lot lately. One of the results has been an education-focused project, which I’ve been sketching on paper, little by little. I’ve not settled on a name for it yet. Since there’s a lot in a name, it’s something to be chosen with great care, something able to draw in interested clients.

Nor have I decided quite how I will present it to the world — or even if I’m the right person to do it and ought instead to hand off my idea to someone more extroverted and talented at marketing than I am. I’m not exactly sitting on the millions of dollars that would be very useful in getting the word out about such an endeavor.

I do know that whatever develops will attempt to unite Christianity with what is best in Stoicism. Stoicism was the leading secular philosophy in ancient Rome when Christianity was just emerging. I’ve made one attempt here, to show Stoicism’s relevance to the world we live in today and outline the possibility of its alignment with a Christian worldview.

The Christian worldview as I picture it tells us that God exists; the world is ordered because He created and ordered it; it is intelligible because He created us in His image, able to use our senses and reason to apprehend the world in our finite, limited fashion.

Stoicism sees a Logos, the Greek word from which we derive logic, logistics, etc. Stoicism may have little to say about the existence of a personal God, but it does speak of the “physics” of the world whole and the “logic” of our best thinking about how the world works.

Christianity could be thought of as taking a Big Picture approach to the world and to life … starting with metaphysical postulates (“God exists”) and working downward to our individual situations and lives. A variant on the Big Picture approach looks at civilization as a whole and tries to discern its trajectory, structure, key institutions, and the problems societies as a whole must face if their members wish them to continue. I’ve done this rather frequently.

Stoicism works in the opposite direction, beginning with persons and their situations in the world, and working upward, or outward. It counsels us, as persons, to focus our time and energy on what we can control. It observes, with Viktor Frankl above, that there is always that space in time between an event and our response to the event, and in that is freedom.

Stoicism is often seen as cold and emotionless. That misgrasps the philosophy. It is about controlling our emotions because these are among the things we can control. Stoicism counsels recognizing the shortness of life — that our days walking this Earth are numbered — with an eye not to fearing the end of our lives but motivating us to make the best use of the days we have.

It is, finally, the perfect philosophy for fundamentally repressive societies. It doesn’t counsel mere conformity with repressive structures, or systems. But it does discourage rash, irrational actions likely to be counterproductive — as opposed to patient investigations to find out what the truth about a situation is, who to communicate this to, and how to go about pursuing what change might be possible.

It thus is no more Utopian than Christianity is — insofar as this world goes.

While Christianity regards us as sinners in need of Jesus Christ’s power of salvation, Stoicism sees us as works in progress, capable of sufficient self-improvement that we can learn this world’s, or a civilization’s, systems well enough to survive and possibly even thrive in them. Or escape the latter and live on the margins. The choice is ours. Note that we own the consequences.

Neither Christianity nor Stoicism permits us to sit on our duffs. Both invite us to ask if we are using to their fullest the gifts that we’ve been given, whatever those gifts may be.

The Apostle Paul discusses spiritual gifts at length in I Corinthians 12:4f.:

There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are differences in ministries, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of activities, but it is the same God who works in all. But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to each one for the profit of all. For to one is given the word of wisdom through the Spirit, to another the word of knowledge through the same Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophescy, to another discerning of spirits, to another different kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. But one and the same Spirit works all these things distributing to each one individually as He wills.

Paul’s ensuing discussion draws a detailed analogy between the human body and the Church (the body of Christ), noting how the different parts of the body work together, all of them useful, none of them designed to reject any of the others. And that if one suffers, the rest suffer.

How does this apply today?

Some of us are extroverts gifted with people. Others are introverts with a greater aptitude for ideas. Likewise the differences between men and women, which enables us to reflect again on what is wrong with “gender ideology” and the attempt to obliterate the distinction between the sexes. That most men have greater upper-body strength then most women is clear; most men are probably better at abstract reasoning than most women. But there are things women are better at than men. They are better nurturers, and are probably more empathetic than men. They are probably superior at adopting what some call emotional intelligence than men.

To ignore these clear, biologically-grounded differences doesn’t do either sex any favors.

I doubt I’ll be teaching “introductory courses” on these matters, of course. At least not to those who just walked in the door. I’ll be far more interested in helping them with pain points regarding health and personal finance — two areas where a lot of people need all the help they can get!

I’ll be emphasizing facing important truths, because to not tell someone an important, immediately helpful truth is to devalue him or her. This brings us to intrinsic value, the core of education for those whose role in this world matters (because they have responsibilities and a legacy to leave); encouraging them to use the skills they have, or that can be drawn out of them (etymologically, the word education comes from the Latin educere, “to draw out”), through leadership, of their potential, so they can be successful problem solvers. Solving problems is among the most important things we are here for.

This project will eventually take all of the time and energy I can pour into it.

Besides, I’ve heard the adage that God laughs at our plans!

But surely there is room to help fill, in some small way, the gaping hold that the de facto collapse of existing educational institutions has left in its wake.

I’m writing about it here so that anyone who cares can hold me accountable and call me onto the carpet if, by this time next year, I’ve only sat on my duff regardless of what God has done.

This will mean less time spent writing articles, though. Leaving article-writing aside will free my time for other things: learning, making new contacts, preparing. The future comes, and it is better to have prepared for it than not.

I keep coming back to the shortness of life. This makes me increasingly less patient with things I’ve written about dozens of times but keep seeing, whether in articles or in personal emails.

I fear I’m increasingly impatient with those who don’t “get” something. Here’s an informal list of what tests my patience these days. Some I’ve written about at length; others not so much. If I sermonized on them all, important tasks wouldn’t get done. So here we go:

Anyone who goes on and on about “conspiracy theories” as a category, as if all are the same.
Anyone who can’t distinguish intelligent conspiracy claims (e.g., “the coronavirus was made in a lab through gain-of-function research”) from stupid ones (“the Earth is flat, and the entire scientific community has been hiding this for going on 500 years”).
Anyone who tells me Jesus Christ never really existed; or if he did, he was just a “good man and teacher.”
Any Evangelical who believes he/she is going to be “raptured” off this Earth (in accordance with the Darby-Scofield-dispensationalist heresy and its misreading of Matt. 24 and I Thess. 4:13–5:4).
Anyone proposing to treat children as if they were miniature adults and adults as if they were big children, not realizing that the most likely result is unruly children and childish adults. (I think Thomas Szasz beat me to this one.)
Anyone who trusts government numbers about job creation, inflation, and unemployment. (The first, after all, is always)
Anyone who thinks the economy is “booming” or in great shape because the Dow is over 40,000.
Anyone who goes on and on about the “deadly insurrection” of January 6, 2021 and still says Trump was responsible.
Anyone who goes on about the “convicted felon.”
Anyone who says Trump is a Russian agent, or babbles about “Russian disinformation” or “Russian propaganda.”
Anyone who still thinks Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.”
Anyone who says Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked.”
Anyone promoting “gender ideology” holding that there are more than two “genders.”
Anyone whose words imply they believe Israel can do no wrong and sees “antisemitism” as a priority problem.
Anyone who says “the Jews” are behind it all. There are much deeper layers of the onion.
Anyone who sees misinformation as a priority problem.
Anyone who uses the words or phrases systemic racism, patriarchy, misogyny, toxic masculinity, homophobia, transphobia, etc., as if anyone who denies these is a bigot.
Anyone who uses the phrase white privilege for people struggling to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table, while praying for no health or car emergencies.
Anyone who thinks being preoccupied with the rise of the billionaire class, and of a state of affairs in which the top .1 percent controls more wealth than the bottom 50 percent, is some kind of closet communist, or Marxist.
Anyone who attributes the rise of the first to a free-market meritocracy.
Anyone who still thinks socialism is a bigger threat nowadays than techno-feudalism.
Anyone who uses the word authoritarian or protofascist for foreign leaders (or domestic ones, for that matter) who place their countries and peoples first, deny globalism, and have reined in the cultural left in their societies (example: Hungary’s Viktor Orbán).
Anyone who thinks populism (undefined) is a mere product of xenophobia (undefined) and leads to dangerous “right wing extremism.”
Anyone who believes Big Pharma has something to do with public health.
Anyone who believes leviathan food corporations care about healthy eating.
Anyone who believes social media corporations have our best interests at heart.
Anyone who believes the move towards a subscriptions-based economy is good for us.
Anyone who believes AI is going to save us, as opposed to throwing tens of millions more people out of work and causing history’s next big wave of technological unemployment.
Anyone who thinks online writing makes money (though a few are making a killing designing courses or building subscription-based communities persuading buyers that they can make six figures writing online).
Anyone to whom I’ve made an offer to solve a problem, using writing or something else, responding to a public advertisement, who can’t be bothered to reply; they get a follow-up a week later, and if that receives no response I’m done, as I don’t cooperate with the rude and unprofessional.
Anyone who comes to me with a problem they want my help solving but doesn’t want to pay me for my time.

I think that will do it for this year. See you around.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

_________________________

Steven Yates’s Substack publication is called Navigating the New Normal. You’ll find commentary there that isn’t available here. While more and more of the Internet is disappearing behind paywalls, NtNN is still free. Consider subscribing, as that is how the Substack algorithm “knows” I exist.

As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

Leftist Narratives Have Collapsed!

By Steven Yates

January 24, 2025

Donald Trump is back! During his Inauguration ceremony he made it clear as crystal: the Bidenista era is over!

What’s also over is the credibility of the cultural left. There’s nothing … well … left! Its narratives have collapsed!

Left wing Democrats — in government, in “legacy” media, in corporations — did everything in their power to try to stop Trump’s return to the Oval Office! They pursued four criminal cases and a civil case against him. They defamed him. They tried to invoke the Insurrection Clause in the Sixteenth Amendment to keep him off state ballots. They threw an enormous sum of money into his opponent’s war chest.

All for naught!

Only one of the criminal cases, the one over hush money payments to the porn star, landed any blows. But few outside the leftist ecosphere bought the transforming of bookkeeping mistakes into felonies at the behest of a leftist prosecutor who’d run for the office on his open desire to “get Trump.”

Corporate media regaled audiences daily about the (nonexistent) “progress” of the other cases. They’ve now been dropped. Jack Smith crawled off like a scolded puppy, tail between his legs.

The civil case, E. Jean Carroll’s accusation of sexual assault, was based on the flimsiest evidence imaginable and would probably have been thrown out of court had its target been anyone else.

Leftists treat the infamous Hollywood Access Tape as evidence Trump thinks sexual assault is okay. That’s defamatory! Taken in context, all he was saying is that it is very easy for a male celebrity to find someone to have sex with, that he could get away with nearly anything because women practically threw themselves at him.

Over 75.5 million voters shrugged it all off. They’ve learned what lawfare looks and sounds like. They were unimpressed by repeated mantras by Democrat judges, Democrat-controlled courts, and Democrat-dominated corporate media, that Trump was facing the “rule of law.”

Moneyed interests threw over a billion dollars at Kamala Harris. Wasted. Voters weren’t going to put Sleepy Joe’s DEI (“Didn’t Earn It”) VP in the White House, although she did get an alarming 72.4 million official votes.

Trump was portrayed as a “threat to democracy” by people who (1) relied on specious legal reasoning trying to remove him from the ballot when he was the clear favorite of opposition voters, and (2) whose own candidate had never won a single primary vote. This, too, wasn’t lost on anyone.

* * *

In the meantime, Democrats and their corporate media allies spent four years trying to cover up Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. They gaslit the public about what we could see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears: a president whose speech was often slurred, never took questions which called for extemporaneous responses, had to be led on and off stage, who at least once tried to shake hands with someone who wasn’t there, and once claimed to have “just spoken with” a foreign leader (France’s Mitterand) who died years ago.

Then Sleepy Joe fell apart in front of tens of millions of viewers trying to debate Trump.

He belligerently tried to hang on. Dementia sufferers often go into denial. Having had a parent who succumbed to dementia, I can spot it a mile away. I tried to tell anyone who would listen back in 2020 that Sleepy Joe was in cognitive decline. Finally, his own people had to tell him, “You’re done.”

The irony is, given the sheer intensity of their efforts to destroy Trump’s reputation and ruin his life, Democrats might have had a chance to win had they not indulged Sleepy Joe for as long as they did in his belief (which he apparently still holds!) that he could have defeated Trump and served four more years.

When Kamala was given the opportunity to differentiate her ideas and proposals from his, asked what she’d do differently, the best she could stammer went something like, “I can’t think of a thing.” I suppose it’s worth noting that she said something intelligible for a change.

* * *

Leftists clearly consider themselves smarter than us ordinary mortals. They’ll say (as one of their number on MSNBC said the other day) that Trump and his billionaire cronies (meaning: Elon Musk) have “duped” America.

That’s to say, they “duped” the more than 75.5 million voters who cast ballots for Trump.

In my experience (which includes watching them up close in academia for years), cultural leftists excel at two things. (1) They can look facts in the face and deny that they exist. Like Sleepy Joe’s cognitive decline. (2) They can make up “facts” out of whole cloth and tell us it’s real. Like Kamala’s qualifications to be president.

It has become increasingly evident, moreover, that the cultural left has put forth some truly idiotic ideas over the past few years. These ideas have been helped by the collapse of education in America, its transformation into a branch of the left wing ecosphere. Coming to mind first: that men can “transition” into women, and women into men, through “gender affirming care” including hormone treatments, and that such procedures ought to be made available to grade school children.

According to these people, you can be any “gender” you like! They seem to have dozens of “genders”!

“Transgenders” — not just adults, but teenagers and kids — have come out of the walls!

Back in the late 1990s, I took a two-year public health education curriculum and received an MPH. I never once heard the word transgender, neither from faculty nor fellow students. Given how that department stressed sex ed, had the idea been kicking around back then, I’m positive I would have encountered it.

Gender dysphoria is real, though not exactly common. Once, not terribly long ago, it was seen as a disorder and treated, not given affirmative action protections which, if you criticized, you could lose your job.

Trump has restored sanity with a single executive order, declaring that henceforth, the U.S. federal government will “recognize two sexes, male and female,” noting how “gender ideology” has nothing to do with biological reality. The fact that so many people now use the term gender when they mean sex indicates how deeply cultural leftism now permeates American life.

* * *

Multiple other failures and lies came back to haunt the previous dumpster-fire administration.

Lies about what happened on January 6, 2021: it was not an “insurrection”; Trump did not order anyone to enter the Capital, just to march to the Capital (he used the phrase “legacy” media always omits: peacefully and patriotically). No leftists shrieks or howl will alter this. One of Trump’s first actions was to pardon those in prison or who now have criminal records because they entered the Capitol that day.

It’s true that a few (under 10 percent) engaged in vandalism or got violent with police. I’d have looked at individual cases before granting a blanket pardon (JD Vance had suggested this) … but Trump’s bypassing this is surely no worse than Sleepy Joe (or, more likely, his handlers) pardoning his son after saying he wouldn’t, and then giving “preemptive pardons” to other family members, Mark Milley, Liz Cheney, Anthony Fauci, and others.

Indeed, while Trump pardoned 1,550 people and ordered cases against 900 more dismissed, Sleepy Joe had given last-minute pardons to over 8,000 — in some cases, to criminals far more violent than any Jan-6er!

America’s southern border: we barely need to look at the mess that developed, which Trump is also going to try to clean up. That was also Kamala’s doing, as Sleepy Joe (or, more likely, his handlers) had delegated that responsibility to her.

Maybe Trump exaggerates the level of criminality here, although Laken Riley’s family wouldn’t agree. But there are procedures for immigrating to the U.S. legally and working in the U.S. legally, just as there are for entering the country legally. Why is this so difficult for leftists to understand?

Foreign policy disasters: as much as has been written about Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, I think we can ask whether he would have undertaken it had he sensed there would be competent opposition from the Asylum on the Potomac.

Would Hamas have done what they did on October 7, 2023; or Israel undertaken its brutal retaliation in Gaza which has killed far more people than Hamas did, had both parties not realized that leadership in the West was diminished to near-nonexistence?

Lies about the economy: I continue to read how Biden left us an “economic boom.” First of all, politicians don’t create “economic booms.” They can, at best, create conditions for economic betterment, but the worst inflation since the 1970s wasn’t going to accomplish that. Because second, no one in his right mind believes the economy is “booming” when at least half of the population is struggling to afford groceries, healthcare, and the roof over their heads. Homelessness, as I’ve observed elsewhere, hit a record high last year because rentals and housing prices have skyrocketed and continue to rise.

“It’s in the numbers!” bleat the corporate media zombies.

It has become clear, the Dow has completely decoupled from the real economy, the one in which you and I buy our groceries. The point-zero-one percenters now control more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the U.S. population. Leftists used to care about such things, but guess what? If the present breed of leftist has any realistic plans to change this, to improve the world the bottom 50 percent of the U.S. population has to live in, he/she/they are sure guarding their secrets!

Official government numbers (inflation, unemployment, etc.) just aren’t believed by many people anymore, now that they realize how much they’ve been lied to.

“Legacy” corporate media, left-of-center for decades, is in a shambles. Their viewership in freefall, MSNBC and CNN are being forced into layoffs. People are turning to X, Epoch Times, Breitbart.com, Substack publications, NewsWithViews.com, and other nontraditional platforms for truthful commentary.

* * *

That the cultural left lives in an alternative reality is something it continues to confirm all by itself, without any help from conservatives.

Consider Elon Musk’s purported “Nazi salute”: the first left-wing outburst of the new Trump era (it took less than 24 hours!).

As John Nolte explained on Breitbart, that’s not what happened. I’ll hand him the mike:

What Musk did was not at all confusing to decent people. Speaking to a crowd of Trump supporters Monday at the Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., he said, “I just want to say thank you for making it happen. Thank you.” Then he touches his heart and makes a gesture throwing his heart out to the crowd. Then he literally says, “Thank you. My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured, thanks to you.” CNN just lost a defamation suit and here are a couple of CNN’s basement-ratings harpies defaming Elon Musk by removing all of the context from the moment — and by “context” I mean the audio where he says, “My heart goes out to you.” Without the only context that matters, of course, it looks like a Nazi salute….

Normal People understand the difference between “Sieg Heil!” and “My heart goes out to you.”

Not even the Anti-Defamation League is convinced it was a Nazi salute!

This hasn’t stopped academic lefties like New York University’s Ruth Ben-Ghiat, of that school’s history department, who opined: “Historian of fascism here. It was a Nazi salute, and a very belligerent one, too!”

Nor did it stop AOC from following up: “In this country, we hate Nazis!”

Alternative reality!

Trump may have won, but this mindset still dominates American academia, much “legacy” media, and much of pop culture. It’s going to take much more than a mere political victory to dislodge it. “Legacy” media may well be finished before too much longer, but since Trump can’t simply waltz onto campuses and fire tenured faculty members, I’ve been saying for some time now that we need new “parallel” institutions … a lot of them! (Any potential donors out there? We’re not talking about something that can be done on a shoestring budget!)

Incidentally, the situation overseas, in Europe, isn’t much better for the left.

Over and over, we’ve read (in Establishment publications like The Guardian) about the rise of “authoritarianism,” “right wing extremists” and “populist” parties in European countries: Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Romania, and elsewhere.

What all these parties have in common is putting their own people first, as opposed to the open borders mindset of European Union political-corporate globalists who have turned a deaf ear to both the economic and cultural wasteland open migration has brought about.

All this means is that cultural leftist narratives have collapsed there as well.

* * *

Diversity, contrary to one of these, is not our strength! Not when it’s imposed involuntarily, willy nilly, on entire societies. What remains of democracy in the West still allows people to exercise what clout they still have in voting booths, and more and more, they support alternatives to political-corporate elites. Since the latter control the largest media, you’re not going to hear about these efforts if you don’t seek them out. They’re not on the 6 pm news.

Trump has moved to end DEI at the federal level. Corporations, moreover, are backing out of it. It doesn’t work! It gave Harvard a Claudine Gay! It’s allowed many colleges and universities to fill up with people who turn their classrooms into launching pads for left wing political activism, and who yell bloody murder if a conservative tries to do this. None of these people have done a thing to … say … help the black community in their cities. White women have reaped the lion’s share of the benefits. They’ve never had life better! And a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, right? This mindset has driven down the number of men pursuing higher education. Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), refusing to date or otherwise be involved with women, or working for women, has now become a national movement, balancing the radical feminist 4B Movement.

This division between the sexes, as I’ve noted previously, is not healthy for a civilization where birthrates were already falling. The cultural left has done this.

* * *

As I’ve noted in the past, once, long ago, there was a left many of us grew up with and even aligned with on a few things. That left rejected racial discrimination, paying women less than men for the same work, and the Vietnam War as moral wrongs. That left worried about economic inequality and seemed, at the time, genuinely concerned to bring about a more peaceful, just, and humane world. Did it get everything right? No, of course not. But it had considerably more credibility and moral authority than anything left-of-center today.

A major turning point, I was arguing as far back as the 1990s (no one paid attention), was the left-leaning Warren Burger Supreme Court’s decision in Griggs v. Duke Power (1971) which shifted the meaning of discrimination from an action taken by individuals to lack of politically acceptable outcomes, or ratios. This shift in meaning crept into academic culture and from there into media and politics. It is behind the replacement of equality with equity. This is the reason we saw discrimination against white men … and eventually, in the new century, open attacks on “whiteness” and on “toxic masculinity.”

That genuine efforts to see women and minorities of merit given a fair shake were replaced by this sort of thing has not been lost on the more discerning of the latter, which is why a record number of blacks and Latinos voted for Trump in all three elections in which he has been a lead candidate.

That earlier left is dead, in America at least.

Now, it’s successor is dying, as Trump openly proclaims (again, handing over the mike):

We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based. This week I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.

He was referring to DEI, of course. His efforts are already getting pushback from the cultural lefties on platforms like HuffPo, aggregated by “legacy” outlets. Also getting pushback is his call to end birthright citizenship (a longstanding perverse incentive for illegal immigrants to have kids in the U.S.). Leftist legal eagles have already begun filing lawsuits against the new administration.

The long and short of it: even though Trump 2.0 is now in office we’re in for a wild ride, because although the cultural left’s narratives may have collapsed, no one thinks these people are going to go down without a fight. When they don’t get their way, I would not rule out their becoming violent.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

_________________________

As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

15 Predictions for 2025

By Steven Yates

January 4, 2025

“The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.” —Paul Valéry

Since numerous writers I read regularly are offering predictions for the upcoming year, I thought I’d offer a few of mine. In the past I’ve shied away from this sort of thing — because, after all, “it’s tough to make predictions. Especially about the future” (Yogi Berra, renowned philosopher and late catcher for the New York Yankees).

But after thinking about it, making predictions shouldn’t be all that hard. After all, there’s nothing special about this particular position of our planet in its course around the sun. Designating a particular day as “New Year’s Day” is totally conventional.

What we can be sure of: human nature will be the same this year as it was last year. People will still try to get as much as they can, with the least possible effort. Most will continue to coast through life. They will still respond to incentives or “nudges,” except for that small minority that figures out the incentive structure encircling them and ignores, escapes, or thwarts it. Such people might actually develop free minds.

With that as background, here are 15 predictions for 2025. We’ll check in at the start of next year, to see how many came true. That’s assuming I’m still walking above ground on this planet and still writing pieces like this.

The growing divide, the “MAGA civil war,” between billionaire technocrats (Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy) and less-moneyed populists (Steve Bannon, Laura Loomer), latent all along, will widen until it fractures the movement. Nothing surprising here: it isn’t just that billionaires and less-moneyed populists aren’t likely to be on the same page, though that’s true. Rather, if there’s anything Republicans excel at, it’s shooting their own feet off. The controversy bespeaks a dark truth: America’s schools aren’t cultivating a mindset likely to produce legitimate scientists and engineers (as Ramaswamy’s controversial tweet pointed out). Naturally those who want to hire such people will go overseas to find them, and will try to bring them into the U.S. legally. American universities won’t produce them as long as they remain left wing indoctrination mills that repel men who have always been more likely than women to study physical science and computer engineering.
Trump will not annex Canada, nor purchase Greenland, nor take back the Panama Canal. The negative repercussions would far outweigh any (scanty) benefits.
He will, however, face difficulties from the get-go with parts of his agenda, such as deporting 15 million illegals. For starters, immigrants, legal or illegal, don’t mind working for peanuts while Americans want livable wages. They’re profitable for corporations, therefore — the other side of (1) above. Corporations will therefore fight Trump on this as much as woke leftists. Trump’s effort will face the added problem that those to be deported must go somewhere, and where that somewhere is, is unclear. Their homelands? At whose expense? No one thinks the affected countries, all of them eyeball-deep in their own problems, will foot the bill!
Leftist frustration risks exploding into violence at almost any time. I’m predicting there will be at least one more assassination attempt against Trump this year. It will fail. An angry “anti-racist” or some other leftist will be taken into custody.
Violence in schools, workplaces, streets, subways, will continue. Mental illness will be factor in some cases; terrorism in others (it only took a little over three hours for the first violent attack of 2025 to take place). The liberal-left will continue to act as if they really believe guns get up and go off by themselves. They will lament the availability of guns, although guns have always been available while they violence we’ve been seeing is of more recent vintage. No one, not even most conservatives, will attend to fundamentals, such as exactly what is producing shoot shooters, why their families are dysfunctional, what pharmaceuticals they’ve been put on, or why Americans’ mental health is in freefall with suicide rates climbing, especially among men. The braver of them may point to militant feminism. They won’t point to an atomizing neoliberal political economy which reduces the value of everything, including human beings, to a marketplace price tag.

Nor will they look at American foreign policy. Even Trump is a committed Zionist.

Speaking of which: those drawing attention to such facts as children in Gaza being traumatized due to Israeli war crimes will continue to be denounced as antisemitic. Many on the right will continue to lump those who won’t shut up about Gaza in with campus wokesters. The latter will play their role because Palestinians are, well, an ethnic minority. They are, aren’t they?
Leftists being slow learners, they will remain locked into identity politics with all four claws. Hence the country will remain divided: men versus women, blacks versus whites, native born Americans versus immigrants, etc. Higher education will continue to offer a smorgasbord of pseudo-subjects taught by pseudo-intellectuals.
Inflation will continue even if is “coming down,” e.g., prices not rising quite as fast as they were a year ago. Government numbers will remain as skewed and misleading as ever. Homelessness in 2025 will surpass 2024’s record high. If Trump follows through with his threats to impose tariffs on imports and corporate predators are allowed to pass the cost on to consumers causing more price inflation, he will get the blame.
The billionaire class will continue getting richer, fueling resentment across the political divide. The Dow is already completely decoupled from the real economy.
Guys like me urging primary prevention in health education will continue being invisible, meaning that obesity, chronic illnesses, myriad other avoidable ailments will continue unchanged. This will go on as long as such conditions remain profitable. Junk food and hyperprocessed foods will continue to fill grocery stores as long as they remain profitable, and consumers can’t be bothered to get informed.
Another healthcare CEO or some other bigwig will be gunned down in a street somewhere between now and the end of March. This person will also be lionized on social media as was Luigi Mangione, despite gasps of horror from pundits and Establishment writers and podcasters. CEOs, especially those atop corporate healthcare leviathans, will hire private security, which will accompany them everywhere they go, 24/7.
Sadly, people on my side of the aisle in some areas will keep going down false rabbit trails, e.g., this. Jack’s Substack takes a perfectly sound idea — responsible freedom — and runs off a cliff with it, this time into “parentarchy,” the idea that parents are little dictators over children, that this is an illicit exercise of authority (because in Jack’s view all authority is illicit), and that no one has previously noticed.

The idea has structural similarities to militant feminist “patriarchy” and critical race theory’s “systemic racism,” in its unstated starting assumption that we’re fundamentally the same — even children! — homunculi of a sort whose ideal state is autonomous reason, sufficient to make us our own authority.

Authority relationships thus reduce to the familiar “oppressor” versus “oppressed” dichotomy, the bane of academic wokeness. It saddens me profoundly to see a good idea (responsible freedom) encircled by a worldview in which it doesn’t fit, and then fall into something that in practice would only further the unraveling of families (flesh and blood human beings in unique situations, not interchangeable units of pure intellect). Jack ignores the actual sources of our problems: godless materialism as a worldview and neoliberal political-economics (see 5 again or go here and scroll to the section on “The Coming of the Neoliberal Era”; for more on parent-child go here.)

There will be more and more people who opt out of everything. Their numbers may be larger than anyone knows. They won’t be wasting time posting on social media. Hence they’ll be all but invisible. They won’t care. They won’t want to hear from any of us: right, left, somewhere in the middle, or off this spectrum entirely. They will be busy tending gardens, trading healthy foodstuffs locally, building things, educating their children to do the same or to pursue trades, and probably praying that the idiots in the cities don’t blow everything up. There are such people now. Some of them do product how-to podcasts. By the end of 2025, I think there will be more of them. This might be difficult to verify but I shall try.
The Everything Bubble will continue to expand. Eventually it will pop. I’ve learned the hard way not to try and put this on a timetable. Although a consumer-debt-based political economy cannot defy financial gravity forever, those profiting from it doubtless learned plenty from the 2008 meltdown and will milk their cash cows for as long as they possibly can before the plug gets pulled.
The Rapture will not occur. In this one, I have complete confidence.

That’s all I could come up with in the 24 hours I gave myself to write this. I’m sure I omitted a few issues. Readers who think of more may feel free to go here and share in the comments.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

_________________________

Steven Yates’s Substack site is called Navigating the New Normal. You’ll find content there that isn’t available here. While more and more of the Internet is disappearing behind paywalls, NtNN is still free. Consider subscribing, as that is how the Substack algorithm knows I exist.

As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

Three Existential Threats to the West at the End of 2024, Part 4

By Steven Yates

December 27, 2024

This is the worst of the three threats. Reader Discretion Advised…

[Author’s note I: the opinions expressed here are my own, and should not be attributed to the NewsWithViews.com editorial staff or any other NewsWithViews.com writers.]

[Author’s note II: due both to the approach of Christmas and family issues outside my control, this will be my final article of 2024. I am grateful to my subscribers, and any others who find their way onto this site and see benefit to what I am doing.]

Praying that all my readers will have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Note to Readers….

As this piece developed, I realized I did not want to publish it, especially this close to Christmas. Parts of it were giving me nightmares. I’d promised four parts, however. Plus: one of my core values is telling the truth to the best of my ability. No one ever said that the truth would make us happy. All of which militates in favor of publishing this, so here we go.

Nuclear War? The Ultimate Existential Threat to Civilization.

Once, eons ago, there was a serious antiwar movement on the left. There were conspiratorial suspicions on the right that it was controlled by the communists. Be that as it may, that left is deader than a doornail. Present-day cultural leftists are more interested in pronouns, protecting the “right” to kill unborn children, and demonizing Trump (or his appointees).

The upper echelons of the present-day left answer to corporate leviathans. The fact that over a billion flowed into Kamala Harris’s coffers following her endorsement by “Joe Biden” testifies to this.

Since these upper echelons include “legacy” corporate media (CNN, MSNBC, PBS, CBS, etc., etc.), we can’t expect anything truthful about, e.g., the Russia-Ukraine War: from eight years of events leading up to the hot war, to who is presently winning.

Hint: Putin’s special military operation of February 22, 2022, was not “unprovoked”; nor is Ukraine “winning.”

Now, as I noted in Part 1, missiles have been fired — endorsed by the U.S./NATO axis. Putin has threatened repeatedly that such recklessness could lead to a nuclear exchange.

Author and investigative reporter Annie Jacobsen has written what may be the most important book ever on just what a nuclear war would look like: Nuclear War: A Scenario (2024).

If Turchin’s book has the most intellectual depth of anything published during the 2020s so far, Jacobsen’s is definitely the most frightening. It relies on dozens of interviews with scientists, engineers, past defense department officials, and others associated with nuclear weapons design and testing — a few of whom deeply regretted their involvement with something able to kill millions of people in less than a minute.

To say that nuclear war would be horrific doesn’t even begin to cover it!!

First, it’s common knowledge that today’s nukes make what was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like cherry bombs by comparison!

What we have today would be civilization-ending! It would make the dangers discussed in preceding sections academic! It would trivialize any debate on whatever is happening with the climate! That’s all there is to it!

We have a moral obligation to make sure the scenario to follow never happens!

The Scenario.

Were a single one-megaton nuclear weapon to strike a major city, it would create a fireball over a mile across in a matter of a few seconds. Everything inside that mile would be incinerated by temperatures magnitudes hotter than the interior of the sun (think: 180 million degrees at ground zero!).

A blast wave of superheated compressed air would surge outward at hundreds of miles per hour and level every structure for another three miles in every direction. The intense heat would shatter concrete structures, melt windows and asphalt streets, and ignite vehicles’ gas tanks. Megafires would rage as tankers bearing combustible substances exploded like lesser bombs.

Everything within 100 square miles or so would be destroyed. This would happen in under thirty seconds. A few parking garages and other underground structures might survive outside a ten-mile radius, but with the power out and generators fried, anyone who chanced to be in them would be in total darkness and quickly suffocate when the air became unbreathable.

The fireball would rise to a height of around three miles. A weird wind reversal would take place on the ground, as smoke and soot and debris were pulled in and upward inside a column as the iconic mushroom cloud began to form and darken the sky.

According to Jacobsen, millions would die in minutes. Those within the reach of the initial fireball would be instantly vaporized without regard to race, ethnicity, sex, age, “gender” identity, class status, national origin, or ideological belief. Those outside the immediate blast radius would die horribly (but quickly), clothing ignited and their flesh burned off in seconds (this science fiction sequence is not improbable — discretion advised!!), or struck or impaled by objects (chunks of masonry, parts of vehicles, shards of glass) flying at supersonic speeds. Those five, ten, fifteen miles out would suffer less severe but still third degree burns, now more from unquenchable megafires than the initial blast, and die less quickly!

Anyone who chanced to look at the fireball, even from a distance of fifteen miles, would be blinded. Its extreme brightness would fry their retinas.

Now imagine this scenario multiplied fifty to a hundred times, however many nukes struck U.S. soil (the same things would be happening in Russia, North Korea, China, or any other country that had allowed itself to be drawn into the war).

Plumes of smoke and ash would rise miles into the atmosphere from every blast point, mushroom clouds thirty to forty miles across would consist of pulverized objects … and human remains reduced to carbon.

Those far enough out to avoid the intense heat and fires, and not be crushed by collapsed buildings or struck and killed by flying debris, would die of radiation poisoning acquired from fallout filled with radioisotopes released into the air. Depending on their degree of exposure, during a period of time ranging from a few hours to a few days their hair would begin falling out; they would experience extreme nausea, begin vomiting blood, have uncontrollable diarrhea; lesions would form on their skin like blisters and burst; severe internal pain would set in as their internal organs disintegrated. Jacobsen’s description is horrifying. Radiation poisoning is about as horrible a death as you can imagine.

There would be no medical help for anyone. Hospitals would be destroyed. Every communications channel would be down, so no 9-1-1. Those who survived this long, however badly burned or injured or suffering from radiation sickness, would be on their own.

There are underground facilities in Cheyenne, Wy., Omaha, Neb., and beneath the Pentagon. If Jacobsen could learn of them, you can guarantee that Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un know about them. There are missile siloes in the hinterlands. “Flyover country” would not be spared from attack, nor from deadly fallout.

Survivors would envy the dead. Jacobsen quotes the late Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev who clearly understood this as he and President John F. Kennedy agreed to the standdown that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis back in 1961. Even then, our arsenal had around 20,000 nukes; the Soviet Union had a smaller but no less deadly number, when a single nuke hitting a major city would kill ten million people.

The Aftermath. Nuclear Winter.

Those sufficiently far into the wilderness to avoid dying in the first 24 hours would still be at risk of contracting leukemia, a product either of exposure to low-grade radiation in airborne particles or from having ingested irradiated food. This could show up anywhere from a few months to five years, again depending on degree of exposure to remaining radioisotopes with half-lives of years (e.g., strontium-90, caesium-157).

Survivors would have lost everything including loved ones. Most would quickly be sick and malnourished. They would die like animals, many of them alone and terrified, and while Jacobsen doesn’t mention it (that I recall), I would not rule out cannibalism by those sufficiently demoralized, desperate for food, and ruthless.

(Another book to read, if you can handle it, as it is strongly suggestive of taking place during a nuclear winter, is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.)

Temperatures would have begun to drop. They would go down 27 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Thus would begin nuclear winter, as around 50 million tons of ash and soot blanketed the planet and blocked out sunlight, especially in the northern hemisphere. Many inland regions would experience unbroken subfreezing temperatures for a period long enough to entomb every body of fresh water under a thick sheet of ice. Coastal regions, too, would be solidly iced in.

While there is disagreement about how long nuclear winter would last, Jacobsen cites scientists suggesting that it could take as long as ten years for the atmosphere to begin to heal itself. That would be long enough to destroy remaining food-growing capacity except in a few southern hemispheric countries like New Zealand and Australia, or in South America (Chile, Argentina, Paraguay).

Is this why some of “our” corporate elites are quietly having underground bunkers built in the first of these?

In the aftermath of an all-out nuclear exchange, there would be large swaths of land with no edible food, no uncontaminated water, no heat. Corpses of animals and humans would be everywhere. Insects largely impervious to radiation and previously kept in check by natural enemies now extinct or almost extinct would breed out of control.

Yes, a nuclear war would be an ELE (extinction-level event).

Jacobsen contends, based on her scientific and technical sources, that in the long run at least 5 billion people would be dead. Those not killed by radiation or by the cold temperatures would starve to death.

Gradually, nuclear winter would dissipate. The sun would return, but remaining survivors would face a new problem. The many firestorms would have released mass amounts of nitrous oxides into the air. These would filter up to the stratosphere and reach the ozone layer, with which they would react chemically and destroy as much as 75 percent of its shielding power against the sun’s ultraviolet radiation.

People would have to go underground.

Some bunkers are designed to sustain small groups potentially for years. Superelites able to ride out a nuclear winter in such facilities had better pray to whatever God they believe in that they weren’t discovered by those above ground, and that they still had ammo. Above-ground survivors, some still dying of leukemia or cancer, others rendered sterile due to chromosomal damage, a few able to give birth to children born with grotesque deformities, wouldn’t mess around. Anyone capable might figure he had nothing to lose by killing the elites where they stood and occupying their facilities.

Speaking of God….

I know Christians who believe God wouldn’t allow a scenario as awful as this to happen, that He would intervene directly to stop it.

Maybe He would. But—

Does anyone know this?

Matthew 4:7; Luke 4:12: “ … You shall not test the Lord your God.”

There are passages in Revelation (e.g., Rev. 8) strongly suggestive of a nuclear exchange.

Are many Evangelicals “testing the Lord [their] God,” thinking they will be raptured away before something like this could happen, so they aren’t as motivated as any non-Christian to speak up?

I wouldn’t count on God saving us from the consequences of our leaders’ stupidity, or our own if we are stupid enough not to do whatever it takes to prevent this!

The Day After.

Many of us probably remember the 1983 made-for-TV film The Day After. With brutal realism, this film depicted a fictional nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and its aftermath.

Over 100 million Americans watched that movie. (Attack scene here; again, viewer discretion advised!!)

I was one of them, then in my 20s, doing graduate work. That movie scared the crap out of me. I gathered that was the intent.

Reagan saw it. He’d been a nuclear weapons hawk. Not after seeing The Day After. He sought a meeting with then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: the Reykjavik Summit happened in 1986, in neutral Iceland. Whatever their differences — the summit was only partly successful — they agreed that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

Deterrence was already the philosophy behind nuclear proliferation. Supposedly, the fact that “we” have nukes and “they” have nukes prevents either of us from using them. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)!

Annie Jacobsen’s motivating question, was: what if deterrence for some reason fails?

I’ve often thought that a nuclear war would only happen if the global ruling elite class believed it was losing control with no possibility of recovery. One of their controlled minions in the political class would then be the first to push those buttons.

Consider: their covid power grab arguably failed. There are more of us aware of them and what they’ve done to the world than ever before.

A CBDC gambit (discussed in Part 3) would have no guarantee of succeeding if enough people rejected it and opted out, whatever the price.

It is important to realize that despite their immense resources, the globalists are not omnipotent. They don’t control everything.

They’re not God, however much they want to transcend their humanity!

They could not prevent, e.g., a rogue figure from an unstable Middle Eastern nation detonating a nuke in a major city, something that could easily escalate.

Computer Error. Should We Be Worried About AI?

Nor could the globalists prevent a computer error, such as the one back in 1983 that “saw” four nuclear missiles on their way to the Soviet Union from the U.S.

Soviet official Stanislav Petrov, doubtless paralyzed with fear, refused to believe what his instruments were telling him, and yes, it turned out to be a false alarm.

That was our closest call to date!

Now think of how the use of artificial intelligence (AI) is proliferating, how more and more decisions are handed to something that, as I noted in an earlier segment, isn’t human, isn’t sentient, isn’t intelligent, despite the hype. AI simulates certain aspects of human intelligence, and its recursive programming enables it to “learn” within those limits.

It won’t become Skynet (the computerized villain of the Terminator films) or come to control the Matrix.

AI may not be conscious, but its controllers and those who stand to profit handsomely from its use certainly are. What AI is most likely to do is put several hundred thousand more people out of work before the end of the 2020s, because AI demands neither pay nor time off nor any other inconvenience associated with human workers.

But never mind that here. How prone might an AI be to interpreting as real an erroneous signal that North Korea has launched, unannounced, a nuclear-tipped missile against the U.S.?

Or misreading some natural atmospheric phenomenon, which is what happened in the 1983 case?

We can’t know in advance, and that’s just the problem!

Summations.

Summing up Part 4 of this series:

Once, as I said, long ago, there was an antiwar movement on the left.

That movement is dead.

The task has fallen to “right wing” counter-elite podcasters like Tucker Carlson and a few counter-elite author/journalists like Paul Craig Roberts — and investigators like Annie Jacobsen — to outline how a nuclear war might start and how it would unfold, in all its graphic violence and intensity.

There are still people who will declare this to be communist propaganda. Others will say these figures are exaggerating and that I’ve fallen for it hook, line, and sinker.

Do you really want to take that chance?

Read the book (Annie Jacobsen’s)!

Sadly, most people will never see this. My readership remains discouragingly small.

What will it take? We’ve reached the point in our society where the only way of getting people to put down their phones and pay attention is to hit them over the head with something they can’t ignore!

Neither Putin nor the Bidenistas will take the use of nukes off the table. At least they announce nuclear tests in advance to each other, to minimize the danger of a civilization-ending mistake. This realization transcends all their other differences.

North Korea conducts nuclear tests unannounced. Arguably, Kim Jong-Un is the least mentally stable foreign leader who has nukes.

Which may be why Annie Jacobsen chose North Korea as most likely to initiate the hypothetical attack that in her scenario ends civilization.

Joe Biden has had dementia for the past four years, leaving us wondering who has really been running the Executive Branch of the U.S. government! The Bidenistas are on their way out, after four years of demonizing Trump and trying to destroy him.

One hopes that whoever is still in charge isn’t insane enough to pull some kind of stunt at the last possible minute!

To save democracy, of course!

Whatever else, this is a deadlier threat than economic inequality, or indebtedness, which will exact their consequences over time. Nuclear war would exact its consequences in a matter of seconds and minutes. Most of us would be equally dead, and our debts resolved when we came face to face with the Almighty (whom I doubt would be in the best of moods!).

This is a deadlier threat than man-made climate change, even assuming that’s real and not another hoax perpetuated in the name of The Science. We’d go from global warming based on computer models and hockey sticks to a sustained multiyear winter in the real, physical world: a veritable ice age that would reduce the small fraction of the human race that survived to hunter-gatherer status, if even that.

Annie Jacobsen compares nuclear war to the event many geologists believe killed the dinosaurs: an asteroid a few miles across hitting the Earth somewhere on what is now the Yucatan peninsula, in Mexico.

An asteroid, she says, is not something we could do anything about.

This, we can do something about!

Let’s revive that antiwar sentiment … and ensure that it isn’t steeped in an ideology of the left or the right, but in our common humanity and the intrinsic value of every person on this Earth!

Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4,

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

_________________________

As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

Three Existential Threats to Civilization at the End of 2024, Part 3

By Steven Yates

December 24, 2024

Public debt collapses economies and could presage the near-future’s biggest power grab.

Author’s note (I): although the opinions and conclusions expressed here are research-based, they are my own and should not be attributed to the NewsWithViews.com editorial staff or any other NewsWithViews.com writers.

Author’s note (II): due both to the approach of Christmas and family issues outside my control, this article, now to be delivered in four parts, will be my final work of 2024. I am grateful to my subscribers, and any others who find their way onto this site and see benefit to what I am doing.

Praying that all my readers will have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Part 1, Part 2.

Nick Giambruno’s Account of the Existential Threat of Public Indebtedness.

A week or so ago Doug Casey’s daily International Man newsletter featured Nick Giambruno’s account of the dangers of public indebtedness based on a history of how debt cripples civilizations. Many of Giambruno’s observations dovetail nicely with Peter Turchin’s.

Here’s the pattern (I’ve paraphrased and elaborated somewhat, mainly to integrate these observations with previous sections):

Stage 1: Societies achieve success, typically because they solved problems associated with both economic development and community stability, with all that these involve, including a stable, reliably-backed currency.

They then grow expansionist, overconfident, complacent. They turn into empires.

Stage 2: Expansionism, overconfidence, and complacency lead to extravagant expenditures on domestic luxuries and foreign incursions that turn into wars when others do not want their ways of life disrupted and dominated.

Stage 3: Empires finance all this by going into debt. Eventually they abolish backing on their currency (e.g., the U.S. empire scrapping the gold standard). The superelite and elite classes are already living beyond their means. Their economy begins to overproduce everything (not just aspiring elites). The peasants must buy what the economy produces, or it crashes. The pundit class thus encourages peasants to spend on credit and go into debt, also living beyond their means which has become a structural requirement of an economy that is overproducing. Thus:

Stage 4: Debt accumulates and becomes a burden as interest on the debt begins to build.

Stage 5: Empires have a choice of financing debt through taxation, or currency debasement, or some combination of both. (Peasants don’t have such options, of course.)

Stage 6: If raising taxes is a political liability, the population still bears the brunt of debt repayment through currency debasement, which destroys the currency’s purchasing power: inflation, which is just more debased currency chasing goods and services. Inflation, combined with stagnant wages, immiserates the previously prosperous public. Over time this leads to civil unrest, individual acts of violence, and increasing instability.

Simultaneously the empire’s military adventures grow increasingly irrational and unfocused. (Examples: Iraq in the 2000s, our proxy war against Russia in Ukraine 2010s, 2020s.)

By this time, the pundit class, serving the increased integration of state and corporate power, is desperately trying to hide from the peasants just how much trouble the empire is in — presenting, e.g., doctored economic statistics and misleading accounts of what is happening on various war fronts.

Those with the means have begun fleeing for greener pastures.

Stage 7: Soon, the debt burden prevents the empire from financing both its military and its domestic obligations, especially with interest on the debt accumulating. This becomes the tipping point.

Stage 8: Underfunded militaries plus loss of trust in institutions make empires vulnerable to domestic strife and possible civil war, or foreign invasion.

Stage 9: The empire collapses, often to a smaller and less complex political unit in the manner of Joseph A. Taintor’s The Collapse of Complex Societies; but what sometimes results is invasion, and sometimes dissolution.

These sorts of things brought down the Roman Empire, Imperial Spain, pre-Revolutionary France, the Ottomans, the British Empire, and others.

Now it’s our turn.

At $36.2 trillion, the U.S. has the biggest national debt the world has ever seen! The debt is rising exponentially and uncontrollably. The official figure does not include Social Security and Medicare obligations.

Giambruno observes that “annualized interest on the federal debt exceeded $1 trillion for the first time in 2024…. The cost is already higher than the defense budget and is on track to exceed Social Security and become the biggest item in the federal budget.”

He cites historian Niall Ferguson:

“Any great power that spends more on debt service (interest payments on the national debt) than on defense will not stay great for very long.”

The U.S., argues Giambruno, is presently between Stages 6 and 7, nearing the point at which crushing debt will make it hard to keep financing military spending.

Present-day public immiseration in those outside the privileged top 10 percent is nearing a breaking point with inflation rendering the combination of housing costs, utilities, healthcare, and groceries increasingly unaffordable — especially for those also making car payments, servicing student loan debt, etc.

And when pundits say “inflation is coming down,” all they are really saying is that prices are rising at a slightly lesser rate than they were a few months ago. Another verbal deception.

The Bidenistas sent hundreds of millions to Ukraine! No one in his right mind can think this rational, since no one in his right mind thinks Ukraine can ultimately outlast the far larger, more advanced, and better equipped Russian army.

This is money literally being thrown down a bottomless well!

Ideally, Trump will negotiate a peace settlement (which will make him even more unpopular with the warmongers than he is now). This won’t end the need for a strong national defense. It won’t stay strong for very long if the federal government can’t fund it.

Paraphrasing Giambruno again: the U.S. federal government will face a choice. It can either (1) make deep cuts in defense spending amid the most chaotic geopolitical period since the second world war; or (2) default on its promises regarding Social Security, Medicare, Veterans benefits, etc.

Either would be political suicide for whoever is in the White House when these two collide.

Consider, too, that the need for Social Security and Medicare payouts will increase as tens of millions more Boomers (around 22 percent of the population) try to retire.

The warmongers won’t allow military spending to be cut.

Result: more money created out of thin air, more currency debasement.

Governments tend always to take the path of least resistance based on desperate, range-of-the-moment thinking.

Further consequence: more and increasingly debilitating waves of inflation! Which in the absence of equivalent higher wages, will mean more people living in tents, cars, under bridges!

This will mean more crime and more physical as well as mental illness, as more and more people see no way out and are unable to cope! Expect the suicide rate to climb.

Also expect more multimillionaire or billionaire CEOs to be assassinated if they can be located by the few who refuse to go quietly into the night. Just sayin’.

And if the right leader appears and organizes the have-nots… Imagine a much younger Trumpian figure — someone with all of Trump’s charisma, but none of Trump’s weaknesses, such as his chronic lack of focus. (J.D. Vance, four years from now?)

Will we see a new Storming of the Bastille in America by 2030?

Here is where authors like David Rogers Webb might chime in. (Commentary here.)

The superelite, who never let a good crisis go to waste, may try solve the currency debasement problem in one fell swoop by introducing central bank digital currency (CBDC).

Their Big Promise will be that early adopters will be able to buy food and stay housed.

The price tag of cooperation will be an end to their control over “their” money, their privacy, their basic freedoms, as CBDCs are programmable. They can be designed not to work outside a certain radius from one’s home if one hasn’t gotten permission to travel. They can be programmed not to work after a given date, precluding saving.

Dissidents will face simply having “their” money turned off, and if cash has been criminalized, they will be unable to buy food.

The peasants in this techno-feudal order will indeed own nothing, have no privacy, but be happy, in the manner of World Economic Forum globalists.

Questioning peasants and counter-elites are figuring this out, and CBDCs are being resisted all over the world including in the U.S.

Counter-elite “populism” continues to rise, exemplified by the “far right” figures and parties all over Europe: Hungary, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Poland, Romania, elsewhere.

More and more of us did not buy, do not buy, their narratives about, e.g., covid.

I see no reason to think the superelite globalists will give up this fight of the century. They want to offer us peasants a stark choice: “global governance” (i.e., de facto world government), or starvation!

They are, however, running out of time!

Bottom line: they can’t change the laws of nature. The laws at the center of attention here: unless they are God (they aren’t!!), they cannot create genuine wealth out of nothing, any more than they could create matter or energy out of nothing. And neither a ruling class nor those ruled over can live beyond their means indefinitely.

And you can only push people so far before you get revolt of various sorts, be it an organization of “alternative” political movements or “wild card” rogue personalities who take direct action as did Luigi Mangione.

On a very guardedly positive note, I just read that many people are making paying down and getting out of debt a priority item for 2025. It’s always a good idea to get out of debt. But it may be too little, too late, and won’t affect the larger system. Neoliberal pundits will point out that getting out of debt means less frivolous spending on “stuff” and contend, not unreasonably given the systems put in place over the years, that less consumer spending hurts the economy. So how did we get into the predicament in which what benefits individuals and families hurts the economy as a system, and what benefits the economy as a system (if it really does) harms individuals and families?

A debt-caused collapse of the neoliberal, Anglo led “rules-based world order” will presage an even more unstable multipolar world. Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, etc., are already preparing, asking themselves regarding the U.S., “Why start a war when your enemy’s debt burden is already leading them to defeat?”

No, it seems more likely that the Anglo axis will be the one to start the really destructive war that could end it all. Or, with more and more AI being used in place of human labor because it is infinitely cheaper, a computer error could do the job.

Part 4 in a couple more days.

Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4 ,

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

_________________________

Steven Yates’s Substack site is entitled Navigating the New Normal, where you will find ideas and content not available here. Consider subscribing.

As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

Three Existential Threats to Civilization at the End of 2024, Part 2

By Steven Yates

December 20, 2024

Public immiseration and the path to violence; thwarted aspiring elites and dissidents become counter-elites; the danger of the narrative war is state breakdown.

[Author’s note (I): although the opinions and conclusions expressed here are research-based, they are my own and should not be attributed to the NewsWithViews.com editorial staff or any other NewsWithViews.com writers.]

Author’s note (II): due both to the approach of Christmas and family issues outside my control, this article, now expanded so as to require four parts, will be my final work of 2024. I am grateful to my subscribers, and any others who find their way onto this site and see benefit to what I am doing.

Praying that all my readers will have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The Luigi Mangione Saga.

Somewhere in our account of Peter Turchin’s public immiseration there needs to be a brief account of Luigi Mangione, 26, accused of first degree murder of United HealthCare’s CEO Brian Thompson, 50, in New York City on December 4.

Since details of this case are all over mainstream media, I’ll go straight to what makes it worth our attention here: his 3-page “manifesto” expressing what corporate media euphemistically described as “ill will towards corporate America,” how responses to the Thompson shooting across social media reveal the depth of resentment against the health insurance industry (another of the most lucrative in the country), and whether this shooting exemplifies looming instability brought about by economic inequality combined with the sense that the haves are cheating.

What Mangione’s “manifesto” said (this is the most quoted passage): “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.”

The document goes on to note that the U.S. has the most expensive healthcare in the world but is #42 in life expectancy (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation).

Regarding social media commentary, I archived the following:

“Thoughts and deductibles to the family. Unfortunately my condolences are out-of-network.”

“Sympathy denied. Greed is considered a pre-existing condition.”

“My only question is did the CEO of United Healthcare die quickly or over several months waiting to find out if his insurance would cover his treatment for the fatal gunshot wound?”

“Today, we mourn the death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, gunned down…. Wait, I’m sorry — today we mourn the deaths of the 68,000 Americans who die needlessly each year so that insurance company execs like Brian Thompson can become multimillionaires.”

In fairness, we also saw comments like this one:

“The seemingly widespread online celebration of the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO makes me feel despair for humanity. I get that healthcare is broken, but these reactions are truly sick.”

Like everything else, the cost of health care in the U.S. has skyrocketed. Premiums and deductibles have skyrocketed. Emergencies, and nasty after-the-fact discoveries that a given procedure wasn’t covered, are now a leading cause of bankruptcy.

People are suffering and sometimes dying from treatable conditions because treatments that would save them are refused coverage. Frustration is rampant among those trying to navigate the thickets of jargon and impenetrable corporate bureaucracy and find out if a given procedure is covered.

Whether anyone likes it or not, this plays into the hands of the Luigi Mangiones who decide to take matters into their own hands. This is why he’s become something of a folk hero in the social media ecosphere.

Among the details that have emerged: he had a condition called spondylolisthesis, characterized by a vertebra in one’s spinal column slipping forward and pressing against the spine. Symptoms can include numbness and chronic lower back pain spreading to thighs that gets worse when standing or walking for long periods.

Mangione looks to have hurt his back in a surfing accident while in Hawaii and had surgery for it. I have no details on whether he filed a claim and was denied, but this wouldn’t surprise me. He’d posted something suggestive on Reddit:

When my spondy went bad on me last year it was completely devastating as a young athletic person. Seemingly all I could read on the Internet was that I was destined to chronic pain and a desk job for the rest of my life. That representation was terrifying, inaccurate, and completely destroyed me until I realized the silent majority of fusions are highly successful.

But is the procedure covered?

Repeating: does this case, and the reaction to it, exemplify the increasing rage felt against the haves in a Second Gilded Age, especially when the haves’ systems are borderline dysfunctional?

But wait a minute. Mangione comes from a prominent Maryland family and was far from poor. His crime was carefully planned, as was his escape from New York City. These bespeak of intelligence, as do his Ivy League computer engineering degrees.

When recognized in Pennsylvania from online surveillance, however, he still had the illegal gun with him, fake IDs, the “manifesto,” and a notebook which outlined his plans for the crime.

He wanted to be caught, to get validation as a man with a mission.

It’s bothersome that the only convincing commentary I’ve seen on this is coming from the liberal-left. Liberal pundit Briahna Joy Gray told British journalist Piers Morgan, re the kinds of comments was saw above:

Luigi is just a vessel through which people are expressing their deep frustrations with the American healthcare system…. So the question is, if you don’t want murders like this to be happening — assassinations to be happening like this in the street — I’m someone who does not believe in the death penalty and don’t condone these kinds of vigilante instances of violence in either case … you have to get to the root of why there is this deep well of tragedy, despair, and outrage in the United States of America.

Morgan was dismissive, demanding to know if she really felt “joy” at the assassination of a man with a wife and two teenage sons — not an unreasonable response but doesn’t go to the heart of the matter.

The issue is how healthcare is to be paid for, during an era of rising costs and stagnate wages, with the superrich clearly getting richer by working the systems they’ve built during the neoliberal era. United Healthcare is facing a class action lawsuit over antitrust violations and using AI-powered algorithms to decide claims. In this writer’s humble opinion, the latter exemplifies something worse than cheating: immorally reducing lives to “decisions” made by something nonliving, not conscious, and not intelligent despite the hype.

The motivations for using AI instead of human workers in this context are simple: AI doesn’t ask to be paid! That means higher profits!

Will any of the heated discussion lead to reforms in an industry that clearly does place profits ahead of lives, livelihoods, and human well-being?

Time will tell.

An Aside: Primary Prevention and Public Health.

What would fix our broken healthcare system? is a valid question. The answer: primary prevention.

Primary prevention is everything you can do to avoid illness, acute or chronic.

This includes eating nutritious food instead of processed “food,” having an exercise regimen, getting quality sleep, managing stress.

It includes not smoking, not drinking excessively, cutting sugar and HFCS, limiting sodium intake, and avoiding other risky behaviors.

A society in which primary prevention was practiced as a matter of course would have less need for doctors, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, and borderline-unaffordable health insurance policies. While there would still be the occasional acute condition to be healed, there would be far fewer chronic conditions to be managed for profit.

Primary prevention thus flies in the face of neoliberal economics.

Need I say more about why no one in the corporate Establishment is interested in it, and why there isn’t a school in the country, public or private, that teaches it? Alas, not even conservatives are interested in it. Most conservatives won’t criticize corporations for fear of being demonized as turncoats or accused of being closet socialists (or something).

(Primary prevention has nothing to do with the array of fad diets out there, although these may have a good suggestion or two.)

End of aside. Returning to Peter Turchin….

Peter Turchin on Elite Overproduction.

By elite Turchin means anyone well-educated (credentialed), ambitious, and riding on the expectations likely created in their psyches while growing up, or during their credentialing process. The Mangione family qualifies as elite in this sense. They were a known quantity in Maryland.

Many of us Boomers who earned advanced degrees in our fields became aspiring elites.

But as we attempted to enter professions, especially if it was after the 1970s, a good many of us hit brick walls.

There weren’t enough positions — jobs — in education, government, or industry — to absorb all applicants. The collapse of the job market in academia during the 1970s is one illustration of this, although with a few specific causes of its own such as the Powell Memo which led to the defunding of universities who turned to corporate sponsors and began hiking tuition.

“Elite overproduction,” explains Turchin, “can be likened to a game of musical chairs — except the number of chairs stays constant, while the number of players is allowed to increase. As the game progresses, it creates more and more angry losers.”

Not all thwarted aspiring elites go quietly into the night. Some ask questions. They do their own research. If they’re convinced that the “winners” cheated, this darkens their mood still more.

They may become — gasp! — conspiratorial. (Just to note, Turchin claims to be empirical, not conspiratorial; see pp. 126-29 of End Times.)

The most articulate of those outside the Big Club will eventually question dominant narratives, such as the American Dream.

In some cases they’ll figure out how to use Americans’ addiction to entertainment to do it.

Some go rogue and become aspiring counter-elites.

Counter-Elites.

Turchin writes as if Trump is an elite, because he’s a billionaire. I disagree with this.

I think Trump became a counter-elite the night Barack Obama ridiculed him openly at the White House Correspondents Dinner back in 2011 — because he’d questioned if the then-president was born in the U.S.

Trump became the quintessential American political counter-elite able to channel the anger of globalized neoliberalism’s “losers.” This is the only explanation for how he was able to win the nomination of a major political party and take the presidency from someone the superelite (those in the upper layers of the .01 percent) had already anointed as the First Woman President, someone who had the backing of all elite media and all of inside-the-Big-Club Asylum on the Potomac denizens.

Three quintessential media counter-elites are Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Joe Rogan. The first landed on his feet following his firing from Fox News: clearly a political decision. The second endured a four-month prison sentence following his refusal to bow before the January 6 Committee over its narratives. The third is probably the most watched podcaster in America, major spokesman for the “manosphere” (a phenomenon generated by systems rigged to favor women and emasculate men).

Elon Musk has certainly been acting like a counter-elite, with his support for Trump, while much of the rest of the billionaire class supported Kamala Harris.

Luigi Mangione becomes a wild card in this ecosphere: elite but not a billionaire, and without visibility, he takes direct action.

The narrative war is the battle between counter-elites and elites.

Between leaders of Those Who Wish To Be Left Alone versus Those Who Push People Around.

The former, when they consider the matter, think of themselves as “truth-tellers.”

Marks of the latter include waxing endlessly about “misinformation,” “conspiracy theories,” “threats to democracy,” “extremism,” “racism,” “hate speech,” “transphobia,” etc.

Authors such as Patrick Deneen now suggest that liberalism in whatever form has failed: it empowers individuals in all the wrong ways and slowly undermines conditions for civilizational stability. Liberalism’s advocates arrogantly assume that its results are a natural state of affairs and not the product of a distinctive ideology holding that people are essentially self-interested economic actors (or should be).

Others point to indicators such as supposed “gender” fluidity and associated preoccupations (e.g., pronouns, bathrooms) that overwhelm public discourse while people have trouble keeping a roof over their heads and food on their tables.

Liberalism only works, minimally, if its participants can have rational conversations where they disagree. It begins to fail when one side is told that disagreement is based on hate, finds intellectual discomfort traumatizing, and seeks safe spaces.

It also places a primacy on trust in institutions, which can only be maintained if those in institutions tell the truth.

Counter-elites contend that those atop the elite pyramid simply lie about how the economy is doing splendidly (by pointing to the Dow when only a small percentage of Americans own stock), about how their favored leaders did splendidly (think: Joe Biden, who was clearly in cognitive decline before he entered office in 2021), how the Western war machine is doing splendidly when it has become is a sponge soaking up moneys urgently needed domestically (think: Ukraine).

Unresolved public conflict between elite and counter-elite narratives brings about state breakdown, the third element in civilizational unraveling Turchin and his team unearthed.

State Breakdown.

State breakdown occurs once enough of the general public stops trusting the institutions they’ve relied on for news, information, education, etc., to reach a tipping point. It’s not as if those outside the Big Club are in agreement about what to believe, or if they necessarily believe anything specific. Twentieth century philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) may have given the best description of what happens, as well as its biggest danger:

This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.

You can lock them indoors for months on end, for example, having scared the majority to death about a virus with 24/7 doom coverage. You can force them to take poorly-tested shots passed off as “safe and effective vaccines,” memory-holing the fact that real vaccines take years of testing and clinical trials. You can force them to relinquish their freedoms to have a sense of superelite-supplied “safety.”

It didn’t work, of course, if the goal was to suppress counter-elite narratives. There are probably more aspiring counter-elites today than ever before!

A situation in which half of society’s members seem to inhabit one world based on one set of narratives while the other half seems to inhabit a different world based on different narratives is dangerous to any stable body politic. This presages the battle for control over institutions we are likely to see once Trump takes office.

The real danger of state breakdown is that it ends with the most unscrupulous figure or group seizing power and ruling as he/they see fit while continuing to call the country a democracy.

I don’t think Trump is that figure. The superelites still have a tremendous reservoir of resources. But as a counter-elite he’s been a huge beneficiary of the narrative wars. He’s promised to alleviate public immiseration with tariffs to incentivize domestic production and create jobs. He’s ready to hand the existing upper echelons elites their rear ends, by appointing fellow counter-elites such as RFK Jr. atop major federal agencies, or people widely regarded as jokes (e.g., Linda McMahon) at the helm of agencies such as the Department of Education as if planning on that misbegotten waste of taxpayer dollars unraveling under her watch.

The counter-elites would prefer to oust the elites and avoid state breakdown by assuming control over institutions, although some are making efforts to start new ones and build up their own networks (the University of Austin is an example).

Bottom line running through this discussion and its predecessor: economic inequality beyond what may be expected from Pareto distributions, combined with the sense that those in the Big Club have cheated to get where they are, is fundamentally destabilizing. As recent events may have shown, it eventually provokes violence against elites. I hope it is clear that nothing here is intended to condone Mangione’s actions. But they have a straightforward explanation.

There’s a bigger problem on the horizon, however, and it could play into the hands of the elites. To the best of my knowledge, neither Trump nor his critics have said anything about it or indicated they are significantly aware of it. (I hope I’m wrong about this and will be happy to be shown that I’m wrong.)

Part 3 in a couple more days.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3,

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

_________________________

As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

Three Existential Threats to Civilization at the End of 2024, Part 1

By Steven Yates

December 17, 2024

Not woke ideology, not Democrats. Not Russia, not China. Not climate. These are worse.

Author’s note (II): due both to the approach of Christmas and family issues outside my control, this article, delivered in three parts, will be my final work of 2024. Praying that all my readers will have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Introduction.

Three dangerous conditions afflict our civilization. They are: (1) massive and worsening economic inequality, (2) massive and worsening state indebtedness, and (3) the threat of nuclear war. Expanding:

(1) Some inequality is normal. Think Pareto distributions (80-20). I’ve seen these exemplified in countless circumstances. They are surprisingly precise. In any sales force, 80 percent of all sales will be generated by 20 percent of sellers. In any class I taught, I’d guesstimate that 80 percent of what was learned, was learned by 20 percent of the class. You’ll probably spend 80 percent of your time today in 20 percent of your house / apartment / office.

It is normal that 80 percent of a civilization’s wealth be in the hands of 20 percent of its population. That’s our default setting.

This is not what we see today. What we see instead: well under 1 percent of the population controls over 99 percent of the wealth. This top well-under-1 percent of haves controls more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of have-nots.

This is potentially destabilizing, particularly if the sense exists among the have-nots — and it does — that the haves have somehow cheated.

(2) Debt kills civilizations no less than it devastates a person’s financial life. Since Nixon killed the gold standard in 1971, the dollar has lost around 98 percent of its value.

This we call currency debasement.

It’s the reason I could fill my pantry for a week for around $25 when I was a grad student in the 1980s. The same amount of food now costs me between $150 and $200.

Currency debasement is part of what undermined the Roman Empire.

As the real driver of inflation — what’s being inflated is the money supply — currency debasement is also destabilizing if you couple it with the first and give it time.

(3) The week before last, Ukraine deployed U.S.-made missiles deep into Russian territory where they resulted in several deaths of Russian military personnel.

The Bidenistas had green-lighted this move. Technically the West is now in a hot war with Russia.

Russia returned fire — conventionally — so far.

But only because Putin does NOT want to be the first national leader since the 1940s to try to end a military conflict with nukes. Even a tactical nuke would take things to the next level quickly!

We have Putin’s restraint and not much else to thank for this conflict not having already gone nuclear.

What happens if his patience wears thin, or if he has a bad day?!

Summing this intro: If these states of affairs are not reversed, the West will follow its predecessors — Rome, Spain, France, the Ottomans, the British, etc. — into the history books. Assuming anyone is here to write them.

This is true no matter who sits in the White House.

Can Donald Trump accomplish what needs to be done? Maybe he’ll surprise us, but I have my doubts!

Peter Turchin’s Research into Why Civilizations Unravel.

We’ll need to spend time on this.

Peter Turchin’s End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (2023) is one of the half-dozen or so most important books of the decade so far. It is one thing to look at specific decisions by deciders. If you want a good idea what’s been happening structurally for almost a hundred years, read this book.

I’ll rely for this article on Turchin’s recent Guardian piece. I know, I know, The Guardian tilts left. Bear with me here. Turchin is not an ideologue. I don’t see him grinding axes. He’s assembled a team of researchers in a new cross-disciplinary field he calls cliodynamics. This team has looked at over a dozen past civilizations and charted their trajectories: their rise, their falls into complacency, their unraveling, their collapse.

Three factors, he argues, are invariably involved in civilization’s decline and fall. All three are presently operating in the West, mostly unchecked.

They are: public immiseration (his term is ‘popular’ immiseration though it doesn’t seem very popular to me), elite overproduction (we’ll look at how he’s using the term elite which is different from how I’ve used it), and state breakdown (following paths of what I’ve been calling narrative collapse).

Underwriting all three: worsening and potentially destabilizing economic inequality, far more extreme than Pareto distributions would justify.

Turchin is convinced that these factors explain Trump’s victory, not just an electoral college victory but the popular vote as well — despite every Democrat-led effort to prevent it.

Let’s take each in turn.

What do we mean, public immiseration?

Public Immiseration.

Turchin offers a history lesson, one not much told anymore. In this narrative, the Rooseveltian New Deal comes off looking rather good. That will be a red flag for some readers, but again, bear with me.

What was accomplished back then, in Turchin’s considered opinion, was a balancing of competing interests of corporations, workers, and government. No one is saying the system was perfect or couldn’t have been done differently and possibly better. What did result — once we got past a world war — was the unprecedented economic growth across the broad swath of the populations of the 1950s and 1960s. A rising tide really did lift a great number of boats. Rising expectations psychologically empowered, e.g., blacks, who demanded that their own boats be allowed to rise.

The U.S. had become the strongest economy the world had ever seen, and with the moonshots, etc., on the horizon we aimed for the sky — literally!

The American Dream became our official narrative — and at the time, it seemed not just credible but one of the greatest stories ever told!

The reasons why aren’t hard to see. Energy was affordable; housing was affordable; families were relatively stable. The prevailing belief was that if you were willing to work in order to achieve, you could achieve any goal you set your mind to. Increasing prosperity backed this up.

The Coming of the Neoliberal Era.

Turchin attributes the success of the era to a “Great Compression.” The superrich were taxed. Union strength checked corporate power. Salaries reflected this across the board. “For roughly 50 years,” Turchin writes, “the interests of workers and the interests of owners were kept in balance, and overall income inequality remained remarkably low.”

These arrangements began to break down in the 1970s. Nixon scrapped the gold standard on August 15, 1971. That was a turning point. The door was open to financialization and eventually rampant speculation—and money-printing on top of money-printing!

For a variety of reasons including the energy crisis of the early 1970s, the economy began to struggle. During the Carter years, it fell into “stag-flation.” Unions had grown corrupt in themselves and were losing their power. When Reagan broke the air traffic controllers strike in 1981, unions were further weakened. Taxes on the highest earners were cut during this era. A narrative had taken hold that if corporations could do pretty much as they saw fit within the bounds of the law, prosperity would “trickle down” to everyone else. This wasn’t credible, and it’s small wonder liberals had a field day with it.

Go back to 1970. That year, University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman published the article that arguably kicked off the neoliberal era: “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.”

Adages appeared such as let the free market work! What happened was: corporations were unbound. We saw regulatory capture. Big Pharma and regulating agencies (CDC, FDA) shared revolving-door relationships. One result was an industry, one of the most lucrative in the country, indemnified against lawsuits for harm done by its products. This isn’t exactly a basis for trust in these products.

Leviathan investment banks also captured the SEC and other regulators. Goldman-Sachs, the U.S Treasury Dept., the Federal Reserve System: we saw people with all three on their resumes.

Neoliberalism is not conservatism, nor is it libertarianism. These get confused since all three appeal to “market forces.” To a conservative, some institutions and states of affairs are conditions of civilizational health and so non-negotiable: family stability, for example, as well as community cohesion, based on trust established over long periods of time, on which one can’t place a price tag. So to a conservative, the marketplace is not absolute. Libertarianism is closer to neoliberalism in insisting on the absoluteness of private property rights and the valuation of all goods and services by the marketplace. How does neoliberalism differ? Despite its rhetoric it isn’t hostile to government. Government is the marketplace’s (i.e., corporations’) protector. Trade freely within government-created “free trade zones,” the neoliberal says. Beyond that, what can’t be monetized, can wither and die.

Among the results of this philosophy are privatized prisons run for profit which are humanitarian disasters. Even those convicted of heinous crimes are human beings.

The reversal of Turchin’s “Great Compression” brought about the increased income inequality that led to the conditions he directly identifies as threats to American stability.

It goes without saying — because so many of us lived through those decades — that families unraveled partly as a consequence of the declining fortunes of “average” Americans. It is well-known that inflation-adjusted wages began to stagnate in the 1970s. In addition, factories closed as corporations sought cheaper labor in foreign countries, i.e., “outsourcing”: first Mexico, with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and then China with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade II (GATT II) and the World Trade Organization (WTO).

“Free trade” meant the freedom of corporations to do as they pleased, while their (former) employees got stuck with the bill. The rich got richer … in spades!

The “Wealth Pump” and the Road to the Second Gilded Age.

In 1965, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 21 to 1. (Source.) In 1978, CEOs were paid on average 30 times more than their average employees. By 2000, the former were paid more than 372 times what their employees were paid. (Source.) The CEO-to-working compensation ratio was 21-to-1 in 1965. It had risen to 366-to-1 by 2000.

Inflation, meanwhile, had taken its toll. Average Americans’ incomes stagnated while the cost of living rose steadily — this did more than feminism to get women into the workplace, as the one-breadwinner family became harder to sustain. No longer were energy or housing as affordable. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s mortgages and rentals rose steadily. Having lived in an apartment during those years, I experienced this personally. I also witnessed the disappearance of local ownership as apartment complexes were drawn under leviathan property-management corporations.

Turchin again: “The result was a decline in many aspects of quality of life for the majority of Americans. One shocking way this became evident was in changes to the average life expectancy, which stalled and even went into reverse (and this started well before the Covid pandemic). This is what we term ‘popular immiseration.’”

What was at work here was a perverse “wealth pump” that siphoned money from the poor and the middle class and redistributed it to the rich, via mechanisms financialized capitalism creates. I’ve sometimes spoken of welfare-statism-in-reverse: redistribution of wealth upwards. These are different ways of saying the same thing.

Immigration, illegal or otherwise, has been a factor. The corporate mind loves immigration. It drives down wages and thus saves on labor costs. Americans who do not live in gated communities are suspicious of it. They see it disrupting their neighborhoods, the schools where they send their kids, etc. Those inside the gated communities (whose kids attend elite private academies) don’t have to deal with the consequences of their decisions.

Communities, as noted above, are built on longstanding bonds of trust which cannot be reduced to economics. Open borders policies resulting in colonization by outsiders disrupt those bonds, as well as the sense ordinary people have of losing control of their lives at the hands of unaccountable elites.

This explains places like Springfield, Ohio.

Turchin compares the period we’d entered by the late 1980s to the Gilded Age, that period from 1870 to 1900, during which time John D. Rockefeller Sr. amassed a fortune and made deals with other “robber barons” (as their critics called them) in various other industries — steel, coal, etc. — to use his railroads exclusively, thus destroying competition. “Competition is a sin,” Rockefeller is supposed to have said.

We’re in a Second Gilded Age.

Consider the present-day online world. When the Internet first became a presence in our lives, there were hundreds of small, autonomous companies engaging in e-commerce.

Today’s online world is completely dominated by a handful of leviathans whom many of us have started calling Big Tech. I probably don’t have to list them.

Our overall online experience has become progressively less pleasant as corporate-owned platforms have become more encircling and powerful. Last year, author Cory Doctorow coined a term for this degradation of our experience which includes planned obsolescence, being slammed with ads, navigating unnecessary complexity, increasing inability to get your content in front of an audience, and finding it increasingly difficult to reach a human being if you need technical support.

Doctorow’s term is enshittification.

The Second Gilded Age began well before the 2000s but really kicked in during the 2000s and 2010s. It has worsened as we got past Covid and into the New Normal.

Charles Hugh Smith supplies a number of charts in his recent article here.

Who reaped the greatest windfalls of the Covid lockdowns? Big Tech (and Big Pharma).

Many others saw their lives upended: small businesses destroyed, etc.

Many of us had our expectations systemically thwarted years before.

We come to elite overproduction.

END of Part 1; Part 2 in few days.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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Steven Yates’s fiercely independent Substack publication is Navigating the New Normal. Subscribe for periodic updates. Don’t worry; while more and more sites are moving behind paywalls, this one is still free.

As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

4B Movement: Latest Radical Feminist Caper Illustrates the Clash of Worldviews

By Steven Yates

November 26, 2024

What is the 4B movement?

It’s often said that we live in a lonely society. While the digitization of everything and everyone is doubtless a factor, radical feminism preceded the Internet and social media. Equity feminism stressed equal pay for women for equal work and equal experience, something all of us who consider ourselves fair minded supported. Radical feminism turns against families and against men as a group. I’ve sometimes spoken of its a-woman-needs-a-man-like-a-fish-needs-a-bicycle thinking. Some trace this phrase to Gloria Steinum. It was actually the brain abortion of an Australian feminist named Irina Dunn, back in 1970.

Nothing has been more obvious of late than the widening political-economic divide between women and men. Women have moved leftward as their economic fortunes have improved, while men have moved to the right as they’ve lost ground. This has become pronounced in Gen Z (born from 1997–2012). Election 2024 reversed a trend of several decades: younger people tilting left.

Speaking generally, single career women came out in force for Harris, while single men voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

This has not been lost on radical feminists, who blame Trump for the Supreme Court that reversed Roe v Wade. They also cite the (very dubious) sexual assault conviction in the E. Jean Carroll case, and the infamous (quoted out of context) Access Hollywood tape as proof of Trump’s “misogyny.”

Sarcastic dismissals of “incels” obviously doesn’t help relations between the sexes. Incel is short for involuntarily celibate. Sometimes it’s a misnomer. There are single men who have given up on dating, relationships, romance, marriage. (Disclaimer: yours truly is happily married … although he left his home culture before this happened.)

Trump won. Radical feminists are quietly livid.

Thus the appearance of 4B. What is it?

The movement began in South Korea in the mid-2010s as the “four no’s,” expressed in Korean, in which bi means, roughly, no: bisekseu (no sex), biyeonae (no dating), bihon (no marriage), and bichulsan (no childbirth).

It began as a response to the supposed misogynist and discriminatory business culture that had developed in that country. Advocates singled out acts of violence against women such as the brutal 2016 murder of a woman in a public bathroom in the Gangnam neighborhood of Seoul by a man who told police “I did it because women have always ignored me.”

An outcry ensued. Then backlash appeared. Women claimed they feared male violence. Men claimed they were indiscriminately treated like criminals. Hostility between the sexes in South Korea has yet to abate.

Now, with Trump’s victory, 4B has spread to the U.S.

It’s a sexual separatist movement, rejecting heterosexual relationships as a means of resisting “the patriarchy.” No dating men or forming relationships with them, no sex with men, no marriage, no children.

In fairness, the problem is worsened by a movement among at least some in the pro-Trump manosphere openly telling women, “Your body, my choice!”

Neither 4B nor this accomplishes anything. What it does is endanger the future we’ll all have to live in. Let’s get some perspective based on this longer view.

The civilizational need for children.

A civilization will not only fail to thrive without children, eventually it won’t survive. Parents must have — on average — around 2.1 children to maintain population.

In South Korea, this figure has dropped to a startling 0.7 children per two adults.

Birthrates have been dropping in the West for decades, and are below replacement rate.

Advocates of immigration (legal or not) have had a field day with this, asking how we’re going to maintain economic growth without immigrants when native populations aren’t having kids. They say: do the math.

The declining family as a legacy of materialism.

Among the legacies of the triumph of the materialist worldview (which underwrites the abortion death culture, and much more) is the decline of the family as a stable unit.

This decline is manifested in the meteoric rise of populations of singles who plan to stay single, whether to emphasize career or just from distrust of the opposite sex.

Hence the loneliness epidemic I mentioned at the outset as years pass and these people grow older alone.

A substantial fraction of single men claim to have no close friends.

What’s the cure? Or, at least, the mitigation, as obviously there’s no overnight fix for this.

Where we can start is with a rediscovery of the Biblical family, a product of the Christian worldview Western intellectual elites threw overboard over a hundred years ago, with a lot of ensuing ripple effects most of which can’t be blamed on radical feminists.

The Biblical Family.

We have an abundance of primary sources for a functional Biblical family. The foundation is Genesis 1:27 (New King James)

“So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them.”

This is consistent with what we can observe directly of modern empirical biology and human anatomy: under normal conditions there are two and only two sexes.

This provides an ethos for the intrinsic value of the human person, as that which is created in God’s image by its nature has intrinsic value — independently of all other qualities: ethnicity, sex, nationality, class status, etc.

Then, in Genesis 2:24:

“…. [A] man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”

Scripture offers abundant guidelines on marriage. From the Apostle Paul, in I Corinthians 7:1:

“ … It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, because of sexual immorality, let each man have his own wife, and let each woman have her own husband. Let the husband render to his wife the affection due her, and likewise also the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. And likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does….

This is manifestly not a recipe for unbridled patriarchy but of deep and loving partnership. It isn’t a guarantee that one will marry, because marriage wasn’t and isn’t for everyone (Paul himself never married or had children).

Scripture makes the husband the head of the household, in the sense that Christ is the head of the church. There just is no license for a man ruling his wife like a tyrant.

In I Peter 3:1-7 we get more details:

“Wives … be submissive to your own husbands, that even if some do not obey the word, they, without a word, may be won by the conduct of their wives; when they observe your chaste conduct accompanied by fear. Do not let your adornment be merely outward — arranging the hair, wearing gold, or putting on find apparel — rather let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in the sight of God. For in this manner, in former times, the holy women who trusted in God also adorned themselves, being submissive to their own husbands, as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord, whose daughters you are if you do good and are not afraid with any terror.

“Husbands, likewise, dwell with them with understanding, giving honor to the wife, as to the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life, that your prayers may not be hindered.”

Colossians 3:18-21 reiterates this and introduces children:

“Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be bitter toward them. Children, obey your parents in all things, for this is well pleasing to the Lord. Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged.”

The Biblical family is not a miniature fiefdom.

One of the original Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:12) is for children and young adults:

“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.”

From Ephesians 5:22-33 and 6:1-4, the crowning discussion:

“Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church; and He is the Savior of the body. Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let wives be to their own husbands in everything.

“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not have spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish.

“So husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church. For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church. Nevertheless let each one of you in particular so love his own wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

“Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with the promise: it may be well with you and you may live long on the Earth.

“And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord.”

There are myriad other passages that elaborate on the Biblical (Christian worldview centered) family, including proper education in the Christian home.

Christian worldview and restoration … or materialism and dissolution?

Secularists will not accept any of this, of course. They consider it mythological. Be that as it may, the question now is: do we continue on a course driven by the materialist worldview that dominates modernity (and has brought us postmodernity and its “post truth” outlook)?

This will mean continuing the death culture, which is hardly limited to abortion.

I use the phrase death culture to emphasize how human life has become expendable and personhood meaningless. Women killing their unborn children and then speaking of their “reproductive rights” is just the death culture’s most visible manifestation.

Are we not also seeing life’s expendability in neoliberal hyper-capitalism, sometimes mislabeled a right wing political economy?

In embracing the idea of a borderless global marketplace of mass consumption and permanent debt slavery, in which “needs” are manufactured through appeals to narcissism, fear, and greed, in which for all practical purposes corporations do as they please, neoliberal hyper-capitalism effectively throws populations to the wolves. At the very least, it has created a world of a few haves and many have-nots.

The have-nots, as increasingly restless outsiders who see no one defending their interests, have turned in increasing numbers to “populists,” perceived as political outsiders, like Trump, who spoke their language. Most are demonized as “authoritarians” in controlled media outlets which protect the neoliberal system which is easily seen as fundamentally godless (its god is the dollar.)

The real alternative is to make our way back to a Christian worldview and its first premises: God exists as Creator; He created human beings in His image. Both our capacity to grasp the world’s basic intelligibility and to act with moral agency begin here.

A morally and practically sound vision of male-female relationships based on mutual respect and honor, and of the family as society’s fundamental unit (not “the individual”), follows as a core component.

The husband may be in charge, but as I’ve noted, his authority is not absolute. For alongside any legitimate authority comes responsibility. His is enormous. It begins by realizing that those in his charge are all God’s creations and must be treated accordingly.

From the Christian family to a Christian society.

Now imagine this idea writ larger: as the basis not just for families but for communities generally, built from families. The Apostle Paul consistently drew an analogy between family structure and the structure of the church headed by Christ. He wrote to churches, as representing Christ in their cities and countries … and to the world as a whole in all its actual diversity.

It may seem like I’m fantasizing with this last, but one of the gifts Western moral philosophy gave the world is its universalism. This is the idea that moral-community status is not limited to members of my group or tribe or nation, or even my faith, but universal: applicable to all human beings, everywhere.

This opens the only door I’ve ever seen to escaping us versus them tribalism which has plagued us from the start as part of our sinful default setting. Nothing manifests us versus them more clearly than the 4B movement. Or the manosphere’s: “Your body, my choice!”

Western civilization was starting to transcend tribalism. Once, long ago, our civilization was progressive in a sense of that term loosely aligned with Christian principles and the possibility of universalist ethics and sense of justice. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Eventually this mindset ended slavery. It recognized the need to extend to women the right to vote and to own property. As it matured further it came to oppose discrimination based on race or ethnicity.

But as materialism became more and more dominant, genuine progressivism was hijacked and became what it is today: angry, Marxist-influenced “antiracism” which targets “whiteness,” angry radical feminism that targets men; sexual “liberation” that celebrates every form of debauchery. With identity politics, including radical feminism, tribalism reappeared triumphant!

Modernity became postmodernity. Our hold on the idea that the universe is intelligible had begun to slip. Even our best conceptions about it, based on empirical observation, were seen as permeated with biases of various sorts: class bias, racial bias, “gender” bias.

According to radical feminists gender is not a biological category but a “social construct.” It is therefore “fluid” and can be changed at will.

The replacement of sex with “gender fluidity,” contrary to everything biological science (once based on the Christian principle of an ordered and intelligible world) has given us biological men allowed to participate in women’s sports and “gender affirming care” for those “transitioning.”

The woke left is fundamentally at war with biological reality. Fight reality, and you’ll lose. These trends threaten to maim children and adolescents for life.

Need I argue further how destructive this all is?

My book What Should Philosophy Do? Reject materialism. A call for Revival.

So where do we go from here?

I wrote a book that sought to answer this question if anyone bothers to read it; it’s cited below.

First, cultivate philosophical thought that identifies, articulates, and evaluates worldviews. Second: realize that materialism is a worldview and not the result of any scientific finding or set of findings; science developed independently of it, in what was still a Christian ethos.

Third: recognize that materialism in whatever form casts us morally adrift … we’re “free” to make up any “morality” we like, including one that exalts Self.

In practice, it will be the wealthy and powerful who impose their “selves” on everyone. A cadre of well-bankrolled pseudo-intellectuals has already emerged to rationalize this by claiming that things were never any different, that the world was always about money and power (and sexual acts).

Lastly: see this as destructive. As we’ve seen, the family as a unit is in decline in every advanced culture. Not just because of anything radical feminists have said and done. The family was in trouble before they came along. Neoliberal political economy, no less steeped in materialism than Marxism, prioritizes and sanctifies the economic decisions of homo economicus in that global marketplace. Homo economicus is a kind of walking economic calculating device, invariably self-interested, his values subjective, with no higher authority no matter his decision. Let the market decide!

Can markets tell us what is true and what is false, or what is moral versus what is immoral?

We’ve noted the rising specter of haves versus have nots (against which an intelligent left might rightly protest), a political class some of whom pretend they have a clue what to do about this, while others simply don’t care — they’re bought and paid for.

As I’ve stated previously, this system is designed to keep most of us broke, in debt, and cash-strapped; to keep most of us dependent, whether on government or on an employer who can fire us on whim; to keep us ignorant about our situation (obviously you’re not going to learn any of this in any government school).

Its structures and invented processes divide us against ourselves. Radical feminism may be one factor, but when social media corporations discovered they could reap windfalls feeding their users divisive and inflammatory content, they did just that.

This system also renders us with a sense of helplessness, anxiety-ridden, depressed, with many of us helping Big Pharma get richer; or angered (think of road rage and mass shootings); or just in despair (if you’ve checked the suicide stats recently, including young people, teenagers, and even children!).

The solution: Revival.

This will include recognizing that we’ll never stop the death culture by trying to legislate it away, through a Supreme Court decision, or even with a presidential executive order.

In the absence of truly fundamental change, felt in people’s hearts as well as in their heads and in their lives, all these cosmetic efforts will do is drive the death culture underground and make its effects on vulnerable people that much worse!

If political economy is downstream from culture, culture is downstream from worldview.

So restore a Christian worldview, one person at a time if necessary (many churches, let us realize, are just as corrupt; and some movements labeling themselves Christian are anything but).

Place God the Creator in the center, understand the spatiotemporal universe as His creation, ourselves as His creations, in His image, and hence with intrinsic value; Jesus Christ as His Son who took on flesh to save us from our sinful nature.

These are the first premises. We can still work to improve ourselves, our families, and become examples in our communities. Read Scripture to find what God tells us. If you are so inclined, work out the consequences — familial, educational, societal, healthwise, businesswise — using the logical reasoning the brains He gave us make possible.

See what happens.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

_________________________

Did the American Deep State allow Donald Trump to win for reasons of its own? Find this and other content unavailable elsewhere on my Substack publication Navigating the New Normal. Subscribe for periodic updates. Don’t worry; while more and more sites are moving behind paywalls, this one is still free.

As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such)

Trump’s Victory, the “Educated,” and the “Un-Educated”

By Steven Yates

November 16, 2024

Puncturing the mythology of credentialism.

A recent article in the U.K’s left wing newspaper The Guardian caught my eye when its author, Peter Hyman, put his finger on something important.

Many American conservatives, he said, didn’t vote for Trump because they thought he was a savior. They voted for Trump they despise his most visible enemy: the organized left. They see leftists as both dishonest and power-hungry, and think you’d have to be blind to miss it.

Another article on the same site actually put it that way, calling it a “simple, inescapable message” that many people despise the left.

I probably have to count myself in that category, however uncomfortable I am saying so.

I don’t despise leftists as individuals. If they talk respectfully to me, I’ll talk respectfully to them. But as a group?

A major reason we despise leftists as a group: their air of moral superiority (epistemic superiority as well) wrapped in arrogance and virtue-signaling, all alongside an almost-unbelievable lack of self-awareness.

The resounding Trump victory has motivated at least some self-awareness, and may shatter other delusions, given time. Hence Hyman’s article. And Harris’s. We’re seeing more than a few leftists groping towards something like an examination of their assumptions.

Hyman quoted Tucker Carlson who provided a clear statement of what probably motivated a lot of Trump voters:

“They tell you, the people who can actually change a tire, who pay your taxes and work 40 hours a week, that you are somehow immoral. We have a message for them: you are not better than us, you are not smarter than us.”

Despite using the smug word “swagger” to describe Carlson’s demeanor, what Hyman says next is worthy of comment:

“To dismiss this as the politics of grievance is to dismiss what it feels like to be disrespected, to feel ‘a stranger in your own land.’ To feel as though the college-educated are looking down at the non-college-educated.”

Hyman thus puts his finger on the meat of what I want to discuss here: this presumption that only “the non-college-educated” support Trump. Only the deluded, those confused by “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories” (two of leftists’ favorite words).

I have three advanced degrees, and I voted for Trump.

I know many other exceptions to the simple-minded dichotomy between the credentialed who fancy themselves “too smart,” versus the non-credentialed who are presumed too stupid to direct their own lives.

It’s the same dichotomy I’ve been hammering: Those Who Push People Around versus Those Who Want To Be Left Alone.

My training motivated me to dig deeper.

For some of us, it’s our awareness of what I call the narrative war — between those who (for example) believe the 2020 election was stolen versus those who call this the Big Lie, or who supported Covid lockdowns and then the mRNA shots as necessary and safe versus those of us who saw only the biggest grab for power ever!

But the issue goes beyond even that.

What does it now mean to be “educated” in America? To be credentialed, that is?

Not as much as you might think!

Higher education in America is rife with pseudo-scholarship, perverse incentives, narratives held for other than intellectual reasons, and overall corruption. How do I know this? Because I was there. For over 15 years total. I saw it directly. It impacted my life personally and professionally.

What I saw, heard, and read, as far back as around 1990, were radical feminists who claimed science is sexist and misogynist because nearly all its founders and most of its practitioners are men. Radical feminists were already discounting biology, to the extent it told us that sex is determined chromosomally. They fixated on gender as a “social construct,” and therefore fluid. Radical feminist “legal theorists,” moreover, described heterosexual sex in ways making it ultimately indistinguishable from rape. They expressed this in ways allowing themselves to squirm out of responsibility if called out for having said something so stupid and divisive.

Example: a woman named Catharine MacKinnon, among the worst of the offenders but hardly alone. These people have a lot of clout in academia!

The question I tried to raise: would they even have become professors and authors of books at university presses without affirmative action, which was controversial even then (with Supreme Court decisions of the 1980s trying to roll it back).

Also of note were the critical race theorists who also got their start in the illustrious 1990s. These people held that Western knowledge and know-how had a “Eurocentric” bias because of the prevalence of white Anglo-European males. They “explained” Western success as built on the backs of racism, sexism, and colonialism, not on philosophical and political-economic ingenuity and the real world applicability of physics and chemistry (underwritten by a still-fundamentally Christian worldview).

These were the people who distinguished systematic from systemic racism, the latter the idea that racism is built into the structure of Western institutions going back to the introduction of slavery in the 1600s (hence their 1619 Project).

They weren’t all that open about their Marxism … or that the only “solution” to the “problem” would be to revolutionize the system but replace Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat with a dictatorship of the woke, i.e., replacing classical Marxism with identity politics. After all, the real proletarians were too white, too male, too straight, and too Christian.

Well before abandoning American academia in 2012, I’d involved myself in conservative causes. I met numerous people whom my colleagues in academia dismissed as “uneducated,” i.e., some either never finished college or never went.

Such people were chefs, electricians, plumbers, farmers, auto mechanics, truck drivers, store owners or managers, restaurant owners or managers, real estate agents, network administrators, or had entered some other occupation Western society needed.

None of these require an academic credential. Just know-how, obtainable with an apprenticeship.

These are the people Tucker referred to who can “change a tire.” They’re not intellectuals but are skilled with their hands.

Unlike a lot of the “educated” they are competent in the art of living.

And they’re better off when allowed to use their skills unencumbered by bureaucratic busybodies and pseudo-intellectuals lecturing them about their racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc., ad nauseam.

The worldview of the “educated” often comes down to: we know best. We’re the experts. Trust us. Not that we’re giving you a choice.

It’s time to puncture this mythology. Assuming that hasn’t happened already.

There is an abundance of know-how knowledge existing outside the confines of credentialism. If anything, credentialism just gets in the way. Again, trust me, I’ve been there. The ancient Greeks distinguished techne (know-how) from episteme (knowing that). The “uncredentialed” have the former in spades. I submit that their instincts on the latter are better than they get credit for — if only because if you look closely at what the “experts” say about such matters as the origin of life, or of civilization, they fail to make a compelling case for their dominant paradigms and narratives.

The “experts” often just assume that God either doesn’t exist, that no one can know one way or another, or that the issue doesn’t matter.

The farmer can look at his crops, instinctively grasp the complexity of the systems he’s immersed in and with which he has daily contact, and experience the works of God.

That’s just one example, of course.

I’ve spoken in the past about the collapse of all the dominant narratives as having brought us into the age of Donald Trump — also Viktor Orbán of Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, and many other figures dubbed “populist” or “far right” by the “experts.”

By collapse I mean loss of credibility among a larger enough segment of the public to support taking over political parties (like Trump did with the GOP), create its own media ecosphere, and eventually — hopefully — to establish its own educational institutions outside corrupted, Ivy League dominated academia.

What narratives have collapsed? These:

Diversity is our strength. Does anyone still believe that?

Globalization will make us all prosperous. Given how financialization has created an economic ecosystem of haves versus have-nots, with the have-nots worse and worse off in a system based on mass consumption and debt, the idea is preposterous! If Covid taught us anything, moreover, it is the fragility of global supply lines and the reasonableness of a return to localism.

The centralized liberal state will make us all free. Free from what? If you think technocrats care about your freedom, I don’t know what to say to you.

Markets know best. Sometimes they do, but unguided by a worldview that grounds the intrinsic value of a human life and fails to acknowledge everybody’s need for validation, no they don’t. Many corporations have prospered on mild addictions (Big Food), moreover, or on constant upgrades which force consumers to buy their products when the old ones won’t handle the upgrades (Big Tech).

You can believe in The Science. Anyone who says that doesn’t know what science is. The Science gave us Tony Fauci, he and his Chinese colleagues’ lunatic gain-of-function research enhancing the capacity of viruses to infect humans, lockdowns when one of their products got loose or was released, masking, and the mRNA shots the full consequences of which we don’t know because it may years for them to play out.

The Science also motivates schoolteachers to terrorize children about “man-made climate change” and directs resources down “green energy” economic sinkholes.

We have to overcome our legacy of racism, sexism, colonialism, etc. We need to forget about race/ethnicity and just be people, all of us seeking the best use of our God-given talents. Normal people don’t obsess about race. Normal white people aren’t trying to figure out ways of “hating,” or “discriminating against” black people. Given their turn toward Trump in this election following nine years of corporate mass media “experts” branding the man a racist, I think at least some blacks (especially black men) have figured this out, as have Hispanic men.

There are doubtless other collapsed narratives, but those are the ones I think of first.

Jeff Thomas, who writes for Doug Casey’s International Man website, discovered this gem:

“If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar.

This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti-Mask. Vax vs. Anti-vax. Rich vs. poor. Man vs. woman. Cop vs. citizen. [Etc.] The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar… and why?” —Shera Starr

I’d not heard of Shera Starr, but I couldn’t agree more!

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

_________________________

Steven Yates’s Substack publication is called Navigating the New Normal. Subscribe and receive content not available on NewsWithViews.com.

As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

TRUMP WINS! But We Can’t Rest On Our Laurels

By Steven Yates

November 7, 2024

… because who knows what American leftists, or globalists, have up their collective sleeve.

Trump won — in the Electoral College, at least! He also appears to have won the popular vote for the first time! That is to say, he won using the rules the Bidenistas claim they played by back in 2020, during and following the “jankiest” (James Howard Kunstler’s colorful term) election in recent memory.

As of this writing, five states remain to be called, four of which are leaning toward Trump — but with 277 electoral votes to Harris’s 224, he’s officially over the line!

Some of my fears have been proven groundless, such as a Venezuela-style theft of the election by Democrats, or — God help us! — voters actually hand Kamala Harris the presidency! Other matters continue to worry me. I’ll get to those in due course.

Trump’s base of support is cheering; Trump delivered a victory speech that did not sound at all like the “man in cognitive decline” corporate media has been portraying of late. While not giving out details, in effect he pronounced this election a turning point. To me, he sounded perfectly lucid and in command — unlike his immediate predecessor whose most lucid recent moment was to call his supporters “garbage.”

Voters have solidly and soundly rejected the far left Democrats (Republicans have taken both the House and the Senate!), based both on the economy as they perceived it during the past four years (an inflationary disaster!), and on the immigration mess that Kamala Harris is personally blamed for having worsened, and then some!

Leftist writers are weeping and wailing!

Tom Nichols, in the establishment Atlantic Monthly, writes: “An aspiring fascist is the president-elect, again, of the United States….” He alleges that “Trump’s minions will continue his assault on democracy, the rule of law, and the Constitution.” Nonsense! His “minions” will assault leftist domination of these institutions and try to purge deep state globalism behind them.

Nichols goes on to demonize this as a “dark moment” and a “national emergency.” He goes on to state that “if there was ever at time to exercise the American right of free assembly, it is now…” raising the question of just what he has in mind, especially as when Trump supporters exercised such rights they risked being physically attacked while leftist rioters in, e.g., 2020, largely got a pass.

Nichols’ Atlantic Monthly colleague David Frum intones darkly that “the rest of us need to prepare to live in a different America: a country where millions of our fellow citizens voted for a president who knowingly promotes hatred and division….”

Leave it to leftists to decry the promotion of “hatred and division” when excelling at this very thing themselves.

Across the ocean, British establishment left wing journal The Guardian calls today a “day of despair” followed by the usual litany of what leftists anticipate Trump doing, ending with “there will almost certainly by a nationwide abortion ban and this will further degrade women’s citizenship, rob them of their dignity, steal their dreams and ruin their health.”

Once we get past the hysterics here … yes, Trump and his “minions” might challenge the death culture leftists have spent the past half-century bringing about. I don’t think legislation or judicial decree is the way to do this, but challenging the death culture has to begin somewhere.

Given such pronouncements … these are only three examples of an across-the-board howl of anguish coming from the organized left…

… we can’t pretend this fight is over and rest on our laurels!

Who knows what leftist activists will do, once they overcome the shock of realizing that a majority of their fellow citizens were willing to vote an “aspiring fascist,” a “convicted felon” and “rapist” into the most powerful office in the world?

A friend pointed out to me this morning that when the AP called the election results prior to all the votes being counted, this might give leftists their first grounds to contest the results — will we be allowed to call their efforts “baseless conspiracy theories” I wonder???

She also observed that leftist Judge Juan Merchan will be overseeing Trump’s sentencing hearing soon. That’s for his conviction of “34 counts of falsifying business records” related to his having arranged paying hush money to a porn star.

Bookkeeping mistakes, transformed into felonies for the first time in U.S. history.

That hearing will be on November 26.

What will Merchan do?

Could a Democrat judge actually sentence Trump to a prison term?

This would be unprecedented!

If he did, I’m sure Trump’s legal team would point out that such a move would precipitate chaos, and file an emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court would immediately reverse the sentence.

I’m not sure Merchan will have the nerve, though.

He might well be too afraid of having his courthouse burned down — or his house torched.

No, that’s not a threat. Just a statement of fact.

Trump won back the White House after losing it for only the second time in U.S. history — for a reason.

Ordinary Americans — by the tens of millions — are sick and tired of being lied to about everything of importance.

They were lied to about the origins of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, told they were “racists” and “conspiracy theorists” if they said it was made in a Chinese lab (funded in large part by Tony Fauci and Co.).

They were lied to about the honesty and fairness of Election 2020.

They were lied to about January 6, which was no “insurrection”; there was no attempt to overthrow the U.S. government on that date.

They were lied to about the necessity of Covid lockdowns which destroyed their businesses and disrupted their lives over something with a comparatively very low fatality rate for anyone not in a nursing home or with a seriously compromised immune system.

They were lied to about the “safety and efficacy” of the Covid-19 mRNA shots given Emergency Use Authorization rather than real approval after just four months of testing.

They were lied to about Joe Biden’s declining cognitive state … and doubtless figured out that Kamala Harris was directly implicated in that particular lie.

They were lied to by those pretending that Kamala is anything more than a product of the Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DEI, if you prefer) political-corporate environment of recent years, and that she would be anything other than an utter disaster, worse than Biden has been, as a figurehead-president representing what is still the most powerful nation and the largest economy in the world, before figures like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and enemy nations like Iran and North Korea.

They’ve been lied to about the economy ongoing, presented with government-corporate numbers that reflect Inside the Beltway and billionaire class status which does not reflect the realities of the man (and woman) in the street.

They’ve been lied to about Trump being a “threat to democracy” when left-liberals have been busy using a mixture of legislation, technocracy, and top-down bureaucratic harassment of various forms to dismantle actual, Constitutional republican democracy — government by the people — for the past half-century (and globalists, longer than that).

They’ve been lied to about both the civil and criminal lawfare cases brought against Trump, whether over January 6, the evidence-free claim that he sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll, the classified documents he had at Mar-a-Lago, that they presented a danger to national security, the first time in history the FBI staged an armed raid on the residence of a former U.S. president! Every U.S. president has found himself accidentally absconding with such documents amidst the tens of thousands of items he has to remove from the White House when he leaves. Finally, there are the above-mentioned bookkeeping errors which leftist New York turned into “felonies” just for this prosecution (they changed the law for this case).

They’ve been told that the Democrat-hijacked legal system and its procedures represent the “rule of law.”

Then there were the earlier lies about Russian collusion, the origins of which were traced back to Big Intel and the Clinton Foundation. There were the earlier lies about Charlottesville, who really provoked the violence, and the circumstances of Heather Heyer’s death.

There have been ongoing lies about Trump telling thousands of lies and spreading “misinformation” when he was questioning official narratives.

To this day, corporate media maintains the cover stories on most of these — and if you question them you’re a “fascist” or a “racist” or a “conspiracy theorist.”

We the People have had enough lies! We’ve had enough official narratives!

We’ve had enough of Globalism, and Cultural Marxism!

It’s time to TAKE AMERICA BACK!

Where do we go from here?

It’s one thing to say all this, though, and another to do it. Early in his speech Trump spoke of the need to “heal” the nation. That’s the truth.

If it’s time to stop the lying, it’s time to start the healing and the rebuilding.

And to tell the truth, wherever we know what it is and can do so.

There are the things Trump is emphasizing, such as stopping the colonization of the country by illegal migrants and restoring the economy.

Then there’s what he doesn’t emphasize as much … such as education, which is badly in need of reform.

He’s said he would abolish the Department of Education.

That will do for a start. Get rid of the hundreds of thousands of paper pushers who either never spent a day in any classroom or fled the classroom due to incompetence.

Imagine the money that will free up that could be used for real educational institutions (and we need new ones!).

Here’s an agenda: recover what is true about the world, versus what isn’t true. Recover what we can identify as the conditions of a healthy civilization and start restoring those from the 30-plus year demolition job done by the cultural left.

These last, of course, would have to be spread across several articles, so I will stop here by congratulating President Trump on his victory over the real forces of darkness in this country … and by repeating my warning over what the leftist-globalist alliance might try between now and January.

There are things I’ve not mentioned which still loom in the background, such as the threat of the forced adoption of central bank digital currencies, and the Great Taking.

Let’s arrange things so that globalists don’t dare even try!

Paraphrasing what Thomas Jefferson wisely said over 200 years ago, though, vigilance has always been the price tag of liberty, and always will be.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

_________________________

Steven Yates’s Substack publication is called Navigating the New Normal. Subscribe and receive content not available on NewsWithViews.com.

As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

Is Trump Trying to Lose This Election?

By Steven Yates

November 5, 2024

[Author’s note: this article expressed the opinion of its author, and should not be attributed to NewsWithViews.com, its editorial staff, or any other NewsWithViews.com writers]

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” —Søren Kierkegaard

Is Donald Trump trying to lose this election?

The question surfaced in my mind Monday morning as I perused the fallout from Trump’s appearance following several others at Madison Square Garden in New York City Sunday night.

This rally wasn’t something he had to do. Yes, it proved he can fill the house and then some, in a notoriously left-leaning city. I don’t know of any head count made that would indicate how many attendees were New Yorkers and how many were from outside the city, or even outside the state.

Trump’s not going to win New York, though.

I cannot tell the extent to which this event has harmed his prospects, but almost assuredly it hasn’t helped him. I would have advised against it. But no one’s asking me. (To the best of my knowledge, my open letter went unread.)

The rally was a bad idea, in my humble opinion. There was just too much danger of someone saying something grade-A stupid.

And sure enough, someone did! In spades!

Murphy’s Law, you know. What can go wrong, will go wrong, and at the worst possible moment! I’m a firm believer in Murphy’s Law!

Whether Trump personally invited the speakers who would appear that night or not, I’m wondering if he vetted the list.

Where did this Tony Hinchcliffe come from, anyway? I’d never heard of him before last weekend. Maybe it’s because we don’t exactly move in the same circles. Since George Carlin passed away, I’ve not followed stand-up comedy. A little homework told me Hinchcliffe hosts a podcast called Kill Tony and that he does “roasts,” i.e., comedy that purposefully pokes fun at someone, usually a celebrity or other prominent figure. I’ve never enjoyed that sort of thing. I guess that’s just me.

Here’s a portion of what Hinchcliffe said (yes, I checked the video; no, I’m not linking to it):

“These Latinos, they love making babies…. Just know that, they do, they do, there’s no pulling out. They don’t do that, they come inside, just like they did to our country. There’s a lot going on, I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

Yeah, Hinchcliffe has free speech rights, the same as you and me.

That said, there’s such a thing as discernment!

I hope I don’t need to say it: what happens in this election will determine the future direction of the U.S. We either begin to turn this mess around, or we don’t turn it around at all. It may already be too late.

Trump needs to repudiate this clown. Otherwise, he risks this being his Hillary Clinton baskets-of-deplorables moment. Remember that? Hillary, exhibiting breathtaking stupidity back in 2016, wrote off an entire bloc of voters in states she needed to win. Naturally that bloc went to Trump.

As blunders go, that was a lulu … but the important thing was to learn from it and not repeat it.

As everyone paying attention knows, leftists are having a field day with this, and with a few other careless remarks made at that rally.

Note, I said careless. I didn’t say racist. I’ll let the leftists do that. Probably with the hiss in their voices.

True: Biden referred to Trump supporters as “garbage” in a retort:

“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters…”

He’ll get a pass. My response: Let leftists and their dementia-addled stand-ins put their hypocrisy on display.

Note also the sexual innuendo in the remark above. This sort of thing, made publicly before a national audience, also indicates a civilization unraveling in its age of decadence.

Focusing on the Puerto Rico remark, Hinchcliff insulted the ancestral home of a people most of whom are in the U.S. legally (some of them born here), who play by the rules, have jobs and families, and whose overall values don’t differ significantly from yours or mine. Most middle class Hispanic people work very hard!

I’m told they did very well economically during what we’re hoping will be the first Trump presidency. Having lived in a Latin American country for a while, I have a few acquaintances in that community. Without exception, they’ve been planning to vote for Donald Trump.

Now, though, some who might still have been fence-straddlers, could be having second thoughts.

This matters, because here we are, six days before Election Day, and I still have no predictions about who’s going to win. One poll says Trump has a slight lead. Another poll says it’s Harris, who may have ticked back up since Sunday night.

I have friends telling me not to worry about it, that a lot of Trump people don’t respond to polls out of distrust and exist in sufficient numbers to ensure Trump a landslide win. I don’t know if that’s true or not. Some of these same people told me Trump would succeed in reversing the disaster of November 3-4, 2020.

One such person scolded me in a text: “Oh ye of little faith.”

In the abstract, I’m as close to being a free speech absolutist as anyone. The only restrictions I would place on it are the obvious ones involving property (you don’t have the right to come onto my property and yell obscenities), or invocations that place others at risk of immediate harm. That old chestnut about shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater qualifies, but so would calls to shoot so-and-so.

For what it’s worth, I think these people calling Trump a fascist are equally irresponsible. For one thing, I can’t see any indication that John Kelly knows what a fascist is. The point is, there are elements in this society that may take such words as a license for violence — perhaps using deadly force to get what they want, which is Donald Trump gone.

After all, none of the lawfare that’s been thrown at him has stuck. His base is laughing off those “34 felony convictions” as the work of a legal system hijacked by hard-left Democrats. They’re laughing at the “sexual assault” court decision whose supposed victim can’t remember what day of the week it was, or in what year it supposedly happened.

Trump has now weathered two assassination attempts. In the first case, had he not moved his head at the right second the bullet would have blown off a portion of his skull. The second attempt was thwarted before the likely shooter could get close … but the question in my mind has always been, how did that guy know Trump would be in that location, as it had not been announced officially on Trump’s calendar for that day? Is there a mole in the Trump organization?

The past four years have been such an across-the-board dumpster fire that in a sense, this really is Trump’s election to lose. Two dangerous foreign wars, the worst inflation since the 1970s, record-high homelessness, the illegal immigrant invasion which I’d warn is not about Latinos but rather Chinese Communist Party operatives and possibly Hezbollah denizens entering the country. Need I continue?

Does Trump want to win? Yes?

Then it is more important than it ever that he be vigilant, and surround himself with people who won’t shoot off their mouths without thinking about the consequences! Or do worse!

Trump himself has made remarks in the past I wouldn’t have made — because they don’t take into account that we peasants are all in the same boat: black, white, Hispanic, Asian, etc.; men and women; straight and gay; Christian or not; and so on.

Unless anyone thinks those at the top care two figs about the “grievances” some of these groups have against others.

We all live under a system that’s rigged to keep as many of us as possible broke, dependent, ignorant, and without hope.

The predators of GloboCorp want us divided and paralyzed with fear: not of them but of one another. GloboCorp is the seamless integration of global corporations ranging from BlackRock to Pfizer with the governments of the world and dozens of NGOs ranging from the Atlantic Council to the World Economic Forum.

This entity has successfully used both identity politics and social media against us. The former emphasizes differences. The latter’s algorithms silo us into echo chambers that take ideological divisions and magnify them. The result is that we’re at each other’s throats and not paying sufficient attention to what’s going on at the pinnacles of power!

If we realize the distinction I’ve been hammering for weeks now — the distinction between those who want people to be controlled and those who just want to be left alone — it all makes sense.

I’m writing for the people who want to be left alone, urging education about what’s really going on, suggesting specific actions, recommending vigilance. That’s been my mission here.

Those who want people to be controlled have a lot of advantages right now. They are better organized; they control all the media empires and the entertainment industry; via Big Intel, they’re embedded in the very structures of Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Food. Above all, they control the financial system and have more than enough money to dictate terms to all of the above, ranging from academia to the medical profession.

The people in GloboCorp’s upper echelons are the ultimate source of the visceral hatred for President Trump. His very presence at the top of the ticket of a major political party in what is still the world’s largest economy and strongest cultural presence is a slap in their faces!

They will do anything, grasp at any straw, to bring him down!

They are using leftist foot soldiers, those who publicly denounce him as a racist and a fascist.

“The buck stops here,” said a sign President Harry Truman kept on his desk.

Right now, the buck stops with Trump. Why on Earth would he allow anyone on his team, or someone speak at one of his rallies, who would give these people further ammunition? Unless he’s subconsciously trying to lose this election, I honestly don’t get it!

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

_________________________

Steven Yates’s Substack publication is called Navigating the New Normal. Consider subscribing and receive content not available on NewsWithViews.com.

As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

Civil Wrongs: 30 Years After!

By Steven Yates

November 1, 2024

[Author’s note: I’d originally planned this for November 4, but putting it up the day before the most contentious election of our lifetimes seemed like a bad idea!]

Thirty years ago, my first book was published. The publication date was November 4, 1994. I was a philosophy instructor at a major Southern university at the time.

Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (ICS Press) was a young scholar’s work, and it didn’t get everything right. Obviously, too, it’s a bit dated. But I was told by more than one reviewer that it broke new ground by connecting the bizarre claims of radical “gender feminists” to affirmative action programs. (In those days, my books actually garnered reviews.)

The connection was that affirmative action programs had gotten university teaching jobs for poorly qualified (but hard-left) white women. I say “poorly qualified” not because these women were stupid — most weren’t stupid at all — but because intellectual curiosity was not what motivated them. Nor did they have a sincere desire to make this world better, as opposed to empowering their tribe.

Efforts to recruit more blacks into academic philosophy had all but failed. There simply weren’t any black applicants for philosophy teaching positions.

The book was unlikely, as the bulk of my education and training had been in the history and philosophy of the physical sciences, and the theory of knowledge. I taught classes in logic, and a few in ethics. I’d been able to write the book because when I need to, I can pivot and do deep dives into new subjects, mastering a literature quickly.

Civil Wrongs, it goes without saying, damaged my academic career — badly.

Universities are places where departures from official narratives are punished — sometimes severely.

The narrative I challenged was that women and blacks were “underrepresented” groups, historically oppressed by us evil white guys, and deserving preferential hiring to correct the historical imbalances. The idea was then just starting to spread to sexual minorities.

What is “underrepresentation”? I’d already asked in letters to the editor and a few previous short pieces. It could only presuppose some concept of “correct representation.”

Who had any idea what that was?

Such queries were ignored. I’d been advised not to publish. “The left will eat you alive,” one correspondent told me.

I’d made a few rash and probably ill-advised statements out of a sense of injustice … that white men of my generation “were being sacrificed on the altar of affirmative action” over wrongs we had no hand in creating or perpetuating. There’d been no chattel slavery in America since 1865. We had been lumped into one collective: white men (soon it would be straight white men and then straight Christian white men). The prevailing narrative assumed we were all uniformly privileged. We were not. Most of us from middle or working class backgrounds, and whose parents were not alumni or donors, had no special advantages whatsoever.

Because I’d been published in refereed journals as a doctoral student and cited in my department as “most likely to succeed,” I’d only had to send out maybe 750 applications during my first five years out of school to be granted something like eight interviews at places where I didn’t have a contact on the inside.

After 1994-95, that number dropped to zero, except for one institution arranged through an inside contact. The department lost funding for the position.

Civil Wrongs almost wasn’t published. I’d begun sending out queries to publishers in 1991. More than four dozen turned it down flat, some with hostile responses. A handful asked to see the manuscript. Then they sat on it. Follow-ups in 60 days, three months, were not answered.

Most were academic presses, as I’d written an academic book. A few were not. In early 1993 a think tank acquisitions editor asked to see the manuscript: the Institute for Contemporary Studies (ICS) based (of all places!) in San Francisco, which offered to publish it conditional on an extensive rewrite, incorporating material on how affirmative action bureaucrats had interfered with industries like construction.

I accepted ICS’s conditions without hesitation, as I’d never assumed the problems were limited to academia. They sent me a trove of material, much of it showing how bureaucrats were threatening federal lawsuits against small businesses that didn’t have bureaucratically correct ratios of blacks in their workforces.

The result was several new chapters and major rearranging. We finalized the manuscript in early 1994, and the waiting game began.

I wasn’t especially looking forward to the book’s appearance, strange as that sounds. By this time, numerous accounts were circulating of classes disrupted by black or leftist students if the professor had used a word or phrase deemed “racist,” or “insensitive.”

Others had faced nuisance harassment by colleagues if they’d taken a stand against the politicizing of their departments (e.g., the departments had hired militant “third wave” feminists of the sort mentioned above). These were manifestations of what was then called political correctness, or PC, originally a term used for Leninists who towed the party line too closely. PC was clearly spreading and worsening. It struck me as antithetical to what a university should do.

Civil Wrongs came out with little fanfare. It received no notification in the campus faculty bulletin where I was then teaching, the University of South Carolina—Columbia, an urban campus with a left-leaning faculty and administration. Sending such notices was up to the author, and I’d not sent them anything.

Instead, I did a guest op-ed for the city newspaper, The State, my point of departure being the election of that year which had seen the routing of left-liberal Democrats and the start of the Gingrich era. I argued that a lot of white males were tired of policies that clearly worked to disfavor them.

The article received a scathing and vaguely threatening reply by a black professor at a small, historically black college in Columbia. The newspaper refused my attempt at a point-by-point reply. A couple of anonymous threats were left on my answering machine. I began wondering if I’d need police protection until this blew over. I got an unlisted phone number.

Four copies of Civil Wrongs stood in the university bookstore in a section for faculty book publications. There was a copy in the display window of a bookstore and newsstand across the street from the State Capitol … in South Carolina, the Confederate flag was then still flying over the dome. We “right wingers” were being associated with that by left-leaning media even though I’d not once mentioned that issue.

For the ensuing six months I kept my head down on and around campus, and around the city, while doing publisher-arranged phone interviews with (mostly conservative) talk radio stations around the country. Most of these went well. I was, however, ambushed a few times. Par for the course, I was learning.

When academic year 1994-95 ended, I was handed the infamous pink slip.

Filing suit crossed my mind. I opted against doing that, having been counseled that any such action definitely would be career-ending. It wouldn’t matter how much I’d published. I’d be radioactive. I’d not been happy at the University of South Carolina, though. I mentioned the left-leaning faculty and administration. Students there struck me as, by and large, substandard. At least 30 percent couldn’t do college-level work, and I’d given a lot of low grades. This gets you bashed in teaching evaluations which the university’s defenders would have used in any legal proceeding — he wasn’t fired because he wrote a book but because he’s ineffective in the classroom.

This was before most watchdog groups had formed, not that they were ever that influential. There were a small handful of organizations devoted to “traditional” (i.e., not leftist-driven or postmodern “scholarship”) such as the National Association of Scholars, but like most academics they were unable to break out of the box of writing almost exclusively for one another.

For the next few years I struggled to survive, working at temp jobs and eventually earning a masters degree in health education.

Meanwhile, questions surfaced.

How powerful was the far left, anyway? How did it get this much cultural power, especially following the supposedly conservative Reagan-Bush years?

I began to think that Civil Wrongs, the final version of which was more about policy than it was history and philosophy, had barely broken the surface of a very deep well.

It was clear, we’d all been lied to about the intent, nature, and influence of affirmative action in academia. My own dissertation advisor had told me falsely years before that the policy was easily gotten around.

Suddenly, one morning (1996, and we were just getting the Internet), the question surfaced: what else had we been lied to about?

I’d long known of maverick scholars who argued that much of what was believed about the origins of civilization was wrong, and that evidence of relatively advanced but completely unknown cultures had been ignored or suppressed.

Who, for example, had created the originals that were compiled into the Piri Re’is Map, possessed by the early 16^th century Turkish sea captain Piri Re’is which bore an accurate depiction of the coastline of South America. Since Piri Re’is had created the map from previous maps which predated South America’s “discovery,” I thought we were entitled to raise the question of who could have known about South America, how far back their knowledge went, and what the implications were. Among academic historians: crickets.

That’s just one example, discussed in detail in historian and geographer Charles Hapgood’s astounding book Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (1966).

Unrelated?

What if lies about affirmative action weren’t the exception?

What if this sort of thing was the rule?

What if important aspects of history are fundamentally fraudulent, constructed to depict a linear advancement model which just isn’t true, because in reality there have been “days and nights of civilization” which has moved in cycles?

We have an artifact from ancient Greece, after all, that depicts the solar system out to Saturn with startling accuracy. Other artifacts recovered from the Middle East, and elsewhere, look disturbingly similar to modern batteries, or even airworthy craft.

I began to review all the official narratives with an eye to asking, did concrete, well-documented evidence actually support them, or was it all about the authority of Ivy League professors with bodies of dogma?

To be sure, issues related to preserving both intellectual and political freedoms in the face of an advancing cultural hard left took priority over such esoteric concerns as the above, so I tabled them hoping someday to get back to them.

A fellow with a law degree named Robert Clarkson (deceased 2010) who’d been disbarred for challenging the IRS too many times on the legality of the tax code had begun inviting me to his meetings of renegade conservatives and a few libertarians. Someone in this group drew my attention to G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature from Jekyll Island (also 1994) which delved into the shady origins of the Federal Reserve System and the power elite driven monetary philosophy behind it.

I also discovered Carroll Quigley’s tomes Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World In Our Time (1966) and The Anglo-American Establishment (1981, posthumously).

Next came John Taylor Gatto’s great works on public education. Gatto showed with great clarity that public schools were never about real education. They were about producing a certain kind of mass that would work the jobs industrial civilization supplied, consume what corporations produced, and believe they really lived in a democracy.

Most did just that. In this sense, given its real aims, public education is not a failure like some insist. It is a spectacular success! It relies on the principle that if you want a controlled population, control the information reaching that population, and control the language in which that information is expressed.

Didn’t professional philosophers analyze language, though? Yes, but not with this in mind! I came to realize that the discipline for which I’d trained for seven years had long ago been sufficiently neutered so that not even its best minds would threaten powerful interests, including those right under their noses on campuses.

They might seem to do so … after all, leftists went on and on about “speaking truth to power.”

Rubbish. They’d become power.

The Matrix came out in 1999. More scales fell from my eyes.

No, we weren’t plugged into an artificial intelligence that had filled our heads with a computer-generated dream world. What we were plugged into, figuratively speaking, was a “Real Matrix” generated by professionalized education, media-saturation, and the deep state. The men behind the curtains were working to bring about, little by little, “global governance,” i.e., a de facto or de jure world government that would serve global corporations.

The “conspiracy theorists” were right!

One of the most significant bits of fallout from all this was my return to the Christianity of my youth. Like most “educated” pseudo-sophisticates with advanced degrees I’d abandoned religion in college as the product of backwardness and scientific illiteracy. I’d once inveighed against “creationism.”

Now I realized: materialism and secularism were a worldview, not rationally-grounded or based on real scientific findings. They had triumphed not because of decisive evidence in their favor, but from having pushed their primary competitor — Christendom — aside, in a long term battle for control over institutions.

They would continue to corrupt actual scientific methods and institutions until we arrived at the Tony Fauci era and calls to Follow The Science, and the idea that “you can be any gender you like (choose from a smorgasbord based on your feelings).

In short, by the 2010s the knowledge-seeking enterprise was melting down, and along with it the culture we were seeing all around us. If we were honest about it.

Narrative collapse within the Republican Party gave us Donald Trump, who, in 2015-16, stepped into the vacuum with his Make America Great Again. America had been undermined by false narratives about diversity being our strength, and globalization making us all rich and free and the world safe for liberal democracy.

Summarizing:

Where did Civil Wrongs fall short, whether through incompleteness or getting things wrong?

You’ll find little or nothing in it about the Frankfurt School and the insidious role of cultural Marxist philosophers such as Herbert Marcuse and his essay “Repressive Tolerance” (1965). This essay attacked free speech on the grounds that it amounted to freedom for white speech at the expense of black speech. Marcuse wanted a reversal, and this became the basis of the preferential hiring mindset that affirmative action became.

Also, Civil Wrongs is far more libertarian than conservative (I dedicated it to the late libertarian philosopher and author Tibor R. Machan who’d been a colleague of mine at Auburn).

Libertarianism offers an unfortunate contrast with the collectivism of political correctness: the individual as homo economicus, in their view society’s basic and most essential unit (not, e.g., the family). In this view there’s no such thing as society, it’s all individuals running around, like atoms. Traditions and time-tested ways of doing things are options and not necessities for the sustaining of civilization. It was these that the far left was attacking, though, not individual autonomy with which they have no problem if the subject is abortion or sexual preference or choice of “gender.”

Libertarianism assumed that “free markets” would sort all this out if “we” just got rid of every law, every policy, every tradition that offered privileges to some at the expense of others. Just hire your individual economic atoms based on measurable personal merit, and everything else would take care of itself.

The problem is, nobody does that. Not even libertarians. Familiarity always trumps unfamiliarity, which explains the success of networking, and “it’s not what you know but who you know.” To purists, this seems ethically shady and isn’t necessarily a good idea, but people naturally prefer known to unknown quantities. It’s how we’re wired.

I also assumed, incorrectly, that “movement conservatives” would be interested in this. They weren’t.

“Movement conservatives” were — still are — too terrified of being called racists to make any attempt to seize the moral high ground, which I and a few others writing in the 1990s were urging them to do. Left-liberals played the “white guilt” card for all it was worth, of course. “Movement conservatives” assume that if they’re “nice” to left-liberals they’ll retain a seat at the table. But leftists don’t respect this. They’re wolves in the sense I invoked here. They respect only power and assertion. So “movement conservatism” stayed at the table, but managed only to embarrass itself as it steadily lost ground. Guys like me, meanwhile, were increasingly ignored.

By 2000, corporations were pushing political correctness on the grounds that left-leaning black groups “had money to spend.” Single career (mostly white) women, too, were advancing by leaps and bounds, and their a-woman-needs-a-man-like-a-fish-needs-a-bicycle view of relationships culturally with them.

So much for the idea that “markets” alone were of help.

In that case, what did Civil Wrongs get right?

I believe it was prescient in predicting our current mess.

I’d tried to warn anyone who would listen that if political correctness was not opposed forcefully and beaten back successfully through conservatives taking back the moral high ground, it would continue to spread from academia until it had infiltrated and subverted every institution in the country.

I predicated a wave of “increasingly brazen politically motivated irrationalism,” which sounds very like present-day transgenderism which wasn’t on anyone’s radar in the 1990s but is now everywhere.

Wokeness is the apotheosis of political correctness, itself a product of affirmative action ideology. This mindset now dominates higher education, mass media, and much of the corporate world — especially the world of those rich enough to absorb the problems it creates, which frequently is having incompetent people around and having to minimize the damage they can do. (Back in the 1990s, one dissident academic asked sarcastically “if feminist airplanes would stay aloft for feminist engineers.”)

Now we have “DEI”: diversity, equity, inclusion (or DIE, as I sometimes call it).

Given the overall ineffectiveness of race and sexual preferences, we have allegations that America is permeated with “systemic racism” that cannot be removed through reforms. Women still face a “glass ceiling” in many institutions, or so it is said.

What’s the implication? Cultural revolution, Maoist-style, which not merely censors but cancels every dissenting voice, by whatever means necessary.

We now have a candidate for President of the United States, of a major political party, who owes the bulk of her appointments, including vice president (Biden once said so explicitly) to her status as a “woman of color,” and whose incompetence as vice president resulted in an unprecedented level of illegal migration that those on the ground will tell you is destroying their communities.

A Harris presidency would eventually legalize them all. They will then vote Democrat, and we’ll have a de facto one-party political system within four years. Maybe conservatives will be tolerated. Maybe not.

Leftists ruined California. They are in the process of ruining the entire country. (Indeed, the leftist mindset has corrupted and ruined every nation it has touched: Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Brazil, Canada, the list goes on and on.)

The mystery, for some, is: why did corporate America got on board with this juggernaut?

There are billionaires such as Soros with hard left beliefs. He’s hardly alone. A lot of Silicon Valley types pushed “DEI” on their workforces and punished dissent. Computer engineer James Damore’s story is telling: he penned a letter criticizing one of the assumptions of corporate leftism at Google, which is that men and women are fundamentally the same, should be interchangeable in job roles, so that any “gender” imbalance must result from “systemic” discrimination.

What’s up with all the moneyed interests supporting this stuff?

The best I can figure out: our present-day billionaire class (much of it, anyway) shares a common premise with the hard left: we’re qualified to manage the world. If this means exercising force against the peasantry so that it knows its place, then so be it.

That is the Platonist premise that has caused so much grief: Utopia is possible, and we’re the ones to build it. We, of the World Economic Forum (for example), are the philosopher-kings. Because we have the knowledge, the insight, the motivation, and the commitment to “social justice” so that “history is on our side.”

Within the billionaire class are transhumanists who, having abandoned God no less than Marxists, have set themselves up as God’s replacement, literally able to reconfigure the natural order (“through our hormonal treatments and other gender-affirming care you can be any gender you like”).

The corporations have the money; woke leftists have the will as loyal foot soldiers.

Meanwhile, those supposedly dominant — straight white Christian men — are the only ones losing ground: culturally, demographically, economically, healthwise, spiritually. We’re group members for political purposes and atomized economically and psychologically, so that loneliness is epidemic as white men stay unmarried.

We’re not having children in sufficient numbers. A population that doesn’t reproduce itself, eventually dies out.

What did/do the corporate leviathans want? To transform as much of the world as possible into a single global marketplace based on mass consumption and debt, managed in top-down fashion. All else has been subordinated to that. What doesn’t contribute to it, or what interferes with it, is expendable at best and must be eliminated if it can’t be gotten around.

Hence the cold war on everything theological and everything traditional.

This system throws most of us to the wolves: that includes most women, most ethnic minorities, as well as most straight white Christian men, outside the enclaves of real privilege.

Watch for the coming of digital currency and the elimination of physical cash. Once the power elite techno-feudal order is set up, this is how its philosopher-kings will consign dissidents to starvation when their credit cards and bank accounts are canceled.

Globalists know that an agrarian feudal order was relatively stable for centuries. They believe their techno-feudal order can be made similarly stable. They are wrong. No empire based on lies, deceit, and when those fail, brute force, has ever endured.

Little of this was implicit in Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action, which warned only of the coming of a world in which your abilities would count for nothing and your group identity, for everything. That warning stands. So do more recent ones, based on everything I’ve discovered since.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

_________________________

Steven Yates’s Substack publication is called Navigating the New Normal. Consider subscribing and receive content not available on NewsWithViews.com.

As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

The Immortal Man

By Steven Yates

October 23, 2024

Book Review, Borrowed Time, by John Nolte (Bombardier Books, 2023). Pp. 389.

What if you were literally immortal, not knowing how, or why?

What if you had no idea of your actual age or birthday, because you were born before anybody kept records, and you didn’t age.

You could be killed or die in an accident or even end your own life, but you’d always return … to the same place, under a Joshua Tree in what is now the American Southwest, a desert, your body reconstituted as it was before.

That’s Joshua Mason’s existence, in this phenomenal novel noir.

Joshua Mason isn’t his original name, of course. It’s a name he made up, or maybe found somewhere. He has no idea of his original name, if he even had one.

He’s thousands of years old, though he looks — always — like a late fortysomething.

He’s the central character in Borrowed Time, out last year from John Nolte, a name you’ll recognize if you read Breitbart.com where he writes a regular column.

Borrowed Time is not a partisan screed. Politics plays a role in the backdrop, in the form of acute observations from someone who’s been around the block a few times, and then some. This book is a thoughtful and often poignant meditation on the human condition. To carry the storyline forward (occasionally backward), Nolte brings Mason into contact with a variety of characters, many of them broken by life. They range from decent folks who mean well to cutthroat opportunists to amoral, bloodthirsty killers.

Nolte’s narrative also ranges across multiple ethnicities, for anyone who cares about that sort of thing.

What would you say about a man who doesn’t get older?

Well, in any stable community, this odd fact about him might someday attract attention. So, such a man can’t stay in one place for long.

He also risks heartbreaking loss should he fall in love. He’s cursed to watch any partner grow old and die….

Joshua Mason let it happen, and this forms one of the central threads of the book: his relationship with Doreen Medina, whose husband had left her and their daughter Maya when the girl was a child. Doreen then lost her daughter, grown and with a child of her own, to a tragic auto accident that also claimed the life of her ne’er-do-well son-in-law, Tate Breslin. Her grandson, Charlie Breslin, then seven, survived the accident, but was brain-damaged and can’t mature past that age.

Charlie remains a 7-year-old in a grown man’s body. His damaged brain has left him with an embarrassing stutter. He’s clueless with women.

His curse is that he knows something is wrong with him, and that no one he knows of can fix it.

Mason has come to care deeply what happens to Charlie. Mason himself is a flawed character. As the saying goes, love is blind! So, he fails to see things he needs to see.

How does such a man earn his living? On the surface, he and Doreen managed a hotel and were doing reasonably well until a highway going in nearby relegated their location to the back roads. Now they’re struggling. Their Rebel Yell Motel has become a haven for drug dealers, bikers, other lowlifes and outcasts.

Mason makes his real money selling his life on the dark web for $50K a pop … to psychos who get their kicks from offing someone in hideous ways. As the story progresses, he works through a degenerate named Ernest, who works for a political class nihilist whom he calls the Old Rich Pr*ck. Mason surprises him by having the money wired to an offshore bank account, and then having the offshore bank send it elsewhere, making it as difficult as possible to trace.

Mason has a broader problem: how does a guy like him survive in what he calls the All at Once: the novel’s name for encircling modernity, which to a guy who has lived as long as he has seems to have come all at once: a world in which you can’t do anything legally without ID.

Mason’s IDs are all fakes: birth certificate, social security card, drivers licenses. His bank accounts also used fake names.

He had a system whereby he could create fake identities, but the All at Once has made it impossible to use. Its systems of surveillance have gotten better and more intrusive, after all, with facial recognition technology (for example).

So the All at Once is closing in on him little by little, threatening his worst nightmare: exposure.

What would happen? He’s figured it out: the All at Once’s well-paid technocrats would put him through endless interrogations and physical examinations, then finally take him apart trying to figure out what makes him tick. Why? Because the powerful want immortality for themselves. Here we get to some of this novel’s more interesting messages.

Joshua Mason has had time to assess how civilizations work — outside the antiseptic cleansings of theoreticians and ideologues and “isms.” I quoted a little of it at the start of a previous article:

Mason didn’t believe in God, religion, politics, or country. Instead, he broke the world into two groups: Those Who Wish to Be Left Alone and Those Who Push People Around.

He was a lifetime member of the former. He’d seen it too many times…. How Those Who Push People Around brought only misery and ultimately war to Those Who Wish to Be Left Alone. He’d seen it happen within families and tribes, in cities, and across continents. So he knew the warning signs…. As Those Who Push People Around started to grow in numbers and a self-righteous certainty about how the other fella should live, speak, worship, and think, oppression and violence soon followed.

Everyone talked about wanting world peace. But no one was willing to do what was necessary to achieve it, which was simply this: Mind your own g**d****d business. How difficult was that? Well, if you read a history book, you’ll see it’s impossible.

Human nature being human nature, one tribe’s always gotta bully the other. One group’s always certain its ideas are superior and won’t tolerate others doing anything different. (p. 240).

That’s truly radical! It goes beyond anyone’s — all of our — “isms.”

How much ideology — of whatever sort — amounts to the ideologue’s rationalization for his (sometimes its her) lust for power?

Nolte gives us a concrete example in another of his characters, a power-hungry weakling broken by his having lost a debate when he was in high school and ending up on meds:

If Jerome were king — and he thought a lot about being king — everyone would live the way he lived. To him, this was a moral imperative. People with large homes, gas-guzzling SUVs, campers, and big yards — people who indulged in all that selfish largess eating up the world’s resources, they disgusted him. How could a great country survive if everyone was allowed to live any way they pleased? (p. 228)

Mason speaks of “cream scrapers” such as the guy just referenced, an ambitious FBI agent:

If there was one thing Mason couldn’t get over about this society, it was how the All at Once made it possible for the most useless people in the world to scrape off all the cream. He knew that if you build yourself a pile of everyone you see on your TV, they wouldn’t add up to the worth of a single plumber, farmer, or coal miner. But if you swept the table clear of those TV people, the world would keep turning just fine, maybe better. (p. 104)

The “TV people” — political classes, most corporate media, a lot of those whose “skill” is moving money around all day — don’t really contribute anything. They only take. At some level, they know this and deeply resent the fact. Burning resentment twists them mentally and psychologically.

Nolte illustrates this by outlining in detail the differences between the Old Rich Pr*ck and the man’s father. The latter earned a fortune producing: making something that benefited others. The Old Rich Pr*ck inherited it, began to squander it, producing nothing, and then — what else? — turned to the reins of power and to depravity and cleverly blackmailing members of the political class.

The Old Rich Pr*ck (who is no match for Joshua Mason) comes to a bad end, realizing with utter despair in his last moments, that despite his inherited fortune his life has been worthless.

Because — let’s face it — we were put here to solve problems. For others, and for ourselves. Some rise to the occasion and reap the rewards; others don’t. The latter quickly succumb to the temptations of Those Who Push People Around.

Thanks to actual problem solvers, modernity — the All at Once — has provided a “bounty” only likely to be fully appreciated by someone who lived before it and saw a world of short life spans, chronic hunger, arduous manual labor, diseases long since cured, and an utter lack of the kinds of creature comforts we take for granted (air conditioning, refrigeration, designer clothing, credit cards, the Internet, other things not available even to royalty in centuries past).

Modernity’s dark side is that it has concentrated power, leaving the many largely at the mercy of the few unless they wise up. It isn’t just power that corrupts; utter powerlessness corrupts as well, as it turns the chronically weak to crime and drugs, the ambitious to depravity of various sorts up to and including killing for sport.

Mason imagines what Those Who Push People Around would say when he refused to help them:

You sound selfish and greedy, sir. Like you’re full of hate, sir. Like a national security threat, sir. (p. 104)

That fake politeness — the “sirs” — of those who wield power runs like a refrain through this book.

Power lives in a bubble, after all. Those Who Push People Around have no grasp of the mindset of Those Who Wish To Be Left Alone, and vice versa. That always spells trouble, but would really spell trouble if the former exposed him.

Most of us fear, or at least are uneasy with, the idea of death. In his The Denial of Death (1973), anthropologist Ernest Becker contended that most human belief and action reflects the deep-seated desire to avoid the thought of death’s inevitability. Cultures try to transcend the thought of death through religions, other symbolic systems including those of nationality, and through heroism — the “hero’s journey” (Joseph Campbell). Ours or that of others.

Stoic philosophers counseled awareness of our mortality. Memento mori, they said: “Remember you must die.” The reminder that our days are numbered might help us use them more wisely.

Scripture tells us, “It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment” (Heb. 9:27).

Some, though, fantasize about living forever. Would this be a good thing? Or would it turn the planet into Hell — literally?!

Mason addresses such people directly, whichever of the two groups they fall into. Nolte italicizes the whole passage … surely to draw attention to the fact that it reflects a core idea:

Anyone eager to wrap their minds around a scenario that only ever ends in a horror show, need only picture a world where no one dies. Forget over-population, focus on human nature.

Let’s start with the one thing no one ever thinks of. Not everyone’s rich, you know. Most aren’t. And for those who aren’t, if you take an honest look over their personal horizon in a world where no one dies, there’s no retirement, no pension, no social security, no rest. Living forever sentences you to grinding out a living forever. Believe me, I know.

You want to spend eternity in a cubicle pushing papers? You want to dig ditches, cut grass, change oil, wait tables, enter data, deliver mail, sell cars, drive a bus, write code, work in a factory, wash dishes, cut hair, fight fires, groom dogs, mop floors, write briefs, clean teeth, patrol streets, sell homes, stock shelves, make beds, flip burgers, and stand behind a cash register forever?

How about a planet full of a**holes? Is that what you want, a world buried in thoughtless, judgmental, unforgiving, forever-young narcissists never compelled to wise up by the coming of the abyss?

Don’t you understand, it’s the cold truth of dying that forces a man to face the fact that there’s no endless supply of tomorrows. It’s death’s unrelenting approach that says you need to become a better man, a better husband and father — now, right now, before it’s too late. Now is the time to forgive, to beg forgiveness, to say “I love you,” and take hold of what matters.

Don’t you get it? It’s the harrowing knowledge of our limited time that separates us from animals. You want to live in a world without that? Trust me, you don’t. (pp. 104-05)

Mason can pass his immortality on to another if he chooses. Only his love for Doreen tempts him. As a Christian, she turns it down. Then she is gone. And courtesy of the All at Once’s encirclements which now include the war on cash which is all he has, he’s faced with not even being able to put gas in his vehicle.

He’s built a safehouse he can go to, well concealed, in the desert, not far from his Joshua Tree. He’s stocked it with nonperishables and supplies. It is interesting that he thinks that if things get bad enough, he can flee there to wait out the All at Once. As a man accustomed to psychological isolation, the thought of physical isolation didn’t bother him. Until Doreen, anyway. And Charlie.

Charlie….

After Doreen dies, the one person Mason cares about is Charlie. And Charlie is shot in the stomach by Ernest (remember him?) who is trying to kill all those who might get wind of his employer’s perverse actions. Ernest nevertheless comes to a bloody end at the hands of an enraged Charlie who then falls unconscious from the gunshot would, and later is severely burned in a fire. He’s not expected to live.

Mason then makes a mistake, and the mistake has ghastly consequences for all concerned. To put it mildly.

But no more spoilers here. I want you, gentle reader, to buy this book and read it. Read it twice. At least.

Borrowed Time is not horror, nor is it science fiction, although at times it pulls in elements from each. It’s more a kind of romance, though not in Judith Krantz’s sense, obviously.

I should warn you: it’s full of expletives. The characters including Mason don’t hold back.

Any number of scenes are graphically violent, moreover.

But Nolte can write! Holy smoke, can he write (he’s better than yours truly)! His characters (minor as well as major) are vividly brought to life on the page, with clear pasts that inflicted damage, and we both see and feel their psychic pain. Various scenes, delivered staccato-fashion, play out like a movie in your mind as we see follow the consequences of the short-term thinking, cultural depravity, and diminishing of personal freedoms Nolte wants to portray. He’s amazingly adept at integrating his points into the make-up of his characters and into the storyline. His ability to “show, not tell,” the biggest challenge any serious fiction writer faces, leaves most contemporary fiction in the dust.

This ought to have been the novel of the year, its author lionized in mass media. But Nolte writes for Breitbart.com. You know, that “far right” Trump-supporting news and commentary outlet?

Thus: no exposure by the “TV people.” No reviews in their elite, glossy, and well-financed periodicals.

In a culture as shallow as it is depraved, a book of this depth isn’t likely to be noticed.

Nolte doesn’t mention Trump or any other current political figures. It’s as if, in the larger scheme of things, politics doesn’t matter.

What matters is how we treat one another with the time we have, and recognizing that actions (and inactions) have consequences.

Although he’s no Luddite (see p. 190), Nolte does depict the All at Once — secular modernity — ending badly.

Then, Joshua Mason lives on…. And on, and on….

Borrowed Time has an ending that has to be read to be believed! Frankly, I didn’t want this book to end! I wanted to see what happened next! Because clearly, something does happen next. Maybe Nolte will write a sequel, although having been all but ignored, these days I can’t blame him if he’s thinking the hell with it.

I give this book my highest possible recommendation. If you read only one novel this year, it should be Borrowed Time, by John Nolte.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

_________________________

Steven Yates’s Substack publication is called Navigating the New Normal. Consider subscribing and receive content not available on NewsWithViews.com.

As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

Next Month’s Election, “Bubble-nauts” and the Real Economy

By Steven Yates

October 15, 2024

“It’s the economy, stupid.” —James Carville

If you were to ask me today who is more likely to win next month’s election, my answer is going to be the same as Tucker Carlson’s a few months back: I don’t know.

I can make an educated guess at the factors that will determine the outcome, though, perhaps in light of any October surprises we haven’t seen yet.

If voters are revved up in favor of the death culture — pro-abort (“women’s reproductive freedoms”), pro-Zionist (favoring a society whose snipers shoot children in the head for sport), or prowar generally (more taxpayer dollars to Ukraine and Israel), then Kamala Harris will win.

If they’re looking at the economy in terms of their own situations, then Donald Trump will win.

A recent article in the leftist British periodical The Guardian helps us nail down the thinking of the latter, whatever the author’s intensions.

Aditya Chakrabortty writes: “This is the future for Kamala Harris: unless she solves this economy mystery, Trump wins,” the article repeats the contention coming from all the elites that the economy has never been better. She writes, citing Mark Zandi of Moodys as authority and summarizing: “Growth: up. Jobs: up. Wages: rising. The value of your home: up. Share prices: booming. Inflation: falling. Borrowing rates: dropping.”

Elites like Zandi say: it’s in the numbers, that “this is among the best performing economies in my 35+ years as an economist.”

But the public isn’t “feeling it.” Asked the Great Question of the Reagan era, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” most Americans would say No.

Asked today if they find it easier to put food on the table after price increases of over 20 percent, they’d say emphatically: Hell no!

So does the unwashed peasantry just not “get it?”

Chakrabortty (doubtless reflecting the elite mindset which disdains ordinary mortals’ experience and gut-level instincts):

“…[H]owever hard they scratch their heads Washington’s finest can’t give a good answer. Many on the centre left paint it as a PR problem: that Biden has failed to claim the credit or that voters are too dumb to realize how good things are.”

She (?) then sites a report from another left-leaning group, the Democracy Collaborative, which looks at all these issues over a longer timeline: not four years but, say, four decades. They reach the result that even the numbers by the elite-sponsored echo that Hell no! Because over that time frame, things have gotten worse, not better, and across the board.

I haven’t read the report, so I can’t assess it beyond what Chakrabortty says about it. But while reading what she (?) says, the reason for the disconnect dawned on me.

The “Bubble-nauts.”

It’s easy for someone in a Washington-based think tank or New York consulting firm to say that “the numbers say x” and present that as final.

This is because they live in a bubble. Not the financial bubble we’ll talk about in a few minutes, a cultural bubble. This bubble begins at Boston, runs through New York, down to the Asylum on the Potomac, and then basically stops, although it has representatives in every big city and a lot of medium-sized ones, and obviously all up and down the Left Coast. Most bureaucrats and career academics live in this bubble.

Most “bubble-nauts” have never worked at a real job in their lives. Most have “social science” type credentials, and doubtless view economics as an empirical discipline in the manner of Keynesians instead of aprioristically as does the Austrian School.

By a real job I mean doing work growing things, making things, distributing them, selling them, and so on. Without these abilities, embedded in families and in communities that remain stable over time and are passed to the next generation, you don’t have a civilization. Not in the long run.

The inhabitants of the Northeastern Bubble Corridor work mostly for the government (some federal, some the states), or in “think tanks” and “consulting firms” — a few are in Ivy League universities, or banking leviathans or other large corporations — where the prevailing skills involve crunching numbers.

Their work includes ensuring that “the numbers” are favorable to those in power, be they mainstream Democrats or mainstream Republicans: the Uni-Party, some call it.

Hence an inflation number that avoids food and fuel costs, and an unemployment number that only counts as unemployed those who are not working and have sought work in the past four weeks.

The “Bubble-nauts” disdain people who, say, work with their hands, and whose lives don’t focus on things valued in the corridors of power. Even though most would starve if they actually had to grow something, make something, sell it, distribute it. Or even teach others about it. As educators most are hopeless (frankly, I’ve picked up more about business from “success coaches” than I ever would have learned in any business school in any university).

At some level, “Bubble-nauts” know this and deeply resent it.

I have to wonder how many actually buy their own groceries.

These are the folks who virtue signal routinely in corporate media and tell us that if you openly note that Kamala Harris is an obvious beneficiary of several decades of affirmative action, what is now called DEI (Diversity-Equity-Inclusion), that makes you a racist.

Also a sexist and a misogynist, because she’s a woman.

Hasn’t she totally screwed up America’s southern border?

You racist, you!

Her husband Doug Emhoff is now known to have slapped around a former girlfriend in public —

Not exactly E. Jean Carroll, “Jane” is staying anonymous out of fear for her safety, because Emhoff is a “prominent public figure.”

Nice euphemism for leftist, since males who are leftists or favored by globalists always get a pass. Think: Bill Clinton and Juanita Broaddrick!

Didn’t happen, you misogynist!

All these, plus the fact that as I’ve noted previously, Kamala helped hide Joe Biden’s cognitive decline about which we were gaslighted for four years, show how fundamentally dishonest leftists really are.

You conspiracy theorist, you!

This is how “Bubble-nauts” think.

The point being: even if the economy might be working splendidly for the “Bubble-nauts,” why should we ordinary mortals out here believe a word they say?

My “economic expertise” and common sense.

So from where does a guy like me derive his “economic expertise”?

Well, first of all, I never claimed to be an economist or an expert on the subject, but like most people I know that bread now costs around three times what it did a few short years ago. Meat, eggs, vegetables, other staples, all cost much more than they used to.

I live well outside the Bubble Corridor!

My “expertise” is common horse sense, in light of the fact that I read books and essays penned by people outside the Bubble Corridor who have looked at both how a real economy works, and what has gone wrong with ours, from a standpoint that sets aside the dominant paradigms embraced by the economics profession.

Several of these observed years ago that rising prices aren’t really inflation. Rising prices are an effect of inflation.

What’s the cause?

Money printing. The Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury Department.

What’s been inflated, for all those four decades and longer, is the money supply, whether as cash, debt, or equities.

Real Economics 101 (if there still is such a thing): create more of anything, and in the absence of greater demand, the value any individual unit that thing can command in the marketplace drops.

Hence houses costing $20,000 USD a few years ago and over $200,000 USD today. Not because the houses are that much more valuable, but because the money being used to buy them has lost most of its purchasing power. (Same with automobiles, same with food, same with everything else.)

It’s a simple fact that most people’s salaries, while rising in terms of sheer numbers, have fallen relative to the purchasing power of their salaries.

From the political class to the corporatocracy.

We can trace all the decisions that brought about real inflation, and the decline of the American middle class, to the political class. When the upper-echelons of the corporate class realized it could benefit handsomely from political decisions it hopped on board, and what resulted was the seamless corporatocracy of today, with centers from Wall Street to Silicon Valley.

Richard Nixon killed the gold standard in 1971. This put us on course for a financialized world of rising debt and took us into an economy fueled by debt instead of production. The result was the progression of bubbles in the economic sense of that term: the tech bubble of the 1990s, the housing bubble of the 2000s, and finally the Everything Bubble of the present.

Ronald Reagan largely killed unions with his breaking the air traffic controllers’ strike. Conservatives lauded this move at the time. They might consider reexamining and checking their enthusiasm for something that, over the long term, contributed to making a lot of common people worse off because it destroyed the balance of power between leviathan corporations and the rest of America.

Reagan also paved the way to NAFTA. The Bushes and Bill Clinton finished the job of throwing open the borders to “free trade” and free migration. Here is where corporations got with the program, as their analysts told them they could profit handsomely from moving their primary operations to cheap labor countries.

The most visible result was the West’s shift from a “manufacturing” economy to a “services” economy. Never mind that the majority of the jobs in the latter paid a pittance compared to their predecessors.

With the repeal of Glass-Steagall (a Clinton political decision), leviathan investment institutions worked closely with commercial ones as they had before the Great Depression, resulting in the complex, poorly understand, but as it turned out, very dangerous “bundled” financial instruments that brought us the Meltdown of 2008.

Both Congress and Barack Obama bailed out Wall Street … proving again how the Establishment Left serves the power elites.

They’d all thrown the (white) working class, i.e., those stuck with the real economy, to the wolves.

The (white) working class responded by supporting Donald Trump.

I think Trump wanted to turn things around. But he was fought every step of the way and continues to be fought.

Clearly, the power elites in the Bubble Corridor consider him the most dangerous figure on the political scene!

He’s dangerous to Those Who Push People Around, working on behalf of Those Who Want To Be Left Alone.

Trump has taken up for cultural conservatives trying to turn back the tides of the death culture, which is why pro-aborts such as Harris and radical feminists generally hate his guts so much.

I attribute this lack of respect to human life to the insidious, long-term influence of materialism as a worldview, but that’s a different article.

Unfortunately Trump does not have a comprehensive worldview or economic philosophy or set of first principles to work from. He’s an empiricist. He doesn’t have that kind of a mind.

This is unfortunate, because we need someone able to put all this together!

Dr. Ron Paul, sadly, definitely is too old (he’ll turn 90 next year!). He wasn’t taken seriously. He utterly lacked Trump’s penchant for showmanship.

I mentioned reading books. There are previous authors we can draw on, who had a grasp of how a real economy works, and gave us the foundations of a sensible science of economics. I’ll discuss a couple of them next week.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

_________________________

Steven Yates’s Substack publication is called Navigating the New Normal. Consider subscribing and receive content not available on NewsWithViews.com.

As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

Another Student Athlete Is Dead, and the “Cause of Death Has Not Been Publicly Shared”

By Steven Yates

October 2, 2024

Once, long ago, there was real journalism, and real investigative reporting. It asked who, when, and where; also how, and why. These last two were frequently the most important. Practitioners of real investigating reporting demanded answers.

Relentlessly.

This brand of investigation is dead except on platforms like Substack, independent blogs, and a few “alternative” news/commentary sites like this one. And none of us have the resources our predecessors had.

This is bad news, because all that mainstream corporate outlets do is push official narratives, while struggling to hide what doesn’t fit those narratives.

Latest case in point: the sad death of Shelby Daniele, 23, whom all indications are was a well-liked student athlete as well as a serious student.

She’d been a sprint runner for California Polytechnic State University’s track and field team for five years.

She’d just graduated last spring with a degree in agriculture — a subject useful to know something about!

The school’s athletic department announced her death — on Instagram, mind you — which had happened three days earlier. (This was the first announcement???)

Here’s a portion:

Shelby was an exceptional student-athlete on the Cal Poly track and field team for five years, graduating from Cal Poly this spring with her master’s in agriculture with distinction. She was a six-time All-Big West honoree, a two-time Big West champion, a team captain and is a school record holder, but more importantly, she was an incredible teammate and leader.

She cared deeply for those around her, had a remarkable heart and was a role model for so many. Shelby was truly one of a kind and will be missed dearly by everyone in the Cal Poly community. Our condolences go out to her family and friends.

Then my primary source for this story drops the bomb (original here).

Read this sentence several times and think about it:

A cause of death has not been publicly shared.

In other words: we know who, where, and (approximately) when, but not how or more importantly, why.

With accomplishments already under her belt, she had whole life ahead of her. (At age 23, I was clueless!)

But if you followed what was forced on the world beginning at the start of 2021, what is your nose telling you right now? Do you trust your nose?

We’re talking about what some believe killed home run king Hank Aaron … 18 days after he had his first dose! Despite the denial. Aaron was 86.

Returning to Shelby Daniele, I did a little digging. What I came up with: according to this site, she died of a brain aneurysm (they misspelled it). What, exactly, is a brain aneurysm? Essentially, it’s a ballooning blood vessel in the brain which, when it bursts, causes a cerebral hemorrhage — a stroke.

In other words, Shelby may have died of a stroke!

At age 23!

Tell me, readers. Does this make any sense to you at all?

This site agrees with our first source: the cause of death “was not released.”

So which is it? Do we know how she died, or don’t we?

I think we can make a reasonably educated guess as to the cause of the aneurysm if that’s what it was. And I think such efforts will be quietly buried.

The life insurance industry — surely a reliable source of information on such matters — noted a rise in deaths among people ages 15 – 45 not explained by covid which was receding by late 2022.

In 2023, such deaths were 20 percent higher than normal.

They noticed, because this has affected their bottom line!

As far back as early 2021, do we not recall the reports of athletes and a few others with no known health problems suddenly dropping dead? I do! I lost count of them all!

These are just the cases reported, because athletes tend to be visible.

Do we know Shelby Daniele had the shots? She was a student athlete at a major university. Do the math.

How many others have died “mysteriously” — no previous health problems — from heart attacks, strokes, and “turbo-cancers” which seemed to come out of nowhere?

The list includes people I knew and considered friends.

This issue has receded into the background. It’s easy to see why. The most important election in over a century is speeding at us like a freight train, and it may decide whether the U.S. will turn back from the brink, or continue on its path to “Venezuela-ization.”

There’s a lot at stake!

The corporatocracy that controls so-called scientific medicine — and much more! — has set the rules on how these cases are handled, and most reporting amounts to automatic writing. Limited, confusing, vaguely secretive, and often contradictory messaging is the norm.

Those atop Pharma corporations want as few people as possible doing the math, so that those who do can be labeled conspiracy theorists pushing baseless or unproven claims.

For of course, no one can prove, absolutely, what I’m insinuating here.

That’s the point. It’s called plausible deniability. Because of this concept, it’s unlikely that any allegation against Big Pharma, or Tony Fauci, would hold up in any court.

People dying at ridiculously young ages aren’t dying of the same things, after all; and most of those who took the mRNA shots haven’t been much affected by them — yet.

If the shots really are sabotaging cardiovascular systems and undermining immune systems, given that different people’s systems and pre-existing state of health are different, you wouldn’t expect them all to drop dead at once, or from the same things!

There is no proof of a causal connection between taking the mRNA shots and protection from covid, either.

Safe and effective was the official mantra.

Effective? I know, or know of, any number of people who foolishly got the shots and got covid anyway. Entire families, in some cases.

A real vaccine, developed and properly tested (which takes several years, including clinical trials spread out across time), prevents what it inoculates for. If you got the MMR vaccine when you were a kid, you did not get mumps, measles, or rubella! Period!

Safe? That question answers itself plausibly with the otherwise inexplicable rise in mortality in a population the lion’s share of whom “got their shots.”

I don’t know of anyone who regrets refusing them — even if they lost jobs and careers over it, as some did.

Not even the life insurance industry has put two and two together. Maybe they’re afraid. Their spokespeople in the source I used expect the abnormal rise in mortalities to abate by 2030.

Maybe it will, but I’m not banking on that.

Meanwhile, the cover-up continues.

For what happens when enough people who had the mRNA shots and then got boosted once or twice, foolishly trusting the Pharma / medical Establishment, awaken from their cultural slumber and realize what may have been done to them, that they have a ticking time bomb inside their bodies that they’ll never be able to get rid of completely.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

[Author’s note: I like getting email, because I often learn from it, from people whose experiences and insights are different than mine. Writers should welcome and not resent this.

Three different readers emailed me about my comment on Haitians eating pets in Springfield, Ohio (here). I was agnostic, but after reading my email and thinking the matter through, I’m a bit less so. One thing to keep in mind: the denial that anything of the sort was going on, with all the usual weaponized phrases, was so voluminous, so continuous, and so belligerent, as to become a caricature of itself. The kind of overkill has to make a reasonable person wonder if someone is hiding something.

In several interviews now, J.D. Vance (R-OH) has told interviewers (including hostile ones like CNN’s Dana Bash) that his sources come from his constituents who live there. This comes in the larger context of almost-four years of an administration — the Bidenistas — which has consistently displayed more interest in the borders of a foreign country, Ukraine, than they have the borders of their own country. The common people of towns like Springfield (especially white people) have almost no one going to bat for them in the corridors of power. Almost no one considers the likely disruptions from government moving 20,000 Haitians into a town of around 40,000! If J.D. Vance can change this, more power to him.

In this light, even though we’ve not seen quite the same level of excess, I have to wonder if my comment about no newborns being allowed to die might also have been in error. I don’t know of specific cases, but the idea is entirely consistent with the death culture the Bidenistas have perpetuated despite Dobbs, and which Kamala Harris would doubtless worsen if she becomes “president”! Why the scare quotes? Because while Sleepy Joe had/has dementia, Kamala simply isn’t bright enough to handle the demands of the presidency. What we’ll have is a seamless continuation of the presidency-by-committee we’ve had since January 21, 2021.]

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Steven Yates’s publication Navigating the New Normal is on Substack. For more content and commentary, do consider subscribing.

Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself. He has authored three books; more than 20 articles, numerous book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies; and a novella and a novel.

In 2012 he moved to Chile. He is married to a Chilean national. Among his discoveries in South America: the problems of the U.S. are problems everywhere, because human nature is the same everywhere. The problems are problems of Western civilization as a whole.

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

Is Ancient Stoic Philosophy Relevant to 2020s America?

By Steven Yates

September 14, 2024

We approach a pivotal election and a very precarious future no matter who wins….

What is Stoicism, and what does it have to do with our present situation?

In order: Stoicism is a philosophy originating with ancient Greeks shortly after the time of Socrates. It was one of several competing schools in what was then the thriving city of Athens. It spread throughout the ancient world and was popular in Rome prior to Rome’s Christianizing.

When we see what it offered the people of its time, we’ll see its present-day relevance. Indeed, there appears to be a certain amount of interest in Stoicism today. Author Ryan Holiday is the most visible figure tapping into this interest. He has built a thriving cottage industry around a few bestsellers with titles like The Obstacle Is the Way (2014) and Stillness Is the Key (2019).

Some will want to know: is Stoicism compatible with Christianity? Devotees of each considered themselves to be competitors during the first few centuries AD. To my mind Keith Humphrey, in his just-published Stoicism and Christianity (2024), lays out a credible account of the overlap between the two, which is greater than their differences. It’s a shame that Stoics and Christians have never figured out how to work together. They had the same enemies. They still do. But their approaches are very different. Each, in my opinion, could stand to learn from the other.

Stoicism: A Brief Account.

Stoicism’s founder was a wealthy merchant and shipping magnate named Zeno, of Citium, a seaport located on what is now Cyprus. It was around the start of the 3^rd century B.C. One day, while bringing some rare and very expensive dye towards Athens (we think), he lost everything in a shipwreck off the coast of Greece. We don’t know the details.

Obviously, he couldn’t call 9-1-1.

He made his way to Athens. We don’t know how he fed himself until the day he wandered into the ancient city’s equivalent of a bookstore and discovered writings on Socrates. He asked the proprietor where he could find a man like that. The proprietor directed him to Crates, of Thebes. Crates was a Cynic (another school of ancient philosophy not to be confused with how the word cynic is used today). Zeno became Crates’s pupil. He also studied a range of other philosophies then available, including Plato’s whose Academy was then thriving.

Zeno appears to have realized that there were problems with all he’d read and encountered, and that he needed to find his own way.

That’s usually how it begins.

Eventually he began lecturing from a location in the Athenian Agora known as the Stoa Poakile (Painted Porch). He and those who gathered around him became known as Stoics. They began to attract the attention of prominent citizens and even royalty. The attention wasn’t negative. Stoic philosophy, though hardly unified in all respects, attempted to be practical and useful, addressing problems of life and self-improvement in a manner anyone, rich or poor, could make use of. (Today’s academic philosophy has virtually nothing to do with the problems of living and sees this as a mark of professionalism and intellectual maturity.)

What did Zeno teach? None of his original writings have survived, so what we know of him is through quotations by later writers such as Diogenes Laertius and others. These indicate that he divided his philosophy into three components: physics, logic, and ethics. The first two served the third.

The value of philosophy, Stoics said, is that it offers perspective, and counsel, in a turbulent world.

How I like to express the Stoic worldview: Stoic physics tries to describe how the world works, i.e., its unity, and causality within it. Stoic logic tries to describe rules for proper thinking about the world, e.g., deductive reasoning. Stoic ethics, finally: given how the world works and our best reasonings about it, if we are to cultivate peace with others, with the world, and with ourselves, how should we conduct our lives and affairs? The Stoics outlined four cardinal virtues: justice, temperance, courage, and wisdom. Each could be an essay in itself (Holiday is at work on a series of books developing each).

The way Stoic philosophy is also sometimes expressed: to achieve and maintain lives of tranquility, we should “live in accordance with nature.” That’s general, and easy to caricature. What does it mean?

To find out, let’s turn to Epictetus, who lived shortly after the time of Christ. This time, we can be reasonably sure we have his actual words, inscribed by a diligent pupil (for like Christ, he never wrote anything down himself).

The most important distinction Epictetus drew was between those things which are within our power and those things which are not within our power.

The basic counsel here is that we should attend to what are properly our own affairs, over which we can maximize personal control. We should let the rest go without reacting emotionally to it, as it is outside our control.

In other words, things in the world operate according to rules, laws of nature, however we put it. The counsel here is to acknowledge these rules, using them where possible and desirable. This is the path to a better life, in which one is at peace with oneself and one’s surroundings. If you do otherwise, the way the world works will automatically work against you, and you’ll be endlessly frustrated and enraged by “the unfairness of it all.”

In other words, Stoicism counsels self-mastery. The word ‘stoic’ (lower-case ‘s’) is sometimes used to mean cold and emotionless. The Stoic isn’t emotionless. Far from it! He sets about to discipline his emotional responses to what is outside his control, allowing reason to guide what he says and does as much as is humanly possible.

We can’t control the weather. We can’t control traffic. We can’t control what the economy does, or what its movers and shakers do. We have no power over life and death. The only way we can affect what the world can do to us is through preparedness.

At this point things start to get really interesting: for most of us, our only real power within the political system (unless we’re office holders, and there are a lot of limits even then) is to vote every two or four years, usually for one of two candidates who have been carefully vetted by those who have the actual power over such matters. Those of us able can write about politics, supporting one candidate over another and giving our reasons hoping to influence others. But we cannot make up their minds for them. Their opinions are outside our control.

In sum: Stoicism counsels focusing the bulk of your thoughts and life energies on what you can control. It never says you can’t expand this through study, learning, and then taking action. The Stoic dichotomy of control is really a continuum. What can we control? What must we control? Can we learn to control more, affect more, doing so constructively and therefore ethically—and recognizing limits.

Our responses, if unleashed, may range from overjoy to fury, depending on how events play out. These often get us nowhere. Reason and reflection, for the Stoic, are paths to a peaceful and tranquil life in a world that was turbulent even then.

Stoicism thus became one of the most popular and prevalent philosophies in the ancient world of declining Greece and rising Rome. How does it apply to us in the 2020s? Before answering that, let’s look closer at the environment in which Stoicism thrived.

The social and political environment of the Stoics?

What motivated Stoic ideas?

Zeno of Citium lost everything to a random event and found himself stranded in a foreign city. How does he cope?

He pivots, and undertakes something new, as this was clearly better than living out his life in bitterness and despair, begging for food.

Epictetus was born and grew up in slavery. In his teens, his leg was broken by a cruel master. The break did not heal properly. He walked with a limp for the rest of his life.

How does he cope? Again, with anger? What does that accomplish?

So like Zeno, he accepts what he cannot change. He embraces a philosophy allowing him to move ahead. He begins helping others do the same.

Another prominent Stoic, Seneca (author of essays with titles like “On the Shortness of Life”), found himself with the unenviable duty of having to advise the emperor Nero, by any measure a grade-A psychopath. Eventually Nero, paranoid to the point of near-insanity, suspected Seneca of participating in a plot against him. He ordered his advisor to commit suicide, which Seneca did, along with his wife.

At the complete other end of the political-economic spectrum from Epictetus was Marcus Aurelius, of the 2^nd century A.D., author of Meditations. Marcus became Emperor of Rome: a true philosopher-king although not in Plato’s sense nor in the pejorative sense I’ve used that phrase.

Marcus had not wanted to be Emperor! Having encountered Stoic teachings, he wanted to be a philosopher! Having been groomed for the position, he became both, penning his Meditations, written for his eyes only, efforts to clarify and contain his own turbulent thoughts.

A Stoic is always aware of his limitations and imperfections. He stresses learning opportunities inherent even in painful circumstances. He focuses both on gratitude for what he has, and on how to be a better person.

All the Stoics were acutely conscious of how little control anyone really has. It is tough enough to control oneself!

Marcus doubtless experienced the personal costs of power. Somehow, he became one of those extremely rare figures who grasped that with enormous power comes enormous responsibility. He set about disciplining his emotions before making a decision that could cause a war, or otherwise affect the direction of the empire and the lives of millions.

He also had to deal with plagues. He buried several of his own children.

Marcus may have been Emperor of Rome, but he suffered. He knew loss.

The question still applies, therefore: how does he cope?

The answer: with a philosophy appropriate to the world he had to operate in. Did he get everything right? Of course not. He disliked those Christians he saw. He seems to have thought their strange faith subversive and even atheistic (they did not worship the gods of Rome). The killing of Justin Martyr happened under his watch (giving us that term).

But at least he became conscious of how power allows and encourages corruption. He understood that if he’d somehow thwarted filling the shoes made for him and walking the path others had laid out in front of him, someone worse would have done so.

So he filled those shoes and walked that path.

Marcus was the last of the “good emperors.” Emphasis on last. He couldn’t control what his successor would do, or what would befall Rome after he passed from the scene. As we know, the empire went into long-term decline. Basically, Rome self-destructed, a victim of overextension and its own irrational fiscal and tax policies. These drove its more intelligent and productive citizens to opt out and build new lives elsewhere. This was something they could control.

Our present situation.

So how do we apply all this today?

This is about more than an election just under two months away.

Even if Donald Trump wins back the White House without leftists rioting in the streets, he’ll have his hands full.

And whether anyone likes it or not, Trump is no Marcus Aurelius. The closest we had to such a person was Dr. Ron Paul, long retired.

He wasn’t taken seriously by anyone in Rome on the Potomac. There simply are no such people in politics today, not on either side of the aisle. Any present-day Epictetuses, or Marcus Aureliuses, are unlikely to want to go anywhere near our present-day governmental-corporate-academic-military-surveillance-censorship complex.

With lust for power in high gear and responsibility minimal, we’re on a precipice. Small wonder we’re seeing dozens of books and articles on whether the U.S. is destined to follow Rome.

Volumes have been written on how we got here.

How “public education” was hijacked over a century ago; how it became an institution that has nothing to do with real education and everything to do with producing a controlled mass that will obey, consume, vote, and believe it is living in a democracy. Democracy is part of our national and international mythology.

How the Federal Reserve was created by banking power elites of its day. How it gave them control over one of the essentials of economic activity, the money supply.

How the IRS was created, so that your personal income could be taxed for the first time in U.S. history even though this had previously been deemed unconstitutional.

How power elites came to control nearly all corporate media.

They had long controlled energy and its distribution … they suppressed Nikola Tesla’s research results, which suggested that “free energy” technology could be brought to people and used to power a truly free, peaceful, and prosperous civilization, not one based on monetary encirclements, forms of distribution requiring centralization, and endless wars.

Our official national debt (which does not include all federal legal obligations) just reached $35 trillion, a sum that would have been unimaginable when Nixon killed the gold standard in 1971. Nixon opened the door to financialization, to what I often call welfare statism in reverse (redistribution of wealth upwards), and to the replacement of the brand of capitalism that gave us the strongest economy in history, that of the 1950s and 1960s, a rising tide that really was lifting more and more boats, to the neoliberalism that created the well-documented wealth gap. Globalized systems managed by globalist elites formulated policies that partly destroyed the middle class earlier capitalism built.

All of this is ultimately outside our control!

We can write about it, but we can’t force people to read it, take it seriously, process it, and act on it by ceasing to vote against their own interests.

But we’re not helpless! The Internet, if it has done anything, has placed in the hands of us peasants the most powerful information aggregation tool in human history.

How we use it is something we can control, even amidst its centralization in the hands of a few leviathan corporations, and the censorship of truthful content labeled “misinformation” (or “malinformation,” i.e., sometimes-obvious truths inconvenient for the ruling elites).

As I’ve also said, though, the Internet is both a blessing and a curse. Its controllers are not our “friends.”

Because of the Internet, we inhabit an attention economy; corporations compete ruthlessly for one thing: your eyeballs, to keep them glued to their platforms for as long as possible.

Hence all the clickbait, the emphasis on negativity and violence. On sensationalism. These attract attention. They encourage and enflame divisions.

In the 2020s, you either learn to control your attention, or you are lost!

Fortunately, your attention is something you can control! I believe Stoicism can help!

Final introductory lessons of the Stoics.

If asked who I think is going to win this election, my answer is the same as Tucker Carlson’s: “I have no idea.”

Unless one candidate or the other louses up spectacularly, e.g., blows the upcoming Sept. 10 debate completely in ways no damage control can’t fix — which is possible — I don’t think I’ll be able to say anything more useful even on Election Eve.

At the moment things are very close. Kamala has made gains, but with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. throwing his weight behind Trump, I don’t think anyone would challenge that.

What I know is that my “Open Letter” appears to have fallen on deaf ears. It met with no response, not even an acknowledgement. I know of at least three people who sent the link here via the contact page. Supposedly that site is monitored, so it’s possible that Trump might have seen it. There never were any guarantees.

Again, outside my control. We can write articles and letters. We can’t force people to read them.

So the first Stoic lesson is that despite all our efforts at showing how a Kamala Harris presidency would only take the globalist/war/Bidenista catastrophe into a new phase, none of us can control the outcome. We can only control our emotional responses to it, and whatever actions we subsequently choose to take.

The second Stoic lesson — it’s more of an exercise — is to ask: what can you control.

Start with your attention.

I think it will be time to tune out corporate media completely. It won’t be possible to get completely out from under the heels of the governmental-corporate-academic-military-surveillance-censorship complex, but you can minimize your contact with large parts of it.

Do you really want to waste your time on CNN and MSNBC, or on controlled opposition (Fox News)? Do you really care what Dana Bash thinks? Or Joe Scarborough?

Do you think anyone in corporate media, or anywhere in the above complex, cares about you?

Tune it out! Beyond, perhaps, bare-bones reportage like this that is can be read and processed in around 15 minutes.

Following up is a third point with which I’d like to think the Stoics would agree: we should focus our attention on what is good in our immediate surroundings, especially our relationships. Without relationships (spousal, or familial in a broader sense, or even professional), where are we?

Isolated, that’s where.

A growing number of people, men and women alike, live isolated lives sometimes because they’ve never found a partner and sometimes because they’ve made choices, especially work-related, that make nurturing relationships hard if not impossible to sustain. Think of those who work 80 hours a week. This isn’t normal and will eventually burn you out.

Social media is also more isolating than aggregating. What can you say when most of your Facebook “friends” are people you’ve never even met and may have nothing in common with beyond political alignment?

Being busy, moreover, may look like controlling your attention, but it’s not the same as being productive. Being busy may be nothing more than avoidance and rationalization of not doing anything of lasting importance.

I think we were put here to solve problems, where a problem is anything that gives someone a sense that things could be otherwise, perchance better. A problem therefore motivates us to learn what is going on and take action.

Learning how things work, their causal properties: that’s Stoic physics. Determining what actions to take is then Stoic logic. Acting courageously, honestly, honorably, appropriately, conscious of others as persons like oneself, with goals and aspirations of their own, and the same desire as you for personal validation: that’s the core of Stoic ethics.

Determining what your innate talents and skills are and who they’ll help you serve, is also something you can control. Have you tried to enumerate them? Or worked out, with guidance if necessary, the ways you can use them to help others?

The Alignment with Christianity.

However things play out, we weren’t put here to sit on our duffs. Jesus’s parable of the fig tree applies:

“[Jesus] also spoke this parable: A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came seeking fruit on it and found none. Then he said to the keeper of his vineyard, ‘Look, for three years I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree and find none. Cut it down; why does it use up the ground?’ But he answered and said to him, ‘Sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and fertilize it.’ ‘And if it bears fruit, well. But if not, after that you can cut it down.’ Luke 13:6-9.

Do nothing, and we’ll be clobbered by events. We’ll be uprooted and blown away!

Both Stoicism and Christianity are philosophies of action as well as putting forth sets of beliefs — a worldview directs a culture, but is worthless if it doesn’t also guide your life.

Neither one counsels withdrawal (as I’ve occasionally done in times past).

If this election really is stolen, and evidence for this can be amassed, hard copies made, etc., the honest and courageous must take a stand. They must stand up “peacefully and patriotically,” and reveal what they know. A Stoic outlook calls for this.

Again, we can expect such information to be systemically repressed, those putting it forth demonized as “election deniers” and “conspiracy theorists,” and their livelihoods and lives destroyed if they persist. I think the extreme harshness with which most of the Jan-6ers were dealt was intended to send a message, that the global governmental-corporate-academic-military-surveillance-censorship complex will no longer tolerate meaningful dissent and determined opposition.

Not to mention jailing people such as Steve Bannon, and weaponizing the Justice Department in an effort to destroy Donald Trump. Even Tulsi Gabbard, surely one of the most peace-promoting people alive, who was demonized by Democrats for her criticisms of the war machine, is now on a terror watch list.

It is very Stoic to take a stand against these things.

If Kamala Harris wins, we will see more people imprisoned and more livelihoods destroyed.

But remember Zeno’s shipwreck. Remember Epictetus’s broken leg. Remember how Seneca was ordered, along with his wife, to take his own life.

Large numbers of early Christians went to horrific deaths — empowered by their faith in what lay beyond. The Apostle Paul was imprisoned several times. It didn’t faze him. He was finally beheaded.

All suffered, because suffering is built into the structure of a fallen world, and even more if we face and promote the truth about it.

This is Stoic counsel, for those willing to listen.

Kamala could win outright, without the Democrat Party cheating, if enough Americans are insouciant enough, caught up in the outright airheaded giddiness, of the campaign that has ensued since Joe Biden stepped aside.

In which case there won’t be anything worth protesting and much to do to protect oneself and one’s own.

Trump (and others) say she’s a closet communist. There’s a lot of that sort of thing in her family history and overall background. But warmongering Dick Cheney and his loathsome daughter have endorsed her. This speaks volumes. She serves the governmental-corporate-academic-military-surveillance-censorship complex just as Sleepy Joe did, and just as Obama, the Bushes and the Clintons did.

Cultural Marxism has become a distraction from the real fight, which is about more wars and more globalism. Its about truth versus lies. It is about those of us who understand our limits, and those who want to be God, as Lucifer did.

This “blob,” some call it (GloboCorp, the New World Order, etc., etc.), is the most hostile visible force in the world if your aim is to live your own life, pursue your own goals, take care of your own, and otherwise be left alone.

Recognize this force for what it is, and also accept the counsel of Paul in Ephesians — the entire letter! — which ranges from personal salvation and calling, to family, and finally to what threatens us all!

Act accordingly. We all must protect our loved ones to the extent we can, further truth to the extent we can, and remember that what God wants is what counts.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

___________________________

Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored three books, more than 20 articles, numerous book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself.

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

A Disastrous Debate?

By Steven Yates

September 14, 2024

[Author’s note: what follows is the opinion of its author, and should not be taken as the opinion of NewsWithViews.com, of its editorial staff, or of other NWV writers.]

By official measures, the other night’s “debate” between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris damaged Trump’s chances of winning this election.

Naturally I hope I’m wrong.

Because if Harris wins and the far left presidency-by-committee that we’ve had since January 21, 2021 continues much longer, the U.S. will look more like Venezuela with each passing year. It is conceivable that with Democrats mostly united behind their new figurehead and Republicans divided between MAGA remnants and its past (globalist) Establishment (Bushes, Romneys, Cheneys, etc.), the U.S. will be a one-party country by 2028.

By which time it will be possible to steal elections in broad daylight, the way Maduro just stole the recent Venezuelan election (the real winner was just granted political asylum in Spain).

Look: after three-and-three-quarters years of roaring inflation, out-of-control illegal migration, and two new foreign wars under Biden’s watch, this is (was?) Trump’s election to lose.

Harris was obviously coached with great care. I can picture her having undergone grueling rehearsals. Finally onstage, she approached Trump hand extended, making it impossibly awkward for him not to shake it. As they’d not met face to face before, she boldly introduced herself by name. I don’t think Trump anticipated that. It seemed to throw him, and he never got his stride back.

There was little of the trademark cackling for which Harris has been ridiculed, moreover — doubtless she’d been warned — and while her carefully scripted responses were seldom truthful, I didn’t hear any of her past lapses into word salad.

She is a former prosecuting attorney, and doubtless that’s what her handlers appealed to during her preparations.

Her voice wasn’t as annoying as Hillary’s, moreover, and she didn’t come across as an emotionally barren technocrat. Her facial expressions sometimes made me wonder if her handlers had studied Tucker Carlson, who’s perfected a trademark can-you-believe-this-crap frown of incredulity. Sometimes she just stared at Trump.

He and his team had to know, going in, that the moderators would handle her with kid gloves while all three of them tried to bait him.

Trump was right when he said afterwards, it was three versus one.

But to my reckoning, he didn’t seem all that well prepared. He might have assumed she’d be a pushover. Big mistake!

It should also have been given that he’d have to stay on point and either answer the questions asked or explain to the audience (according to Nielson ratings around 67.1 million tuned in) why the question was inappropriate.

Instead, he set himself up for ridicule. He hammered certain issues, like illegal migration, while neglecting things he should have said if he really wanted to portray the other side as incompetent and dishonest.

As valid an issue as illegal migration is, he didn’t handle it right.

Why on Earth did he start pontificating about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio?

Now I don’t know if that claim has any truth or not? I’m a long way from Ohio.

But in our post-truth world, Trump hurts himself with this sort of thing. It just sounds like something lifted off social media, which corporate media can label misinformation.

Public ridicule is effective because of how it appeals to emotions and is thus hard to defend against rationally.

It should be possible to observe, though, that as long as Democrats are engaging in it, their calls for unity ought to be seen as bogus.

Trump didn’t say this, either.

Next: when addressing the abortion and IVF issues, why did he say some states were killing newborn infants?

As bad as the pro-abortion death culture is (and Harris will make it worse!), no one is doing that! (So-called fact-checkers do get things right sometimes.)

Again, Trump set himself up to be taken down.

His best bet would have been just to say that abortion is not a federal issue. One of the consequences of the reversal of Roe was its being decided on a state-by-state basis.

Abortion is not a problem that will be resolved politically because it is a moral and spiritual problem. It is a worldview problem.

The way the Dobbs decision backfired illustrates this. You cannot change a culture’s dominant worldview by legislating against consequences. It’s like taking aspirin to fight cancer. Abortion will not go away until we somehow address the materialist death culture at that deeper level: fighting the cancer of materialism not with the aspirin of judicial decisions or legislation but having a serious conversation about what sort of worldview a society requires if it is going to remain civilized.

As for IVF, Trump made a remark that, had I been in the room, I’d have wanted to crawl under the nearest carpet:

“I have been a leader on fertilization.”

Ouch!

Trump did land some blows on how Harris has failed utterly on border security. That’s when he wasn’t talking about a few illegal migrants eating pets. He could have noted the effects of mass migration, legal or illegal, on Europe, where entire portions of major cities have become Muslim colonies.

Then asked those 67.1 million viewers/voters if that’s what they want the U.S. to look like four years from now.

Instead, why did he turn to the size of crowds at his rallies?

Again, he was baited, and gave in to something irrelevant to the issues facing the country — and in a broader sense, Western civilization as a whole!

Why, also, did he also allow himself to be drawn into a back-and-forth on January 6, and whether or not he really won the 2020 election?

Yes, he quickly corrected the moderator’s official narrative which omitted the crucial words peacefully and patriotically. As for that election, he may think he won, and we may think he won, but it’s history, and going back over it now isn’t going to help him win this election!

If anything, it again hurts him because too many Americans believe the official narrative! It won’t win over undecided voters in crucial swing states!

Trump could have emphasized such uncomfortable facts as that Harris becoming the Democrat candidate without winning a single primary vote, that she’d been soundly rejected by voters back in 2020, and that until very recently, she’d been less popular than Joe Biden. Her staff has huge turnover rates, moreover: a sign that behind closed doors, she’s probably not the nicest person to work for. She might be like Hillary in that respect.

Trump could have pointed out that she and her handlers, the presidency-by-committee (consisting most likely of the Obamas, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, a few other powerful Democrats, and possibly unknown others in the shadows), spent four years hiding the fact that Joe Biden has dementia, and since cognitive decline is progressive, eventually he was going to be unable to handle himself.

Hence June 27, a disaster for Democrats.

Kamala Harris contributed directly to this cover-up! This should be an indication of how fundamentally dishonest she is! Do we really want this person in the Oval Office?

All this would have been on point! Trump missed this golden opportunity to win back the hour.

Now, with Kamala Harris (age 59), corporate media can portray Trump (age 78) as the senile old man, using his chronic inability to get on message against him: a sign that it’s time to “turn the page” on him.

Trump botched an opportunity to own his interrogators on the war in Ukraine. Challenged point blank on how he would resolve the war quickly, something he’s said repeatedly he could do in 24 hours, he talked about everything else. He spoke passionately about the millions of people who have died needlessly on both sides, but not how to put a stop to the killing.

I’d hoped to hear something like: I’d bring President Putin and President Zelenskyy to the table in neutral territory and we’d not leave that room until we worked out and signed a binding deal. Each party would gain something, and each party would give up something. They’d shake hands and then go get the job done!

Details of such a deal?

None of your left wing media business! Trump could say. I’d have to be out of my mind to give the house away supplying you guys with any more specifics!

Trump missed other opportunities to score direct hits on Kamala. There was a pro-Palestinian protest going on outside. Eventually the situation in Gaza came up. Harris gave an obviously canned rehearsal of support for a two-state solution, ending with, “too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.”

“How many deaths are acceptable?” would have been my question. “Give us a number.”

For Trump this is a bit more complicated, however, because if Russiagate was a hoax, Trump’s fealty to Israel is well-known (so is Harris’s; this might be their biggest area of agreement no one will talk about).

Harris has also said in the recent pass, defending her supposed move toward the political center, that “my values have not changed.”

So does that mean she still wants to defund the police, as she did back in 2020? Does she still want to completely eliminate private health care coverage?

Despite saying otherwise, the other night? (Following the Biden dementia coverup, her honesty is an issue, remember?)

Trump, instead, kept referencing Biden, to the point where she retorted, “You’re not running against Joe Biden, you’re running against me.”

He stated, at one point, “She is Biden!”

No, she’s a full magnitude left of Biden! Trump needed to hammer this point!

Trump’s closing speech was solid, noting how Harris has been positioned for over three years to solve the crisis at the border and hasn’t done it, how “we’re a failing nation” and “being laughed at all over the world.” All true. I doubt very much that Putin would have gone into Ukraine, or that Hamas would have attacked Israelis, had they not sensed weakness in the most powerful nation in the West, had they not recognized that we’ve had almost four years of the weakest presidency and vice-presidency in recent memory. As a result, we’re indeed closer to a third world war than we’ve been at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It was too late to fill in the gaps and missed opportunities, though, or avoid leaving audiences with the impression that overall he was off-balance and struggling.

Trump made the same mistake he made upon entering office back in 2017: underestimating the opposition.

He’s said he has no plans for another debate. Maybe that’s just as well. I have friends who believe he’s nevertheless still going to win, if only because the Bidenista economy has been a disaster for ordinary people. Many of Trump’s supporters out in the hinterlands, friends argue to me, have basically gone silent. They’ll come out of the woodwork on November 5, knowing that at the end of the day, Kamala Harris is a hard-left radical, a product of the Diversity-Inclusion-Equity culture, who probably could not set up and run a lemonade stand by herself.

Who would not be where she is now without that presidency-by-committee we’ve had since January 21, 2021, and without corporate media’s manufacturing her image.

“What happens November 5 is what counts,” one person texted me yesterday.

I sincerely hope this is true.

Because what we’re seeing is indeed a mass media manufactured figurehead, a product of media corporations and the deep state.

As I’ve said previously, she’s now the Establishment candidate, a product of those terrified of a second Trump presidency.

Should she win and becomes the First Woman-of-Color President (white not being a color), leftist Democrats will celebrate dodging Trump’s “threat to democracy” while they continue pressing the political prosecution and personal ruination not just of Trump but of as many of his past and recent associates as they can. Some, such as Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, have been jailed already.

The left is trying to ruin J.D. Vance as we speak. If Trump loses, Vance will likely be out of politics within a year. I, for one, won’t blame him.

Conservatives will lament lost opportunities while predicting the one-party state I mentioned. Expect it by 2028, if she wins. A Constitutional scholar from Berkeley (where else?) recently had a major article in The New York Times on how the Constitution itself is now a “threat to democracy.” This, too, should be a wake-up call. Under a Kamala Harris presidency we should expect moves to limit or even replace the document with a “woke” successor probably already composed and waiting in the wings.

A Constitutional Convention will do it.

By 2040 if not much sooner, the U.S. will have followed Venezuela into full-on corruption and oblivion. Perhaps a few or perhaps many intrepid states will have taken the steps going through with secession threats already being made. But that’s a different article.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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An Open Letter to Mr. Donald J. Trump

By Steven Yates, Ph.D

August 23, 2024

August 20, 2024
Mr. Donald J. Trump
U.S. President, January 2017 – January 2021
Presidential Candidate, Republican Party, 2024

If You Want to Win in November, This Is What You Must Do!

Dear Mr. President:

First, add my voice to those who are grateful to God you survived the attempt on your life last month, and for the heroic image still burned into our minds of you rising, blood on your face, fist in the air, telling your supporters to “fight! fight! fight!”

It’s going to take more than that, though, Mr. President. Do you want to win back your rightful place in the White House? I know you do. At least that’s my working assumption here, that you don’t want the empty pantsuit the Democrat Party is running against you to get anywhere near the Oval Office. Many of us voted for you twice and will vote for you a third time.

Myself, I’m based outside the country. I hope and pray you won’t hold that against me. A group of us left during the Obama years, convinced that post-financial-crisis Federal Reserve policy was going to collapse the dollar. Didn’t happen, of course, but it still could. I don’t think our ideas were wrong, just our timetable. I maintain a U.S. address, and there’s a chance my wife and I could return to the U.S. during your second term. But you need to be elected first, and that’s why I’m here.

If you want to win Election 2024, the first thing you must do is get on message. This is what your supporters are praying you’ll do, and fast!

If your message is about the economy, obviously a major voter concern, all you have to do is ask your audiences these age-old questions: “Are you better off than you were four years ago? Or are you paying an average of around 20 percent more for everything, with some of your costs absolutely skyrocketing?”

Most people think with their pocketbooks/bank accounts. A lot of people of our age range (you’re 78, I turn 67 in six days! yikes!) are struggling as prices rise faster than incomes. I know you know this.

Inflation is a worldwide phenomenon, as I’m sure you also know, because of how central banks across the world follow the Fed’s every move.

To parry the fake news corporate media claim that “inflation is coming down,” all you have to do is note that all this means is that prices aren’t rising quite as fast this month as they were last month. Everything is still getting more expensive, with no end in sight.

If paid “economists” and “economics writers” told the truth, they’d lose their jobs, of course.

To make these points likely to resonate with over a hundred million voters right away, you don’t need to talk about immigration, or about January 6, or any of those other things, however tempting.

You don’t even have to say anything about Kamala Harris specifically, just to make this point about the inflationary economy of the Biden years and asking people if this is what they want to continue.

A couple of weeks ago, Dr. Naomi Wolf penned an article on her Substack I think you’ll find useful. In case you’re not familiar with her, she’s an author who was once a Democrat Party consultant (and an arch-feminist). She has a mind now, but remembers clearly how those people think. She’s worth consulting for sound advice, getting on message and informing your voters of the actual benefits of a second Donald Trump presidency.

Here’s her most important points (not word for word, I’ve shortened them considerably):

(1) You have to appeal to voters outside your base. It’s in the math: there just aren’t enough MAGA Republicans, especially not in the swing states you need to win in order to win the election. You have to show how you will follow through on something you said during your speech to Republicans at their National Convention, that you’ll be a president for all Americans.

In this context, take note, also, of how bad homelessness has gotten. It’s the worst of my lifetime. Maybe the worst since the Great Depression. Its cause: skyrocketing rentals and mortgages! (Watch this. It’s worth 1:40 it will take to get through it.) Many of these people have jobs and aren’t on drugs, though of course, some are. Their biggest pain point is that they can’t find jobs that pay enough for a mortgage, or rent. Because of inflation, a lot of people — including a lot of recent college graduates — can’t afford to move out of their parents’ homes. Many Americans in our general age bracket are one health emergency away from having to live in their cars, or even die of a treatable condition.

Probably most of these folks aren’t MAGA Republicans. Heck, they’re probably Democrats. You can appeal to them by showing what the policies of globalism and leftism have done to their lives, and then tell them confidently that you can fix this.

(2) Be more conscious of how your messaging is likely to be received. Criticizing Kamala Harris for how she self-identifies (Indian and Jamaican) is not a winning strategy. She’s far more vulnerable for what she’s done (or hasn’t done) than who she is.

Among the things she did was help hide Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, all the way up to the infamous debate of June 27. She, her staff, and the entire Democrat apparatus gaslit the public about this for almost four years, indicating something you can say to voters that may have a lot more persuasive power: she and the people she’s surrounded herself with are dishonest to the core of their being, and shouldn’t be trusted with the reins of power in this country!

Among the things she didn’t do is help secure America’s Southern border. I’ll return to this.

Likewise, avoid doing what Hillary did in 2016 and write off half the voting population with something akin to her “basket of deplorables” remark.

That was an epic-level mistake and probably cost her the election.

In this context, I would also lay off criticizing anyone’s military service. Make this off limits! Cease any and all remarks interpretable as anti-Veteran. There are millions of Veterans in America. They’ll not get mad, they’ll get even — by voting for your opponent!

(3) Besides these specific evidence-based claims, cease all personal attacks. Dr. Wolf observes how you claimed Willie Brown had “said terrible things about [Harris].” I hear this from some conservatives: she “slept her way to the top.” Don’t do this! For one thing, nobody really knows, any more than anyone knows what really happened between you and what’s-her-name (the porn star), if anything. For another, it’s tasteless. You’re above this. Paraphrasing Naomi still, it sounds like the sort of thing a grumpy old man would say and plays into the hands of surly Democrat women who go on and on about The Patriarchy. You don’t need any more of this baggage weighing you down. As Naomi asks, “Why even go there?” You gain nothing, and with some leftists still prattling about the Hollywood Access tape, and with E. Jean Carroll, you have too much to lose.

(4) Focus on conservative first principles. I can help you: go here and here. Now I don’t like the idea of biological men in women’s sports any more than you do, nor do I think that “gender affirming care” or “puberty blockers” for minors is something any conservative ought to approve of, but as Dr. Wolf points out, you’re talking about something that only affects a minority of voters.

There may be gays or lesbians, or even “trans” types, who claim to be Christian, moreover. I know that’s incoherent, but it’s also not a problem facing most voters, and so doesn’t have to be one of your probleDr. Again, don’t go there! Some of these folks may even be let-us-live-our-lives-and-be-left-alone libertarian types. That puts them more on your side, as people who would be better off under a Donald Trump presidency. Let their personal lifestyle choices go if they’re not hurting anybody. Remember, you’re running for president, not moral policeman. Delegate these things to us, out here.

For the same reasons, I’d leave the abortion issue aside to the greatest extent I could. It’s not a winning issue for conservative Republicans right now because the abortion death cult is simply too strong and has captured too many suburban women who might otherwise be willing to vote for you if they think you’ll do better with the economy. We’re not going to stop the abortion death cult with a Supreme Court decision or with legislation, anyway. This will be a tough nut to crack, and all I can say here is it’s not about economics or politics but is about what you believe is true, morally and spiritually, and this can’t be forced. We’re not even close to being able to have that kind of conversation right now, so again all I can suggest is to leave it aside unless someone else brings it up.

(5) Use surrogates. Dr. Wolf’s way of putting it. Remember Joe the Plumber? Surrogates are ordinary people doing ordinary things, but carrying your message. The point is, they’re relatable. Whether we like it or not, Kamala Harris is doing this effectively. Naomi mentions someone named Megan Thee Stallion. I never heard of her, but I’m no expert on pop culture fads which I find as annoying as you probably do, but they’re there and there’s nothing you can do about them except counter them with a few of your own. There are people out there: actors, athletes, country music singers. You have Elon Musk on board, but he’s also being attacked because of his international-level free speech advocacy, so he’s not going to be enough.

I hate to say it, Mr. President, but there are people out there who like most of what you stand for but they don’t like you. I know I’m taking a chance just putting this in here, but again, it is what it is, and it’s another reason why you need more ordinary, relatable people selling your message to reluctant voters about the benefits of a second Trump presidency. The last thing you want to do is push people away.

(6) Honor the KISS principle (Keep It Simple Stupid). Not that any of us, your voters, are stupid. What we are is fed up with the status quo and its false narratives, it’s why we turned to you in the first place. You don’t have to be MAGA to be fed up (look at the support Bernie Sanders had). Moreover, too many voters are too busy trying to survive to process long, involved messages. What are we talking about here?

Obama had a zinger: “Change you can believe in.”
Bill Clinton: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Ronald Reagan (lest you think Democrats have a monopoly on this sort of thing): “It’s morning in America.”

One of these, if well timed and aimed, can take out an opponent. Remember “Where’s the beef?” Hardly anybody remembers who Gary Hart even is.

I know you had Make America Great Again, and while it worked in 2016 it’s not resonating today if only because it’s been around too long.

You could modify it to something like, Make America Affordable Again! I wish I could take credit for it, but again it’s Dr. Wolf’s. It refers back to the economy and again the number one concern of most voters.

Then repeat, and repeat, and repeat some more. That’s how Democrats are being effective with their hit jobs; when they want to attack you all they have to say is convicted felon and when they want to attack J.D. Vance they say childless cat ladies, or weird.

This stuff resonates, and that’s the point.

You need a new mantra, and if I were a paid consultant, the one above is the one I’d go with even if it isn’t original with me. But you be the judge.

(7) There are a few other things I’d like to get in here, some from a list Dr. Wolf sites from the Republican Platform which didn’t seem to impress her all that much (there are 20 planks in all, for one thing, and that’s waaaaay too many!).

Promise to end the flood of illegal migrants into this country. But be careful how you pursue this, because crime stats don’t really back up the claim that migrants commit more violent crimes than native-born Americans. You can highlight incidents, especially by repeat offenders, that wouldn’t have happened without Joe Biden’s having thrown the border back open, and then you’re in a position to expose Kamala Harris’s utter incompetence as “border czar” (whatever that was).

What you can do is note how illegal migrants from places like the Middle East conceivably place Americans at risk. No one seems to know for sure who these people are or where they’re from or what groups they may be involved in. Hezbollah? I don’t know, either, and that’s the point! This in addition to how many do not speak English, cannot truly assimilate into American society therefore, and cannot possibly identify with the founding principles of the U.S.

Besides, no one has ever seen a multicultural society work. They always eventually blow apart, especially if there’s a perception of one ethnic group getting government freebies at the expense of another group.

No more outsourcing of jobs to cheap labor countries. Goes hand in hand with the now-obviously-false narrative that globalization will make us all prosperous. Instead, turn the U.S. back into a manufacturing superpower!

Make America the dominant energy producer in the world. Note that America was on our way to energy independence under your watch. Then, when Biden got in office, one of the first things he did was shut down work on the Keystone Pipeline and kill 10,000 jobs overnight … other jobs as well, if they involved serving those people.

This goes hand in hand with restoring America’s manufacturing base, which would create thousands upon thousands more good-paying jobs. This, with the right training programs, might get people off the streets and out of homeless shelters.

A few others quickly, Mr. President:

Defend our Constitution and Bill of Rights, including Free Speech, Freedom of Assembly, Freedom of Religion, and all the rest. Do this unequivocally.

End motor-voter registration, and establish ID requirements as a condition of voting. Americans need ID to prove their identity for practically everything else, so why not this as well? Goes without saying, this will greatly reduce the risk of fraud!

Pledge to end sending resources to Ukraine and Israel to bankroll their wars when those resources are urgently needed inside U.S. borders.

Remind people that you won’t touch Social Security or Medicare.

I could go on, Mr. President, but you get the idea. As far as I can tell, based on my correspondence, these are the issues that will be on voters’ minds this fall, and on more than just MAGA minds. These are the people outside your base you have to convince to vote for you. Since you’re a master salesman, you know that people buy benefits, not features. You have to sell them on the benefits of a second Trump term in the White House …

You were going mostly in the right direction before covid hit. Inflation, as I remember, was negligible. So now, speak about a future of good-paying jobs, low inflation, prosperity, abundance, safe schools, safe neighborhoods, migration limited to those who do it legally.

Summing up:

This messaging strategy should go further than just implanting in voters’ minds the fear of what could happen if a lifelong, bona fide DEI appointee and cultural Marxist gets into the White House. It would be, as I said last week, presidency-by-committee. By a committee of committed cultural Marxists!

Please think about these things, Mr. President, and best wishes, because time is running out! According to my count you have exactly 77 days to get this right, and show voters what you can do for your country.

Yours sincerely,
Steven Yates, PhD

Professional writer and supporter of yours presently living in Chile (where we have problems of our own with radical left lunatics).

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

What Would a Kamala’s and Tampon Tim’s Presidency Look Like?…

By Steven Yates

August 17, 2024

… The specter of woke totalitarianism

The “surge.”

First things first. We’ve been reading (unless you’re wiser than I am and turned off “the news”) about the Kamala Harris “surge” that has disrupted what would probably have been a landslide victory for Trump in November, a victory so decisive that election theft wouldn’t have been a credible option no matter how many mail-in ballots, motor-voter chicaneries, boxes of ballets arriving at 3 am, or people voting from addresses that turn out to be empty lots there were.

Keep in mind that after the past four years — heck, after the past 40 years — anyone who takes anything “legacy” (corporate) media says at face value needs to have his head examined. If MSNBC or CNN or ABC or NBC or Politico or NPR tell me it’s a full moon tonight, I’m going to open the shades and look for myself.

So how much of this “surge” even exists outside media puffery.

Well, what we know is that hundreds of millions of dollars have flown into Kamala’s war chest since Dementia Joe succumbed to the “pressure” — probably it was more than that — from powerful Democrats to end his candidacy. Kamala clearly has the backing of the Establishment: corporate media, Hollywood and much of Silicon Valley, academia, and obviously the People’s Republics of Massachusetts and New York – Asylum on the Potomac power corridor.

She is clearly now the Establishment (leftist/globalist) candidate.

That’s what I’m going by.

What I’ve been saying all along: powerful people don’t want a second Trump presidency. They can’t control him, and they know it. Moreover, he won’t make the same mistakes this go round.

Kamala, on the other hand, will do as she’s told, just like Joe did. Since she owes every position she’s ever held to Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) policies, she’s arguably not bright enough to do otherwise.

Presidency-by-Committee

The first thing about a Kamala Harris presidency, therefore, is that it would be a presidency-by-committee. The committee would likely consist of the Obamas, the Clintons, Pelosi, Schumer (perhaps) — with George Soros and Larry Fink (BlackRock’s megabillionaire CEO) somewhere in the background — and probably others whose names we don’t know. Arch-globalists all.

This isn’t new. Given Joe’s now-recognized cognitive decline — which Kamala dishonestly helped to hide for four years — we’ve had presidency-by-committee since January 21, 2021. It was the committee who told him, “you’re done.”

What will be new is the difficulty hiding this feature of a dumbed down political system, visibly hard left but servicing globalism-on-steroids while simultaneously trying to avoid blowing up the world in a major war.

Kamala’s VP pick, Tim Walz, checks almost all the hard-left boxes: he’s pro-abort, anti-gun, supports men pretending to be women, is pro-BLM. He let Minneapolis burn during the George Floyd riots. He drew the line at defunding the police, suggesting a spark of something between his ears. But then again, “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness” is his oft-repeated venture into breathtaking stupidity.

No great expectations here, therefore. Walz is no more qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency than Kamala has been. This assessment is possible without even considering doubts a few Republicans have raised about his military service.

The long and the short of it: this would be the most hard left presidency-by-committee in U.S. history: more of a DIE administration than Obama’s or Biden’s ever thought of being. We could definitely expect to see more men pretending to be women holding cabinet positions, and you’d not be allowed to ask questions. The abortion death culture will stay intact, and then some.

Some conservatives have spoken of “woke totalitarianism.” Let’s explore this notion a bit.

Woke Totalitarianism.

Many of us, back in the day — for me it was the early 1990s — underestimated the cultural power the hard left had even then. This power is based on emotion, not reason. It is also based on the Platonist idea that some are most fit to rule others. This is a powerful psychological motivator in some personality types who identify with power-elitism and believe they should be allowed to dictate terms to the unwashed peasants. And to enlist as many of the latter as possible to further their own enslavement to agendas, via “virtue signaling” or worse.

Wokism built on this. It incorporates the Hegelian master-slave dichotomy and the Marxian notion that the “wrong masters” have been in charge all this time. Hence the incipient call for revolution characteristic of all forms of Marxism, of which wokism is just the latest variant. After the revolution, the philosopher-kings will be in charge: intellectual-activists ready to impose, willy nilly, their vision of Utopia. This, too, is a Platonist idea (it is central to Plato’s major dialogue The Republic).

Marx placed the working class, “the proletariat” (Hegelian slaves, opposed to their “bourgeois” masters) on a pedestal, but neither he nor Engels nor Lenin nor Stalin not Trotsky ever worked at a “proletariat” job in their lives. They would never have deigned to interact with the rabble. Hence they had no clue how real working people think. The Frankfurt School Marxists finally figured out that the real proletariat don’t want to overthrow the bourgeoisie but join it, or have their children join it, through enterprise and hard work. That motivated the Frankfurt School shift from economics to culture, advocated separately by Italian communist Gramsci, and begin their “long march through the institutions.” This is why we speak of cultural Marxism as the foundation of wokism.

One ingredient was missing, though, and Marcuse supplied it in the 1960s. He replaced class with race. His proteges added gender, sexual preference, and world religions so long as Christianity was excluded as cultural Marxism sought to destroy Christianity.

Since too much of the working class was white, male, and Christian, the increasingly cultural Marxist Democrat Party kicked them under the bus — furthering their gradual immiseration and increased impoverishment was corporate globalism sending their jobs to China for cheaper labor. This meant higher profits for the neoliberals atop corporations (neoliberalism purports to be about markets but goes hand in hand with corporate wokism, just in case corporate wokism also makes money).

The Federal Reserve contributed by debauching the dollar. Hence inflation, with no corresponding increases in wages.

Naturally the mostly white, male, and Christian working class voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016, again in 2020, and will be voting for him this November despite the “felony convictions” that are convinced are products of a system rigged by Democrats and probably just the start of 2024’s election theft.

The academically-trained, and media wokesters, fancy themselves as our era’s philosopher-kings, “understanding” as they do the “problems” of hidden “systemic racism,” “the patriarchy,” “gender as a social construction,” “transphobia,” etc., etc., while defending “reproductive freedoms” (i.e., the aforementioned death culture, the freedom to kill the expendable unborn).

Academic wokesters have all but destroyed American universities. If you don’t believe me, watch this; then realize that Portland State is just an extreme case of the sort of thing going on everywhere, even if in diluted forms, as woke Generation Z moves through college.

They’re delusional, of course. Most owe their voices to the agendas they serve, which is itself subordinate to the “greater” agenda. As people able to get anything useful done, few could set up and run a hot dog stand much less guide a civilization.

The real would-be philosopher-kings are in the World Economic Forum, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Tavistock Institute, etc.; and in corporate octopuses like BlackRock, Vanguard, etc.; and in central banks at the top of which is the Band for International Settlements. These legs, arms, and branches of the Global Corporatocracy have considerably more resources to throw into their projects than a bunch of woke academics who serve to distract the public with gosh-gee-whiz stuff at the former’s pleasure. The real would-be philosopher-kings have thrown the bulk of their resources into leviathan financial institutions, political classes and technocratic bureaucracies, and corporate mass media to maintain financial and narrative control.

They won’t object to woke totalitarianism because it is a useful control instrument. Most whites fear being called a racist in public. In the present woke-controlled environment it can be career-ending: unless you have the ingenuity (and the personal financial resources) of, say, a Tucker Carlson, you’re canceled and might as well not exist.

Hence we see the U.K’s new Labour Party regime led by Keir Starmer trying to repress the anti-immigration / anti open borders mass protests by demonizing its participants as racists and “far-right extremists.” British citizens can now be handed jail sentences for posting or even reposting politically incorrect, anti-immigration social media posts on X. This regime has even threatened Elon Musk, X’s owner, with legal action even though he’s nowhere near the U.K. (he’s also been threatened by the globalist EU).

As Aaron and Melissa Dykes (proprietors of Truthstream Media) observe in this crucially important video I hope readers will watch when we get done here, if you don’t have free speech, you don’t have any other freedoms. Which explains why the battle on campuses on our side of the Atlantic is fundamentally a battle over who is allowed to say what.

The woke totalitarians are those who would not just crush free speech but modify language in ways that protesting their agendas would be impossible. George Orwell gave us an introduction in his two novels Animal Farm and 1984, how this is done. Today’s totalitarians have (as I’ve noted previously many times) introduced invented concepts like homophobia and transphobia which aren’t real phobias in any clinical, scientific sense at all. Another of the signs of a woke totalitarian is how they throw around words like hate speech and harm but never define them. They want safe spaces free from microaggressions, also given circular definitions at best.

We can speak of woke as totalitarian because ultimately it is about total compliance. Control over language means thought control. And woe unto dissidents. It is still fortunate that in the U.S., at least, the un-woke and anti-woke still have avenues they can explore after they’ve been fired from jobs by woke universities or woke corporations. Free speech isn’t yet illegal in the U.S. I’m sure, however, that under a Kamala Harris / Tim Walz regime, the woke will go to work on this!

Woke totalitarianism was also exemplified in Canada’s WEF Young Global Leader president Justin Trudeau ordering the freezing of bank accounts of truckers who protested plandemic policies back in 2022.

This brings us to what the real elites, the real would-be philosopher-kings want, which I’ve enumerated many times before. They don’t really care how many men pretending to be women there are in women’s sports, or in government, although if enough such agents of chaos are around and made highly visible through, e.g., participation in the Olympics where they sow discord and confusion, this helps the real power elites in the Global Corporatocracy (gosh gee whiz again).

They want total surveillance and control over obedient techno-feudal peasants, and a Kamala Harris / Tim Walz presidency will help them get it.

The real war, again, is being waged on those of us who want to worship God, live morally worthy and prosperous lives, take care of our families, contribute to our communities, and otherwise be left alone.

Philosopher-kings and the fallacies of globalism and multiculturalism.

Philosophy, etymologically, means the love of wisdom. Sadly, the academic subject might as well be dead. Its capacity to influence the public conversation for the better is nil, and for the most part, deservedly so.

To be wise surely includes wanting a better and more humane world. It also means recognizing our limitations in building such a world. We’re not God. Our natural state is limitedness of thought, knowledge, and action.

The truly wise therefore understand that national-level centralization cannot be made to work for everybody … much less global-scale centralization.

Why not?

Because while physical nature can conceivably be understood through the application of a few basic principles (typically expressed mathematically), this is not true of human societies. The kinds of principles that help us truly understand human nature, e.g., that human beings act consciously on their surroundings and don’t simply obey physical law, that every one of us is slightly different, and every one of us wants to be important, don’t enable totality of understanding and technocratic control.

They indicate that we all have our own quests we are on, and we don’t care if would-be elites approve or not.

Any legitimate social inquiry has as its subject matter the millions of anonymous people on their personal quests. This means enormous complexity. Complexity by definition cannot be planned, or planned for. It can only be interfered with, and those interferences inevitably cause far more problems than they solve.

The truly wise, therefore, will back off. They will recognize the natural rights of persons to live as they see fit in their communities, which usually means the right to adhere to the traditions of their forefathers such as family structures, traditions that have proven to work (to solve the problems of survival and political-economic organization) over time. They will understand that one of the bases of community is trust, via longstanding relationships, familial and professional: that (except for the occasional hermit) most people prefer to interact with those they know, like, and trust.

Coerced, elite-directed multiculturalism goes against this by opening borders and allowing into traditional societies (without asking them) populations consisting of mostly unknown quantities. No multicultural society based on elite-sponsored, top-down policy has ever remained stable and peaceful for any length of time. People naturally hesitate to interact with those who don’t speak their language or even recognize the legitimacy of their culture. At best, they hunker down. If it comes to it, they rebel. A murder of one or more natives by an immigrant or someone perceived as such will spark a mass rebellion. This is what happened in the U.K.

Peoples who differ from one another in fundamental ways (e.g., holding different religious beliefs) but are forced to live under the same political roof tend to resent it. Consider Yugoslavia, which held together under Tito’s dictatorial control and then blew apart very quickly following his death. The region has been a tinderbox ever since.

Yet coerced multiculturalism is the official policy of the EU, and despite Brexit, of the U.K., and of the U.S. under the Democrat Party (and Establishment Republicans). Opponents of free migration across open borders are denounced — this is typical woke totalitarianism — as racists, or far-right extremists. This despite the fact, for fact it is, that free migration impoverishes and destroys the cohesiveness of neighborhoods, communities, civilizations — quite independently of any crime element. There is truth to the saying that if you import the third world, you become the third world.

There are ways peoples who are different can learn to forge relationships and build trust, but these take special leadership and communication skills, including good will which must be cultivated, further skill-building in those being led, and then the ultimate crucible which is time, freed of economic or other sources of disruption. Time, and freedom from disruption, are what we do not presently have in abundance. This process cannot be coerced, moreover. It must be carried out from the bottom up, not from the top down. If opponents have to, they will engage in passive resistance by doing the absolute minimum in coerced-multicultural workplaces. They will stay indoors as their neighborhoods disintegrate.

A Kamala Harris – Tim Walz presidency-by-committee won’t get any of this, of course. Nor will its media defenders and supporters nor the people who will vote for such a presidency. (Neither will the left wing Keir Starmer regime in the U.K. get it; nor the Euro-crats in Brussels thought they were separating from.)

Trump / MAGA probably gets some of it instinctively (but not enough).

The real elites in the real power centers (such as the City of London, and Basel and Davos, Switzerland; and possibly the Vatican) don’t care one way or the other, so long as their capacity to increase their global wealth and power increases. It’s important to keep this in mind going forward.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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A slightly different version of this article is also available on Steven Yates’s Navigating the New Normal (Substack). Subscribe to Navigating the New Normal for more content

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Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

Of Childless Cat Ladies and Healthy Civilizations

By Steven Yates

August 10, 2024

The woke left can’t stand J.D. Vance. It never could. Leftists attacked him furiously when he ran for Senate in Ohio. Why?

Was it because despite his Yale education, his time in the Marine Corps, and his Silicon Valley successes — an enterprise no one forced him to leave — he had not forgotten his roots; and that instead of serving the ruling oligarchs, whether of Big Tech or the Asylum on the Potomac, he presented himself as a voice of the people: real people, that is — real human beings who work for a living and are trying to raise families in an increasingly hostile environment?

On top of that, Trump selected him for running mate….

After once delivering scathing criticisms of Trump including in his book Hillbilly Elegy … but then changing his stance.

I’ve no trouble envisioning leftists, possibly dozens of them, combing through Vance’s past interviews looking for anything they could hit him with. They were bound to find something, and they did.

They found the now-infamous “childless cat ladies” remark he made to Tucker Carlson three years ago.

I won’t bother quoting it. Anyone likely to have clicked the link and found their way in here has probably seen it a dozen times.

Now my wife and I don’t have kids. We do have two cats, which I happen to adore.

I didn’t take offense to Vance’s remarks. Why not?

Maybe because I knew right away that Vance wasn’t issuing a general broadside against childless people.

Because surely he knows that people might be childless for any number of reasons. Never married, married too late in life, fertility problems, etc.

How dense can people be, anyway?

Vance was criticizing a political mindset which is either anti-family, whether openly or by pushing policies that are making it harder and harder for a couples to raise children in America. Or by promoting “alternative families,” let’s call them, e.g., Pete Buttigieg and his husband having adopted two children; or Kamala Harris’s stepchildren saying that they “love their three parents,” which is, on the face of it — to use one of the words of the moment leftists are wielding (they sound like fifth-graders) — weird.

Were the attacks on Vance a product of the blind, bitter hatred of those who knew they were his targets?

This mindset has concentrated in the Democrat Party. Some have children in some form, many don’t. AOC doesn’t have kids that I know of. She’s an easy example. Kamala Harris has no biological children. Pete Buttigieg and his husband can’t have biological children for reasons obvious to grownups.

The mindset goes hand-in-hand with a-woman-needs-a-man-like-a-fish-needs-a-bicycle feminism, which has inspired millions of women to choose singlehood and career over families and children.

I don’t know what percentage of the population we’re talking about here, but the epidemic of singlehood in America has become common knowledge: both men and women who either never married (perhaps because they never found a suitable partner), or married and got divorced in our easy-divorce environment.

Now they are aging alone. Many aging single men in particular will die alone and unmourned because they have no close friends, either.

Picture such a guy who has been alone for much of his adult life. Maybe he’s retired. Eventually he has health problems. A stroke, perhaps, leaving him partly paralyzed on the floor, unable to call for help if his phone is by some chance out of his reach. He lies there until he dies of thirst and starvation.

Would such a scenario make the feminist radicals happy?

Given that those I had to interact with during my aborted academic career were the most unempathetic people I knew at the time, I don’t think I want the answer to that.

The derogatory word for at least some men who burn with resentment against the women who rejected them is ‘incel’ (short for ‘involuntary celibate’).

There is no culturally acceptable derogatory word for ‘at least some women’ who burn with resentment against the men they associate with ‘The Patriarchy.’

Overall, and to say the least, this is not a healthy state of affairs.

Childlessness seems to be on the rise in all Western societies, alongside aging populations of singles.

Guys like J.D. Vance propose to try to turn this around while there’s still a little time. They are articulate and outspoken.

This led to his remark to Tucker being ripped out of context and weaponized against him.

All of which brings to mind something I’ve been pondering of late.

What does a healthy civilization consist of, in terms of functioning institutions, political-economic arrangements, and fundamental (perhaps tacit) worldview commitments able to shape and guide culture?

Thinking the matter through, I found myself singling out seven ingredients for civilizational health. They overlap and should be thought about in light of my two earlier pieces on conservatism (here and here). How many of these conditions currently exist in America in 2024?

The ingredients: (1) cheap, abundant energy; (2) affordable housing; (3) strong families (two-parent or extended); (4) safe neighborhoods and cohesive communities; (5) a work ethic parents are able and willing to transmit to their children; (6) the capacity and the will to defend themselves preventively from invaders; and last but hardly least (7) a worldview that grounds the intrinsic value of all persons and is also transmissible, propagating through the culture.

This is not the article to discuss all these. Some I’ve discussed previously; a few such as (1) and (2) I hope to say more about in future articles later this year. We’re just talking about (3) and possibly (4), because it implies lots of children running around, in an environment that’s safe for them to do so, and attend neighborhood schools (homeschooled or at least private is better!), so that the values that shaped whatever successes the community is presently enjoying are passed on: the children have chores to do, homework to do, are kindly instructed by mindful parents and teachers that it is wrong to hit other children, etc. These can all be communicated in ways that children grasp the benefits and internalize behaviors that will serve them well in the future.

Despite the very real problems of the decade, with signs of more problems to come, we were on track towards achieving this kind of society in the 1950s and early 1960s. I think this is why many of us aging Boomers look back on our childhoods and adolescent years with fondness. We recall times of optimism, when truth seemed to matter, and technology was still far more our friendly servant than a vaguely menacing master.

We look at the prevailing trends of today with disdain at best, and have little trouble returning the contempt we sometimes get from hostile left-wingers who really are (as Vance put it) “miserable with their lives” consciously or not and want us to be miserable.

One of the reasons these people are so spit-spraying furious with Vance is that his remark hit home so accurately.

I sometimes envy those who can respond to the continuing political and cultural circus with amusement (as could the late comedian George Carlin, and eons before him, H.L. Mencken).

It is hard to be amused, though, at people pushing policies that encourage “gender” confusion in 9-year-olds, inviting them to wonder if their “gender assignment” at birth was correct.

Or at the fact that if you’re a teacher and you speak out against this sort of thing, your career is in ruins.

This is where we are today.

This is why I’ll be casting my vote, using whatever ID is required, for the Trump-Vance ticket.

Because looking back on those seven requirements of a civilization that can anticipate continued long-term health: I look at America in the New Normal, the 2020s, and I don’t see any of them. Think of the almost-20 percent increase in the cost of living during the era of Biden-Harris. Or think of the disaster on the Southern border, in which Harris had a direct hand whether again through malfeasance or simple incompetence. Now she’s the Democrat Party’s presidential candidate. I truly believe a Kamala Harris presidency, all criticisms of which would likely be parried with allegations of the racism and misogyny of the critics, could easily take the U.S. the rest of the way over the cliff.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

______________________________

A slightly different version of this article is also available on Steven Yates’s Navigating the New Normal (Substack). Subscribe to Navigating the New Normal for more content.

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

It’s Mid-2024: You Have Entered The Twilight Zone

By Steven Yates

August 6, 2024

“I can imagine what can be, and can be unburdened by what has been.” —Kamala Harris ???

“I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people, you think you just fell out of a coconut tree” — [loud cackle] — “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what you came before you.” —Kamala Harris ???

“The significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time.” —Kamala Harris ???

“It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day. Every day it is time for us to agree that there are things and tools that are available to us to slow this thing down.” —Kamala Harris ??? (on covid)

“So, I think it’s very important, as you have heard from so many incredible leaders, for us at every moment in time — and certainly this one — to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future….” —Kamala Harris ??? (at a pro-abortion rally, Howard University)

“It may be said with a degree of assurance that not everything that meets the eye is as it appears.” —Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone

“You’re caricatures, all of you! Without your masks, you’re caricatures!” —Jason Foster, “The Masks,” The Twilight Zone, Season 5

“We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.” —Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone

Ever feel like you’ve been taken out of your regular life and inserted into a Twilight Zone episode?

The past five weeks certainly seem that way.

I think it began with the planned first and now only debate between Trump and Biden, June 27, which everybody realized within the first few minutes was going seriously sideways for Joe Biden.

Some of us had been saying from the start that the man was cognitively impaired, and that all you had to do to was compare statements he made years ago to statements in 2020, few and far between as those were, or earlier in his political career.

The Democrat Party gaslit the country for three and a half years about this! Kamala Harris was part of the gaslighting!

Did Biden’s handlers, and perhaps their handlers, see that he’d fallen behind Trump in all the polls in swing states? Did they decide to pull the plug on their figurehead in the hopes that they could replace him with someone who wouldn’t lose the upcoming election in a landslide?

It definitely looks that way! In the spirit of my last article, it’s a surmise — a likelihood, consistent with what we’ve seen.

The Twilight Zone aspect here was how the official narrative changed with the abruptness of an earthquake. Democrats and controlled corporate “legacy” media went from blanket denial (“it’s a conspiracy theory!”) to open admission that Biden was too old and should step aside.

What came my way was: Obama, Pelosi, Schumer, possibly other powerful Democrats, simply called him up and told him, “You’re done.”

Biden wasn’t going to defeat Trump and it was becoming obvious. We know what those with real power think of the very possibility of a second Trump term. And their every effort to date to stop the Trump juggernaut with the weaponized legal system had either stalled or ended in failure!

Thus, on July 13: the assassination attempt. Having done two articles on that, I doubt there’s much more to be said. Author and investor Doug Casey was recently asked what would have ensued had Trump been killed. What he said:

I’d say that the 30 to 40% of the country who are MAGAs would’ve gone wild. It’s a semi-religious movement at this point, and they won’t take losing their savior lying down.

If he’d been killed, it would’ve immanentized the Eschaton. Generally speaking, the public killing of a semi-religious figure is big trouble. You saw that with the riots that followed the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, even more so with the death of George Floyd in 2020. In an unstable country, even a worthless common criminal can be apotheosized and set off riots.

I’d previously doubted that such an event would be controllable. But there’s the likelihood that the Deep State’s guns (or worse) would have come out to put the rebellion down, and more besides (more lockdowns “for your safety”?). The MAGA movement is not centralized and well-organized. MAGA groups trying to get revenge on their own couldn’t begin to stand up to Homeland Security backed forces.

Remember those hollow-point bullets?

No Deep State effort to kill Trump would have been launched if those ultimately behind it did not believe they could contain the consequences.

That surmise ought to give MAGAs a few sleepless nights.

Returning to Joe Biden — and to the Twilight Zone sensibility that has fallen over us this past month — he was belligerently defiant. Remember?

Until he wasn’t.

Again, the narrative changed with earthquake-suddenness and he quit his campaign: Sunday, July 21. With a letter posted as a tweet!

He was out of sight until the following Wednesday.

In the Twilight Zone?

His speech that night contained no lapses into word salad but was nevertheless a strained, dismal affair acutely uncomfortable to watch.

Both because he was visibly struggling to read the script on the teleprompter, and because there wasn’t a word of truth in anything he was saying.

All the official narratives about protecting democracy in America were on display.

Without even a glimmer of free, independent thought.

You’d think America was entering a new economic golden age, with its border newly secured, inflation now under control, etc.

Not a place where homeless encampments have gotten so numerous and embarrassing to the official story on the Bidenista economy that in California at least, the “unhoused” are, as I write, being removed by force.

So much for sensitivity in that hotbed of Jacobin cultural leftism….

Biden “passed the torch” not to a “new generation” but to Kamala Harris, his hand-picked successor and former border czar (and what a catastrophe that was!).

Another narrative-quake. Another case of memory-holing the old so the new could be brought in and celebrated.

The prevailing assessment of Kamala had been lukewarm at best — until she abruptly became the First Would-Be Woman-of-Color President.

Without having won a single delegate in any primary.

So much for democracy. Especially given how much ink the pundit class has spilled on how “our” democracy “hangs in the balance.”

To say that she underperformed as informal “border czar” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Memory-holed now, of course, as much as possible.

Trump called her “dumb as a rock.”

What comes to mind is, What does intelligence have to do with anything?

She’s controllable. She’ll have her handlers just as Joe did.

They won’t care that she’s 100 percent behind abortion death mills, for example. That’s a means of keeping left-liberal women under one prevailing brand of cultural hypnosis.

As a lifelong Diversity-Equity-Inclusion beneficiary— … oops, I forget, we’re not supposed to say that, that’s raysssist!

More hypnosis.

She’ll keep that agenda alive, even as she continues the present administration’s open borders. She’ll support more giveaways to Ukraine and Israel while the Western economic situation — the real economy, that is, the one people of ordinary means struggle to survive in, with the worst homelessness crisis since the Great Depression — continues to disintegrate.

Conceivably opening the door to Universal Basic Income and Central Bank Digital Currency which she’ll doubtless support even if she can’t begin to grok it.

Be all this as it may—

It’s crucially important that Trump not underestimate her, or the sudden groundswell of support by those in the grip of this new narrative.

She’s not Hillary Clinton, who came across as a cold-as-ice technocrat.

Kamala is warm and oh-so-bubbly, with that beloved cackle of hers!

Over $126 million flowed into her coffers almost immediately after Biden ended his campaign.

The figure has since swelled to over $300 million.

She now has Barack (and Michelle) Obama’s endorsement.

This is all you need to know. Those with real power are putting their eggs in her basket.

She’ll wear out the anti-Trump broken record: “Convicted felon!” (said while adopting her former prosecuting attorney mask). “Insurrectionist!” “White supremacist!” “Sexual predator!” “Russian-controlled!”

She also has J.D. Vance’s “childless cat ladies” remark made to Tucker Carlson three years ago. (More on that in my next article.)

Who knows how many more weaponized words and phrases will emerge between now and November?

Useful to remember, too: two whole generations, Millennials and Generation Z, have grown up never knowing a world without political correctness, anti-white racism / white guilt, and male-hating brands of radical feminism, and without the pseudo “transformative” politics (“Change you can believe in!”) exemplified by the Barack Obamas of the world.

A substantial fraction of Gen Z (born from 1997 – 2011 or thereabouts) is now of voting age.

Most are almost native leftists, at least to some degree, and contemptuous of aging white guys like me (and probably many of you, my readers).

“OK, boomer…” is one of their mantras.

Kamala could win, therefore!

Virtually everyone agrees that Biden’s ending his campaign and Kamala’s suddenly becoming Girl Wonder before Establishment Democrats and in the controlled corporate media have changed the dynamic.

Now Trump (age 78) is the old man — the “old and angry white male” — in addition to the other presumed baggage he carries.

“But it’s all untrue!”

The assault on E. Jean Carroll probably did not happen, for example. The woman couldn’t even remember what year it was! Trump was convicted in New York of concealing payments to a porn star under what come down to bookkeeping mistakes. Again, no one knows what really happened between them, if anything.

This case, prosecuted entirely by Democrats (the judge was also a Democrat) followed changes in the law to make felony prosecutions for bookkeeping errors possible.

The New Normal is post-truth, post-ethics.

It’s all about power now.

As I’ve argued at length, this is where secularism takes a world.

Not even The Science still matters.

We were told in corporate media that Biden had caught covid.

He’s been vaxxed, and twice boosted.

Did anyone even notice the incongruity, how this violates the official narrative that the covid-19 “vaccines” were “safe and effective”?

Is anyone out there thinking?

Did Rod Serling comment above anticipate today’s moment with startling accuracy, well over 50 years ago?

Or is it that the power elites no longer care if we’ve figured out their scams.

I wonder if Biden will resign the presidency at some point between now and November.

He’s said he would focus on his remaining months in office … but we know how much his saying this means.

His simply resigning on his handlers’ command would allow them to test-drive a Kamala Harris presidency for a few months!

The World Economic Forum and other branches of the Global Corporatocracy will find out from first-hand observation whether she’s sufficiently pliable, and how well her distracting presence enables the narratives they want.

You know, that future in which you own nothing, have no privacy, but are happy (eating bugs).

The globalist agenda:

(1) the slow removal and eventual abolition of everything “traditional,” including the two-parent family (different sexes);

(2) a borderless mass consumer marketplace based on debt-serfdom, where people buy and sell compulsively and thoughtlessly on credit; a handful of corporations make all the crucial decisions and attribute their success to “the free market”;

(3) the ideals of “everybody’s equal” and “all lifestyles are equal,” but “some are more equal than others” (recognizing that DEI is as Orwellian as Orwell himself); alongside the myriad gosh gee whiz! and look over there! distractions these divisions bring about in a poorly-educated society;

(4) most important of all: world government (“global governance,” the “rules-based liberal order”) also answering to global corporations: what I’ve variously called GloboCorp or the Global Corporatocracy; others, the Great Reset, and still others the New World Order: secular and pagan, techno-feudalist, run by and for sociopaths, where your peasant life will matter a little if it serves “the system” but is easily disposable (like an unborn fetus) if it doesn’t.

Not to worry; there will be plenty of escapist mass entertainment of all varieties!

We may even still be allowed elections every two and four years, and they will still be called “democratic.”

Welcome to The Twilight Zone!

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

______________________________

A slightly different version of this article is also available on Steven Yates’s Navigating the New Normal (Substack). Subscribe to Navigating the New Normal for more content.

Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored more than 20 articles, book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself. In 2012 he moved to Chile. He is married to a Chilean national.

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

We May Never Know What Really Happened on July 13, 2024

By Steven Yates

July 26, 2024

[Author’s note: due to a minor hardware issue I wasn’t able to get this article out before now. And as the saying goes, time and events march on. Biden ended his campaign for reelection and endorsed Kamala Harris, who, if she became president, would most likely push all the leftist Bidenista policies under a more overt Diversity-Equity-Inclusion banner. Otherwise, presidency-by-hidden-committee would continue, since no one with functioning brain cells thinks Kamala is qualified to make any real decisions. With the grace of God and new Chinese-made technology, more on these and other recent developments in the next article.]

“Some say that it is too early to know what explains Trump’s near assassination. However, a good case can be made that we already know all we will ever know. The passage of time simply allows official narratives to be constructed, and they are used to muddy the waters. I support the calls for an official investigation, but government investigations are always coverups. Think the Warren Commission Report, the 9/11 Commission Report, the NISH Report. If there is an investigation, nothing will come of it, and if by chance it does the presstitutes won’t report it.” —Paul Craig Roberts, “The Assassination Attempt,” July 17, 2024

“I have certain rules I live by. My first rule: I don’t believe anything the government tells me. Nothing. Zero.” —George Carlin

How much do you know about the assassination attempt against Donald Trump the weekend before last? Including anything gleaned from my piece, or sent out by online “influencers.” Was there a second shooter? Did Secret Service simply screw up, or was there major malfeasance (i.e., was this an attempted Deep State hit)? Given that Thomas Crooks, 20, was a Gen Z digital native, where’s his digital footprint? Are we really supposed to believe he didn’t have one?

The kid was in a BlackRock commercial made in his school, since scrubbed from the Internet. What’s up with that?

Do you believe you’ll get answers from “your” government?

Now for the kicker: do you believe you’re able to deduce correct and final conclusions from “influencers” on X, Rumble, or elsewhere, who weren’t there?

Does anybody truly know what’s going on?

Back in June, a guy named David Cain (not the DC Comics villain; this David Cain publishes Raptitude.com, a mindfulness and self-improvement site, not a political site) posted an article I’ve not stopped thinking about.

“Nobody Knows What’s Going On” was its title.

Cain argued compellingly that most of our beliefs about people and events outside our immediate experience are wrong most of the time. That most information circulating — especially online — is wrong, whatever its source. Usually this doesn’t hurt us, and so it isn’t disincentivized. Passing along what looks insightful (but is merely exciting and provides us a sense of being “in the know”) may even win accolades from those who applaud how “knowledgeable” we are.

Cain quotes George Orwell: “The most fundamental mistake of man is that he thinks he knows what’s going on. Nobody knows what’s going on.”

How did we get here?

In pre-technology days, the range of information that reached any ordinary person was quite small: limited to home, the farm, neighboring farms perhaps, what was going on in the village or town — and Scripture. Everyone knew everyone else. They knew what to expect from one another. Most played by the rules, because the consequences of not doing so were often immediate and sometimes severe.

There were two levels of knowledge, in other words. There was first-hand knowledge and there was Scripture.

First-hand knowledge was trustworthy based on empiricism. Farmers knew when to plant, when to harvest, etc. They understood land and soil, animals and plants. They passed this knowledge to their children, and it was passed to their children’s children.

Scriptural knowledge was just as real. Life was doubtless difficult, because farming is labor-intensive; so is washing clothes by hand, the fate of nearly all women in those days.

But God’s presence was evident in the setting sun extending its fan of multihued light across the sky, or in the wonderous balances of nature. One could read out of Genesis (especially 3:1-19) what was, for them, an adequate explanation of life’s harshness; from the Gospels and Paul’s epistles came the realization that this life was a testing ground of sorts. Upon death they would go to be with their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Scriptural knowledge was trustworthy because it was God’s revelation.

One imagines diligent believers contented.

In any case, a war could be raging a few hundred miles away. They’d never know about it, because it didn’t affect them.

Industrialism and its complications.

Industrial civilization changed all this.

First, “low” technology increased our ability to affect our environment. Much of this knowledge was still empirical and first-hand: instead of farming by hand, machines could be used, and their use could be taught to apprentices. With the Gutenberg press, the common man’s access to Scripture increased; one result was the Protestant Revolution.

With the increasing size of organizations and the growth of national-level and then international trade, knowledge of what was going on elsewhere mattered more and more. Some needed to know if a war was raging somewhere in their region.

Second, man’s increasing mastery over his surroundings led to hubris, alongside developments in the sciences that seemed to render God superfluous. That sunset and its colors? Natural phenomena only. Evolution offered a nontheistic account of nature’s “balance” via natural selection and adaptation.

The thoughtful in different parts of the world (e.g., Dostoevsky in Russia, Nietzsche in Germany) pondered the perceived loss of God, because they understood it meant losing what had been the foundations of a moral view of the world for almost 2,000 years.

No one had proved God’s existence. For most ordinary peasant lives, this didn’t seem to matter. Food still had to be grown and taken to market; clothes had to be cleaned; animals and machinery had to be tended to; new discoveries and inventions were changing our lives.

Civilization grew more complex and anonymous. Farms were soon far away. In cities, food came from stores (a few outdoor markets remained). You were fortunate if you knew your neighbors. Trust, which depended on the presumption that nearly everyone would play by morally-backed rules, began to diminish when it was realized that those who had risen to the top did not (nor did all the neighbors).

Those born and growing to adulthood in this new world had far fewer means of testing the narratives they received. First-hand knowledge narrowed rather than increased. Public schools were the primary means of “educating.” They encouraged conformity, not critical thinking; and this continued on into adulthood. Read John Taylor Gatto, whose discussions of how government schools prepared entire generations to live in a controlled society passed off as a democracy are comprehensive.

What went contrary to official narratives could be effectively hidden from most people.

Then computers happened: “high” technology. The Internet arrived, for most of us bursting on the scene in the 1990s. As a medium of communication and information distribution, it only grew.

The Internet: a blessing and a curse.

The great blessing of the Internet is its having created an environment in which anyone can research anything that interests them and post their findings on a website or blog for all the world to see.

The great curse of the Internet is its having created an environment in which anyone can research anything that interests them and post their findings on a website or blog for all the world to see.

You read those sentences right. The Internet’s blessing is also its curse.

Because as every conservative knows, freedom presupposes responsibility.

Because like it or not, industrialism and secularization diminished moral responsibility.

For decades prior to the rise of the Internet there were few penalties for official lies.

People grew careless with information, especially if they had no means of checking it first-hand but it accorded with their political beliefs. Sometimes they simply made crap up.

This was incorporated into Internet culture and explains shoddy information online.

I’ve been stung a handful of times. Back in the happy and carefree late 1990s, I penned an article (thankfully long gone) which included a reference to Clinton’s attorney general Janet Reno referring to Christians as “cultists” during a 60 Minutes interview:

A cultist is one who has a strong belief in the Bible and the Second Coming of Christ; who frequently attends Bible studies; who has a high level of financial giving to a Christian cause; who home schools their children; who has accumulated survival foods and has a strong belief in the Second Amendment; and who distrusts big government. Any of these may qualify but certainly more than one would cause us to look at this person as a threat, and his family as being in a risk situation that qualified for government interference.

Fighting words, from an arch-leftist?

The problem: there was no such interview; she never said those words.

The fact that few of us thought much of Reno, the “butcher of Waco” — I’d referred to her as “our first affirmative action attorney general” — predisposed us to believe the worst about her. Someone put words in her mouth, and we fell for it.

A reader pointed out that the quote was bogus. I issued an erratum the following week.

There used to be a lot of bogus quotes from the Founding Fathers online. These are now much easier to check. Everything ever written by George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, etc., has been archived. This wasn’t true back in the 1990s.

We were too trusting. I’d guesstimate that by the end of 2016, which saw the Trump upset, a lot of the earlier trust had been shattered, especially in official narratives.

The covid nightmare diminished trust still more. Does anyone reading this truly believe in The Science??? (Tony Fauci on the “vaxxes,” etc., etc.)

We’re now in an environment in which distrust of most of what reaches us ought to be our initial response. Because there is indeed “misinformation” circulating on the Internet, especially on social media platforms. Much of it is innocent, people carelessly passing along what they believe is true because it fits their preconceptions. Some of it is less innocent.

It’s never been easier to “get into print,” and so it’s tempting for writers to take short cuts.

Nor has it ever been easier just to pass some item along without checking its veracity.

Incentives to produce more and more “content” contribute to this. I know of “influencers” who would tell me I should be sending out articles every day, not roughly once a week!

Right! I’d be online 24/7/365, and my wife would have divorced me years ago!

Writers should try to get things right, but because of innocent errors, readers should also read with a critical eye. They may forget to do this if they agree with the writer’s worldview.

This definitely applies to political events with emotions running high!

Especially if we weren’t there and have no first-hand experience of those events or been able to talk to anyone who does!

But in the digital dystopia we now inhabit, such claims are now the norm, regardless of which side they come from. They get circulated as if they were proven fact.

Proven facts are hard to come by in the New Normal!

“7/13/24”: What do we know? Not a whole lot! Possibly we never will. What can we surmise?

Is it a proven fact that “Thomas Crooks, 20, was the sole shooter at Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13, 2024, and one of his shots drew blood from Trump’s right ear”?

Or is it this: “Crooks was a patsy, because a hidden sharpshooter on the nearby water tower fired the shot”?

A few others now claim acoustic evidence supports the idea that there was a shooter inside the building Crooks was on! Evidence: one of the shots that injured a rally attendee was on an upward trajectory, meaning that it could not have come from Crooks’ weapon.

Many people at the event reported seeing Crooks on the roof well before Secret Service did anything — according to some of my sources. A very small handful claimed to have seen a second shooter on the water tower — according to other sources.

If true, then for them (not for me writing this or you, reading it!) that would constitute first-hand knowledge.

Also first-hand knowledge that Crooks’s presence was known about for close to a half-hour. No one in authority did anything. A distraction, the patsy?

What we know is that after the shooting, claims about someone seen on the water tower were instantly memory-holed. The water tower vanished from all diagrams and official reportage.

Secret Service, moreover, killed Crooks on the spot. Dead kids don’t talk.

There are first-hand claims (again, according to my sources), and then there’s surmise.

The nuttiest theory I’ve seen is that Trump and his entourage engineered the whole thing to make him a martyr and boost his popularity.

He was nearly killed, and that is all that should need be said about what a few left wing nut jobs are saying.

Another odd claim is that Crooks not only wasn’t the one killed but appeared in a video saying he hated Trump and that “you got the wrong guy.” Just one source for that, dated a couple of days after the shooting, with no follow-up or indication of truth, makes it highly dubious to say the least.

Other claims are less deranged, e.g., that one Jonathan Willis, a police sniper positioned on a different rooftop, had Crooks in sight for three minutes but effectively told to stand down, and subsequently fired for taking Crooks out without authorization.

Not crazy, but it doesn’t check out. The post was anonymous, on 4chan: another red flag. Moreover, no police agency on the scene had anyone on payroll with that name.

The claim was passed to me by someone who believed it, because she believed there was a Deep State conspiracy to take Trump out.

Was there?

Did it include a powerful corporate entity such as BlackRock?

Simple logic: none of the usual suspects — the CIA, etc. — would have sent an untested 20-year-old to do the job. They would have sent a trained sharpshooter, while the kid on the roof served as a distraction.

Sharpshooters usually don’t miss.

Trump moved his head at the last possible instant to point to something on a diagram (he doesn’t ordinarily use props). Had he not done so, the bullet would have blown the back of his head off.

Divine intervention?

Trump himself may think so. His acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention contained more references to God than all his previous speeches put together.

Whether you find the idea credible depends on your worldview.

I can’t prove any of this, of course.

What’s missing is whatever connection (if there was one) between the kid, Crooks, and the on-the-ground entity positioned to take Trump out.

Probably no one reading this was there (if I’m wrong, you can tell me). Note my qualifications above (e.g., according to my sources).

We rely, whether we want to or not, on reports from media of various sorts: some mainstream, some not.

Only if you were there, or directly involved in investigating the events, do you have first-hand knowledge of them. The rest is media-dependent as well as bias-prone (including in case those entrusted to investigate what happened were handed a narrative in advance), or just plain error-prone because that’s the human condition.

David Cain again, from the article I cited:

Only a tiny percentage of what a given person “knows” is in this first-hand, embodied form. The rest is made of impressions gathered from anecdotes, newspapers, books, schoolteachers, blogs,…

It makes perfect sense, if you think about it, that reporting is so reliably unreliable. Why do we expect reporters to learn about a suddenly newsworthy situation, gather information about it under deadline, then confidently explain the subject to the rest of the nation after having known about it for all of a week? People form their entire worldviews out of this stuff.

Or under pressure to deliver something coherent in the heat of the moment!

We can’t prove, but we can surmise.

We can be reasonably certain that powerful, behind-the-scenes forces want Trump gone. What we can’t know are the specifics.

Summing up: a case for intelligent skepticism.

So where is this ending up?

All manner of claims are circulating about the assassination attempt on Trump, at every level of reasonability and unreasonability. Some are incompatible with others. This is typical of events that elicit “conspiracy theories,” themselves a product of a low-trust environment.

I’ve previously listed the events we’ve been lied to about. My list somehow omitted 9/11 (a reader pointed this out). It also omitted the Oklahoma City Bombing, and what really happened at the Branch Davidian compound two years before. Mea culpa.

Events about which we can make surmises with varying degrees of credibility. Where we go off course is in thinking we have proof.

Rather like science — the real thing, based on a careful and constantly renegotiated balance of consensus and skepticism. As opposed to The Science, in which those with official narratives would have us place religious adulation.

Real science is rarer than you think.

You can probably trust most first-hand knowledge, based again on empiricism. But most first-hand knowledge today is irrelevant to what gets us hot and bothered politically.

First-hand knowledge tells me the cats are asleep on the bed as I write this; I can walk into our bedroom and see them. First-hand knowledge tells me that if I touch a burner while the stove is on, it’ll hurt. First-hand knowledge tells me it’s sunny outside as I write this.

I have no first-hand knowledge of anything political: nothing Trumpian, nor of Biden’s resignation (and present whereabouts!), nor anything the power elites are doing or even who the upper echelons are, even if I have my suspicions about what is really going on!

It’s all second-hand. All second-hand communication by definition comes from outside our experience. Most comes from some media source. Our world is media-saturated.

The New Normal is a low-trust environment because of how difficult it is to determine what, and who, to believe. Because of the combination of sometimes innocent human error, the willingness of some to “go along in order to get along,” that of others to deceive, and a few to simply peddle bullshit (in the late philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s sense of that word) — there are events about which we may have some glimmerings of truth based on initial statements and what we can surmise.

Specific utterances from those claiming first-hand knowledge can be valuable, because they come before anyone has time to put an official narrative in place. The statements by rallygoers claiming they saw someone on the water tower qualify.

But we may never get the whole story. Not on this side of the grave.

7/13/24 looks likely to be added to the list of such events about which an official narrative will be recycled on CNN and MSNBC endlessly, every other consideration dismissed as “conspiracy theory.”

And now, with Biden’s campaign having ended (or been ended for him — again, who knows?), the news cycles are moving on. Being replaced by the official narrative that Kamala Harris is actually qualified to sit in the White House.

I understand the temptation some might feel to throw up their hands in despair and walk away from everything political.

Two nights ago, as I finish this, I ran across a Facebook post that I’ve also been thinking about a great deal. Edited a little without changing the meaning:

Let’s be honest, people: politics has little to no effect on our personal lives. We just use political agendas as a crutch to support our own egos.

Social media companies, entertainers, and large corporations are the real leaders of this country … most of Washington, D.C. doesn’t even know how to properly navigate computer operating systems. There are millions of individuals out there under the age of 21 who will have or already have created computer algorithms that have flipped this world upside down and have full control over the information we see.

I urge individuals to let go of political interest and start focusing on building families and developing long-term healthy relationships with people. I love you all, and may God bless you all.

I have no idea of the author. But I’m convinced, having accidentally seen his remark, that he’s touched on two important realizations: corporate leviathans — BlackRock being one of them — control the world, and there’s nothing any of us latter-day, digital-age, media-inundated peasants can do about it other than reduce, as much as possible, our contact with them.

The advice I’d add, therefore: get offline later today, go outside and, say, go up a hill and watch the sunset. Take a loved one with you.

You might see God.

Oh, by the way: the George Orwell quote above? It’s bogus. If we believe David Cain, anyway.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

A slightly different version of this article is also available on Steven Yates’s Navigating the New Normal (Substack). Subscribe to Navigating the New Normal.

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

We’ve Just Gone to the Next Level

By Steven Yates

July 17, 2024

“I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin…. Much bleeding took place, so I realized then what was happening…. [I was] shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear.” —Donald Trump, Truth Social, July 13, 2024

Well, it’s happened. Part of me is wondering what took so long.

After all, I predicted back in 2016 that eventually someone would take a shot at Trump. Now someone has … or was allowed to, because Secret Service personnel did not do their jobs.

Lower the Volume?

There’s a sense we just entered a new world. The next level, one might call it. Since probably everybody reading this knows the basics (where the assassination attempt took place, who the shooter was, etc.), I’ll skip over those in order to discuss something I’m seeing in a lot of “legacy” media: we need to lower the volume! Turn down the temperature! Scale back the heated political rhetoric!

Who is “we”? This is coming from left-of-center publications like The Atlantic Monthly. That’s just the one I thought of first.

As if leftists and leftist publications haven’t been outrage factories from the get-go … all the way back to the first Trump campaign (2015-16). Joined by countless Hollywood types, left-leaning celebrities like Robert de Niro who said he’d like to punch Trump in the face, or Madonna who said she’d thought about setting fire to the White House. Or Kathy Griffin who held up a mock bloodied severed head designed to look like Trump’s head.

This last incident ruined the minor-league actress’s career. Because the average American does not feel that way. The average American does not want to see Donald Trump beheaded, or shot … or to countenance an image of such.

Anyone who looks honestly at history and can get past the litany of controlled media lies, will see that leftists not only lie more, they tend to be more hotheaded and violent than anyone on the right, or in the (increasingly rare) center.

The right has been more reactive than active. At least until Trump came along. Leftists lost their minds.

Back in 2017, Steve Scalise was shot at a sports event by a lunatic Bernie Sanders supporter.

That same year, Antifa and Black Lives Matter descended on Unite the Right rallygoers in Charlottesville. Leftist-controlled corporate media, as I noted last week, has been lying about this event ever since.

In 2020, these groups did hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to major cities — far more than was done to the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The former were “mostly peaceful protesters”; the latter, an “insurrection against democracy.” Antifa types cordoned off several city blocks in Seattle during that period, with the blessings of that city’s leftist government that feared to cross them. In leftist-controlled Portland, Ore., they burned police stations.

When leftist thugs are able to do these sorts of things and authorities do nothing, you have anarchy.

Turn down the temperature?

Leftists have only continued as their man, the clearly senile Joe Biden became their anointed commander-in-chief. J.D. Vance’s recent tweet on X strikes me as a good place to begin:

“Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign has been that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Some have denounced Vance for that remark. I suppose they’d prefer that we memory-hole the disquieting speech Biden made back in 2022, blood-red background like something out of the film V For Vendetta, in which he denounced Trump’s base of support as “enemies of the people.” He’s also said that if Trump wins in November this could be our last democratic election.

Not just the Bidenista campaign, but the entire center-left to hard-left online and offline ecospheres have promoted the idea that Trump is a “threat to democracy,” that he’s “authoritarian,” an incipient “autocrat” or “dictator,” a “protofascist” (or “fascist”), the “next Hitler.” The GOP, leftists state, is now a “cult” filled up with “neo-Nazis”; etc.

Sometimes the violent rhetoric coming from the left has gone beyond this, claiming that Trump would unleash “death squads” and “disappear” LGBTQ+, and that it would all be endorsed by the conservatives on the Supreme Court.

Now I’m all for turning down the temperature. But so-called progressives (i.e., leftists) are going to have to turn theirs down first, which means stopping the lies (which I listed last week before this happened) and ending their own violent rhetoric.

Lies: CNN introduced a headline reading Secret Service rushes Trump off stage after he falls at rally….

Falls? He was shot! A bullet missed his forehead by centimeters!

Another headline sugarcoats what happened: Trump injured in incident at Pennsylvania rally….

Incident? It was an assassination attempt!

These are just two examples. MSNBC was just as bad with Secret Service: Donald Trump safe after popping sounds heard at rally…. Trump safe after being rushed off Pennsylvania stage after gunshot-like sounds….

Are you kidding me?! Gunshot-like sounds?

One wants to seize the shirt-collar of whoever writes headlines like these and shout into their faces, “You idiots!! Those were gunshots, and they just missed killing a former president of the United States!!”

Neither leftists nor globalists would wind seeing Trump killed, of course, and I found the crocodile tears coming from Joe Biden and others in the Asylum on the Potomac to be vaguely sickening when they weren’t simply insulting!

More cases of CNN’s continued dishonesty are documented here. Unlike CNN and MSNBC, Australia’s fiercely independent Sky News has emerged as one of the small handful of media organizations you can trust.

Inside Job or No? Unanswered Questions About the Performance of the Secret Service on July 13.

The questions about this incident needing answers fall into two categories: those to do with the shooter himself, and those having to do with why he wasn’t stopped before he could kill a man and wound three others including Trump.

Who was Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pa.? Going not just off media reports but from everything I’ve been able to gather online, he’s not far from being a tabula rasa.

His political stance is confused. According to public records he was a registered Republican, but had made a $15 donation to a leftist group.

There are some indications, according to former classmates, that he was a bit of a loner, bullied in high school. That’s the closest we have to a red flag, since bullied kids get angry, repress their rage, and sometimes it eventually comes out violently.

He was seen as an intelligent kid, very good in math and science.

He seems to have had an interest in guns, but wasn’t a good enough shot to make the high school rifle team. (He was a member of a local gun organization. Maybe, with practice, he got better.)

I sought an Antifa connection, based on what turned up Saturday night on one Facebook forum when I searched under his name.

Nothing I’ve seen since confirms this.

Either he had a minimal social media presence, or his accounts were quickly scrubbed. I’ve heard nothing about a manifesto left somewhere.

None of which means that something won’t turn up in the near future.

His parenting seems to have been normal. Both his parents were licensed counselors.

He graduated on time from high school and earned an associate degree in engineering science from a local tech college. He had a job at a nursing facility.

No one he’d studied with, or worked with, had noticed anything unusual recently. Nothing, that is, to indicate that on Saturday, July 13, 2024, he would hop into his car with a rifle and explosives, drive the distance to Butler Co., climb onto a roof, and try to assassinate Donald Trump.

He had no record of previous brushes with authorities; he doesn’t appear to have been on any watch lists. Nothing about him attracted attention.

So why he did it remains, as of this writing, an unsolved mystery.

How was he able to do it? No mystery here! Secret Service allowed him to do it, whether, as I said, through epic-level incompetence or deliberately.

Start with Kimberly Cheatle, a Bidenista appointee (2022) to Secret Service’s directorship.

A Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) appointee?

Probably, given what we know of this administration. Although she’d been with Secret Service in the past, she’d left. She’d been working for PepsiCo when the Bidenistas tapped her for her present job. She was clearly preoccupied with increasing the number of women Secret Service agents. Some of them can be seen on the video from Saturday night … moving in circles not knowing what to do. Watch (especially 2:00 – 2:05). Reportedly some of these gals don’t know how to holster their weapons properly.

That in itself is a recipe for eventual disaster.

This is a drum I’ve been beating, to no avail, for 35 years now! When hiring personnel, you can prioritize merit, or you can prioritize group identity. You cannot prioritize both at once! The moment you prioritize the latter over the former, quality and competence erode and your organization is eventually dysfunctional.

Look at academia, which has prioritized group identity for over 35 years now!

So it’s certainly possible that we saw epic incompetence last Saturday, and not an inside job.

Recall Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice what can be explained through stupidity.”

Listen to this scathing critique by a bona-fide expert.

Then this.

The other possibility, of course, is that there was genuine malfeasance involved. Nothing said above rules that out absolutely.

Start with the fact that people in the crowd spotted Crooks on the rooftop with a rifle before Secret Service did anything. Where they were stationed, they couldn’t possibly have not seen him (I am presuming the DIE mindset doesn’t entail blindness).

Around 40 seconds went by before the shooting itself. Secret Service personnel had plenty of time to get off a warning shot, which might have sent Crooks scampering away and prevented what followed, which was the murder of a man with a wife and daughter and the injury of at least two others in the crowd besides Trump. There’s protocol to follow, though. No one in Secret Service is allowed to open fire on someone who hasn’t fired first without proper authorization.

No authorization came. Then shots rang out. Crooks was dead at the scene seconds later, but the damage was done.

One version of the inside job theory requires that Crooks have previous contact with the FBI, which, twenty years ago, gained an underground reputation for pulling unhappy or unstable individuals into its clutches, presenting them with illegal activities often involving explosives, effectively entrapping them and then arresting them, as “evidence” of the “terrorist threat” (foreign or domestic).

As I noted, no evidence of any such prior contact has turned up. At least not yet. If it does, you can rest assured, I will pay attention.

A different inside job theory just requires that there be at least one mole inside Secret Service, someone positioned in the organization to be able to give a stand-down order and know that it will be complied with: word going down and not going out.

Because the Secret Service answers to Homeland Security, which is part of the Deep State. The Deep State wants Trump gone!

Now that’s conspiratorial!

Secret Service is about to face its biggest inquest since the assassination attempt against Ronald Reagan back in 1981. Maybe we’ll have a chance to find out what really happened.

That’s if the inquest is an honest one, and whatever results is dispensed transparently to John Q. Public. This is a mighty big if!

Restoring Trust After This Disaster.

Want to restore trust, media? It’s like I’ve said:

Tell the truth for a change! Especially about the role of the far left in promoting dysfunction in America, whether through Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) or through its consistently dishonest portrayals of past and recent events!

Consider: as I noted last week: trust in institutions — especially corporate media institutions — is at an all-time low. Repairing the damage corrupt outfits like CNN have done is going to take a while … possibly a long while.

Building back trust won’t happen overnight. There’s a lot to undo.

Some are saying that Trump just won this election … if nothing else, through the sheer resilience he displayed, raising a fist in the air after having been shot. This on top of the resilience he’s displayed for over a year now in the face of the four criminal lawfare suits against him (one of which has corporate media labeling him a convicted felon, no more questions allowed) as well as the civil lawfare suits.

He may have just won the election, unless what happened last Saturday is only the beginning…

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

A slightly different version of this article is also available on Steven Yates’s Navigating the New Normal (Substack). Subscribe to Navigating the New Normal.

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

The Consequences of Lying (to Yourself, to Others, to a Country)

By Steven Yates

July 13, 2024

“[Man] is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to succeed with it. He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living consciousness, every “is” implies an “ought.” Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction.” -Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” presented at a symposium on Ethics In Our Time, University of Wisconsin, February 9, 1961.

If I told you that through the “right” process of meditation, will power, and concentration (close your eyes!), that you could suspend gravity — and then walk off, say, your tenth-floor balcony and continue to walk across mid-air — you’d probably look at me like I’d gone nuts. And rightly so.

Because unless you’re God, you’re not going to “suspend gravity.”

And if you try to do something so spectacularly Darwin-Awards-level dumb, odds are good, you’ll be killed when you hit the ground.

We’re free to choose, as Miss Rand said above in one of her most lucid moments, but we’re not free to avoid the consequences of bad choices.

Choose rationally, basing your choices on facts to the best you can ascertain them, and you’ll at least survive. Maybe even thrive. Choose irrationally, basing your choices on fantasy, propaganda or lies, you’ll pay a possibly very steep price.

For us mortals, the laws of nature seem to be fixed. We’ve developed civilization around this premise: engines, vehicles, bridges, skyscrapers, etc.

Yet there are a growing number of areas in (post)modern civilization where fantasy has outrun fact, with help from political and (to my continued dismay) “educational” institutions. It continues, because the protected elites involved can ensure that others pay for their mistakes!

Transgenderism Versus Reality

Among the laws of nature that science (not to be confused with The Science) has uncovered: broadly, chromosomes determine sex. If you were born with XX chromosomes, you’re female. If you were born with XY chromosomes, you’re male. These are biologically fixed. It is true that there are anomalies — hermaphrodites — but these are rare, and also biologically fixed.

In other words, if you’re born female you can’t “choose” to turn yourself into a man; and if you’re a man, you can’t “choose” to become a woman.

This was common horse sense science for years. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either uninformed or just lying.

Transgenderism is an ideology that says otherwise, denying science in favor of (I assume) some version of The Science, in which hormone suppression and other forms of “gender affirming care” transcend biology.

At one level, we see the consequences of the transgenderism lie: the Ionesco-level absurdism of a man (“Rachel” Levine) holding a top position in the Bidenista administration wearing a dress. Then evading perfectly rational questions about promoting this absurdity to children. Watch. Every time Levine opens his mouth and speaks with that deep voice, it’s clear to any rational, reality-based person that Levine is a man.

Yet following that interrogation, Sen. Paul (R-Ky) was condemned as “transphobic.”

We’re seeing the ruination of women’s sports, as biological men are allowed to compete with women because our present, post-truth political climate allows them to self-identify as women. Listen.

These people’s reality-denial makes them violent when confronted over it, as swimmer Riley Gaines discovered.

The lie still stands. We may see the ruination of children’s lives, as government schools promote this ideology, confusing them, encouraging them to question their “gender,” based on the postmoderny view that gender is a “social construct,” and that biology is “fluid.”

Militant feminists in academia have been promoting these weird ideas since the late 1980s.

In the 2010s, when universities really started going to crap, and when social media sites like Tumblr became a safe haven for transgenderism, this ideology got legs. It has been running (and swimming) ever since. Those who have tried to challenge it have found the consequences to be career-ending, just as those of us who challenged the utility and honesty of affirmative action back in the 1990s found that to be severely career-damaging.

Sometimes there are immediate consequences to believing, and promoting, something that is factually false. Thinking you can suspend gravity by force of will is an obvious example.

Other times, the consequences of lies, whether told to yourself, others, or an entire society, only emerge over a period of time that varies from case to case.

If you smoke one cigarette, you might have a coughing fit, but you’ll probably not get lung cancer or heart disease. If you chain smoke for 40 to 50 years, telling yourself that can’t happen to me, there’s an excellent chance that you’ll do permanent, life-ending damage.

Oddly, Rand herself never grasped this. She was so addicted to smoking that she couldn’t quit even when her doctor told her cigarettes were killing her. Hospitalized, she would sneak off to places where she could have a cigarette! She died in 1984 — from lung cancer.

Her “Objectivist” philosophy had no room for addictions, because it saw our rational “free will” as absolute.

This is a consequence of thinking that a philosophical ideology trumps (or is) fact. It may not see forms of causality in which consequences are systemic and only occur over a long period of time.

Does this apply to our present political-economic mess? Let’s find out!

The Strange Case of Senile Joe

For four years now, Democrats have been in collective denial about Joe Biden’s cognitive state. Or his hard-left handlers (Obama? The Clintons? George Soros?) believed they could cover for him while they worked to reverse the Trump years and get the globalist-leftist agenda back on track.

We saw the truth on national television June 27.

As I put it last week, now they’re in peeing-in-their-pants panic about whether they can retain the White House.

Biden’s handlers can’t cover for him anymore. There’s simply too much evidence floating around, and no longer can it be dismissed as the product of “right-wingers.”

Biden himself, at least as of this writing, has dug in his heels.

This is typical of dementia sufferers. They go into denial, even when the evidence is plain to everyone around them.

As our family doctor put it metaphorically, when explaining that I had to get help for my father (this was summer of 2008) who fiercely denied that he needed help, it isn’t the patient talking but the condition.

Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia patients can’t be reasoned with. They can only be placated. It’s worse in late afternoons and early evenings. The sufferer becomes increasingly and often inexplicably agitated.

This is called sundowning.

Biden’s family — especially his academic feminist wife — stands behind him. Again, at least as of this writing.

It’s become clear, though: Biden won’t survive another four years in office.

Thus the frenzy in the Democrat Party over who replaces him. The obvious choice, for some, would seem to be his VP, Kamala Harris.

The fact that other names are being seriously floated (I listed them last week) is an index of how seriously she’s taken, even by her fellow Democrats. She’s a Diversity-Equity-Inclusion pick. This is obvious to everyone with a brain.

There’s no explicit legal process, though — Democrats themselves changed the rules allowing them top-down replacement of a candidate back in 2018 — and it portends a possible free-for-all when the Democrat Party Convention is held in August. Unless, that is, Biden steps aside voluntarily or is removed from office via the 25^th Amendment. The latter would be fought in court and cost valuable time unless the Supreme Court again steps in on an emergency basis and decides the matter.

A Parade of Lies and Consequences

This is what happens when an entire four-year administrative edifice is built on lies. One risks a meltdown far worse than if the truth were simply faced.

The lies about Joe Biden’s cognitive state are only the start. I’ve been convinced from the get-go that (as James Howard Kunstler puts it) there was something “janky” about Election 2020. Even if we can’t prove overt fraud anymore (I can’t help but wonder what happened to all those affidavits, signed under penalty of perjury), social media giants like Facebook have admitted that they suppressed information about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the evidence on it that would have revealed the extent of Biden family corruption. And yet leftist Democrats and corporate media keep talking, in perfectly Orwellian fashion, about the Big Lie (that the election was stolen).

We were lied to about what happened in Charlottesville in August of 2017. To this day, no corporate media leviathan or governmental entity has mentioned the Black Lives Matter and Antifa presence that day, much less that they (not Unite the Right) initiated the violence. (For more specifics, go here.)

These are just the lies that come to mind first. I studied them. Lies go back decades.

We were told when the stock market boomed in the 1990s that we were seeing genuine economic health and not the most massive credit expansion in human history. We received a minor-league wake-up call in 2000; banking leviathans ignored it and kept on with reckless financial behavior. Then the meltdown of 2008 happened.

If and when the bottom drops out again in a fashion that makes what happened in 2008 look like a bad hair day by comparison, we’ll learn the consequences of the mixture of lying from our so-called leaders and lying to ourselves trying to rationalize their motives.

We’ve been lied to about the Federal Reserve and about the long-term sustainability of the mountains of debt that just keep piling up: the national debt, consumer credit card debt, student-loan debt, and so on. When historians write about Richard Nixon, we read much about Watergate but little about his killing the gold standard. Ronald Reagan, ten years later, observed that no nation that goes off the gold standard remains great. Don Regan, one of the power-elite moles in his administration, told him to shut up about such things. He did.

We were lied to about Iraq, told about WMDs that did not exist. The Iraq War, which actually began during the first Bush regime with the Gulf War, ultimately destabilized the entire region.

All to control resources, protect Israel, and help Halliburton score big with what leftist author Naomi Klein called “disaster capitalism.”

Again: lies have consequences. A reason power elites like wars is because, as the saying goes, the first casualty of war is always the truth.

We’ve been lied to about what led Russia to invade Ukraine, as the “Maiden” revolution of 2014 (which overturned a democratically-elected government) was memory-holed and evidence of the abusive treatment of ethnic Russians by the government in Kyiv was blacked out. Western media also lie about Russia “invading” Crimea. Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to leave corrupt Ukraine and join the Russian Federation.

We were lied to about the origins of the coronavirus. Not a scrap of evidence ever supported the claim that it “evolved in a bat.” The “lab leak hypothesis” was blasted in both government corporate media as a “racist conspiracy theory.” Another lie.

We were lied to about the necessity of lockdowns which destroyed thousands of small businesses while corporate leviathans reaped windfalls. We were lied to when told there was no Big Tech censorship of reputable scientists claiming that the lockdowns were harmful. Recall the Twitter Files. An entire cohort of children is behind where they should be educationally because of something that was never necessary.

We were lied to about the “safety and efficacy” of the covid-19 shots; the evidence is in of a large spike in abnormal deaths from heart attacks, “turbo-cancers,” and similar causes in people under the age of 50 is in the numbers aggregated by life insurance companies having to make payouts, and from funeral homes and government databases.

Do I even need to talk about George Floyd, or the “mostly peaceful protesters” who did hundreds of millions of dollars of damage in around a dozen cities during the 2020 “summer of love”?

Or about the “insurrection” of January 6, 2021?

I’m not sure we’ve been told the full truth about what happened Oct. 7, 2023. We’re safe in presuming that an explosion of violence did occur, as we have abundant on-the-ground testimony; but such explosions of pure, insane rage don’t come from thin air. What has Israel been doing to the Palestinians for 80 years now, and why aren’t we supposed to ask? Why are most Evangelical Christians in America locked into the support-Israel-no-matter-what mindset with all four claws, despite horrifying evidence brutal exterminations of Palestinians and famine conditions in Gaza? I doubt very many starving women and children there care about Hamas! Making matters worse: the Israeli army designated certain locations “safe zones,” and when Gazans go there, the Israelis attack those places!

God’s Chosen People, or garden variety psychopaths no different from what they once opposed?

Again: why aren’t we Americans supposed to question the unconditional support for Israel coming from across the political spectrum, and as prevalent amongst neocons (who tend to be operational atheists) as it is among Christians? Is AIPAC really that powerful? Are we all supposed to be Zionists now? Zionism, if you recall, is an ideology, separate from Judaism.

Conclusion

Lies, lies, and more lies. All with consequences, sometimes devastating ones.

One of these is that few people really, honestly know what to believe any more. Trust in American institutions — media, academic, corporate, Congressional — is at historic lows.

But the really painful consequences come not from the lies themselves but waking up one day and realizing that you’ve been butting your head up against reality pretending it is something other than what it is: something you either acknowledge, or sooner or later it automatically works against you.

We’re back to our lead Ayn Rand quote. I’m not a “disciple” of hers. I think she greatly overestimated the human capacity for rational thought. Even she lied to herself, as we saw.

Many “right-wing” freedom believers kid themselves about government being their sole enemy, deluding themselves that there is no meaningful systemic coercion by corporations, or what Peter Joseph (the Zeitgeist man) calls structural violence perpetuated by them (addictive ingredients in processed foods being an example of this).

I have no explanation for the love affair many conservatives, most Libertarians (and their close cousins who label themselves voluntarists) have with corporations. Corporations don’t love them. Big Tech and Big Pharma scorn them, all the way to the bank.

To my mind, these delusions aren’t all that different from leftists deceiving themselves and lying to the country about diversity being a strength, and about the idea that men can become women and women can become men through the magical incantations of “gender affirming care.”

The only way to break out of the universe of lies is, first, to be skeptical of all “official” sources (government, mass media, corporate, academic) as well as many “unofficial” ones, then to do one’s diligent best to learn the truth in those areas of one’s life one cares about. Read multiple sources. Experiment and discover what works. Don’t make the assumption you have the final answer, or are incapable of being deceived.

There are things we can rely on, statements we can and should believe, because they deliver positive results. Sometimes, though, immediate results aren’t available. Present your best findings for evaluation — to oneself, and to anyone you trust who cares to listen.

Oftentimes, weaponized language is a dead giveaway that you are being lied to, or at least that an official narrative is being protected. Be alert to these: misinformation, conspiracy theory, racist, white supremacist, fascist or neofascist, domestic terrorist, Putin-lover, homophobic, transphobic, antisemitic, etc., etc., etc.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

This article is also available on Navigating the New Normal, on Substack. Please consider subscribing and getting these sooner. It’s still free (for now).

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

The Collapse of the Bidenista Regime

By Steven Yates

July 9, 2024

“Since his hiding-in-the-basement campaign in 2020 “Joe Biden’s” Party of Chaos has pretended that he is fit and alert for the job and now all of sudden they pretend to be shocked to see how far gone in the head he really is. The bull***t shovelers of the mainstream news media were especially rocked, not by the truth of the situation per se, but at being unmasked as the contemptible, confabulating tools that they’ve become. The New York Times wheeled around on a dime from their servile lionizing of the presidential hologram they helped create to its editorial board abjectly yelling for him to drop out and get gone. They were joined instantly by a long list of other opinion-shapers, campaign donors, political celebs, and Beltway players.” —James Howard Kunstler, “Surprise, Surprise!” July 1, 2024.

It’s becoming commonplace: yesterday’s “conspiracy theory” is today’s inconvenient truth. What was “fringe” yesterday — in public, anyway — but is self-evident now, at least to those who can think, is that Joe Biden is in terminal cognitive decline.

It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s a fact of political reality. Anyone who watched the debate had to see it.

I don’t think anyone is still using that CIA-promoted phrase now, not for this.

All you have to do is go back and watch one of the debates between Joe Biden and Donald Trump back in 2020, then compare Biden’s performance in those to the sorry spectacle we saw on national television last week.

I’m not ridiculing the man. However much I disagree with his politics and what his handlers have done to the U.S. over the past three and a half years, I can’t find it in me to wish Joe Biden harm. Quite the contrary. To my way of thinking, what we’ve been seeing has all the markings of a form of elder abuse!

His wife, a career academic (and we know how out of touch with reality most of them are) wants to perpetuate the abuse! She is defending his continued candidacy to corporate media!

I’ve seen cognitive decline up close. My father passed away right before Christmas in 2009 from vascular dementia, which is like Alzheimer’s on steroids. In just three years he went from being the most meticulous record-keeper I ever knew, his financial books always perfectly balanced, his records so carefully kept, that even an IRS agent who audited him back in the 1990s expressed open admiration, to being unable to write out a check without help. By the start of 2008, his records were a shambles.

Since I could compare Joe Biden’s performances in 2020 to earlier ones made before Congress, it was clear to me even then: he was in trouble. We all noticed how he didn’t do much in the way of serious campaigning (this being one reason why so many of us never for a heartbeat believed Election 2020 was “free and fair”).

Even if you don’t think Trump is a saint — whoever said he was? — he doesn’t have dementia. Yes, he rambles and goes off on tangents when he speaks. But he’s done that for years. He’s not tried to shake hands with people who aren’t there, claimed to have had conversations with foreign leaders who haven’t been alive in years (Biden said this about Mitterrand), mixed up names of foreign leaders like Biden recently did with those of Egypt and Mexico, or simply frozen in public as if losing all track of where he is and what he’s doing.

Or delivered verbal products like this one.

The spinmeisters tried to say Biden had a cold on debate night.

How dumb do they think we are? Anyone who’s had a bad cold — and who hasn’t? — will retort: those aren’t cold symptoms!

Another spin: Biden has struggled with a stutter all his life.

Answer: “She no long! She new sllunasuhhijuhnide our freedom can never be secured” is not stuttering.

Nor is using the word Medicare instead of Covid-19. Or trillionaires when one means billionaires. This kind of verbal mishap, also common in stroke recovery patients (my mother was one of those, so again, I’ve seen it up front and center!), is a sign of physical brain deterioration.

But what about his State of the Union address? Another spinmeister gambit.

Yes, he sounded coherent that night. But it’s easy to believe he was “on something.” Perhaps just caffeine. Maybe something stronger. No, I don’t have evidence. But something must explain that rare departure from the general pattern every honest person has seen and must acknowledge. That one makes the most sense.

All of which has to make you wonder, who’s really been in charge for the past three and a half years? This during a period of wide open borders and two (so far) dangerous foreign wars erupting.

I’ve been using the term Bidenistas. The “Bidenistas” aren’t Joe Biden. The term has been a placeholder for Joe’s handlers, and a recognition that this has been a fake presidency from the get-go.

Some say the real president has been Barack Obama. I have no idea if that’s true or not. I’m not sure it even matters. The Bidenista regime has collapsed. By collapse in this context I mean: lost credibility with everyone whose brain cells are functioning.

So what’s next?

I have no idea.

We’re seeing articles like this one: listing those being considered as Biden’s replacement. Or this, observing how one in three Democrats wants Biden to step aside.

Many see Kamala Harris as the obvious choice. She’s VP, after all.

She’s also a joke! She’s an obvious product of identity politics. Were she regarded as qualified, other names (like Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer, etc.), wouldn’t even be being floated.

Needless to say, none of these are any more qualified. Newsom has wrecked California. J.P. Pritzker is wrecking Illinois. Same with Whitmer in Michigan.

Others wouldn’t have the government jobs they have outside our cultural Marxist wasteland (Pete Buttigieg is a gay man with a husband).

All these people are disasters in living color!

Our current situation indicates how the leftist Democrat Party as a whole — or as James Howard Kunstler colorfully calls it, the Party of Chaos — in no less in terminal collapse than were the Republicans of the pre-Trump era. The reason they got Trump.

The curtain’s pulled back, and Party elites and elite media are in peeing-their-pants panic mode. Flood warnings any day now!

The last thing they want, after all, is also the last thing their globalist handlers want: a second Trump presidency. Especially during a year in which the elite-media-described “far right” is making gains all across Europe.

This is an index of the extent to which Brussels elites and the elites in the various capitol cities (e.g., France’s Macron) are despised.

Newsflash: they’re despised on our side of the Atlantic as well, but like the Euro-elites, they’re too narcissistic and sociopathic to realize it.

I’ve no predictions about what happens next. We’re just past the midpoint of 2024. Whatever else one says, the next six months are going to be quite interesting!

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

The Real Matrix: New Normal Edition

By Steven Yates

June 21, 2024

The Internet: Yesterday’s Information Gold Mine, Today’s Dystopia.

An article series I did some years ago entitled “The Real Matrix” (late in 2004) became the most popular item in my archive (it’s still here). It garnered hundreds of emails and two all-expenses-paid invites to speak at national meetings. It still received favorable emails years later.

I tried to continue the series about ten years ago, but for reasons that escape me now, it never got finished. It was going to culminate with an account of how we no longer live and work in a capitalist economy (given a standard understanding of that term) but a technofeudalist one, beyond the merging of state and corporate power that was Mussolini’s conception of fascism. I penned and had posted an independent essay on technofeudalism and its structure back in 2015, but it disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The link now redirects to an Indonesian gambling site.

For a time I wanted to refurbish that essay, but Yanis Varoufakis beat me to it! As Greece’s one-time finance minister, he has a considerably larger audience than I do, anyway.

Some time ago, a reader queried me about refurbishing “The Real Matrix.” I gave the matter thought, especially post-plan-demic.

The verdict?

No.

Why not?

I hope you’ll bear with me. This is going to take some time.

For starters, we’re in a totally different environment now from when I wrote the original. It’s a different Internet. Much larger, more all-pervasive, more integrated into everything than it was in 2004.

And totally commodified. When the Internet first became publicly accessible, it was ad free. As Varoufakis explains in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, it was designed (in the bowels of DARPA) as a vehicle for “communication” between military computers, not for commercial purposes. Then, in the late 1990s, Jeff Bezos asked, “What can I sell over the Internet?” His first answer, we know, was books. Amazon thus became the first online bookstore. Now it sells nearly everything and has put thousands of brick and mortar endeavors out of business. Bezos’s corporation was among those who reaped windfalls from the plan-demic. His net worth skyrocketed to well over $100 billion!

Fast-forward to the online world of 2024.

You’re as hammered with ads as if you were watching TV. If I can be bothered to check my Facebook feed, it’s over 60 percent ads. I cannot watch a YouTube (owned by Google) video without constant interruptions. Options to click off the ads are disappearing.

You can, of course, give the billionaire owners money with a paid account and make the ads go away. That’s the point. Interruptions are corporate “nudges.”

It’s a commonplace now: if you have free accounts anywhere — and most social media accounts can be set up for free — you’re not the customer. Big Tech’s customers are those paying big bucks to advertise.

You’re the product: your attention, incentivized; your clicks; your online footprint. Marketed and sold, based on what algorithms “say” you like.

Sites like LinkedIn have become jokes: “entrepreneurial” wannabes trying to sell services to one another, paying something like $59 a month (first month a freebie!) to search for “connections” on levels non-paying users cannot access. (Yes, I was one till I wised up.)

If you’re not participating in this circus, Internet marketing “gurus” have plenty of means of guilt-tripping you. You’re losing out! You’re being bypassed! You’re a broken human, and we can fix you. Just buy my program. Only $499, discounted to $249 if you act now!

LinkedIn is a billionaire corporation, goes without saying.

Whatever the billionaire class touches, it turns into one more cash cow, often at the expense of our time, money, and peace of mind.

It’s not just the billionaire class. More and more content is disappearing behind paywalls as we move to a paid-subscription economy. Do writers struggling to survive have a choice? I do not know how long I can keep Navigating the New Normal going without going entirely paid! I do not know how much longer I can keep sending material to NewsWithViews.com for free!

I’ve encountered many writing “gurus.” Some claim to be earning $10,000s/mo. blogging. I’ve never seen a tax return, however, and since they’re all selling programs on how to make money blogging, or with online newsletters, I suspect they’re earning more selling programs than they are writing. I could be wrong, of course. Show me a breakdown on what was earned doing what, alongside that tax return, and I’ll recant.

Lastly, in this techno-dystopia, don’t even think of trying to get a person by phone at a corporation! As technology has replaced human beings in waves, customer service is a thing of the past. It’s magnitudes worse since the plan-demic. Have a problem? Can’t figure out how something works on a website? Google it, and good luck! Having trouble just logging in? Don’t have a phone or number that can receive an authentication code by text now that everything’s gone to two-step authentication (to protect your account, of course)?

If you’re not given an email option, then again, good luck figuring out what to do!

I was once able to get through to a person at Hewlett-Packard, trying to troubleshoot a printer problem. Instead of helping me resolve my problem, the person tried to sell me a subscription to their technical support services! Only $25/mo., for something I needed once, and might never need again! I turned them down flat! My wife’s nephew is an engineer. He came in and fixed the problem for free!

How long will it be before the subscription economy spreads from the Internet to everything?!

Think of basic kitchen appliances. If a microwave oven sells for, let’s say, $195, and the corporation can instead sell you a subscription (incentivized by free servicing again assuming you can reach a human being) for, say, $25.95/mo. instead, then if the microwave lasts for three years the corporation has made $934.20 per oven, not $195; and if it’s sold just 1,000 microwave ovens on this subscription model, that’s almost a million dollars as opposed to just $195,000!

In the future you’ll own nothing, have no privacy, and be happy (and eat bugs)! Remember?

If you’re wondering what any of this has to do with updating “The Real Matrix,” please do keep reading.

“Why Nobody Sees My Stuff”: A Short Guide to Overproduction.

In our developing technofeudalist dystopia, we’ve seen a massive overproduction of content, including commentary. This continues daily. Multiple feeds come my way each morning. Email is now a burden. Folks in my network send me their latest pieces, or links to still more material. If the person is a friend, I try to at least skim it to get the gist of it. But reading more than a tiny fraction of what comes into my inbox each day is impossible. Nothing else would get done.

So, I get it: information overload explains, at least in part, why few of my own recent pieces have generated much interest: are doing well to garner 100 hits (on Substack, anyway, where I can see the analytics).

My audience seemed to diminish in size during the 2010s. During the 2020s it has plummeted.

No more speaking invites. Two radio interviews in the past five years. Same host.

I’ve never sought celebrityhood. I don’t think of myself as an “influencer,” and I don’t have tens of thousands of “followers” on X (formerly Twitter). I’m an introvert, and not good at self-promotion. And if you want to know the truth, I’ve come to detest most social media. Given its addictive and divisive tendencies, it’s clearly done more harm than good. It worries me that an entire generation has grown up following “influencers” on Instagram and now TikTok, playing violent videogames, watching porn, etc., thinking that what they’re seeing and hearing is reality.

What worries me more is that if you’re not spending hours on X (formerly Twitter), or Instagram, or TikTok, making videos, posting, commenting, “building your brand” (your online identity which is almost certainly a fantasy), you’re invisible.

The Internet was becoming an information gold mine in 2004. Nothing like it had ever existed before. Anyone could research anything, and they did! They could write about it and easily gain an audience!

In 2024, it’s become a digital prison.

Rather like The Matrix, a prison for our minds.

Something you can no longer live a normal life without. Same with smartphones.

Much of it is fantasy, the product of business models designed to capture and hold our attention (“built to keep us under control,” Morpheus says), so that its billionaire owners, the equivalent of the feudal lords of centuries ago, can get even richer by adding advertising to our content while incentivizing us to produce more of it.

It’s also well-known: users see what the algorithms show them. Sometimes this reflects their history on the site, sometimes not.

If you’re relying on these platforms “to get the word out” and are not supporting official narratives, again (unless you have really good contacts out in the real world) you can forget about visibility.

It’s called shadow-banning.

Algorithmic censorship started during the Obama years but kicked in seriously with the Trump upset in 2016. By that time, of course, the Internet was controlled by corporate overlords. Google was, and still is, atop that list. Google’s remains the dominant search engine. No one else’s is even close to it.

Email? I know of content creators and writing “gurus” who sing email’s praises. They make the reasonable point that if you can build a list of tens of thousands of email addresses (hundreds of thousands is better yet!) you can reach your audience directly without depending on any social media platforms. (Don’t forget to include your offer!)

They’re probably right about that. But this doesn’t address the larger picture: the massive overproduction of content and the time-crunch it creates for readers who (one hopes!) have lives away from screens.

Of what shows up in my inbox these days, probably around five percent gets opened.

Over half of my email is some “guru” trying to sell me something.

Newsflash, therefore: hitting send doesn’t get your email read. Not without just the right headline, sent at just the right time, and there are “gurus” who will sell you gimmicky courses just on email headline writing! For as is also well known in the trade, “spammy” headlines aren’t seen at all. Email, too, is at the mercy of the “gatekeeper” filters of the host system (Yahoo, Gmail, etc.) that will automatically nuke your email to the spam folder.

So what do you do in this environment if you’re not famous?

No refurbishing of anything, as if you were. Not enough people will see it to make the project worth doing.

The “Real Matrix” is shattered.

All this aside….

IF THE TENS OF MILLIONS OF POTENTIAL READERS OUT THERE WEREN’T AWAKENED BY THE EVENTS OF MARCH 2020 THROUGH LATE 2022, NOT REALIZING THEY WERE LIVING THROUGH THE BIGGEST POWER GRAB IN HUMAN HISTORY, I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO HELP THEM!!!

Those who can’t see what’s gone on since, e.g., with the lawfare attacks on Trump — or see through “legacy” (corporate) media’s litany of weaponized phrases (misinformation, threat to democracy, conspiracy theory, far right, Russian propaganda, extremist, racist, neo-Nazi, white supremacy, false equivalence, misogyny, toxic masculinity, homophobic, transphobic, antivaxxer, antisemitism, etc., etc., etc.), I’d have no clue what to do for them if I was an “influencer,” or had that huge email list and genius headlines “begging” to be opened!

The “Matrix” is shattered! Unplugged, if you prefer!

You shouldn’t need to be “red pilled” to see that you’re being lied to 24/7 by nearly all corporate media! That there are only a few truthtellers left you can trust to at least try to get things right (and God knows we’re far from omnipotent; but very few of us can afford a staff of researchers and fact-checkers; so we don’t always succeed!).

Sometimes the truth isn’t even hidden from you.

Consider Event 201 that predated the arrival of the (almost certainly lab-enhanced) coronavirus. That was October 18-19, 2019, and featured a “tabletop” exercise version of what was unleashed on the world a few months later.

As you can see if you just click the link, it’s still not hidden! It’s plain as day, right on the World Economic Forum’s own website.

Not a “conspiracy site.”

It’s true, such exercises weren’t splashed across newspapers or placed “above the fold” on websites.

The power brokers knew then, and know now, that mass audiences remain more interested in sports, celebrities, and porn. So, they don’t bother to hide.

As I’ve explained previously, obsessing over politics and power is not on most people’s plates. Their priorities are their own relationships, work and personal goals, financial concerns, health concerns, children if they have them, involvement with their communities in some cases, and whatever else affects them directly or what they can affect. Their personal lives and immediate problems are understandably at the center of their attention.

This is normal.

But in a world controlled by the Global Wolf (go here, scroll to Sec. 8), normal works against them.

The Global Wolf: What He Wants.

We need sheepdogs in the sense I discussed in Pt 2 of “Conservatism.” Obviously, as Dave Grossman observed, someone needs to confront the dangerous sociopaths in our midst: the wolves. Research tells us that roughly 4 percent of the general population has sociopathic tendencies.

This is why no form of purely voluntarist anarchism, or even totally “free market” libertarianism, is going to work on any large scale.

Remember: you can’t be nice to the wolf. He doesn’t respond to ‘nice’; it’s not in his makeup. It is dangerous to try and trade with him, work for him, or employ him, because these all presuppose trust, and trust presupposes honesty. The wolf doesn’t play by such rules. He makes it up as he goes along, to gain whatever he seeks, be it money, power, murder and mayhem, or just someone to use for sex. If the wolf has an identifiable rule, it’s the old saw that the ends justify the means. Or perhaps: “If I want something, I have a ‘right’ to it. If I want to do something, I have a ‘right’ to do it.” If you’re nice to him and assume he’ll leave you alone if you leave him alone, he’ll take advantage of your naivete and go right on being a wolf.

A major reason I stopped being a Libertarian was that I saw in it no machinery able to control the wolves. Especially the intelligent ones, able to act “virtuous” until they are positioned where they want to be. Then they do as they please, destroying trust, and your society crumbles.

What about confronting the Global Wolf? That’s much harder! The Global Wolf has all the above coupled with organization and resources most of us cannot even imagine!

Confront him directly? How does one even do that?

Think about what I was saying about just trying to get someone at a corporation on the telephone (this applies to government agencies in spades as well).

One is in the position of trying to deal with a vast, amorphous blob (author James Howard Kunstler even calls it that). Like the mythical Hydra, if you’re somehow able to cut off one head, two more appear. Dealing with one of its appendages will leave the rest untouched, and a good bit of it is invisible.

Any viable action steps have to start with fierce dedication to the truth, and to getting cognitively, psychologically, and economically as independent and self-sufficient as possible. If you’re trading time and effort for a paycheck (which describes over 90 percent of work in industrial civilization), you can’t do it.

Writers trying their damnedest to expose lies and wake people up need to think of themselves as Sheepdogs of a different sort (note the upper-case): language police in a higher sense of that term than it’s typically used for, standing guard on the walls of information, exposing propaganda, weaponized words and phrases, and bald-faced lies.

Neither type of sheepdog is popular. As Grossman observes, the former looks a lot like the wolf and is just as capable of violence as the wolf. For purposes of protection and sometimes punishment, not predation.

Both small-scale wolves and the Global Wolf are predators. But they don’t want the same thing. The Global Wolf isn’t looking for someone to use for sex. He has much bigger prey in mind.

What is to be done?

If you write, carry the truth forward, however and wherever possible.

Or undertake another project the goal of which is independence and self-sufficiency. We must work to extricate ourselves from dependence on systems and institutions the Global Wolf controls, which is most of them.

Continue to remind yourself that whatever the immediate future holds, the Global Wolf’s days are numbered.

Why?

Because even if God doesn’t step in and clean up this mess in a big way in the near future, what the Global Wolf wants is an empire.

Not merely the U.S. empire. He likes the U.S. war machine, but he’s after bigger game.

He wants world government (“global governance”), formal or not, able to serve his vast network of global corporations ensuring control over all resources and endeavors: energy, finance, land, water, trade, infrastructure, food, health, education, information, science, technology, weaponry. He wants all us peasants in positions of submission and subservience, voluntarily if possible, accepting this as our lot in life.

A world in which you own nothing (everything you use is by subscription), have no privacy (your smartphone knows where you are even if you turn it off), but will be happy even if you’re forced to eat bugs.

What the Global Wolf doesn’t want is anything as potentially disruptive as an informed, self-sufficient, and willfully independent middle class.

But …

EMPIRES ALWAYS DISINTEGRATE! They eventually choke on their own corruption. They cannibalize themselves and fall from within. Always.

That’s freedom’s ace-in-the-hole!

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

A slightly different version of this article is available on Navigating the New Normal, on Substack. Please consider subscribing. It’s still free (for now).

Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored more than 20 articles, book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself. In 2021 he moved to Chile. He is married to a Chilean national.

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

What Does It Mean to Be a Conservative?, Part 2

By Steven Yates

June 14, 2024

“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites … in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” —Edmund Burke, “Letter to a Member of the General Assembly,” 1791.

Back to Basics: Eight Conservative Principles.

If they try, conservative thinkers can articulate the basic values that motivate them to write and act. They can answer the question, what are we trying to conserve? and in a way not necessarily tied to current controversies such as whether to support Trump or not (though I’ve no idea who else they’d presently support).

Russell Kirk tried, and the result was Ten Conservative Principles. I thought some of his were a bit obscure, so I’ve settled on eight items as of major importance (we can always supply add-ons later).

Kirk noted that conservatism does not have a “magnum opus” like communism does (Marx’s and Engels’s Communist Manifesto or Marx’s Das Kapital).

The reason: as a philosophy for living in society and in the world as it is, conservatism is more “organic”: tethered more closely to and woven into the lives of people. It did not start as a systematic body of ideas worked out by an intellectual. Hence it isn’t easy to systematize. Yet I’ve tried. My results aren’t identical to Kirk’s. Other conservative writers might work out different ways of saying these things, and that’s okay. If conservatism really is “organic,” not proceeding from some rationalist’s pen, this is what we’d expect.

First, we must sweep aside the debris we’ve inherited, especially the Utopias of philosophers from Plato down through Francis Bacon to modern technocrats such as B.F. Skinner and the more recent ones in the World Economic Forum.

Conservatism is non-Utopian. We’ll see why.

In that case, to be a conservative in my sense is to believe that:

An enduring, transcendentally-grounded moral order binds us all. What grounds moral order is Almighty God Himself as Supreme Creator and source of all value. God having created humanity in His image (Gen 1:26-28), this is the best grounding for what “transcends” much conservative policy and corrects a few things it gets wrong: all persons have intrinsic value — value they have by virtue of being human, and not derived from anything beyond having been created in God’s image. Can atheists promote this, and the principles enumerated below? They can try, of course, but I think they’ll have trouble justifying anything special or intrinsically valuable about us as persons, all of us unique. This alone will have consequences (think of abortion and the debates surrounding it). Institutions of whatever sort should serve persons, not the other way around. When they do this, they establish trust, which is essential to a functional societal order. What we’ve seen in recent history is a slow but largescale and long term collapse of trust resulting from loss of confidence in institutions, born of the decay in personal and civic virtues when secularism is assumed and religion becomes a private and completely optional indulgence to be “explained” by secular psychology.
We live in a fallen and partly broken world, whether we call this original sin or something else (imperfection, fallibility, etc.). Even given the best and most virtuous parenting, the best education, and the best work to do, we are all still beset by moral weakness and temptation. Even the most diligent are doing the best they can. This is a reason it is a mistake to compare candidates for political office, or heads of institutions, or even thought leaders looked up to in entire civilizations, to some kind of Ideal Man. All will fall short and we’ll be paralyzed. All candidates for an office, institutions, and societies will have various strengths and weaknesses, and we must make the best and wisest choices we can (and in collapsing civilizations, wisdom may include the choice to separate if all choices seem equally or almost equally vile).
Basic beliefs, traditions, customs, fundamental institutions (e.g., the family, and private property) are validated not by abstract reasoning but from having passed the test of time. Hence the conservative tends to respect custom, tradition, “old and familiar ways of doing things.” A basic belief, moreover, is that lives have purpose. As Proverbs says, “Without vision, the people perish.” This purpose is typically found in a connection to something larger than self. This may be a natural human impulse. We cannot tolerate a sense of meaninglessness and will fill the vacuum with something, anything. For the conservative Christian, this ‘something’ is God. For others, it will be some surrogate for God such as a political movement or loyalty to state authority, loyalty to one’s work or profession, or perhaps just love of money as an end in itself. If these aren’t obtainable, one turns to drugs or alcohol or sexual promiscuity or some combination of these or something else to distract from the emptiness or numb the pain. As a last resort, one ends it all with suicide.

Family units are not optional. Perhaps they would be if we did not come into the world as helpless infants. Family systems exist in every culture ever studied by anthropologists. There are variations, of course, and plenty of imperfections. Childrearing is essential, because children are a community’s future. Education in the customs and other expectations of one’s culture is also essential. Its purpose is to prepare the next generation for the realities and necessities of life in the world as it is. If the Western family unit in particular, shaped by Scripture, was somehow unsound, we wouldn’t have survived much less built Western civilization.

Private property is also a societal good that has appeared nowhere else. What is justly acquired and owned, one tends to take care of. Owning private property is not, as we’ll see below, an absolute license to do whatever one wants. The sanctity of human life, for example, trumps it: because of the intrinsic value of persons, you cannot sacrifice someone to some pagan god on an altar on your property. Yes, this is an extreme example. But the virtuous person does not use his/her property in ways that harm others, short or long term, or interfere with them without their knowledge or permission. The solution to whatever abuses of private property rights can be documented is not to abolish private property rights but to promote virtuous conduct and supply sensible regulations to constrain what isn’t virtuous. Speaking of which:

Private passions need to be restrained. This is a tough one for intellectuals, because they’re so used to thinking of us as “rational animals” (Aristotle), although a few philosophers such as David Hume were more realistic (“reason is the slave of the passions”). As psychologists have figured out, we’re far more creatures of emotion (passion) than we are reason. Reason identifies, classifies, explains, solves problems; it reaches conclusions validly (one hopes) from premises. Its capacity to restrain potentially very powerful passions is not its default setting. But restraint of passions is necessary if we’re going to live together and work together in communities. We either learn to restrain them ourselves with systems that discipline us, this being built into childrearing and education, or they will need to be restrained from the outside—typically, whether one likes it or not, by government. So who restrains government? We the people restrain it, so that it serves the purposes we created it to serve. We’ll return to this problem below.

The point is: freedom isn’t free. It is not the freedom to do whatever we please. It is the freedom to act morally and virtuously, to do the right things by ourselves and by others. If we misuse what freedom we have, we soon don’t have any. But if we see those around us as having intrinsic value, just like us, as having been created in God’s image just like ourselves, that will put us ahead of the pack in how to act.

The economic side to all this begins with the distinction between needs and wants. Needs are everything that keeps you alive (oxygen, food, water, a roof over your head, the responsible care of others before you’re old enough to care for yourself responsibly). Most everything else is a want. It’s true, the distinction is not an absolute dichotomy (is a suitable partner a need or a want?). But adults can tell the difference most of the time; one of the signs of being an adult is acting accordingly, both in the public marketplace and in one’s personal life. There are civilization-created needs, i.e., the necessities of a “normal” life (electricity, for example, or a telephone, and these days, an Internet connection).

Speaking of economics, conservatives will see political economy as “downstream” from culture. I think this is what Steve Bannon had in mind when he described a country as more than its economy, and this ties in with the idea that what Big Business sees as good for itself is not necessarily good for the country. It depends on the values businesses are embodying. Culture, moreover, is “downstream” from worldview. What this means: beliefs such as those supplied by religion (or the cultivated irreligiosity of secularism) have more influence on the public mind and public behavior than purely economic considerations (this goes against both Marxists and many capitalists both of whom see economics as the fundamental science of humanity). By presenting a set of extra-economic values, Christian or otherwise, worldview and culture set conditions for what is produced and how much; how money is made, distributed, and spent; how much is saved, etc. Again, a great deal of what goes on in a free marketplace presumes relationships based on trust, because most people prefer to do business with people they know, trust, and like, and in an overall ambience of trust and safety (e.g., freedom from random criminality). When trust breaks down, whatever the cause, the free marketplace tends to follow.
Because of (2), I think a real conservative would assert that concentrations of power are dangerous to liberty, wherever located. This favors a mindset, ensuing programs, and policies favoring decentralizing power and distributing it across a variety of institutions. And since in capitalist civilization wealth becomes power, this favors the idea that massive and increasing concentrations of wealth are also dangerous. Indeed, there was once a species of liberal who argued for minimizing inequality even if their focus was more on race than on class. Real conservatives, it seems to me, should be acutely uncomfortable with how financialization in the context of the neoliberal economics of the past 40 years has allowed a coterie of billionaires to concentrate their wealth and grow ever larger and more controlling — enhanced by the central bank (the Federal Reserve System) created for just this purpose. The arguments here need not be moral. All they need do, based on history, is demonstrate that massive economic inequality is destabilizing — especially if there is a widespread perception that the “haves” got where they are by somehow cheating, or working the system, which requires those outside the enclaves of actual privilege to actually work for their livings, and this latter comes to seem increasingly futile because of inflation as currency loses its purchasing power.

Real conservatives should favor closing the Federal Reserve! Central banks are inherently dangerous! If that seems radical, that’s a sign of how far the centralization of wealth and power have come, and how much the primary destroyers of freedom in the West have come to be accepted.

For a conservative, locality matters. Places within designated borders are special. Borders don’t have to be “eternal” for this to be true. They just have to be agreed upon by those living within them, who require those on the outside as well as governing authorities on the inside to respect them. America is more than “an idea” (although it is that). It is a unique place, founded through a unique process, in accordance with unique ideals — ideals originating in Christendom which we have admittedly struggled to practice consistently (e.g., equal rights of all persons under the law). But by keeping these ideals firmly in mind, conservatives on the Right can offer progressives on the Left everything they can say they legitimately want, such as a country free of irrational prejudice and discrimination. Many of us supported such goals back in the 1960s, after all — before they were hijacked (rallying cries against racial discrimination replaced by racial quotas and preferential hiring to achieve “parity,” for example). Which brings me to:
Calls for change can be validated on this basis, given also what we affirmed in (1) but tempered by (2). Conservatives need not oppose calls for change in kneejerk fashion but rather should assess them according to these criteria. Thomas S. Kuhn is best known for his landmark tract The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (orig. 1962). He also penned a thoughtful essay entitled “The Essential Tension,” that between “liberal” and “conservative” impulses in the physical sciences. The former favor openness to new ideas which, at its extreme, lies dangerous credulity; the latter try to close new ideas off and maintain the status quo. In this direction lies stagnation. Kuhn argued for a careful and constantly shifting balance between the two — based not on “criteria” that can be specified in advance but needing constant negotiation and renegotiation, because we learn new things, circumstances do change, and innovation and improvisation become necessary.

What applies in the physical sciences surely applies doubly in human communities filled with emotion-driven agents. We are problem solvers. But the burden of evidence that a solution works and that change is necessary is invariably on the change agent, not on the critic. That said, the critic has a balancing obligation, in the interests of intellectual honesty, not to move the goal posts or establish criteria so high that no one can meet them.

What’s Next? Does Conservatism Have a Future?

We’ve laid out principles. Our principles are grounded in an ethical sensibility that acknowledges God and seeks to manifest the eternal in our daily lives and in our communities. Our opponents — enemies, if we’re honest about it — see only historicity, change, and their visions of a man-made Utopia to come.

The leftist-globalist axis has no principles other than whatever advances power — a capacity to dictate the terms of life to other human beings, whom they see as highly evolved animals, not beings created in the image of a Supreme Being. Hence there are no reasons not to treat them like cattle.

This puts the conservative at a structural disadvantage. I’ve often had the feeling of having brought a knife to a gunfight. You can’t reason with people whose starting premise is that reason doesn’t count; power are what counts (money is how you keep score). You can’t be “nice” to them, with calls for “dialogue.” Niceness is not reciprocated but treated with contempt. They don’t want dialogue with those they consider beneath them. Conservatives have tried to play by the rules of the knife fight and issued statements but been unable to do anything to stop the advance of leftism in the culture, any more than they’ve been able to stop the advance of globalism on the world scene. Indeed, all too many conservatives have been bamboozled by economistic narratives about how “globalization will make us all rich” and “open borders is great for the economy.”

So it’s going to take much more than yet another assertion of conservative principles. What I’ve done here is a start, but not more than that. Trumpian “populism” has done more to monkey wrench left-globalist efforts, if only by being unpredictable and uncontrollable. The Donald Trump that went into office in 2017 clearly had no idea what he was going up against. The Donald Trump of 2024 has definitely learned a few things, and those behind him are strategizing accordingly! But it’s still going to take more than winning an election — assuming that’s even possible — and strategizing on desktops, to bring down the leftist-globalist axis.

Conservatives, as I noted, are not Utopians. They understand the need for rules, and that in a fallen world, rules don’t protect or enforce themselves.

Interlude: From A Few Good Men (1992)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sLcfQKU_co&pp=ygUOYSBmZXcgZ29vZCBtZW4%3D

“Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom! You weep for Santiago and you curse the Marines! You have that luxury! You have the luxury of not knowing what I know; that Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives! And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives! You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall! You need me on that wall! We use words like honor, code, loyalty! We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something! You use them as a punchline! I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it!! I would rather you just said “thank you” and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand a post. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you are entitled to!!” —Col. Nathan R. Jessup, A Few Good Men (1992)

Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs: Modified.

Author and U.S. Army Lt. Col. (Ret.) Dave Grossman penned a disquieting statement on sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. He offers a supplement to everything penned above that conservatives ought to consider.

The common people are sheep. In our context, this is not pejorative. Grossman meant it in the sense of those who are peaceful, take care of their families, mostly mind their own business, and won’t hurt others and unless provoked. They just want to be left alone as I’ve described. They take ethical principles seriously and try to live by them, however imperfectly.

Grossman’s point: left to their own devices, the sheep are all but helpless when the wolf attacks.

The wolf lives by his own rules and has no qualms about using force to get what he wants.

Who protects the sheep from wolves? Sheepdogs, that’s who.

When a mass shooter attacks, the sheep take cover. If there’s a sheepdog on the scene, he pulls out the weapon he is never without and sets about taking the wolf down if he can.

The sheepdog is prepared both mentally and physically to use deadly force if a situation calls for it, even at the cost of his own life. The sheepdog understands that there are principles worth dying for; otherwise, nothing is really worth living for.

Sheepdogs include properly, ethically-trained soldiers, their superiors, Navy SEALS, police officers … and members of any militia devoted to securing and maintaining the freedoms of those in their charge.

The men with guns on the walls.

Sheepdog ethics has a firm rule: never harm the sheep. Your job is to protect the sheep by confronting and defeating the wolf. A sheepdog who harms the sheep is kicked out.

The sheep don’t care for the sheepdog. On the face of it, the sheepdog looks kind of wolfish. He and the wolf are both capable of violence. The sheepdog is a reminder that the world isn’t always “nice,” and that any society needs policing, borders, and defense forces to protect them. Else the wolves attack and feed on the sheep without mercy.

The sheepdog points out the unpleasant reality that you can’t be “nice” to the wolf. He’ll go right on being a wolf. That’s his nature. The sheepdog gets used to not being listened to. Most sheep are in denial, and will stay in denial — and then beg for protection when the wolf attacks.

What Grossman doesn’t tell us is what to do once we realize that the wolves are now in charge, in all the pinnacles of power!

Sadly, given the Global Corporatocracy in all its guises, the wolf presently controls much of the planet via its political economies and finances! Call him the Global Wolf!

He doesn’t control everything, however. He thus wants more control. He wants Total Spectrum Dominance, a surveillance-and-control global state, the sheep reduced to complete dependence on systems the Global Wolf controls, so that He may feed on the sheep at his leisure!

This is the biggest dilemma of our era!

What kind of sheepdog do we need to confront the Global Wolf who spends more financial resources in a day advancing his agenda than a sheepdog can expect to see in his life.

The truth:

Wolves of any sort will not be nice unless they are forced to behave themselves, generally through fear of a greater power! Needless to say, the wolf isn’t much inclined to believe in a transcendent God, or anything else he can’t see, hear, taste, touch, and smell — and eat.

Given the New Normal and where this year seems to be going, it may be too late for the West. Because of inattention and the misbegotten skepticism of those who go on and on about “conspiracy theories,” the Global Wolf has gotten too far and taken too much.

A Trump victory won’t be enough. I doubt that what needs to be done, can be done in just four years. No president has that much power. Trump’s most important choice will therefore be his VP. It has to be someone who shares his vision and goals of a U.S. freed from leftists and the Deep State, and able to continue what Trump began for eight more years.

Considering how long the Global Wolf has been at work, this still might not be enough time!

What conservatives need, therefore, is a rational Plan B to organize themselves and separate, if need be, forming self-sufficient communities built around solid family structures and sustainable small businesses, working from the bottom up instead of from the top down, able to sustain and defend themselves when the Global Wolf attacks, as he inevitably will. Those of us presently in our 60s and therefore too old to man posts on walls ourselves will have to live with the fact that we probably won’t live to see the outcome of the coming battle.

What we have, though, is God on our side!

Part 1,

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

A slightly different version of this article is available on Navigating the New Normal, on Substack. Please consider subscribing. It’s still free (for now).

Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored more than 20 articles, book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself. In 2021 he moved to Chile. He is married to a Chilean national.

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

What Does It Mean to Be a Conservative? – Part 1

By Steven Yates

June 8, 2024

“When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment, we have no compass to govern us, nor can we know distinctly to what port to steer.” -Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

Doubtless readers expect something on the Trump lawfare verdict in the “hush money” kangaroo court. What Tucker Carlson wrote on X:

Import the Third World, become the Third World. That’s what we just saw. This won’t stop Trump. He’ll win the election if he’s not killed first. But it does mark the end of the fairest justice system in the world. Anyone who defends this verdict is a danger to you and your family.

Ah, Tucker’s optimism. I’m not sure the Democrats and those working behind them (e.g., in Big Tech) will allow Trump to win. Should I be wrong and Trump miraculously wins in the Electoral College, we’re liable to see Soros-funded “mostly peaceful protesters” taking to the streets again and burning down city blocks.

A close friend of mine sent me this:

“It is all in the instructions!” Phillip Kline, a law professor at Liberty University and former Kansas attorney general, wrote in a post on X commenting on the jury instructions. “Judge Merchan has thru delay and obfuscation hampered the preparation of a defense, constructed a manner for the jury to convict without agreement on what crime was committed, and paved the way thru allowing irrelevant evidence for mere animus toward Trump to convict! Welcome to the left’s living Constitution!”

Doubtless pundits real and fake will talk the verdict to death. Convicted felon is the term being bandied about by corporate media as the latest verbal sledgehammer. Suffice it to say: we had a leftist court, a leftist prosecution, a leftist judge; the jurors remain unidentified but they’re all New Yorkers. Draw your own conclusions. This represents the full hijacking of the legal system in a country that has been subject to periodic lurches leftward for decades. Why the country has continued to lurch leftward no matter which party controls Congress or the White House and no matter what conservatives say and do is an interesting problem! Whatever happens in November, never has the need for a new articulation of what conservatism was/is supposed to be more badly needed, and I can only hope this is read in that light.

“Conservatism” today is rife with divisions. The deepest, obviously, is between “movement” (Establishment) conservatives of the past who took their original cue from William F. Buckley — Reagan, the Bushes, the Cheneys, the Romneys, etc.; writers such as George Will and other token conservatives at The Washington Post — versus “MAGA” conservatives who reject that past, are represented by figures such as Michael Anton (who penned “The Flight 54 Election” as Publius Decius Mus) and who have pretty much taken over the Republican Party: a sign the “Establishment” wasn’t as established as its members thought. Their grip did not survive the collapse of all their narratives.

The Establishment is obviously still around and has nothing but disdain for the MAGAs. The MAGAs despise the Establishment.

Then there are neoconservatives — the Kristols, Norman Podhoretz; Project for a New American Century types whose Rebuilding America’s Defenses became a blueprint for the war machine of the 2000s; most of Bush the Younger’s appointees; or writers such as Max Boot whose affiliation with the Council on Foreign Relations should tell you all you need to know. There is abundant overlap between the Establishment and these guys, obviously.

The first group is on its way out as it only has one highly visible member under age 60 — Liz Cheney. The second is trying to return Trump to the White House. The third seems hellbent on getting us into World War III.

Now, the million-dollar question:

If they claim to be conservatives, could any of them tell us what they want to conserve?

Back in the day I asked an acquaintance in my age bracket whose views aligned most closely with the third (he’d supported the Iraq War against every criticism I made) who self-identified as a conservative what he was trying to conserve.

I received a blank stare of noncomprehension I never forgot.

So here we are—

What Conservatism Isn’t.

My late father called himself a “conservative Republican.” For him, and for many people whose means of keeping the lights on and food on the table involved Monday thru Friday eight-to-fiving, conservatism seemed to mean, “what’s good for business is good for the country.” He never said as much, but the idea often emerged from his actions.

And making money. I forget whom I was criticizing, but my dad’s response was, “They make money.”

I retorted, “So do drug dealers and sex traffickers.”

He told me I had a bad attitude.

Al Capone was once quoted as saying, “I’m just a businessman giving the people what they want.”

Readers should consult Randall Fitzgerald’s The Hundred-Year Lie: How Food and Medicine Are Destroying Your Health (2005). It is full of insights on Big Pharma and Big Food, which also make money.

The majority of businesses supply a lot of good and necessary products, obviously. Some of the biggest have served up carcinogens, and drugs linked to violence and suicide as well as environmental damage (e.g., discarded pharmaceuticals contaminating the water table).

What’s good for business is good for the country didn’t ring true to me in any generalized sense of just giving the masses whatever it is they want, and for a long time I rejected conservatism. In college I had my “left-liberal phase.” If we’re reasonably intelligent and intellectually curious, don’t we all? Later, I discovered Libertarianism. But that’s for another day.

Conservatism isn’t merely “what’s good for business.” It’s not about money. What if global corporations have sold us out by undermining the well-being of ordinary working Americans while they laughed all the way to the bank?

I hope that’s not a “lefty” type question.

If so, conservatives need to sort out their relationship to a free-market absolutism that is more associated with Libertarianism. What markets do they want to support, and what must constrain the system so that it benefits instead of harms?

Nor, finally, is conservatism what advances the interests of defense contractors who serve the war machine, allegedly to “make the world safe for democracy.” That’s to confuse it with neoconservatism again. Conservatism isn’t a furtherance of Empire, as Patrick J. Buchanan explained in one book after another.

So, then, what is it that conservatives should want to conserve?

Richard Rorty: Achieving Our Country? Or Restoring It?

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) may be the last American academic philosopher of historical importance (judging from the way academia is circling the drain). In the late 1990s when Harvard was still a mostly respectable place, he delivered a series of lectures there. The response was sufficiently favorable that he turned them into a slim volume published as Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (1999).

Surprisingly, Rorty criticized academic leftists stingingly. He saw them as insular, obscure, micro-specialized, and ultimately pointless in their typically academic retreat from the lives of the ordinary, suffering human beings their ancestors had claimed to speak for. He thought that their overriding disdain for “American pride” was wrongheaded and unhelpful.

Emerging from Achieving Our Country along the way, though, was an image of Right versus Left relevant to what conservatives might want to think about conserving.

Rorty maintained that according to the Right, America’s greatest achievements were in its past, so that the country’s overall trajectory over the past century (maybe longer) has been downhill. While there are some exceptions to this: check.

The Left — or what Rorty saw as best and healthiest in the Left — sees America’s greatest achievements as in the future. We have not, that is, “achieved our country.”

The Right is thus driven to restore something lost. Constitutionally limited government, perchance?

The Left seeks “progress” toward that future. Hence leftists’ frequent use of progressive to describe themselves and what they want.

Conservatism and the Transcendent.

Rorty was part right and part wrong.

Conservatism, if associated with ‘The Right,’ does look to the past to find our greatest accomplishments. It sees documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. These did not come from thin air. Their predecessors included the English Bill of Rights and ultimately the Magna Carta of 1215.

But conservatism doesn’t just look at the past. Rorty oversimplifies.

A thoughtful conservative wants something Rorty’s philosophy of ‘neopragmatism’ (like the product of most academic intellectuals) rejects: that which is transcendent and eternal, whether exemplified in past, present, or future.

Or, as conservative philosopher Russell Kirk put it, a thoughtful conservative perceives an enduring moral order, an order made for us and for which we were made.

Going back to Aquinas, who lived not long after the insidious King John was forced at sword point to sign the Magna Carta: God left humanity two books: the direct revelation of Scripture, in which we find Moral Law, and the indirect revelation of His Creation, in which we find Natural Law.

According to conservatism, there is both a definite human nature and a definite natural order. Natural Law is where they intersect. Our actions, whether as individuals or as a society, either harmonize with Natural Law or they ultimately fail.

Truly great achievements are timeless because they glorify God the Creator who is timeless. God’s existence is of an entirely different order than our limited spatiotemporal existence. His existence is evident in the workings of nature — their complexity under close study (e.g., the amount of information biochemically encoded into a single strand of DNA) as well as their immense beauty (think of the peaks of a snow-covered mountainscape, a sunset viewed over an ocean under a clear sky, or perhaps a new mother cradling her just-born baby for the first time).

Rorty, it goes without saying, was an atheist and a materialist. He saw both instrumentally, and not as descriptions of anything “interesting.” His ‘neopragmatism’ saw little to be gained, or practical and social problems to be solved, by asking the questions such terms raise. He would have had us stop asking whether there’s a God, or ‘what the world is made of’ beyond science’s provisional answers.

Leftists — progressives, if one prefers — tie themselves to history, not eternity. Their modern founding father is German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, who originated the ‘master-slave’ (or ‘lordship’ vs ‘bondservant’) dichotomy, in which the two experience the world in very different ways.

Karl Marx cut his teeth studying Hegel. He saw the dichotomy in terms of class (oppressing bourgeoisie versus oppressed proletariat). Twentieth century cultural Marxists such as Herbert Marcuse generalized it to incorporate race; radical feminists expanded it to include gender; homosexuals took it still further. With transgenderism, no longer is there any definitive Natural Law, not in a world where you can be any “gender” you like.

The Hegelian dichotomy thus haunts us to this day in the present divisions drawn between oppressors (typically straight, non-gender-confused, white Christian males) and the oppressed (everyone else).

Leftists and materialists make a good pair, as do leftists and postmodernists (the relationship between materialism and postmodernism is too complex and obscure to get into here).

Both reject the idea of a transcendent ground for moral valuation outside history and culture. Both see these as human creations, or to use the trendy phrase, “social constructions.” Reality itself is a “social construction.” It’s not that there’s no such thing as objective reality, but what we see of it is always viewed through the lens supplied by “oppressor” language and epistemology, or that of the “oppressed.”

Conservatives do not see or speak about structures of privilege and domination; they see departures from both Moral and Natural Law by sinful humanity, and societal failure to constrain these departures.

Leftists claim that the “oppressed” experience daily the effects of white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, etc.

Indeed, one of the propositions of critical race theory is of “everyday racism” that permeates American life all the way down to the privileged “Karens” because it is systemic.

According to “third wave” radical feminists, misogyny is structurally built into marriage and the family which ‘privilege’ ‘toxic masculinity.’

Speaking generally, leftists (academic or otherwise) now see their job as unmasking all these ‘structures of privilege,’ exposing them to the light of day, and taking all us straight white Christian males down as many notches as possible.

Is it not clear, even taken on its own terms, that this is a recipe for distrust, miscommunication, division, hostility, conflict, and rising social chaos — not progress? Is it not fundamentally nihilistic? Its advocates cannot even describe a society they claim would be free of the “systemic racism” they claim permeates America. It’s too all-pervasive!

Surely the America they describe is hardly worth conserving!

Continued in Pt 2: principles worth conserving!

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

A slightly different version of this article is available on Navigating the New Normal, on Substack. Please consider subscribing. It’s still free (for now).

Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored more than 20 articles, book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself. In 2021 he moved to Chile. He is married to a Chilean national.

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

The Real Fight, Pt. 2

By Steven Yates

June 1, 2024

The only “us versus them” that matters. The values that matter.

[Author’s disclaimer: the opinions and conclusions expressed in this two-part series are solely mine, the author, and not necessarily the opinions and conclusions of NewsWithViews.com, its editors, staff, or other writers.]

Pt 1 Fallout.

The Substack version of Part 1 cost me a subscriber. I suppose it’s a plus that I only lost one; most readers drawn there seem open to unpopular ideas. I’m not writing the usual lovefests for Israel that afflict a lot of Christians as well as neocon and neoliberal secularists. I hope they don’t ever encounter anything about the U.S.S. Liberty. Their heads will explode. I’m open to hearing from anyone who believes he/she has evidence that present-day Israel has something to do with the Biblical Israel.

Zionism, a modern political-economic (not religious!) movement dating at least to the late 1800s, aimed to create and unconditionally protect a special nation for (Ashkenazi) Jews alone, under the premise that (Ashkenazi) Jews aren’t safe anywhere else, and is just one side-current of the globalism I oppose. It is secular to its core.

This is not something I will pursue further here. Many things are happening at once. At home, there’s the ongoing crisis caused by over 15 million illegal aliens having flooded into America since the Bidenista era began. There’s the ongoing collapse of higher education, courtesy of the Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) intellectual vacuum and other misplaced priorities. There’s the rising cost of living for everyone, courtesy of the systemic debauching of the currency (thank you, Federal Reserve). Tensions are rising over the upcoming election between those who want a second Trump term and those who hate everything Trump stands for.

We must pick and choose our fights. As a “big ideas” writer, I’m trying to isolate the Real Fight, underlying all others. Fighting it successfully will open a path to sustainable freedom. This means defeating the Real Enemy.

Who is the Real Enemy, against which we wage the Real Fight? What is the latter’s real nature?

The most obvious candidate for Real Enemy is what I’ve variously called the superelite, globalism, GloboCorps, or most recently, the Global Corporatocracy.

We’re not going to be fighting the Global Corporatocracy directly any time soon. It doesn’t offer many visible targets. We’d not only lose hands down, but probably get killed in the process and our very existence memory-holed so that no one would even know we were here.

There’s a second candidate for Real Enemy I’ll discuss at the end. An Enemy we can defeat with a second Real Fight.

So what is this Fight?

The First Real Fight: Reiteration and Expansion.

As stated in Pt 1, there are those who desire to live as they see fit, participating in traditions of their choosing (probably because they grew up with these traditions) and otherwise be left alone if they aren’t bothering anyone else.

Then there are those who, in one way or another, won’t allow them to live as they see fit because in one way or another they are drawn to power.

The latter have always existed. We’ve always had warlords, kings, tyrants, etc., and today we have dictators and would-be global soft-totalitarians. Technology has enabled those drawn to power to pursue it on a planetary scale, invoking “global problems” they claim call for “global solutions” and this “global governance.”

The former are content with family, occupation, church, community, locality, circumscribing what they know and care about: God, spouse, children, work, those they interact with on a regular basis. Few are systematic thinkers, though some are intelligent, carefully consider their opinions, and vote. Their “philosophy” could be described as a kind of native realism. The world is what it is, and as Edie Brickell sang in that 1989 hit, “I know what I know if you know what I mean.”

There are right ways versus wrong ways of doing things. This is reality. One’s first obligation to one’s spouse is love, kindness, support. One’s obligation to one’s children is to school them in what is right, as well as love, kindness, support. This may mean the right way to handle workaday situations such as growing food, or in the moral sense: it is wrong to hit people, or lie to them, or break promises. Money is a tool — for acquiring and maintaining the necessities of life. These folks don’t expect to get rich doing whatever they are doing but if your relationships to God and to loved ones are solid and nurturing this is okay! Implicitly the common people understand that relationships are what is important.

Their relations are built on trust, typically longstanding. They favor working with (or for), and doing business with, people they know, like, and trust. This explains the suspicion of outsiders some gripe about when they pass through small towns. Outsiders, by definition, aren’t known quantities. The natural tendency of locals is to watch them carefully, however disconcerting this may be to the outsiders. But trust is earned, not given away for free. Keep going back, behave yourself, be honorable, be useful, and it’s possible.

The superelite, driven by their fascination with power, may have a vision of global domination, a Utopia. Among their number are enough systematic thinkers to suggest that this is an occupational hazard. Others are driven by an inner compulsion to be larger than life even if this means controlling the lives of strangers they will never know, much less value as unique persons. The money bug has bitten them. They see how money enables control. So they want more of it. The more the better. Money is more than just a tool. It is a means to power. It enables creating systems to control those whose beliefs, low-tech occupations, guns, and God, are in the way.

The superelite collectively believe themselves most fit to rule. They believe themselves authorized to make decisions — usually exchanges with like-minded others — because they can (and because the results make money) even if their decisions bring harm to tens of thousands to millions of people. They rationalize these beliefs and actions with bromides about “free trade.”

Professional relationships among elites are based on such abstract factors as credential power. This guy has a PhD from Harvard. He’s smart and his judgment can be relied upon. She held a position in such-and-such corporation (or federal agency). Or: she’s written such-and-such. So she’s one of us. They can be family people, or not. What should be clear is that anything as traditional as family is not what motivates them. I can’t help but suspect that many elites are emotionally isolated.

That first group, the common people, we noted, are the majority. They have ways of dealing with any psychopaths in their midst. Those who aren’t honest with others find themselves excluded at best, and at worst, they run afoul of the law by harming others and end up jailed. Or they figure their best bet is just to leave and move to a big city where the anonymity of most interactions protects them.

The elites, drawn to globalism, amount to a tiny fraction of any human population as we also noted. Psychopaths and sociopaths may thrive in its midst nevertheless. Birds of a feather, and all that. Borderline cases may consolidate in urban power centers among the “well educated” (government, corporations, so-called intellectual centers, and everywhere in between). These relationships are also built on a certain degree of trust. Those who prove themselves reliable in furthering official agendas rise in any large organization. A reasonably intelligent sociopath figures this out and acts accordingly.

The common people are interested primarily in what affects them and their loved ones directly, or in what they can affect. What’s not in that purview, might as well not exist. This will work against them, because what they’ve not foreseen will affect them. As when a “free trade” deal closes the factory they work for, all the small businesses that depended on that factory also close, city streets are soon boarded up, and a once-thriving community turns into a ghost town.

Strategists among the elites instinctively apply the divide-and-conquer principle. They hijacked race relations long ago, because the last thing they wanted was working class blacks and working class whites talking to one another and comparing notes. If the peasants, whatever their ethnicity, observe enough and learn enough, their attention will eventually turn to the elites.

This also holds true of the hijacking of feminism of the 1960s understood as equal pay for men and women of equal experience doing an equal amount of work in the same job. All fair-minded people supported this. The elites have been very effective at driving men and women apart. The number of single-never-marrieds of both sexes, growing older alone, testifies to this.

The “free trade” deals, of course, accompanied by the diminished purchasing power of the debauched currency, accentuate the biggest and worsening divide, which is between the haves and the have-nots.

It is easy to envision the Real Fight, then, as between these two mindsets: the only “us versus them” that matters!

Making matters tougher is realizing further that this is not an absolute dichotomy. There are all manner of shades of gray — many people who come from one background adopt traits of the other. Those with an elite mindset can hijack small towns. They aren’t exactly oligarchs, but neither are they poor. Most live in reasonable comfort. They identify with authority and don’t mind it being imposed on others, including the “commoners” they look down their noses at.

Can we fight this fight?

Much of my work, dating at least to the late 1980s, has involved trying to “wake people up.” Most do not respond, of course. G.I. Gurdjieff, whom I mentioned in Pt 1, believed most people exist in a kind of “waking sleep” that subjects them to control.

Most in that first category above are in comfort zones and won’t leave their comfort zones voluntarily.

Scottish philosopher David Hume said it back in the 1700s: reason is the slave of the passions. Emotions rule us more than reason. The emotion here is fear. By and large, people are afraid of what I’m talking about. They’d rather remain pleasantly asleep and dreaming than face unpleasant truths.

Since arguing is pointless, one turns to popular culture (as I’ve sometimes done), i.e., to productions like The Matrix (1999), arguably the most important film of the past half-century. Morpheus explained in a crucial scene:

The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.

This, dramatically, is the mindset that calls this a “conspiracy theory” and closes the case. The Matrix does much more, of course, depicting the looming dystopia by substituting for it an AI-generated artificial reality, which each “sleeping” person experiences while being plugged into the ruling entity which is actually using his/her life energies:

What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world, built to keep us under control, and turn a human being into this.

Morpheus is holding up an ordinary battery: symbolic of the life energy of everyone being drained doing meaningless tasks serving those in power.

Real money power is not hiding. World Economic Forum annual meetings are not hidden from us, even if they are invitation-only. Their projected Great Reset is not a conspiracy. It’s happening out in the open, though there are myriad distractions from it.

Here is a list of distractions: claims about “systemic racism,” “misogyny,” “homophobia and transphobia”; the struggle between Zionist forces and pro-Palestinian ones; the lawfare against Trump and the abject terror felt by Democrats over the possibility of a second Trump term; the demonizing of Putin over Ukraine; multiple elections around the world; doubtless more.

Obviously I’m not saying that these conflicts are, in some sense, unreal. They’re real and deadly! My claim is that none had to happen. They were fomented, and that they take attention off the Global Corporatocracy.

This bloblike entity is what is eroding not just freedom but hope itself as it uses the money political economy (degraded and devalued currencies) to encircle and transform us into computer-literate but medieval-minded serfs — owned not by the feudal lords of old but by the system itself, its specific agents being corporations (be they employers or suppliers of necessary goods and services).

The late political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called this system inverted totalitarianism. Totalitarianism without visible totalitarians, because the system itself is totalizing. Greek economist and former Syriza Party Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis calls it technofeudalism (a term I’ve used in the past). Interestingly, both these gents write from the Left, not the Right. Plenty of folks on the Right speak of being “red pilled” and urge people to “wake up.” Along these same lines, Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin penned The Great Awakening vs. the Great Reset (2021). Good luck finding it; the book has been “shadow banned” in the U.S. Amazon refuses to carry Dugin’s books. Wikipedia calls him “fascist or neofascist” because he is openly pro-Russia. This is typical. My response: read the book if you want to know what Dugin has to say. Look for copies on eBay.

There’s more to fighting the Real Fight than reading a few books, obviously. Although it helps.

A widespread belief holds that if the globalism of the Global Corporatocracy is sufficiently exposed to the light of day, especially in light of its many failures (“Globalization will make us all rich”), popular sentiment will reject it, and that this explains the upsurge of “populist” movements around the world.

There’s something to this. A few leaders labeled “populist” or “nationalist” have retained office despite globalist-controlled media hostility. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán comes to mind. Others, though, despite winning elections, were ousted (by means fair or foul; I’ll not get into that here): Donald Trump obviously, and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. Meanwhile, “the Right” has been rising in Europe, with Giorgia Meloni becoming Italy’s prime minister, Geert Wilders having won the Netherlands’ recent election on a platform rejecting open borders, and political parties corporate media hysterically labels “far right” and “neofascist” making gains in France, Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere.

The plan-demic both should have, and did, “awaken” even more people despite the censorship, the deplatforming, the demonizing of criticisms of the official narratives and production of alternatives as “misinformation.”

Yet we’re still in the New Normal and wondering when the next shoe will drop.

For the fact remains: we’re up against something backed with oceanic-trench-deep pockets.

Atop the Global Corporatocracy is a group that would fit comfortably into a university lecture hall. This group, which regularly attends annual WEF confabs, commands more wealth and resources than the entire bottom 50 percent of the world’s population.

The Second Real Fight. And in sum….

What, then, are our options?

As stated above, opposing the Real Enemy openly is a road to nowhere. A far better strategy is to do what these articles attempt to do, which is reach as many people as possible with truthful information, counseling them to “wake up.” Some will respond; most won’t. Those who won’t, will reap the consequences of remaining “asleep” (or “plugged in” or “taking the blue pill”).

This brings me to the second candidate for Real Enemy I mentioned, against which we have a second Real Fight.

It’s counterintuitive until we think about it, but this second Real Enemy is ourselves.

Our impatience, our frustration with “the sheeple,” our anger however justified.

All futile…. You cannot force anyone to agree with you!

This second Real Fight, therefore, is with ourselves: to control ourselves by circumventing all the above with mental systems of self-discipline, a quest for viable strategies of “opting out” as best we can, and of course turning to and relying on God, while patiently educating those who will listen.

Also read Epictetus the Stoic on focusing on what you can control: your mind and your actions. You can choose to value what is really important: your relationships with others. You can cultivate kindness to all those around you, whether they are on board with any of this or not. You can be patient with those who don’t “get it.”

Other, more visible actions are obvious. Don’t go into debt if you can avoid it. Don’t live in big cities. Steer clear of big universities. Learn a trade instead. You can do this at a community college, or through an apprenticeship if you can arrange one. Had I been born into Gen Z knowing what I know, I’d be doing the latter. Farmers, electricians, plumbers, etc., are “evergreen”: always needed to keep a community running. They will never be replaced by AI or other technology.

And then be doubly-patient.

Because the Global Corporatocracy is an Empire. If we study Empires historically, we learn one thing: all eventually fail. They fall from within.

The one being built now will not be an exception.

Those with hands-on skills will be the ones to build up something of value both during, and in the wake of, its fall into oblivion, however fast or slow this happens.

In ensuing material I hope to explore the nature of the Global Corporatocracy more, and this kind of response. I don’t wish to focus on details of the upcoming election. Ask me who is going to win, and I’m going to echo Tucker Carlson’s answer: I’ve no idea. I’m convinced that leftist agents of the Global Corporatocracy will pull out all stops to make sure it isn’t Trump. The rest is details. As I’ve stated previously, I have over a dozen scenarios in my back pocket. I’ve no idea which one(s) the elites will implement in their bid to maintain Empire power.

Of greater importance is the need to explore what we can do as persons to extricate ourselves and protect ourselves from the debacle likely to come. Focusing on what we can control.

The Global Corporatocracy is filled with sociopaths and psychopaths from top to bottom. How high do its layers go? I don’t know that either (but read C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters!).

What I should note in closing: it is fundamentally corporate. Not governmental. Most freedom fighters get this wrong. Its primary institutions (e.g., central banks) are private, not public. It controls governments by buying easily-manipulated political classes and legions of bureaucratic underlings. It is probably behind every major political assassination of the past 70 years, with the CIA being its ever-reliable tool. It is behind a lot of what the Left condemns as colonialism, which destroyed indigenous cultures and pulled whatever was left into the money political economy of mass consumerism.

It is behind what the Right condemns as wokeness (bankrolled by the George Soroses of the world). This further undermines what was already on life support: liberal arts learning generally, and specific learning based on a Christian worldview. Wokeness — the DIE intellectual vacuum — demonizes those who have done the most to build Western civilization: straight Christian white males, or just those believing that physical science was serving up useful understanding of an objective reality. Many woke beliefs, e.g., in “gender fluidity,” reflect its departure from the kind of realism discussed above. That this is being pushed on impressionable children further indicates their psychopathy and penchant for destroying ordinary people’s lives.

The Global Corporatocracy was almost surely behind the covid catastrophe!

This does not mean that everyone with an elite mindset, or who starts a war is working for the Global Corporatocracy, or even knows about it. Most politicians probably don’t. I doubt that a Yahya Sinwar does, or that necessarily a Netanyahu does (though I could be wrong). In a divided, materialist world in which money talks and amorality prevails, there are bound to be political nihilists and independent mayhem-makers whose destructive actions prove useful.

The point has been, and still is, to the keep the industrial serfdom focused anywhere except on the very top.

We must realize that if we want to live free lives, we’re going to have to figure out how to do it ourselves. No one is going to do it for us. Fortunately, some are already doing what it takes.

That’s the Real Fight, in whichever variant, and the sooner we absorb all this into our worldview, the better.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

A slightly different version of this article is available on Navigating the New Normal, on Substack. Please consider subscribing. It’s still free (for now).

Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored more than 20 articles, book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself. In 2021 he moved to Chile. He is married to a Chilean national.

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

The Real Fight, Pt. 1

By Steven Yates

May 24, 2024

[Author’s disclaimer: the opinions and conclusions expressed in this two-part series are solely those of its author, and not necessarily the opinions and conclusions of NewsWithViews.com, its editors or staff, or other writers.]

From DIE to Campus Upheavals.

College and university campuses have been roiled by pro-Palestinian protests, some pro-Israeli counterprotests, and more than a few professional agitators posing as pro-Palestinian. Columbia University and UCLA seem to be competing for Ground Zero status. I penned an article to address this but decided not to use it. Sometimes that happens. It explains my absence last week, for which I apologize.

Among the things that piece said that seems worth keeping around: academia has done this to itself.

For four decades now, colleges and universities (and other institutions as well) have hired and promoted based on group identity, not merit.

The result is the DIE (Diversity-Inclusion-Equity) intellectual vacuum in which a Claudine Gay rises to the top at Harvard and is forced to resign when she can’t navigate this kind of situation and is exposed as a plagiarist besides. Columbia University has Minouche Shavik at the helm. She has somewhat better credentials than Gay’s, having been at the helm of the London School of Economics — the U.K.’s Fabian-founded elite institution. But when asked about free speech and “antisemitism” at Columbia, she stammered helplessly, and also faces calls to resign.

As for the protests, I’ve no doubt that most of the students are sincere. They might not be able to find Gaza on a map, but normal human beings react viscerally to news that an admittedly vicious, psychopathic attack that killed 1,200 people including a lot of women and children is answered with a much greater power that proceeds to slaughter 35,000 more people including women and children. The other day, Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s strongman, was profiled as having orchestrated the October 7, 2023 attack. What emerges is a portrait of a violent psychopath. Is Netanyahu a psychopath as well as a closet globalist? This wouldn’t surprise me at all. What we can believe is that when violent psychopaths tick off other violent psychopaths, the results are likely to be spectacularly bloody, with a lot of innocent people getting caught in the crossfire.

Returning to the U.S. and academia’s disastrous DIE policies:

Students of Palestinian heritage probably wonder why they don’t seem to be included in The Diversity. Back in 2020, Black Lives Matter “peaceful protesters” did hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage in over a dozen major cities and got off with slaps on the wrist. The majority of these students really are peaceful (walkouts at commencement are one species of nonviolent protest). But instead of the kid-glove treatment afforded BLM, their DIE university presidents or other administrators call in the cops who start breaking limbs and heads.

Or: unidentified black-clad troublemakers appear out of the dark and attack violently, while campus police stand down.

Perhaps if they’d consulted Steve Salaita….

The Strange Case of Steve Salaita.

Back in 2014, Salaita, a left-of-center literary scholar who is part-Palestinian, was summarily fired from a newly acquired position at the University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana. His offense: he’d posted tweets sharply critical of Israel following actions on the occupied West Bank that year — using casual obscenities I wouldn’t have used, but that’s just me.

Warranting a dressing down, perhaps, especially for the new kid on the block, but— a firing offense?

Salaita had signed his contract, resigned his previous position, and moved with his family to Champagne-Urbana. Suddenly he didn’t have a job.

No other institution would touch him. He was radioactive.

The university clearly breached its contract, an actionable offense. Their lawyers settled with Salaita out of court. With no teaching prospects, he retrained to drive a bus.

Eventually he found a job overseas, at the American University of Cairo, in Cairo, Egypt.

So why was Salaita’s contract breached?

At least one wealthy Jewish donor had threatened to end an annual million dollar donation to the school if it allowed Salaita into the classroom. If honoring Salaita’s contract meant the loss of that money, I doubt there was discussion or hesitation.

In a money political economy, money talks! Truth is often what walks!

Donors, moreover, talk to each other. There’s little doubt: Salaita was blackballed in the U.S.

Takeaway: being a man of the left doesn’t matter if you cross the wrong people!

The Power of the Zionist Lobby in the U.S.

Zionism, both nationally and globally, is probably more influential behind the scenes than cultural Marxism. Zionism is not Judaism. The latter is a religion. The former is a political-economic movement which has come to equate criticisms of Israel and its policies with criticisms of Jewry as a whole and therefore as constituting “antisemitism.”

An Antisemitism Awareness Act currently making its way through Congress trades on this purposeful confusion.

AIPAC (acronym for the American-Israeli Political Action Committee) is easily the most powerful lobby in Washington.

Even Trump bows to this lobby.

One of the most influential organizations in the country is the Anti-Defamation League, founded the same year as the Federal Reserve (1913). Another is the Southern Poverty Law Center, which we’re not supposed to notice has nothing whatsoever to do with Southern poverty.

These outfits ruin careers and lives for sport. Their networks are vast, with tendrils all throughout academia, corporate media, Big Tech, and the business world generally. The latter remains the go-to organization by corporate media on “hate groups” which are almost invariably conservative and Patriotic.

Enough said, to explain why Palestinians were never incorporated into the DIE intellectual vacuum. Some of those involved in the campus protests couldn’t care less about the Palestinians, or about Israeli policy, however, and probably couldn’t tell you what Zionism is.

I’m referring to the professional agitators that have mixed and mingled with the sincere students I mentioned. Some, like this woman, wear it on their sleeves! She’s not alone.

These people are there to cause trouble. Some may have been on the scene back in 2020 as well, because no one really thinks everyone involved with Black Lives Matter instigated or participated in the mayhem back then.

The Real Fight.

Cutting to the chase.

What’s the Real Fight? Is it between supporters of Israel and supporters of Hamas?

No.

Sure, you’ll find a few Hamas supporters among the students who are oblivious to the psychopathic nature of Hamas leadership. But they aren’t the majority.

The Real Fight is not between “right” versus “left,” moreover. There are supporters of a “hard” Zionism that equates criticism of Israeli policy with antisemitism on both sides of the aisle.

It’s not between Republicans and Democrats. It’s not between those who support Donald Trump and those who hate him.

It’s not between blacks and whites, or any other groups. It’s not men versus women, though systemic attacks by the same forces that built up the DIE cognitive vacuum have been driving them apart.

Social media has done its part isolating everyone into online echo chambers.

The Real Fight is not between Muslims and Jews. Or between Muslims and Christians. Or between Christians and any other non-Christians.

The Real Fight is between people who desire to live as they see fit, participating in the traditions they grew up with, and otherwise be left alone providing they aren’t bothering anyone else. Versus those who won’t allow them to live as they see fit either because they have a vision of global domination or because leaving others alone isn’t profitable. They believe themselves most fit to rule. They have proven themselves willing to pull out all stops in order to establish themselves as a global ruling class.

Those are “our” really dangerous psychopaths, with a deep-seated need for control over others, whatever the source of their pathology (theories are circulating such as their having been abused or neglected as children).

We’re talking about less than a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the total human population. That fraction of a fraction of a percent is superbly skilled at driving the rest of us apart, applying the divide-and-conquer principle, using money to incentivize “the masses” (i.e., an industrial age peasantry) in specific directions, distracting and isolating us all into bubbles, some based on ideology, some on religion, some on supposed educational level and profession, and some on other things which may be innocent in themselves but which serve the psychopaths’ purposes which is to hijack our attention (e.g., fascination with celebrities, film or television franchises, whatever).

If you want to live a free life, however you define this (and I hope your definition includes leaving others alone if they decline to be involved), that fraction of a fraction of a percent is your enemy!

Are we getting this?

Not whites as a group, not blacks as a group, not Muslims, not Jews, not men collectively or women collectively. Not Christians and not non-Christians necessarily.

Not supposed sexual minorities.

Not Trump supporters, and not all Democrats.

Not “conservatives” who can’t tell you want they want to conserve; nor “liberals” who can’t identify what they want liberation from.

We’ve been busy pointing fingers at each other! Are we asleep, or what?

Who was G.I. Gurdjieff? Why he might matter.

The subconscious mind is a strange entity. I sometimes think it will dredge up information from our distant past that might prove useful in a troubled present, and we don’t even have to ask it!

This morning as I write this (15 May 2024) I awakened with a name on my lips that I hadn’t heard in decades — not since my undergraduate days. The name was G.I. Gurdjieff. As a thinker, he’s unclassifiable — at least given most Western categorizations. He penned tracts with curious names like Life Is Real Only Then, When ‘I Am’ (1934?). I once had a copy I’d found in a used bookstore. I wasn’t able to make much sense of it.

Some of his students, such as P.D. Ouspensky and J.G. Bennett, explained him better.

Their school communicated an idea that resonated with me back then. This, I should note, was my take on it. What Gurdjieff originally meant might be different, and I’m sure my account is incomplete.

The idea: nearly all humanity is asleep (metaphorically). We go through life in a kind of hypnosis, a waking sleep. In this state, we are subject to outside control. The source may be an ideology, a mass movement, an appeal to fear, or even a Christian denomination that has lost touch with its roots.

If every soldier and every commander in every army fighting every war were to awaken all at once in this sense — both sides — they would stop, drop their weapons, and go home to be with their families.

Political leaders, too, of whatever stripe, if they awakened, would drop their power agendas, shake hands, and decide as one to work on common problems, such as seeing to it that the people they have responsibility for have food to eat, a roof over their heads, and an environment safe enough to conduct personal business and care for loved ones. They would attend to conditions necessary for this to happen and serve those conditions, not their previous fascination with power.

Gurdjieff seemed to believe that as persons we could wake up and become what a human being should be — by working on ourselves and recovering our spiritual roots. He called this “The Work.” It could help us become simultaneously autonomous and able to live mindfully in a world of other people, some of whom are different from us but with many common problems.

I wonder what such a figure might offer today.

My interest in philosophy arose around the time I discovered Gurdjieff, one of a smorgasbord of thinkers to draw on. I sought a criterion for who to study and who to leave aside.

My question: suppose we’d looked at what seemed to be the foundations of the scientific view of the universe, compared this to what seemed necessary for a moral view of the human world, and discovered that the two came into conflict. What then?

Later, the realizations came: we’re tribal beings. Our natural tendency is to divide the world into us and them. For most of recorded history, ethical norms call for a respect for persons applied to us; it did not apply to them. This made it possible to rationalize everything from chattel slavery to genocide.

A number of significant philosophers attempted a universal morality: ethnical norms that would apply to everyone, not just us. We’ve never figured out how to apply this idea. We’ve remained in our tribes even if we refuse to call them that.

Materialism as a view of the universe (and, a fortiori, humanity) has only reinforced this tendency, and accompanied with advancing technology, made the capacity for genocide magnitudes worse.

If the Creator created all of us in His image, then we have a basis for persons’ intrinsic value, and, a fortiori, a moral sense able to transcend us versus them by appealing to the transcendent (which modern secular philosophers don’t do).

At least in principle. Perhaps it is this moral sense that is telling students that what the Israeli IDF has been doing in Gaza is wrong, however much we repudiate Hamas, since 2007 the dominant force in Gaza, and independently of what we may or may not believe about Israel generally.

How does this square with what I said above, about the Real Fight and who the enemy is? Is that not just a recreation of us (the people) versus them (the elites)?

Continued in Pt. 2.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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A slightly different version of this article is also available on Steven Yates’s Navigating the New Normal (Substack). Subscribe to Navigating the New Normal to receive access to exclusive content.

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Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored more than 20 articles, book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself. In 2021 he moved to Chile. He is married to a Chilean national.

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

What Would It Mean to “Make America Great Again”?

By Steven Yates

May 7, 2024

“Because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion, avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.” —John Adams (1798)

“And this is progress? You must be joking! Me, I’m looking for any kind of hope!” —Peter Hammill (British singer, songwriter), “The Future Now” (1978)

From “Free Trade” to Dystopia: A Very Brief History of the Past Forty Years.

This article can be taken as complementing Devvy Kidd’s informative article of April 29. She focused on so-called free trade agreements that decimated America’s manufacturing base starting in the 1990s. These abominations turned many thriving cities into ghost towns where the only employers are government, fast food joints, and the local Walmart — unless Walmart corporate bureaucrats hundreds of miles away decided that the store wasn’t profitable and closed it.

Those able to leave such places, did. Those who remained saw them become havens of substance abuse, despair, and suicide.

How often must it be said? “Free trade” enables corporate leviathans to do as they please “voluntarily” (having purchased the political class) while everyone else pays the price.

Another result is the diminished quality of everything, as well as ease of use. When I was a child (1960s), my parents bought some top-of-the-line Ethan Allen furniture. I still have some of it. It’s over 60 years old, and in very good condition (a coffee stain here or there).

Back then, things weren’t just made in America, they were built to last!

Try finding anything of that quality today unless you’re in an antique store.

Buy a chair at Walmart. It’s in bagged-up parts when you take it out of a cheap cardboard box. You have to figure out how to assemble it. (I did this back around 2000 before I’d learned all this. The assembly instructions were in Chinese!) Often there’s a part missing, or which doesn’t fit properly. Assuming you get it assembled, cheapness is evident the first time you sit on it. If it lasts six months, you count yourself lucky.

Build-in obsolescence is now a mainstay of mass consumer goods. All made in cheap-labor hellholes. American makers of, e.g., quality furniture, could not compete with foreign slaves. This is also true of automobile components and it’s true of electronics. My first home PC bought in the late 1980s lasted twelve years. Most laptops start disintegrating after about two years. Corporations discovered they could bleed consumers for money this way. Consumers get dependent on an item. When it breaks down (having been designed that way), they’re forced to buy the “upgrade.”

Devvy spelled out the consequences of “free trade” and suggested some remedies. I hope I can enhance the discussion by reminding readers of the body of ideas that went into building a once-thriving civilization. We’ve all but lost this body of ideas … a reason why corporate leviathans feel justified in doing as they please to line their pockets as possible, including locating operations in cheap-labor hellholes and transforming the American workplace into a dystopia of Amazon drones, Uber drivers, etc.

The West’s Christian Foundation.

Whether we like it or want to admit it or not, Western civilization rose on a Christian foundation. This is not a cliché. It is a profound truth that needs to be shouted from every rooftop.

God exists. He created the universe, and men and women in His image. As Aquinas observed, He left us “two books”: the book He revealed, and the book of nature.

The book He revealed contains moral law, based on how His universe is designed to work. God doesn’t force us to obey His law. But if we don’t, the fact that the world operates according to those rules automatically works against us. Our choices, not His!

Since God created us in His image, we are finite renditions of His infinite Logos: we possess a rational (if fallible) capacity for apprehending how our surroundings work and how to use what we find in nature to improve our lot.

As Sir Francis Bacon put this: “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”

Respect for nature and its operations precedes technique: employing specific means to achieve specific ends, applying physical principles. If we do not respect nature, again this works against us. A lot is packed into that. It should give serious environmentalists everything they claim they want. Unfortunately, most seem to be pagans, not Christians.

We are social beings. Nowhere in Scripture nor in the world we inhabit is there any sense that we were designed for prolonged solitude. Our need to get along calls for rules for ordering our lives, families, businesses, and societies, including governance. Some call this the social contract.

Imperial Economics and the Real Great Replacement.

Where did we get the idea of — what should I call it? — imperial economics? The idea that there are economic transactions and then there is window dressing, so that economics trumps everything else.

It came as a consequence of what I’ve begun calling the Real Great Replacement: when materialism (or naturalism) replaced Christendom as the West’s dominant worldview.

According to materialism, God doesn’t exist. Ancient peoples invented Him. Materialism’s advocates usually aren’t that blunt (except for the New Atheists of our time). But beginning around the late 1700s and proceeding through the 1800s, first intellectuals and then some commercial men became operational if not outright atheists.

The problem: the entire edifice of thought on which Constitutional government depended required a Christian worldview, in which men and women had intrinsic value because they were created in God’s image.

This worldview limited worldly power — especially governmental power but also corporate power (and the enhanced powers that emerge when the two seamlessly integrate!).

Its ethics grounded natural rights: rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, best sought, obtained, and enjoyed in a spirit of gratitude for what God has done and for what He has given us.

This edifice developed in stages with the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, and eventually our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.

The worldview behind these was not always spelled out in black and white, like I’ve done here, because readers of these documents could assume it. It permeated their culture. Their authors would not have understood a world where the prevailing mindset was otherwise.

Exactly what happened has been the subject of libraries!

Our innate falseness, despite our having been created in God’s image, worked consistently against us. All too many of us never sought God.

Hence as we learned that we could explain parts of the world and use what we learned to our advantage — using our own minds and hands — it went to our heads.

Enlightenment philosophers didn’t just turn against ecclesiastical authority, they turned against the authority of God himself.

“I have no need of that hypothesis,” physicist and astronomer Pierre LaPlace put it (late 1700s). This became the hallmark of later Enlightenment philosophy. Although such philosophy began in France and Germany, it soon crossed the English Channel and infiltrated the Anglo-American world.

Obviously I can only tell a portion of the story of the Real Great Replacement (for more, readers are invited to consult my book What Should Philosophy Do? available from Amazon and its publisher; links below).

Nietzsche and Modernity’s Breakdown.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche provided an important pivot. Nietzsche was among the first to realize that once a civilization rejected God’s existence and authority, it would be compelled to reject everything God’s existence and authority gave meaning to. That meant every trapping of Christian and Christian-derived morality had to go.

Equality? There’s no equality in nature (there’s no equity, either).

Nietzsche called for a “revaluation of all values” and predicted an “advent of nihilism.” He urged the development of a morality for life in this world exclusively, given the materialist assumption that our entire existence is limited to whatever number of years fate allots us. Then we become worm food.

Such a morality could only be based on one’s capacity to survive and advance one’s interests: health or vivacity, strength, prowess.

Nihilism derives from the Latin word nihil, meaning nothing. But no person and no society truly believes in nothing. We just aren’t wired that way.

In practice, we created surrogates for God, I like to call them. An obvious surrogate for God is the totalizing state. Another is The Science. A third is money. Possibly the most common, which the third often serves, is: Self.

The twentieth century portrays results of the erosion of a morality based on principles not of our creation. What was supposed to evolve smoothly into a Utopia of Modernity, a civilization based on science, technology, commerce, universal education, and a firm belief in the inevitability and goodness of secular progress, blew up into history’s most destructive war up to that point in 1914.

We see effects of that war on our collective psyche in Dadaist art and in the troubled characters of Ernest Hemingway’s great novels.

Western powers botched the aftermath of the Great War, as it was then called, setting the stage for the even more destructive World War II. And if the Nazis murdered millions, Stalin in the Soviet Union murdered millions more. Mao’s body count would exceed Stalin’s!

Genocide is a likely consequence of life after the Real Great Replacement, in which human life has no intrinsic value because we are highly-evolved animals instead of beings created in God’s image. Human life can be eliminated if inconvenient. Don’t think just of the Nazis. Think also of the pro-abortion American death culture.

What the Nazis and Communists did are extreme cases, of course, and it is not as if there were no previous genocides in this fallen world where, despite the dominance of a Christian worldview, those in power got drunk on it. But there remained hope of Transcendence.

Hegel and the Fate of Liberalism.

Modernity served up three fundamental political economies: communism, fascism, and liberalism (and combinations of these). We should also consult G.W.F. Hegel, who lived a century before Nietzsche. Hegel wrote of masters (or lords) and slaves (or bondservants), and the clash between them as history’s chief driver. Each had its own mode of consciousness. Hegel’s followers diverged into “right wing” Hegelians with a “master-oriented” moral and societal code, versus “left wing” Hegelians who purported to side with the “slaves.”

The former of these led eventually to Hitler. The latter, to Marx and to Soviet and Maoist Communism.

Liberalism, the third, prevailed in the Anglo-American world. It strove to combine materialism with a natural-rights / libertarian view of society. This has proven unsustainable. Liberalism moved leftward until we arrived at the version found in today’s Democrat Party.

Underwriting the political economy of liberalism was the autonomy of homo economicus, a primarily self-interested secular agent pursuing secular goods, wealth, pleasures, in an expanding global marketplace.

The trouble is, beings created in God’s image are by their nature not designed for total autonomy. Most, if not all, will adopt one of the above surrogates, or turn to whatever secular authority they find, offered by a political movement, a guru-led cult, the worship of Self, or just the lure of the Almighty Dollar.

Since in this world what counts is power, and money is the path to power, we end up with globalism and the “free trade” world Devvy Kidd criticized.

This is the ultimate unsustainability of liberalism.

That is, all three modern political economies fail.

Under liberalism’s professed autonomy for women, over 60 million unborn babies have been aborted. How’s that for genocide? Both men and women have been “freed” from Christian-based marriages and families. Both pursued career over marriage and family. One in two marriages now ends in divorce. The birth rate is falling all over the West. Both sexes find themselves emotionally isolated, screen-addicted, compulsively trying to avoid the reality of growing older and possibly dying alone.

This is what liberalism has done.

It’s Worse: Modernity to Postmodernity; From Justice to Antiwhite Racism.

Modernity as sketched above has “evolved” into postmodernity. In postmodernity, we have not just a totally subjective ethic, but reason itself is dismembered.

Recall Hegel’s division between the consciousness of the master and the consciousness of the slave. The former (straight white males, collectively) “repress” the latter (everyone else). Our perceptions and reasonings are all shaped by “biases” (of race, “gender,” etc.).

Thus the ability to trust our senses and their capacity to yield knowledge is gone. It’s all a “social construct.” In practice, science becomes The Science (epistemic authoritarianism, not scientific method). Technique is used to encircle and enslave, usually to help individuals and corporations make more of the Almighty Dollar in the matter described in the first section: also the perversion of the marketplace into a deliverer of porn, mind-altering drugs, even trafficked human beings (mostly girls and women but not limited to them!). Legality? What’s that? There’s the 11^th commandment: “Thou shalt not get caught!”

Efforts to provide justice and equal opportunities for those previously denied them are hijacked until they attack the “oppressors” (the very open antiwhite racism we now see).

“Education” under such dystopian conditions indoctrinates and subordinates; it doesn’t enhance genuine learning which must be done on one’s own if at all. Those doing it quickly become isolated and turn cynical.

Language itself is now weaponized so those in power can use it for thought control, by labelling opinions they disapprove of misinformation, conspiracy theories, threats to democracy, etc.

The edifices of freedom, including free speech, freedom of inquiry, a free press, the right to disagree, the sense of obligation we once had to participate in civil discourse, and whatever obligations we have to each other; also property rights; were all manifestations of a Christian worldview.

It is significant that this philosophical and legal structure did not emerge anywhere else in the world! Other peoples developed crafts. They did not develop science.

When the Christian worldview goes away, this all goes away, piece by piece. Or is perverted into forms its original architects wouldn’t recognize if they could come back.

A Real Dictator Coming?

You get the economic results Devvy Kidd wrote so informatively about, rationalized through such locutions as “free trade” and “free markets at work,” having destroyed careers, ruined lives, undermined communities, and eventually sowing the seeds of armed revolt among that element of the immiserated peasantry not prone to self-destruction.

The kind of revolt that puts a potential dictator into power if he can convince enough people he can clean up the mess.

I hope it’s obvious that I’m not talking about Donald Trump.

Trump turns 77 next month. One way or another, in a few years he’ll be gone. But the problems that put him in the White House back in 2016 will still be around.

He might have a successor, who will have all his strengths (especially charisma) but none of his weaknesses (lack of focus, inability to respond effectively to crises which hurt him badly when the globalists unleashed COVID, an inability to shut his mouth when doing so would be wise).

This person might be very self-disciplined. Those around him as well. He and they will be everything the presently-terrified globalist-leftist elites accuse Trump and MAGA of being.

Those struggling to hang onto an intellectually discredited leftist-liberal elitism and “globalization” will have done this to themselves!

So, What Would It Mean to Make America Great Again?!

Don’t merely vote for Trump, although four more years of Democrat rule will be more disastrous than the past three-and-a-fraction.

Start restoring a Christian worldview. This is Biblical (Mark 6:15). Note for those interested that materialism as a philosophy of nature as well as of humanity has major drawbacks that have nothing to do with anyone’s “religious convictions” (I discuss them in chapter 5 of my book).

Today, those trying to do this are maligned as Christian nationalists: combining Christianity with America First!

If what I’m describing here is Christian nationalism, then so be it! I am beyond caring what label its enemies pin on it!

Recently I happened to catch clips from a video in which some bimbo (on MSNBC, I think) described Christian nationalists as “believing we get our rights from God and not from the government!”

She found this horrifying, like something out of Stephen King.

I found myself laughing hysterically at her palpable terror.

We must assert that rights come from God and not government. All we have to do is look at what has happened as a result of relying on the opposite assumption for well over half a century now.

What government gives, government can take away!

Even Libertarians figured this out!

It can (and should) be made obvious to grade school children. Which is why Founders such as John Adams understood the need to keep government on a short leash. If there must be a political class and that class recognizes that it answers to Someone higher than itself, then all might be well. When its members believe otherwise, they tend to become dictators.

Corporations aren’t necessarily better. Some are worse! “Free trade” agreements were promoted by corporate lobbyists and well-moneyed think-tankers in NGOs who had the political class bought and paid for. I don’t know how many Libertarians fully grasp this, or the failure of everything-is-economics imperialism.

Economics-before-everything has given us, over various decades, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Media, Big Pharma, and Big Tech. All have based “marketing” (i.e., propaganda) on the assumption of a mass to be controlled, so that mass will spend money it does not have on things it does not need.

Political economy is downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from the prevailing worldview. To illustrate: if we look at the cultural trends (in e.g., popular music) that existed during, say, the Great Depression, or afterwards, we find beauty! We find elegance! Despite the suffering that characterized those years!

Or compare classic cars to the monstrosities being turned out today. (Paul Craig Roberts recently did this.)

Or just go to the 1970s, before the really massive cultural deteriorations had set in. Compare the rock music of that era, often with intelligent and thoughtful lyrics, to what passes for popular music today: “vocalists” who can’t utter three lines without at least one f-bomb.

A lot of today’s art, architecture, fashion, is just ugly and repellant.

In the 1970s girls and women did not cover their bodies with tattoos, pierce their noses and faces, dye their hair green or purple, or curse like sailors which many “career women” do today quite liberally!

So what would it mean to truly Make America Great Again?

It would start, as I said, with a restoration of the Christian worldview, and since our dominant institutions are probably beyond hope, any Great Restoration must start outside them and proceed person to person, writer to reader, parent to child, teacher to student, group to group, until we can rebuild families and rebuild a basis for stable, prosperous communities in which all will recognize the intrinsic value of all their members and work out the policy implications.

The latter, I submit, will include a lot of what self-identified liberals of old said they wanted, in arenas such as housing, health care, nondiscrimination, and so on. It will have extracted the antiwhite racism and the “gender” fluidity/confusion of wokeness. It will leave us in no danger of falling under a world government, or of “transhumanism.” Recognizing God means realizing we are not God, we are not entitled to rule others as if we were; but neither are we an autonomous mass of homo economici able to make up our own “rules” as we go along.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

A slightly different version of this article is also available on Steven Yates’s Navigating the New Normal (Substack). Subscribe to Navigating the New Normal to receive access to exclusive content.

Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored more than 20 articles, book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself. In 2021 he moved to Chile. He is married to a Chilean national.

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

The New Normal: Ambiguity, Tragedy, Fear and Loathing

By Steven Yates

May 3, 2024

In the 2020s, there’s no shortage of these!

There’s a sense in which this “article” is really three shorter articles in one. So much is happening it is difficult to keep up.

Ambiguity: Scenarios.

Well, we got through April 8 without incident. It was never a given that something bad would happen that day, but Sarah Smith convinced me: it was possible. Her sources were credible. Hence the scenario we drew. Scenarios are possibilities, not predictions or prophesies. Huge difference….

I hope no one thinks we’re out of the woods.

Potentially dangerous people amidst the 10 million plus (does anyone know how many?) who have entered the U.S. illegally since the disastrous Bidenista regime was handed power on January 21, 2021, haven’t gone anywhere.

The New Normal is an ocean of ambiguities … given the number of possible scenarios, events that could happen at any point the rest of this year or the early part of next.

Another and possibly worse virus, with more mRNA “vaxxes” issued without any bona fide testing? A terror attack on U.S. soil (or false flag event posing as one)? A cyberattack? World war, into which the U.S. is drawn, partly because of ongoing explosive conflicts in the Middle East made worse by the Bidenistas’ utter lack of leadership or diplomatic abilities?

Eventual open war with Russia, now that Congress stupidly authorized sending $61 billion more taxpayer dollars to Ukraine?

A relatively sudden financial debacle — Sept.-Oct. 2008 on steroids?

Maybe none of the above. The more difficult it would be for the globalist-leftist axis to contain the fallout, after all, the less likely the scenario.

It’s just as plausible that we’ll approach the November election — tensions probably higher than they are now — with events unfolding absent major disruption because the globalist-leftist axis will have a system in place for stealing the election. This assumes that the Democrat-led lawfare underway in New York City, or one of the other cases, doesn’t make it impossible for Trump to win.

Accomplishing, that is, exactly what they’re accusing Trump and his network of planning.

As I’ve noted previously, though, Trump is antifragile. Attack him, and he gets stronger!

To the globalist-leftist axis, that has to be frustrating!

As I noted last week … too many people see through the lies and are fed up.

Those that aren’t too busy just trying to survive in this economy, of course.

The point is, the globalist-leftist axis will steal the election if they believe they have to, and can get away with it. They’ll have plausible deniability, just like before. Evidence (affidavits testifying to wrongdoing at voting centers, covertly made videos of ballot stuffing, accounts of trucks showing up in wee hours of the morning filled with ballots 100 percent for Democrats, abuses of mail-in voting, etc.) will be memory-holed again, so that there’s “no evidence.”

Point this out and you’ll continue to be labeled a “conspiracy theorist” and an “election denier.”

Further scenario: Joe Biden is re-selected, then dies in office. Kamala Harris is anointed Oval Office occupant. Can’t you already envision the circus that will entail? Representatives of the globalist-leftist oligarchy might come all the way out of the closet, indicating “our” instilled presidency-by-committee since January 2021. Possibly with Barack Obama at its helm, but who knows for sure?

Tragedy: The New Normal Mixes Instability with Insight?

Last week, a man named Maxwell Azzarello, 38, set himself on fire in a designated protest area across from where jury selection was underway in Trump’s first lawfare criminal case.

Obviously, one has to be mentally unstable to do such a thing.

On the other hand, though, if he wanted to make a statement, he couldn’t have chosen a better place. With what was occurring across the street, TV cameras would be everywhere. Some captured the gruesome scene of a man burning alive, flames shooting high into the air. One reporter commented on the odor of burnt flesh.

Fox News wisely put a sketch of Trump inside the courthouse up while reporting what several dozen people witnessed in horror before first responders could put out the fire.

Azzarello died of his injuries several hours later.

He threw pamphlets around before self-immolating. Among them might have been printed copies of his Substack “manifesto” which — like that of the Unibomber published back in 1995 — was not the work of a stupid man.

Possibly it was the work of a broken man.

It was fun (in a black-humored sort of way) seeing pundits initially try to portray Azzarello as MAGA and connect him to the Trump trial, when there was no connection whatsoever beyond his realizing that by doing what he did in that spot, he’d get publicity.

Publicity for what?

For warning of the “apocalyptic fascist world coup” in the works, of course.

The word fascist in this context marks him as a man of the left.

As Sasha Stone notes on her Substack, he was a former Democrat. Possibly pushed over the edge by circumstances of the New Normal.

His “manifesto” is a disjointed potpourri of names (Peter Thiel, Jeffrey Epstein, Michael Dukakis, Rob Lowe, the Simpsons, others), ideas (Ponzi schemes), and condemnations (e.g., of cryptocurrency, as “an economic doomsday device …”).

All in support of the not-entirely-crazy idea that

[o]ur government is conning us completely. That Bill Clinton was secretly on (former CIA Director) George H.W. Bush’s side, and that the Democrat v. Republican division has been entirely manufactured ever since….

For what it is worth: both Clinton and Bush-the-Elder supported NAFTA. For example.

We get to the new century, though, and the “manifesto” goes sideways:

…. Clinton is with Bush; Gore is with Bush; Trump is with Hillary, and so on.

Huh? He seemed to say (one of his many protest signs) that Trump and Biden are working together … which is nuts!

But again, and on the other hand, this is the document’s climax:

The public’s distrust of the government is at an all-time high, but so is the belief that we are helpless to do anything about it.

And with all this, a sharp rise in apocalyptic messaging: climate change will kill us all; COVID will kill us all; vaccines will kill us all; AI will kill us all — no matter the bubbles we ascribe to, we’re bombarded with existential crises with no solutions. We’ve seen a surge in apocalyptic film, literature, and video games that tell us there is no way out of our poor circumstances but total societal breakdown….

This is our rotten farce: For our entire lives, we have been flooded with media designed to slowly steer us into a world where the American Dream was dead, where the public was fully divided against itself, where everybody believed we were powerless to do anything about our worsening circumstances. It is all so they can organize an unprecedented, apocalyptic rug pull on the entire populace as they pivot to fascism, which is perhaps best understood as kleptocracy at the barrel of a gun….

Why on earth would our elites do this? There are many reasons, but the simplest is because capitalism is unsustainable, and they knew it: climate change and resource extraction would catch up eventually. So, they never intended to sustain it. They knew all along that they would gobble up all the wealth they could, and then yank the rug out from under us so they could pivot to a hellish fascist dystopia.

You may agree with parts of this and disagree with other parts of it; but one thing is clear: the man was no dummy!

The rest of his “manifesto” consists of illustrations of events supposedly paving the way for the present/future dystopia by desensitizing the public to violence (e.g., Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange), greed (Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko telling us that “greed … is good”), and corruption (Chinatown’s defeatist ending).

There’s just enough truth here to warrant our attention.

Fear and Loathing: that the American Dream really is dead, the power elites have killed it, and most of us will end up in a hellish dystopia.

Last weekend, a couple of days after Azzarello self-immolated, I came across this. The title is worth iterating: “The American People Are Petrified.” The author is Douglas MacKinnon, writer and political communications consultant with a career going back to the Reagan era.

Perhaps the fact that so many people are now in survival mode explains the irrational and self-destructive behavior that sometimes bursts forth. MacKinnon:

Tens of millions no longer recognize the country they were raised in as they fear for their personal safety, their economic security, and the future well-being of their children. Day by day, these Americans are becoming convinced that their nation and their world is on the verge of collapse.

This is not a partisan belief. This is not ideologically driven. This is not based on race, religion or sexual orientation. This is about tens of millions of poor, disenfranchised, working-class and middle-class Americans from every single demographic and community who feel lost, confused, alone and stressed about what the next day will bring.

They are scared. But more than anything else, they feel betrayed.

These are Americans who play by the rules, pay their taxes and respect authority. Every single day they keep their compact with our nation. And every single day they feel cast aside or ignored by the system they have supported their entire lives.

They now look out their windows at a nation that has been purposefully divided by political elites, activists and anarchists looking to consolidate power, increase their control over the masses, cash in, or (usually) all three.

Minus the disjointedness and the predictions of apocalyptic fascist coups, is the tenor here so very different from portions of Max Azzarello’s “manifesto”?

A point I’ve made, and which MacKinnon reinforces throughout his piece: America is now a two-tiered society. Not just America. So is every advanced, industrialized nation in the West. We can debate how long it’s been such, and how it got that way. But the fact of two-tieredness is undeniable. It is also incompatible with either genuine capitalism or democracy. It is more aligned with technofeudalism and plutocratic oligarchy.

What are the consequences of two-tieredness?

One is a “justice” system that plays favorites. Elite-favored “in” groups (e.g., Black Lives Matter, Antifa) can go on rampages causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage in major cities, including in one case cordoning off several city blocks and claiming them as their own (Seattle). This continued for weeks, back in 2020.

Those who stood up to these groups found the legal system pursuing them.

“Outs” such as the Jan-6ers, few of whom were violent, are then condemned as “insurrectionists” and given sometimes very long prison sentences for something that lasted a few hours of one day and did not overturn a single vehicle or burn down a single building.

You’re supposed to look the other way at this double standard. Otherwise, again, you’re a “conspiracy nut” (or a “white supremacist”).

Awakened (not woke) common people see through this, increasingly.

If enough are motivated to forget “expert” punditry and just pay attention to what their eyes and ears tell them, comparing notes with others doing the same thing, eventually they’re going to react.

If “the experts” tell them the economy is “booming” but they see nothing in their lives or around them except struggle, decay, decrepitude, corruption, who are they going to believe?

If “the experts” insist that violent crime is falling when they know good and well that they’re talking their lives in their hands walking down a city street at night, are they going to believe?

Or are they going to conclude that “the experts” have ulterior motives? Or, at the most charitable, that they are living in a bubble of what MacKinnon calls “privilege, luxury, and protection floating aimlessly above working class, poor and continually disenfranchised Americans”?

Two-tieredness, otherwise known as massive economic inequality, combined with a sense both that the top tier is cheating and that “the experts” are protecting that top tier, will destabilize any country sooner or later.

Today’s elites definitely have a “let them eat cake” mindset regarding a peasantry they consider beneath them. Remember Hillary’s “baskets of deplorables” remark that probably cost her the 2016 election?

The peasantry is serving them food and expensive drinks in the plush restaurants they frequent, cleaning their McMansions, servicing the infrastructure that keeps the lights on and the water moving through their gated communities, and so on.

Many of these people are working two and sometimes three low-paying jobs and still living from check to check. It’s well known that most don’t have $1,000 for an emergency.

Yes, some have made bad financial decisions, or not tried to save, e.g., 10 percent of their incomes up front — if that’s possible. But there’s a reason there’s no financial education in any public school. Elites and “experts” don’t want a population that is financially literate! They profit from mass financial ignorance! Keeping the rabble permanently cash-strapped is, after all, very effective at keeping them in line!

Bidenista-era inflation, moreover, is making their lives harder. It erases the value of savings. The elites who control corporate media wonder why Joe Biden’s ratings are so abysmal when the only viable alternative is Donald Trump, and why almost no one believes in “Bidenomics.”

No, they’re likely to believe that this administration is more corrupt than its predecessor ever thought of being.

It is a shame that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been effectively demonized as an “anti-vaxxer.” He’s been on target from the start of his independent campaign with his claim that the biggest threat to freedom (“democracy,” if you prefer) in the West is the seamless integration of leviathan government, predatory corporations, and the preference of both for a technocratic, top-down managerial state.

The problem for power elites is that more and more people are figuring this out.

The latter then go from fear to loathing. I don’t think the elites realize just how much they are loathed.

Some common people, sadly, are acting in either self-destructive or societally destructive ways — because they are trapped, divided amongst themselves, frustrated, and have no idea how to proceed.

If they are increasingly enraged, it is because they grew up on stories of the American Dream: which has become, for them, a living nightmare of struggling to make enough devalued money to keep the lights on, the rent or mortgage paid, food on the table, etc., all at once — without going into unrepayable debt (some do just this!)

Are we approaching a Storming of the Bastille moment in America?

Or possibly in Europe? (I keep reading how “far right” political parties are on the rise across the Atlantic.)

Possibly at a global level?

It’s a dangerous question. There are a lot of elections this year, and a lot of possibilities for massive realignment. A lot can happen between now and November just in the U.S. I very much doubt that the globalist-leftist cabal has played every card in its hand. There are almost surely cards we can’t yet see!

Final scenario: should Trump escape the lawfare being applied by the weaponized “justice” system, and should he by some chance win in the Electoral College (but lose the popular vote again), this cabal will send its well-financed minions into the streets, and if real Americans aren’t ready, what you experienced back in 2020 is just a taste of what’s to come.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

A slightly different version of this article is also available on Steven Yates’s Navigating the New Normal (Substack). Subscribe to Navigating the New Normal to receive access to exclusive content.

Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored more than 20 articles, book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself. In 2021 he moved to Chile. He is married to a Chilean national.

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

The Vibe Shift We Need

By Steven Yates

April 23, 2024

“Fundamentally, the Vibe Shift is a return to — a championing of — Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition.” —Santiago Pliego, “Vibe Shift,” Substack, Feb 24, 2024.

Santiago Pliego’s article sent me on fire more than anything I’d recently encountered on Substack. It did more than keep my mind occupied before the “minor” heart surgery I had scheduled for the following Monday.

Since I’d not heard of him before, I did a search and learned that he’s involved with a venture firm called New Founding, which (according to its website) “build(s) and back(s) companies defined by American ideals and a positive national vision.” Followed with, “We explicitly oppose all DEI/ESG and the bureaucratization of American business culture.”

They sound like my kind of folks! Naturally I signed up to receive their newsletter!

But what on Earth is a “vibe shift”?

Vibe Shifts 2022.

The phrase was kicking around online in early 2022. The catastrophic lockdowns and “social distancing” measures were starting to end, and people were trying to figure out what was what. It was a time of great disorientation, as so many were still uncertain what had hit them during the previous two years. Some of us started waiting for the next shoe to drop.

A trend-watcher/forecaster named Sean Monahan claims credit for coining the phrase. He identified it with changing fashions like the return of “hipster” culture. Why, he asked, does one such trend seem to define an era? Why do certain things seem “in” or “out of style”? His first article on the subject is (unfortunately) behind a paywall. He did leave us this illuminating diagram. You’ll also find him commenting publicly here:

The US supreme court judge Potter Stewart refused to define obscenity, saying in 1964 rather: “I know it when I see it.” Trends are a bit like this. You know them when you see them — you just have to have your pattern recognition goggles on.

In other words, if you’re looking and you have some idea what to look for, you just “see” it. Earlier that year, one Allison P. Davis elaborated in a widely circulated article in a publication called The Cut:

In the culture, sometimes things change, and a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated. Monahan … breaks down the three vibe shifts he has survived and observed: hipster/indie music (ca. 2003-09) … post-Internet techno revival (ca. 2010 – 16) … [including] … dressing like The Matrix…. And Hypebeast/Woke (ca. 2016-20)….

There’s been a real paranoia that people have, everyone coming out of hibernation being like, What are people wearing? What are people reading? What are people doing?

Not everyone survives a vibe shift, Davis continues. Trends move on. Something new and exciting comes along, embraced by early adopters. The crowd follows. Then you’re asked, hopefully by friends, “Why are you wearing that?” Or perhaps, “Why are you saying that?”

I thought I was something of a pop culture watcher who didn’t take it too seriously. I’ve always been a music afficionado with a substantial collection covering all the decades of my life (and before). Most “vibes” are associated with clothing and hair styles. Bright-colored bellbottoms were everywhere in the 1960s and gone by the 1980s. I don’t know exactly when women started getting tattoos and men started wearing earrings, or when either started dyeing their hair every color of the rainbow. What I know is that when I was in high school in the early 1970s, heaven help anyone who did any of those!

Remember when TikTok became “a thing”? Seems that was late in 2020. All of a sudden, selfie videos of Gen Z-ers gyrating mindlessly seemed to be everywhere. I just assumed that someone, somewhere, was making a killing. (Turns out, it was the Chinese.)

I’ve no clue what Hypebeast is (or was). I guess I didn’t have the right pattern-recognition goggles on. I knew what it meant to be goth back in the naughty-aughties — for the “unhip,” that’s the ‘00’ decade. Goth was kids (sometimes adults) dressed like Barnabas Collins or Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, and dancing to dark music.

I also know what Woke is, and I consider it disastrous (it didn’t stop in 2020, either!).

Ending Cancel Culture, Returning to Reality.

Getting back to Santiago Pliego … I have my doubts the commentators above would find his article all that conducive to what they’re up to. He begins with a discussion of the James Damore versus Google fracas back in 2017. Damore, if you remember, was cancelled by Google after penning a piece questioning that the imbalance of women to men tech engineers was due to systemic discrimination. The essence of Damore’s question:

“Hey, what if Reality — and not targeted misogyny — accounts for the fact that more men than women work in tech? Also, why does it feel like I could get fired for asking this?”

It took just three months. What followed was a lawsuit alleging that the real discrimination in Big Tech was against white male conservatives. The suit was eventually dropped.

Cancel culture was definitely “in” during the latter 2010s, Trump notwithstanding. It continued to be “in” when Captain Covid hit, and afterwards as the New Normal began. Look at all the people kicked off Twitter, YouTube, etc., etc., for questioning the necessity of the lockdowns or the safety and efficacy of the mRNA shots that appeared at the start of 2021: obviously without the years of laboratory tests, clinical trials, etc., real vaccines had always undergone.

Censorship was definitely “in” during the early 2020s. Add to the above, Election 2020 and Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Pliego intimates that the tide is turning, and that while Google might be able to get away with canceling a James Damore today, there’s be a louder outcry than there was in 2017.

He pins down the turning point as Elon Musk’s buying Twitter and turning it into X. Quoting Mike Solana, also of New Founding:

For over twenty years it’s been obvious the internet doomed the 20^th Century media oligopoly. But it took decades for a majority of Americans to move online, and in 2016, at precisely the moment it seemed social media would replace the former order, an unofficial alliance of powers refortified an elitist hold on discourse. A year ago, Elon shattered that alliance. The thought criminals were freed, and the window of acceptable discourse broadened until it broke — a total Overton collapse. Now, for better and for worse, there is no more curation, there are no more fake trends, there are no more Washington Post-employed state sock puppets propped up artificially, and there is no more political censorship. Yes, whatever Elon finds personally annoying tends to vanish (R.I.P Substack links), and he’s still not been tested by a major election. But, for now at least, news trends are dominated by stories people actually care about (even when they suck). This has never happened before, and so the phenomenon necessarily poses opportunity that has never before existed.

While his description of the present state of affairs seems a bit optimistic to me, remember PropOrNot?

Anonymous “experts” alleged in a totally unsourced article on the front page of The Washington Post that “Russian propaganda” had infiltrated online discourse, fueled Trump’s campaign, putting him into the presidency.

It was so transparently an attempt to delegitimize the election the leftist-globalist alliance had just lost that it practically caricatured itself. Hillary Clinton’s loss was the biggest upset that what Solano calls the oligopoly had yet seen, a consequence of the collapse of the narratives the oligopoly had championed for decades.

The oligopoly is more than “legacy” (corporate) media, of course. That’s just another term for the leftist-globalist ruling class. This class, which I sometimes call GloboCorps, controls the money and international banking system (via the Federal Reserve and its overseers the Bank of International Settlements, SWIFT, etc.), intel agencies and the military hierarchy; globalist “think tanks” here and abroad (think: Trilateral Commission, Atlantic Council, etc.); the WHO; the WTO; Big Tech; Big Pharma; academia via the Ivy Leagues which DIE (Diversity, Inclusion, Equity) has substantially compromised and weakened over the years.

Haven’t you noticed: the oligopoly’s minions still don’t need to produce evidence for their claims. No one ever proved, for example, that Donald Trump sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll. She couldn’t even remember the year of the supposed assault. An honest judge and jury would have thrown that case out in embarrassment. Come to think of it, there’s no evidence of a tryst between Trump and Stormy Daniels; at one point, she denied it! Until she didn’t!

Leftist Democrats make up Reality as they go along.

Thus absence of evidence didn’t prevent a leftist judge from fining Trump almost half-a-billion dollars total for exercising his rights under the First Amendment. We have no “rule of law”! What we have is a system in which money, power, and weaponized language dominate. This is becoming obvious to anyone paying attention.

Is the obviousness of this starting to bring about a change from the outside? That’s the really interesting question!

Vibe Shift 2024!

Vibe shifts apply to the information world, not just the worlds the trendwatchers watch (fashion trends, music, aggregate generational behavior).

Maybe, because so many people are sick and tired of the lies, the canceling, the bullying, the bullshit,* the biggest vibe shift in quite a while might be starting!

It might indeed have begun when Elon Musk turned Twitter into X, those called the “woke mob” left on their own, and the platform became a place where real conversations could take place.

Substack, I’ve also noticed, is full of real writers of various stripes encouraging real conversations (some earn decent incomes doing so!).

Even a few Democrats have noticed, after all, that our present VP, a DIE pick if ever there was one, isn’t even remotely qualified to be one heartbeat away from the presidency.

This, with the guy at the helm often stumbling, slurring words, trying to shake hands with people who aren’t there.

Now consider the torching of Claudine Gay’s short-lived, DIE-sponsored presidency at Harvard (I’ve discussed this here; it is also at the center of Solana’s piece). Hers was just one of a wave of resignations of the unqualified.

For the first time, DIE is being rolled back across the country. Its premises, that the U.S. is an irredeemably “systemically racist” country also drowning in misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, etc. (what’s next? pedophobia?), are being challenged openly.

I’ve been saying all along that 2024 has the potential to be a year with some of the biggest pivots we’ve seen in our lifetimes!

In that spirit I very much applaud Santiago Pliego’s proposals:

The Vibe Shift looks like ditching childless civilizational nihilism and saying, yeah, having kids is good, actually.

The Vibe Shift is the repudiation of homogenizing hyperglobalism and instead intentionally pursuing the communal, the local, and the national.

The Vibe Shift is the rejection of reality denial and instead embracing that men and women are unique and different.

The Vibe Shift is the refusal to subordinate yourself and your family to the whims and anxieties of activists and bureaucrats and relearning to trust your eyes and ears.

The Vibe Shift is the rejection of secular liberal materialism and a return to the Christian foundations of the West.

Last emphasis mine, because actually, believing in God and trusting in Providence suddenly sounds kind of cool!

Atheists are as tiresome as they are arrogant!

Pliego lists more, so I’ll again send you to the article (scroll down).

The Vibe Shift We Need rejects everything that is holding us back if not actually destroying us.

It embraces equal treatment under the law but rejects DIE. Hire your people based on your best determinations of merit, not politically-coerced favoritism. I’ve been arguing this since 1989. Too bad we’ve had the disasters we’ve had before this started to sink in.

The Vibe Shift We Need embraces science but rejects The Science (Tony Fauci’s faith to be “believed in” and followed blindly).

It embraces technology so long as technology is our servant and not our master (at the hands of corporate predators).

It embraces markets in the same spirit: they are our servants and not our masters. Money is no more a good surrogate for God than the state.

The Vibe Shift We Need looks toward the Christian elements in our national founding and rejects paranoid nonsense about “theocracy” or “dominionism.”

It urges a life culture and rejects the death culture. It might embrace the idea that human beings, as individuals, were created in God’s image, and urge an ethic of the intrinsic value of a human being that acknowledges this and develops the consequences.

Needless to say, after this Vibe Shift, women killing their unborn children will no longer be cool! They won’t want to. They will see that children are our future.

The Vibe Shift We Need embraces human finiteness. We are not God. Anyone who thinks he/she is, or thinks himself/herself able to plan the planet for all of humanity, is possibly a sociopath and will be shunned no matter how much clout he/she wields or money he/she throws about.

It thus supports Pliego and New Founding in embracing the local, the communal, the national.

I’d add that this Vibe Shift embraces approaching others with kindness and empathy, as all our lives can be viewed as lengthy adventures including struggles, with oneself the central character and protagonist.

Everyone you pass on the sidewalk may be fighting battles you can’t see or hear.

This Vibe Shift thus encourages civility towards those who disagree, assuming charitably that the reason they disagree goes to their life story in some way. This to the extent they will permit disagreement, of course, and not confuse disagreement with hate. If they don’t, the new ethos will counsel simply walking away.

In the new ethos, bullying will not be tolerated.

For civil dialogue is a better path to truth and justice than shouting and cancelation. Through conversation and careful identification of our common problems in a common world, we might work together instead of separately to improve the human world just a little. Cancel culture — efforts to erase whatever makes political bullies angry and afraid — will be seen as increasingly uncool! (Even progressive rock groups are now subjecting cancel culture to ridicule.)

Can we turn the New Normal in a new direction? We’ll find out. The future will come regardless; and it might be best if we took charge of it and worked to make it better.

*For more delicate readers: I’m using the term bullshit the way the late philosopher Harry Frankfurt used it in his slim tract On Bullshit (2005). The truth-teller and the liar both care about what is true; the former tells it while the latter tells something else intending to divert your attention from it. The bullshitter, Frankfurt argues compellingly, couldn’t care less about truth or falsehood. He/she is only interested in trolling.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

This essay is also available on Steven Yates’s Substack publication Navigating the New Normal. Please consider subscribing if you haven’t already.

Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored more than 20 articles, book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself. In 2021 he moved to Chile. He is married to a Chilean national.

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

The Cultural Left’s Cold War on Christianity

By Steven Yates

April 11, 2024

A Transgender Day of Visibility.

Recently we were handed a choice Bidenista treat: a declaration of a Transgender Day of Visibility that just happened to fall on Easter Sunday.

Conservative Christians were pretty upset, some calling it blasphemous and satanic.

The leftist response: a condescending “every March 31 at least since 2010” (summary of the history here, with tweets, etc.) has been a Transgender Day of Visibility, while Easter Sunday moves around so as to fall on Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox. Respondents also stated that Joe Biden is a “devout Catholic” as if that meant anything these days.

Were we supposed to be paying attention to every shenanigan these people have instituted since “progressives” started getting progressively more lunatic?

March 31 has been “Transgender Day of Visibility” that long? Apparently this is true and not fake news, though the Bidenista choice of words makes it sound like something Sleepy Joe’s handlers just cooked up:

Today, we send a message to all transgender Americans: You are loved. You are heard. You are understood. You belong. You are America, and my entire Administration and I have your back.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 31, 2024, as Transgender Day of Visibility. I call upon all Americans to join us in lifting up the lives and voices of transgender people throughout our Nation and to work toward eliminating violence and discrimination based on gender identity.

No references there to any past proclamations. Can you blame Christians for thinking this was a novel affront?

This is, after all, the most left wing White House in U.S. history: in the cultural sense of left, not the economic sense (the difference is substantial). The culture lurched left during the 1990s, but the 1990s were sane compared to the New Normal!

Leftists act as if Christians are universally a bunch of stupid and backward rubes who didn’t know that Easter moves around. This adds insult to insult, something the woke mob excels at, and which the Bidenista regime serves whenever possible.

Turn this around! Knowing in advance that Easter fell on March 31 this year, and that Christians reserve the day to celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior, the Bidenistas could have moved their celebration of secularist gender fluidity back or forward a week. It would have been a nice gesture.

Wolves don’t make nice gestures, however.

The Larger Effort to Remove Christianity from Society.

This is just the latest volley in a much larger effort, that of cultural leftists and secularists more broadly, to remove the Christian worldview from visibility and end its capacity to influence the public conversation.

These efforts go back over a century, starting conceivably with the tensions Darwinism provoked, leading to the Scopes trial and the realization by a few theologians (e.g. J. Gresham Machen, author of Christianity and Liberalism back in the 1920s) that Christians were being strongarmed into embracing the liberal/materialist/Darwinist outlook. Those who resisted, maintaining that such supernatural events as Christ’s Resurrection really happened, were labeled “fundamentalists” and canceled. (Yes, Virginia, “cancel culture” didn’t begin yesterday, either.)

Supreme Court decisions such as Engel v Vitale (1962) removed prayer from public schools, using the spurious argument that a morning prayer violates the First Amendment.

What the First Amendment says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

A morning prayer in a government school hardly “establishes a religion,” and it should go without saying, schools are not Congress. Apparently, too, prohibiting the free exercise thereof was simply ignored.

It is probably true that the Framers didn’t envision an age when Federal power would be not just in schools but literally everywhere. Expansionist government, alongside relentless secularization, have combined to enable the cultural left’s cold war against Christianity, operating through the courts but hardly exclusively through them.

I call it a cold war, because obviously it is a war of influence, not violence. Christians aren’t being physically assaulted in large numbers — yet. We’ve been seeing efforts to marginalize, leaving Christian denominations intact.

Leftists thus have plausible deniability. They can laugh at their Christian critics and point to all those churches standing on street corners in every Southern city and town.

What they can’t do is point to many influential Christian scholars in major universities.

To the best of my knowledge, a fellow named Alvin Plantinga is the last remaining Christian philosopher of note, author of books with titles like Warranted Christian Belief (2000) and Where the Conflict Really Lies (Science, Religion, and Naturalism)(2011).

At age 91, Plantinga is semi-retired at the University of Notre Dame. I am only aware of two other Christian philosopher with university positions (last I knew): Edward Feser, who has criticized the evangelical New Atheism of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and others in a book entitled The Last Superstition (referring to materialism)(2008); and Francis J. Beckwith, author of Defending Life (2007).

While researching this article I did a search for Christian scholars and this shot to the top. Two items are worth noting. (1) No one listed is under 60. Many are in Plantinga’s generation. They’ll probably be gone in less than ten years. (2) I wonder about someone’s status as an adherent to a consistent Christian worldview if he or she declares that it and Darwinism are compatible. If each is properly understood, they are incompatible, and that’s all there is to it. One, moreover, Hans Küng, is described as thinking that “all religions are true” which is also not a belief a Christian can hold.

So how many authentic Christian scholars are there in academia? Obviously, I might have missed a few people, but I’d guess-timate that you can count them on your fingers and toes. Very unlike academic leftists, who dominate the philosophy, history, and literature departments in the top-tier universities.

Auguste Comte, the Frankfurt School

Paving the way for scientistic and secularist attacks on the Christian worldview was Auguste Comte, French founder of sociology and originator of the philosophical ideology known as positivism, with his Law of Three Stages. His third and final “stage” was “positive science” as the sole source of intellectual truth. The story is a long one, and I can only direct interested readers to the second and third chapters of my book What Should Philosophy Do? (link below).

Most relevant to the Bidenista effort on behalf of a tiny group of probably under .00001 percent of the population is the Frankfurt School who set classical Marxism aside in favor of what some call cultural Marxism — or cultural leftism.

Its architects such as Hungary’s Györgi Lukács and Germany’s Theodor W. Adorno saw Marx’s emphasis on economic relations as short-sighted. They realized: political economy is downstream from culture. The prevailing culture of the West was Christian. Thus they turned to psychology, literature, music, art, film, etc., with an eye to “capturing the culture.” This meant attacking Christianity at a foundational level. They drew on Freudian psychoanalysis, existentialist literature, sociological studies of the effects of technology on society, and enhanced their criticisms of capitalism in the context of what they called critical theory.

They and their students became very good at what they did as they infiltrated universities, the entertainment industry, eventually media empires and other corporations. We can study how they’ve weaponized language with invented words like transphobia (and its older sibling homophobia) and the even more ridiculous misgendering someone (e.g., calling men men because they have male chromosomes, male DNA, male physiology, even if they are wearing women’s swimwear and participating in women’s sports).

One of the Frankfurt School’s best students, Herbert Marcuse, shifted the emphasis of leftist-liberalism in the U.S. from class to race, and from free speech to calls for controls on speech, in his influential 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance.” Those seeking to understand critical race theory and its doctrine of “equity” (as opposed to equality and equal opportunity) need to study this essay. Political correctness began with Marcuse. By the 1980s his ideas were being applied to women, and by the early 1990s, especially following academic radical feminist Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) we started hearing not about sex, which is biological, but gender as a “social construct,” meaning something capable of deconstruction and recreation: the origins of gender fluidity and of transgenderism.

The Christian worldview had already been beaten back via Supreme Court decisions, of course. It had a marginal status before any of these people came along. No one in centers of intellectual influence was listening to Christians. Materialism as the guiding metaphysical ethos of nearly all twentieth century science made the cultural left’s cold war on Christianity easier, even if transgenderism tries to deconstruct materialist biology by portraying biological-genetic sexuality as a manifestation of the “patriarchy.”

Christians remain, of course, and continue to have influence outside the big cities, intellectual centers, and controlled media institutions. Our definition of marginal is to be outside of those and not having their reach, while noting that most of those churches are still there.

If there is any psychological trait that characterizes leftists, though, it is their need to control others en masse. Most Christians couldn’t care less what the big cities do and have ceased trying to influence them. Leftists who rule those citadels can’t stand it, however, that in Dothan, Ala. (e.g.), there are churchgoers who don’t “affirm nonbinary persons” in their midst (are there any “nonbinary” people in Dothan, Ala.???).

The Declining Influence of Religion.

Today we have solid data on declining religious observances and belief, especially among younger generations, illustrating the success of the cold war on the Christian worldview. According to a Pew Research Center survey, more than three quarters of Americans agree that the role of this worldview in American public life is shrinking, whether they support this change or not. Many would agree that religion’s loss of influence is “a bad thing,” while 57 percent retain the view that religion has a positive impact on American life.

According to this same study, nearly half of U.S. adults claim they feel “some” tension between their religious beliefs and mainstream culture.

Gallup polls show that for decades now, the percentage of Americans with “no religious affiliation” had increased.

This has become an era of skyrocketing mental health problems, including suicide as one of the leading causes of death in those under 30. The New Normal is an era of school shootings and road rage. There are plenty other signs of a society where stress has risen to dangerous levels, with nothing, no larger sense of purpose, to counteract it.

Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist, grew aware of how common people’s faith in Providence sustained them. In his day, commoners had far harsher lives than most any of us — some argue, in fact, that with what prosperity we have and with today’s creature comforts, we’ve never had it better!

But somehow, “our” secularized world doesn’t feel better. We’re plagued with anxiety, depression, sleep disorders, suicidal thoughts, and chemical dependencies. Some “snap” and express their frustration violently.

This is because there’s no sense of Highest Purpose which only God can supply, and it gets worse as more and more people (e.g., Gen Z; it might actually be worse for Alphas the oldest of whom are about to enter their teens) grow up and come of age without this sense.

They’re not going to get it in their wretched public schools, of course; and they’re no longer getting it at home.

Can Christian influence be brought back?

Given the cultural and sociological disasters of recent years — including the “happy nihilist” mindset of “party animals” that sets conditions for horrifying events like this — and given that many Christians attribute these to the removal of their faith from the public square, the fear that Christianity might make a comeback, or revival, in the form of a new Great Awakening, haunts the left.

Hence talk of “dominionists,” a supposed Christian conspiracy aimed at establishing a theocracy. This has about as much chance of happening as flapping our arms and flying to the moon.

Evangelical Christians’ support for Donald Trump (although with a few exceptions) has been a mystery to secular leftists. There’s no mystery. Had Evangelicals not supported Trump, they would be completely outside the national conversation.

So what do we do?

The truth is, we don’t have much to show for anything we’ve done over the past few decades. Secularists / leftists have continued to advance, even during the Trump years which culminated in the George Floyd riots of 2020.

Too few Christians have tried to frame this as a clash of worldviews. Many have agreed with secularists that the only solutions to our problems are political — which means getting “their” people into elected office.

How’s that working out, anyway?

We’re faced with the likelihood that the abortion issue could cost Trump and other Republicans this November. Because a single Supreme Court decision was never going to repeal the death culture, which is a matter of deep-seated worldview belief and practice. Always remember: politics is downstream from culture, and a culture is downstream from a worldview.

There is no political solution for the problem of girls and women thinking it okay to kill their unborn children and using phrases like women’s reproductive rights or my body, my choice. That the latter sentiment never applied to the covid mRNA shots should tell you all you need to know.

The same kind of weaponized language that brought us homophobic, transphobic, and misgendered.

I’ve promoted the idea before: create new, separate institutions that will provide the basis for a parallel culture and a parallel economy: parallel institutions, in other words.

As I’ve noted, existing higher education can’t be saved. Nor can the big cities nor the corporate leviathans be salvaged.

Christians can only be resourceful and learn to operate outside their confines.

We need to develop a parallel culture, which will include a parallel marketplace and ultimately a parallel financial structure that won’t be abrogated.

That’s a tall order, but the only alternative will be if enough Americans decide they actually care about collapsed education, the toxic social media environment, a dysfunctional political order, an economy that redistributes wealth upward, and a decaying culture more broadly. Then there might be some slim hope of fixing at least some of these institutions from the inside.

That’s so iffy, however, that pursuing an agenda of separation and independence seems to me the way to go. If that can’t be made to work, then nothing will.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored more than 20 articles, book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself. In 2021 he moved to Chile. He is married to a Chilean national.

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

A Look Behind the Anti-Trump Lawfare

By Steven Yates

April 6, 2024

Introducing John Porter: Ordinary Concerned American and Trump Supporter

Once again, an item written by someone other than myself came my way this past week and struck me as worth republishing: another “ordinary” guy and not a so-called expert. I don’t know him. What I’ve gradually learned over the years, though, is that “ordinary” guys (and sometimes gals) have more wisdom than we think. Typically they’ve worked in the real world, which is more than you can say for the average politician or, more and more these days, the average corporate bigwig who took his corporation public. The item, an emailed missive, comes courtesy of a correspondent, a fellow writer named W.H. Lamb who writes for The Times-Examiner based in Greenville, South Carolina, where I lived for a while.

Here is what Mr. Lamb sent out:

Greetings, Patriots:

I’m sending you this insightful, and disturbing, message from John Porter, part of our Patriot Readers Group. In a sense, at least possibly as it applies to some Americans, it is a condemnation of the confused and totally unfair attacks on a man, Donald Trump, who served for four years as our POTUS, and who appears to have earned the disgusting enmity of a large part of our “American” electorate, courtesy of the evil propaganda and outright lies told about him in the Marxist-controlled mainstream media and from the “kept whores” of Academia, government bureaucrats, multi-national and “woke” corporate leaders who often despise America, anti-American lobbyists for un-American companies, the Marxists / collectivists / globalists who inhabit the “Klan of New Bolsheviks” (a.k.a. Demoncrat Party), and the Chinese Communist Party, which has its tyrannical tentacles wrapped around far too many of the so-called “American” entities just mentioned!

One does not have to be a supporter of former President Trump to know in one’s heart that the treatment being meted out to him by the scumbags mentioned above is totally unfair — totally un-American — totally un-Christian. WHY have Americans allowed “politics” to DEGENERATE in this manner? For that matter, IF this is now to be the permanent state of “politics” in America, why should any of us subscribe to this “Bovine Scat” any longer?

In any case, please read John Porter’s cogent words — reflect upon them, and determine whether or not they might apply to anyone you know. OR to YOU!

1. H. LAMB

Commentary Writer &

Local Columnist

The Times Examiner

Steven again. I don’t know John Porter. We’ve never been introduced. But what he says makes perfect sense. I’ve removed the identity of the list where this was sent and everything that could be used to trace him to his location. Mr. Porter, you have the floor (very light editing for grammar).

——– Original Message ———-

From: John Porter

To: undisclosed-recipients@********.***

Date: 03/28/2024 7:15 AM EDT

Subject: WHAT? WHAT? WHAT?

From: John Porter

To: Americans everywhere

March 28, 2024

I offer no apology for what I am here expressing to you, for this is truly how I feel.

I have lived through Presidents Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, and have studied the lives of the rest of them.

Every one of them had some of their policies not liked and criticized, as it should be. Every one of them performed in ways not popular by some, as it should be. Every one of them lived through some trying times with some of the American people, as it should be. After all, they are all human beings whom we have hired to work for us.

But, in my lifetime or before I have never witnessed or heard of a President while in office, or after leaving, being scrutinized over every word he speaks, every action he takes, humiliated daily by the public news media, slandered, ridiculed, insulted, lied about, charged with almost 91 various crimes by an Attorney General appointed Federal prosecutors, some state, and even local COUNTY prosecutors, hounded by the head of our own Department of Justice, had his private home raided in the early morning hours by more than 30 FBI agents, had many of his private possessions impounded, arrested and mugshot by a LOCAL COUNTY SHERIFF, had his name removed from some state presidential primary election ballots, ordered to post almost half a billion dollar cash bond or his property will be confiscated, had his wife, as well as his children, threatened, insulted and humiliated.

It is nothing less than a shame and a disgrace in the life span of our nation as a Constitutional Republic. I am ashamed of the ruthless, cruel, violent, and evil Trump-hating people both of the general public, and those who are supposed to be serving us in government. Do they have no morals? For many of them, their hatred of Donald Trump has become greater than their love of our country. I am ashamed of the reporters and the several news media organizations who feel they have the right to carry on with lies and fake stories and say the things they do for a good story even though they know are not factual.

Other Presidents took the oath of office and were mostly left alone while serving in the job and after leaving office. Even those who stood for re-election, weren’t on the news 24 hours a day seven days a week, their every word and action being misinterpreted, ridiculed and lambasted, found guilty, and punished, of crimes, by four members of a state Supreme Court and a state Secretary of State all without a trial.

Folks, we all know that politics in America have always been rough and tumble since the founding of the nation. It’s the way we do it.

Definition of rough and tumble:

“A situation in which there is a lot of arguing or competition and people do not worry about upsetting others; Rowdy, disorderly, and boisterous; marked by scuffles or infighting.”

Ladies and gentlemen, this is far more than rough and tumble politics. That can be accepted. This goes beyond the pale. Definition of beyond the pale; “outside the bounds of acceptable behavior.”

It absolutely begs the question, and it must be answered so the rest of the American people can be warned of this danger if one exists. WHAT ON THIS EARTH ARE ALL THESE PEOPLE SO SCARED TO DEATH OF IN THIS MAN, Donald Trump????

Unless someone can let me know the danger this man has demonstrated while he was our president for four years, or otherwise, I must confess, it strengthens my resolve to help him be re-elected come November 5 this year.

Thank you …. John Porter…. [Location withheld.]

I’m back. I think I can help him with his all-caps rhetorical question.

This is not about Trump, folks.

It’s about what he represents.

His rise 2015-16 came in the wake of systemic narrative collapse, I call it. What, precisely, does this mean?

Collapse here means: loss of credibility outside the enclaves of out-of-touch and unaccountable elites who inhabit Beltway and big city echo chambers. These narratives have collapsed:

Globalization will make us all prosperous.
Numbers (e.g., GDP, the Dow and NASDAQ) tell the story of the economy.
American foreign policy is making the world safe for democracy.
The Exceptional Nation’s obligation is to police the world.
Diversity is our strength.

There may be others, but these seem key. Trump didn’t collapse these narratives. He just walked into the political vacuum that narrative collapse opened.

Details aside, the first as an economic ideology has destroyed much of the American middle class. Nearly every professional economist seems also to believe in the second, enabling them to paper over the increasingly precarious situation common people face by talking about Wall Street, or tech and hedge fund billionaires, or a “low” U-3 “unemployment rate.”

The third and the fourth, favored by neocons, have started wars, gotten thousands of Americans killed or maimed for life, displaced countless native populations, and caused the mass migrations we’re seeing now everywhere in the West.

Belief in the fifth has almost ruined higher education, captured corporations and professions, harmed the military, and conceivably placed us in grave danger at the hands of migrants from countries that consider America their enemy.

What wasn’t obvious to the pseudo-pundits at CNN, MSNBC, etc., inside the Beltway, and in Silicon Valley, was visible to tens of millions of ordinary Americans getting stuck with the bills. They were powerless to prevent their jobs from being outsourced to cheap labor countries, or to avoid having their lives shattered when their sons and daughters returned from Afghanistan or Iraq in boxes draped over in flags.

They lacked a voice until Trump came along and became the only voice they had — even if flawed.

The power elites are scared to death of Trump 2.0!

Nowhere near as naïve as he was in 2017, he conceivably represents a massive disruption, if not the actual end, to everything they’ve been working on for decades now: a globalist superstructure that puts Americans last.

In short, he represents the potential end of an era, and the arrival of a new period of genuine freedom.

Hence their desperate efforts to brand him an authoritarian, a fascist, a “threat to democracy” (or to “democratic institutions” or to the “rule of law”), as they brand others around the world who speak for their people instead of those who want to rule the entire planet.

Hence their efforts to malign and destroy movements such as MAGA, which have counterparts in Europe and in countries like Brazil where substantial fractions of populations have figured out what is going on.

Here’s a thought: suppose these efforts succeed? Suppose the elite-controlled legal system, operating through folks like Letitia James, Fani/ Willis, Jack Smith, others, manage not just to stop a Trump 2.0 but put the man in jail, having destroyed him politically, professionally, and personally.

What happens next?

The following seems to me a plausible scenario … even though it assumes the Establishment is able to circumvent, or put down, massive civil unrest in the meantime.

This, I submit, then becomes a plausible scenario, which I’d look for no later than the mid-2030s, possibly much sooner.

A new “populist” voice emerges. He is younger than Trump, has money, but is more focused and less apt to post every passing thought on social media. Possibly the product of a home destroyed by the techno-feudalist economy or by having lost relatives in one of the elite-sponsored wars, he’ll be angrier and more radical.

Being as charismatic as Trump was (maybe more), he’ll do just as well at attracting a following of the like-minded. He’ll have a knack for channeling much greater frustration than existed in 2016, or 2020, or 2024 — because his supporters will be poorer, more damaged, more desperate, and just as angry. While the political and corporate superelite classes will be that much richer.

In short, this fellow and his base of support really will be everything today’s political and corporate media elites says Trump and MAGA are now.

The Establishment will mobilize accordingly. Even so, they’ll have a potential American edition of the Storming of the Bastille on their hands that will make January 6, 2021 look like an elementary school cafeteria food fight by comparison.

Add to this mix CBDCs to which the new generation of dissidents will have figured out how to avoid by forming an extensive unregulated underground economy. Maybe the tech-savviest among them will have invented technology they can use to “cloak” themselves and their activities.

As CBDCs are rolled out globally (expect this in the next 12 to 24 months), only a fool will fail to recognize what I’ve described as the real battle of the near future: between that sociopathic minority that wants to rule the world and “transcend humanity” (“transhumanism”) versus the hundreds of millions of ordinary people(s) everywhere who just want to be left alone.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

This article is also available on Steven Yates’s Navigating the New Normal (Substack). Subscribe to Navigating the New Normal to receive access to exclusive content.

Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored more than 20 articles, book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself. In 2021 he moved to Chile. He is married to a Chilean national.

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

Is America Cracking Up, One Horrific Incident at a Time?

By Steven Yates

March 30, 2024

“The Ultimate Act of Betrayal”

A few days ago news feeds were filled with accounts of the Ohio woman, Kristel Candelario, 32, who’d gone off on a vacation to Puerto Rico for 10 days, stopping in Detroit on her way back, leaving her 16-month-old daughter alone that whole time. The girl, whose name was Jailyn, was dead in her crib from severe dehydration and starvation, as all she’d had to eat or drink for that whole time were a few bottles of milk. She was lying on blankets saturated with urine and feces.

This woman’s daughter died alone, suffering from combined thirst and hunger, doubtless terrified, and finally succumbing. She’d lost seven pounds during her ordeal. Neighbors had reported hearing a baby crying out, but nobody had tried to find out if something was wrong.

Candelario pled guilty to aggravated murder and child endangerment. A forensic pathologist testified during the woman’s trial that a very young child’s worst separation anxiety occurs between the ages of 9 and 18 months. The judge, before pronouncing a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole, called what she’d done “the ultimate act of betrayal” of the solid bond between a mother and her child based on “love, trust, and unwavering protection.”

Characters in Stephen King’s novels and short stories have suffered some horrific deaths. This — which really happened! — strikes me as magnitudes worse than almost anything the horror maestro has penned!

Candalario’s vacation was last June. I don’t recall any of the aftermath being reported at the time. Maybe I just missed it.

Through her attorney, she pled struggles with ongoing mental health issues, for which she’d been on medication. One wonders if she enjoyed her vacation, partying indifferently in Puerto Rico with a boyfriend, and then stopping in Michigan to see another boyfriend before returning home to find her lifeless daughter.

The thought running through my mind while reading this account and follow-ups: what would possess a mother to do something like this? Is it humanly possible for one person to be that self-absorbed?

I also thought of revisiting my opposition to the death penalty….

It was interesting to peruse comments sections under these articles. One comment stood out: execute the woman in the same fashion she executed her daughter, by locking her in a cell without food and water for 10 days or however long it took.

No prison would do that, of course, as it would straightforwardly violate the Constitution. But I get the sentiment. It’s a flash of sanity, having brushed up against horrific insanity, reacting to it.

Kaylee Gain

The above case came to my attention on the heels of the story of the black girl in St. Louis, Missouri who pummeled a white girl in a brawl involving several girls outside a high school, pounding her head on a concrete sidewalk until she was unconscious and convulsing.

Kaylee Gain had suffered a fractured skull. Brain bleeding and swelling was diagnosed later.

A video shows the attack in progress! (I decided against linking to it. We’re not going to be voyeurs of that sort of thing here. Anyone who wants to can track the video down; it went viral, after all. Surprise, surprise.)

This happened on March 8. Last I heard, Kaylee was in intensive care and has not regained consciousness. She’s 16; her attacker is 15. The attacker’s name hasn’t been released, but she was arrested, taken into custody, and charged with criminal assault. Her family has provoked outrage by opposing her being tried as an adult.

It’s tempting to play up the racial angle here, but we don’t have to (except to note how black kids tend to be far more vicious than white kids when they fight, if only because they seem to have less impulse control).

For my purposes here I’d prefer to emphasize something else. Fights broke out when I was a kid. Never having been one of the “popular” kids, I got in a few scrapes myself.

But never did anything like this happen. When we were kids and a fight broke out, the victor always stopped the attack when it was clear he’d won.

Fights in today’s high schools and even middle schools are apt to result in serious injuries and even deaths!

Moreover, whereas other kids often took actions to break up fights when I was growing up, in today’s digitally-saturated media environment they’re more likely to film them and upload them to the Internet to see if it goes viral!

Are kids going insane? What’s happened to parenting? Have families disintegrated that badly (especially black families)?

The Mississippi “Goon Squad”

Episode three: six white Mississippi former police officers, self-styled as members of the “Goon Squad,” the name they actually used for themselves, were handed long prison sentences this week for torturing two black men in various ways culminating in shooting one of them in the mouth.

Again, it’s easy to wonder if this case would have received the national coverage it did had the races been reversed, as that wouldn’t fit the official cultural Marxist narrative of oppressed blacks perennially victimized by privileged and empowered whites.

But given the details of the torture, which included stripping them naked and humiliating them with sex toys, again we have to set such matters aside and wonder: did these men completely lose their marbles?

In this post George Floyd era, a white police officer would have to be out of his mind to shoot or even get especially rough with a black man, but obviously it still happens.

I’d argue that this case, like many others where race isn’t even a factor (e.g., white cop shoots unarmed white man), goes beyond such considerations.

Transgenderism

There are plenty of other episodes out there, more modest in the sense that no one got physically harmed as a result, but suggesting a country spiraling towards sociological oblivion, making real victims of ordinary people finding themselves in insane situations. Some are related to the genuinely oppressive wokeness that has spread everywhere.

For example, there’s the woman in Fairbanks, Alaska, a life coach by profession whose membership in a Planet Fitness gym was canceled after she complained that she’d confronted a man shaving in the woman’s locker room. The man had self-identified as a “queer LGB”; this was supposed to excuse him. There’d also been a freaked out looking very young girl in there. Perhaps aged 12.

The gym issued a statement calling itself a “judgment free zone.”

The woman had snapped a photo. That was the excuse used by the gym to cancel her membership, citing a rule against members taking photos or videos of other members in the locker rooms without their permission.

The gym later clarified: the man identified as transgender. The gym cited a slew of rules about “gender identity.”

Transgenderism alone is a sign of how America is going stark, raving nuts.

When I was in college, even leftists would have responded to the idea that men can change into women and women can change into men as completely bonkers.

Now you can be fired from a teaching position at a university for contending that sex is a matter of biology alone, and questioning the current dogma that “gender” is a “social construct” that “privileges” the “patriarchy.”

Transgenderist insanity began to infect corporate America during the last decade.

I happen to have a public health education degree. It took me two years to earn it, back in the 1990s. The program emphasized sex ed, over more sensible topics like nutrition (it did have an exercise physiology division).

Transgenderism was not mentioned once, not in any class, not by any student. While transsexuals had been known to exist, no one considered the phenomenon a politically-grounded identity. It was considered a form of mental illness and treated as such.

At least Planet Fitness has taken a hit, as sane members across the country responded by canceling their own memberships.

Go woke, go broke, as the saying goes.

That’s an exaggeration. Disney and other woke corporations are far from broke. What may be called the deep influence of extreme left identity politics is everywhere, including in businesses that go with the flow, but then probably don’t give politics or culture a second thought if they’re making money.

“Squatters Rights”

The last case I’ll look at is of a woman in Queens, NY, heir to a house worth at least a million, who came home from an extended trip only to discover that “squatters” had taken up residence in her house. She ordered them out and changed the locks to keep them out.

Then she was arrested.

In NYC, people can claim “squatters rights” if they’ve been living on a property for 30 days. Evict a squatter, and the homeowner can be charged with unlawful eviction.

My sources for this story don’t state whether these people were in the U.S. legally or not — no corporate media outlet (not even Fox!) touched that one — but we know that NYC has filled up with illegal aliens during the three-plus Bidenista years we’ve suffered through. We also know that the “Bidenomics” of the New Normal has been a complete disaster unless you’re comfortably in the one percent. (No, what the Dow is doing is not a reflection of what the economy as a whole is doing!)

The owner of the house says she is selling it and moving with her family away from NYC.

Inheriting property is the only reason I can think of for anyone to live in NYC, or in any major city in the U.S., for that matter. Such cases have erupted in cities like Seattle as well: also controlled by leftists who hijacked the legal system long ago.

Clearly, you no longer have property rights in America unless you’re superelite. If you have property rights it’s your call, absolutely, on who lives there and who doesn’t.

From the Death Culture to Creating a Culture of Intrinsic Value

So how do I sum up a piece like this? These cases are all different from one another. The first was the most horrific, and described as such by those involved — indicating a semblance of sanity on the part of law enforcement, forensic investigation, and attorneys involved. At no point did Candelario’s lawyer try to excuse her conduct; he only tried to mitigate it with an account of her health issues — issues that, as the prosecution pointed out, were hardly in evidence during her 10-day vacation.

I wonder, though, what percentage of those in that courtroom think that abortion is okay, is just a woman exercising her “reproductive rights.”

We live in a death culture, and it has many manifestations. Abortion can dissolve an unborn baby in the womb, or tear the unborn baby’s limbs off.

Medical science has proven that unborn fetuses can respond to stimuli just a few weeks after conception. That means they can definitely feel pain, and possibly sheer terror during their final seconds of life.

We also live in a culture where quite a few people — it is hard to know what percentage since I’m unaware of any studies that have tried to explore this — see others as having only extrinsic value: value accrued by doing something, or obtaining some title, or more precisely, value to them. A statement I saw somewhere online the other day seems to describe their attitude: It’s my world, and you just happen to be passing through it.

We can conquer both of these by affirming, under God, the intrinsic value of persons and building this idea into education and into all of our societal systems and institutions.

What does it mean to say a person has intrinsic value? To Christians, what it means is that all persons have value by virtue of their being persons created in God’s image.

To secularists and materialists, I have no idea what it means, if it can mean anything.

This implies that scrapping materialism as a worldview and restoring an upgraded Christianity is what we need to pursue. To clarify: materialism didn’t make Kristel Candelario abandon her baby girl. Nor did it compel the Mississippi cops to torture two people. What it did is create a nihilistic cultural environment the consequences of which include me-first narcissism, which can range from disregard of the property of others to a disregard for their well-being and eventually their lives.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

This article is also available on Steven Yates’s Navigating the New Normal (Substack). Subscribe to Navigating the New Normal to receive access to exclusive content.

Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored more than 20 articles, book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself. In 2021 he moved to Chile. He is married to a Chilean national.

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

“And So, It Begins….”

By Steven Yates

March 20, 2024

Both Trump and Biden have clenched their parties’ nominations. This on the heels of the angriest (not to mention the most deceitful) State of the Union address I’ve ever heard. Dark Brandon was on display, and then some!

Brandon — or his handlers, whoever wrote that ugly speech — began with Hitler comparisons that are now so old and hackneyed that one can only groan at leftists’ inability to come up with anything new. The speech proceeded with a call for more support for Ukraine, under the assumption that a much smaller and backward country could defeat the Russian Army if only “we” funnel more arms and money into Kiev.

Won’t happen. It’s delusional! All it will do is get hundreds of thousands more people on both sides killed: more Ukrainians than Russians. That’s the best case scenario; the worst is that an unpredicted action by some hothead will trigger an uncontrolled escalation, e.g., sending ground troops into what Russia now considers her territory, bringing on a nuclear confrontation. Putin has indicated his readiness for such.

Returning to the SOTU: it contained nothing that would unite Americans. All the official narratives were in evidence, sometimes stated openly, sometimes not. Nothing Biden said indicated sincere interest in what ordinary people are thinking about: inflation, food costs, housing costs, health care costs, the Southern border, wretched schools, the distressing sense of having to answer to unaccountable powers based hundreds of miles away.

Some are upset at the choice between Trump and Biden, seeing both as irredeemably flawed. There may be as many as three other candidates on some ballots, but no intelligent person thinks any “third party” candidate has a chance against the Washington Party.

So much for the idea that the U.S. is a democracy. Not if democracy means answering to We The People. America is a plutocratic oligarchy, and has been since the Federal Reserve was created.

The rest is theater.

Within this theater, each side sees the other an existential threat to “democracy” (or “democratic institutions”).

Conversations across the aisle, attempts to understand philosophical differences, are rare. To the best of my knowledge, only Tucker Carlson and Chris Cuomo have recently attempted it. They had common ground: both were unceremoniously unloaded by corporate employers who, as it turned out, were limiting them (hint: that’s what corporations do).

Watch.

You might find yourself reconsidering your opinion of one, the other, or both, depending on where you stand. All I can say is, my opinion of Cuomo as a person went up after listening to him in that environment, even if I still disagree with him on many points.

All these media people — all of us — are human beings, after all, with human concerns, and human failings.

Outside the Beltway, of course — outside the province of the Washington Party — warring narratives over philosophies of governance, stated or only implicit, are very real. There has been far less transparency and motivation to communicate across the real divide.

Two Basic Philosophies of Life.

Large numbers of people just want to be left alone, in their communities, so long as they aren’t bothering anyone else. They deeply resent being dictated to, or buffeted about by unanswerable forces they barely comprehend and from which they never benefit.

This describes most of rural America. And rural Europe.

Then there are those who won’t leave them alone, because they believe themselves most fit to rule. They are obsessed with the need to control others — the need to dictate conditions of life to entire populations whom they regard as ciphers.

This describes much of big city America. And big city Europe.

The primary concerns of the former are family, business (almost invariably small business), education for their children, saving for retirement or trying to do so, and varying degrees of community involvement. Their focus is naturally local. Most couldn’t care less what’s going on in big cities hundreds of miles away if it’s not affecting them.

Most believe in God, or a Supreme Being.

The latter want to dominate the world. They are Platonists in a broad sense of having an ideal “Republic” in mind — a designed Utopia with a place for everyone and everyone in his/her place. They believe they have the wisdom and technocratic expertise to accomplish this. Their focus is global. They can’t stand it that there are locally-focused yokels out in the boonies who resist their plans in the name of We The People.

Collectively this second group either disbelieves in God or finds the matter meaningless. But they sure believe in themselves!

What stands out is the asymmetry. The globalists, relatively few in number (maybe 300 to 400 extended families at their core), have known for generations that their goals called for a vast ordering coordinated across continents and oceans, and that this requires enormous financial resources. They’ve done all they can to accumulate those resources, establishing central banks (e.g., the Federal Reserve System), other financial leviathans (e.g., Goldman Sachs), and think tanks such as the Trilateral Commission and the Atlantic Council. And economic controls centered around energy, food, health, and all the infrastructure and supply chains these imply.

They’ve known from the start that a controlled population is best had by controlling the information reaching that population. Hence controlling schools and mass media. Accomplished over 100 years ago.

What’s stood in their way, consistently, is the demand for freedom on the part of a relatively few voices among those commoners outside the globalist clubs: demands from We The People, that is, to control our businesses and lives; and to raise our children in accordance with traditions passed down to us from time immemorable because these traditions worked: these provided the ethos and cultural “glue” that holds communities together and assures stability and continuity.

All systems, left to themselves, gravitate towards stability or equilibrium. Family and community systems are no exception. Disruption happens but is not the norm.

Sadly, few of We The People have ever recognized, much less understood, the globalist impulse — and why we’ve experienced so many disruptions since the 1970s.

That’s not unexpected. Sociopaths are somewhat mysterious to non-sociopaths. We The People have always had a few in our midst. Healthy communities can marginalize and if necessary expel such people.

But this won’t work against the superior organization and command of resources of sociopathic globalists.

Globalists/Leftists: Very Well Organized! Conservatives: Not So Much.

What’s clear today is that the Bidenistas have most of the billionaire class behind them. They have outfits like George Soros’s Open Society Foundation funding their campaigns and supporting New York leftists trying to destroy Trump’s real estate business.

I don’t know of anything similar on the right. The Kochs (for example) are neocons, not real conservatives. Neocons are as much about domination as leftists; where they differ is that neocons are more fascinated by war. A single neocon, Victoria Nuland, stood behind the coup in Ukraine ten years ago which put that country on collision course with Russia.

We The People don’t want war. We don’t vote for war. We know we don’t benefit from it. Many of us have been dragged into supporting wars through fake patriotism and fomented fear. We are justifiably afraid that instead of accomplishing any real goals, it will bring our children home in boxes with flags draped around them. (This.)

But wars keep happening. Why? Because the sociopath minority profits from the war machine. When populations are left devastated by war, this minority’s wealth and power increases.

Globalism has advanced on multiple wars that didn’t need to happen, often driven by false flag events and false narratives that drove nations apart. The financial titans were bankrolling both sides!

These people are very well organized! Their underlings — like Barack Change-You-Can-Believe-In Obama, Sleepy Joe, and Kackling Kamala — do as they’re told.

Conservatives are not especially well organized. We probably spend more time squabbling amongst ourselves than we do struggling against the left. All too many Christian conservatives have retreated to their basements to wait for the Rapture!

What was said about Libertarians — before they became totally irrelevant — is just as true of conservatives: organizing them is like trying to herd cats.

Most conservatives cannot articulate what they want to conserve. (I know. I’ve asked.)

Not that there’s much in contemporary culture to conserve.

Philosophically, though, many conservatives are completely at sea. They might say something about free enterprise, or the Constitution. Or traditional family values. Often, though, in practice their political-economic philosophy boils down to, “What’s good for Big Business is good for the country.”

That’s simply untrue!

Most conservative (and conservative Christian) organizations, moreover, as I noted last week, are closed clubs.

Hence the majority of conservative intellectuals I know about write on Substack or similar platforms. Or got out of the game years ago and learned to code or design apps.

Then those in conservative organizations wonder why the left (which tends to support its people) has been cleaning their clocks for over three decades now. Globalism, of course, has been active much, much longer, with many of its spokesmen telling readers openly about their plans for the world.

Globalists Have Been Explicit About Their Plans.

One of their plans for the U.S., once they had the controls over the economy the Federal Reserve System afforded them, as well as control over public schools and mass media, was holding elections as theatrical performances every four years between carefully vetted candidates of “two parties,” essentially alike at their uppermost echelons. (Remember how both the first George Bush and Bill Clinton supported NAFTA in 1992, and how both “movement” conservatives and liberal Democrats got behind the second George Bush’s disastrous Iraq War in the early 2000s?)

What’s stated openly is by definition not a “conspiracy theory.”

Carroll Quigley, in Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World In Our Time (1966):

The chief problem of American political life for a long time has been how to make the two Congressional parties more national and international. The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. The policies that are vital and necessary for America are no longer subjects of significant disagreement, but are disputable only in details of procedure, priority, or method….

[E]ither party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies (pp. 1,247-48).

Globalists haven’t always been able to maintain this consistently. Every so often We The People found a champion. Quigley’s ensuing discussion attacks the “extremist” Barry Goldwater’s takeover of the Republican Party in 1964.

The controlled media of the day destroyed his candidacy with fomented fears of nuclear Armageddon. Watch the infamous “daisy” attack ad.

See how this worked, even then?

Today’s equivalents bemoan the rise of Donald Trump, which followed the collapse of such narratives as we have to fight them over there or we’ll be fighting them over here, globalization will make us all prosperous and diversity is our strength.

That was in 2016, which began a new chapter in American political-economic history.

The globalist-leftist alliance struck back, and in 2020 we got both Covid and the Bidenistas.

And the New Normal.

Now with the same candidates having clenched nominations, it begins…. Or continues….

I’ve been working with the idea that 2024 is going to be a pivotal year — in many respects. The narrative war is coming to a head, its focal point being this election — which, like its two predecessors, overturned the state of affairs Quigley described so approvingly back in the 1960s.

We have two candidates representing very different philosophies of governance.

One is favored by those who want to be left alone. The other is favored by those who won’t leave them alone.

As I’ve noted, this struggle has parallels in Europe in farmers’ protests, and elsewhere. It’s invariably the same: common people compelled by declining fortunes to stand against unaccountable and arrogant power elites.

I’ve expressed strong doubts that Trump will be allowed to win. I hope I’m wrong. But part of me is convinced that all a Trump win in November will accomplish is to buy time against the better organized, focused, financed, and hence more powerful forces of the globalist-leftist alliance — unless we can organize and promote more parallel institutions in both education and mass media, recovering the intellectual foundations and the independence and the resilience it will take to continue resisting this alliance.

We should remember the words of one of its earlier exponents who was quite open about what he believed was to come: one-time Fabian socialist H.G. Wells. In The New World Order (1940) he wrote that

even when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people … will hate the new world order, be rendered unhappy by frustration of their passions and ambitions through its advent and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to estimate its promise we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people (p. 129).

Revisiting the Threat Posed by Digital Currencies.

For example, just two days ago as I pen these final paragraphs I perused an article on Reuters about the advances of “digital currencies,” i.e., CBDCs, in Europe, in China, among BRICS nations* and elsewhere. The author was bemoaning how America had fallen behind the curve:

A total of 134 countries representing 98% of the global economy are now exploring digital versions of their currencies, with over half in advanced development, pilot or launch stages, a closely-followed study on Thursday showed. The research, by the U.S.-based Atlantic Council think tank highlighted that all G20 countries with the exception of Argentina are now in one of those far-along phases although, notably, the United States is falling increasingly behind.

The author projected the full advent of CBDCs during the period 2026-27. I’ve written elsewhere about the prospects of CBDCs as part of a developing total-surveillance-and-control scheme, or to use the military term, full spectrum dominance.

Trump has said he would oppose a “digital dollar,” but he has to be elected first. Trump 1.0 greatly underestimated what he was up against and is paying the price (along with part of his family). We can count on leftists continue the lawfare, everything they can do to stop a better prepared Trump 2.0. Even if he gets back into the White House, though, that won’t stop the globalists from working around him, through the Federal Reserve, the financial leviathans, and NGOs, to start instituting it by stealth or through a catastrophic event such as this whether the date is next month or later in the year.

Even Trump 2.0 will be gone after 2028, though. He’ll be 82. Eventually he will be gone. Who will then lead the “malcontents”? I have no idea. None of his kids strike me as “ready for prime time” and few if any younger conservative voices seem to have the charisma now necessary to gain the large scale following Trump has amassed. I can see the “MAGA” movement fragmenting and disintegrating if he cannot retake the White House.

As things presently stand, all the globalists have to do is wait us out, because in a few years a good many if not most of us will be gone.

*The fact that BRICs nations are so far along in cooperating with this agenda belies those who claim that the economic-financial bloc represented by Brazil, Russia, etc., are truly independent of Western globalism. Indeed, if Brazil was actually a sovereign state, Jair Bolsonaro would probably still be its president.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

This article is also available on Navigating the New Normal (Substack). Subscribe to Navigating the New Normal to receive access to exclusive content.

Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored more than 20 articles, book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and eventually unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he gradually turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself, finally abandoning American academia and moving to Chile. He is married to a Chilean national.

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

Higher Education: The Case for New, Parallel Institutions

By Steven Yates

March 15, 2024

“Our students will learn the foundations, blessings, and challenges of a free and prosperous society. They will grasp the importance of law, virtue, order, beauty, and the sacred. They will appreciate the distinct vitality of the American form of government and way of life.” —Dr. Jacob Howland, Provost and Dean of Intellectual Foundations, University of Austin

Higher education in Western civilization is broken. As the saying goes, it has lost its way. This happened gradually, but now the process is pretty much complete. Based on my own experiences as well as those of others, I am skeptical that anything can be salvaged. If its mission ever was to educate and not indoctrinate, and given the ludicrous price tag of a four-year degree today, the ideal would be to allow today’s academic mainstream to die a natural death.

The time has come to create and build up new institutions of higher learning: parallel institutions in a parallel academy.

True, there have been a handful of private colleges that for years have remained steadfastly independent and committed to their own visions, typically by refusing all federal money. Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Mich., and Grove City College in Grove City, Penn. come to mind first. They are the most visible. There are a few others. Because our situation is dire — the collapse of real education in the face of the rise of the bogus surrogates that pass for education in today’s urban wastelands, not to mention centers of governmental and corporate power, is a threat to our survival — we need new institutions and we needed them yesterday.

From the Plagiarism Crisis to the Fundamentally Fraudulent Nature of Most Higher Education.

What is the evidence that existing institutions cannot be salvaged and ought to be allowed to die?

I think the most recent thing that did it for me was this. It is worth reproducing; this is Harvard University’s flagship publication, at what is still the most prestigious university in the country:

“Plagiarism Is the Right’s Newest Weapon. Harvard Must Disarm It.”

You read that right.

This is in the wake not just of Claudine Gay’s forced resignation from the presidency of Harvard following her exposure as a plagiarist (“retiring” to a position in the history department that will pay her a cool $900,000 a year!), but the accusation of the school’s DIE officer (okay, DEI, if you insist) Sherri A. Charleston, of 40 counts of plagiarism.

By “disarming it,” the authors (the entire Harvard Crimson editorial board) mean contending that plagiarism and DEI (Diversity-Equity-Inclusion ideology) “have nothing to do with each other.”

Don’t they now? Well, the connection is less direct than pure cause-and-effect.

If the allegation is that DEI, which is just the latest and most extreme permutation of affirmative action ideology, obtains admissions for students and positions for faculty and administrators that they aren’t qualified for, then one might expect its beneficiaries to take short cuts. Plagiarism is one such short cut, possibly the easiest. Claudine Gay was clearly unqualified to be the president of anything. Were she not a “woman of color,” as the prevailing jargon would have it (white isn’t a color, after all), she’d never come anywhere near Harvard, much less be instilled at its helm.

I don’t know how much plagiarism exists in academia today. Software’s ability to detect it has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years. The problem is that the torrent of academic publications — books with dozens of academic presses, book reviews and review essays, stand-alone articles, shorter discussion pieces, in hundreds of academic journals in every discipline — has never been larger. According to one estimate it would take thousands of hours to vet all the publications of the faculty of a single institution such as Harvard, even with today’s enhanced detection software.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not of the view that plagiarism is limited to affirmative action’s beneficiaries or hard academic leftists. With full-time, tenure-track teaching jobs increasingly scarce and competition correspondingly fierce, the pressure to publish in order to be visible to hiring committees has never been greater. This, too, is bound to tempt the ambitious to take the same short cuts if they believe they can get away with it, knowing that no editor at any academic press or journal can possibly be familiar with all the literature out there, even in their specialty.

Plagiarism is thus just one massive problem plaguing academia. Philosopher Peter Boghossian — co-author of a controversial series of articles (search for “conceptual penis”) which were accepted for publication in journals of the feminist / postmodernist / DEI persuasion despite being purposefully fraudulent — gave a recent interview in which, in the context of a devastating criticism of wokeness (yet another term that emerged for the affirmative action mindset; see also here and here) recommended also searching for replication crisis.

Replication of results is essential to so-called scientific method. If a study has been done properly, methodologically speaking, it should be possible for others to use those same methods to reproduce the results of that study, thus validating those results as contributions to our knowledge base. Yet after the past couple of decades it has become clear that many supposed findings by academic scientists have resisted replication.

How much of this is due to incentivized carelessness, resulting from the need to publish as a condition of tenure and promotions, and how much is due to actual dishonesty, is not clear. According to Nature, as mainstream a scientific periodical as you’re likely to find, a poll of 1,500 scientists yielded these results: 70 percent reported that they had failed to replicate results of at least one study conducted by peers. Various more specific percentages cut across scientific and technical disciplines: 87 percent of chemists, 69 percent of physicists and engineers, 77 percent of biologists, 64 percent of environmental and earth scientists, 67 percent of medical researchers, and 62 percent of all other respondents made such claims. Fifty percent, moreover, had been unable to reproduce one of their own experiments.

Two percent of this group confessed to having falsified results, and 14 percent knew someone who had. Alarmingly, this same study indicated that bogus results are more frequent in medical research than elsewhere. Think about the implications of that when you are assessing official narratives about the safety and efficacy of the mRNA shots for covid.

Where does all this leave academic science? Most academic science is either government science or corporate science or both in some combination, because of the reality that a scientific study is too complex and cumbersome to undertake in the absence of outside funding — an obvious source of potential bias in favor of the ideas, worldview, and perhaps ideological agendas of those holding the purse strings.

Boghossian argues compellingly, moreover, that “smart people” (people with PhDs) are especially prone to missing the problem here. Most probably believe themselves above making that sort of mistake. Being a “smart person” doesn’t necessarily make you conscious of your limitations, however. Sometimes it does just the opposite.

For as Boghossian observes, “smart people” are very good at coming up with rationalizations for dominant ideas that may be utterly irrational, or at least lack the support that is assumed, incorrectly if the studies it is based on are methodologically botched. If the hard sciences can have gone as far sideways as the above percentages suggest, think what this means for the “softer” humanities!

Groupthink and intellectual inbreeding are definite factors; no one wants to be the “odd man (or odd woman) out,” and in academia given the above-noted structural pressures, being ostracized for any reason can jeopardize a career. The need to be hired in the first place; then tenured; then promoted; cumulatively create an environment which breeds corruption as professors praise and cite each other, sometimes publish one another, and play off and reinforce one another’s irrationalities.

As I’ve put this previously: conformists can gain admission to the club. Dissidents are weeded out. The results are a vast echo chamber — fundamentally fraudulent and compelling us to ask: how much of our supposed knowledge base I referred to above really merits that designation in the present environment?

Diversity-Equity-Inclusion ideology, having brought about the opinions that “math is racist” (because black students have trouble with it) and that “gender reassignment” is viable for kids, is probably the most obvious sign of the fraud. A moral (or pseudo-moral) impulse took priority over actual, demonstrable results. The best way to describe this pseudo-moral impulse: absent discrimination (active or “structural”), every group identified as such via identity politics will be politically and economically equal and have equal access to resources and positions of authority. If we don’t see this we shouldn’t advocate for mere equality of opportunity, as this will only reinforce “structural” discrimination; but instead equity, which sets about rearranging the structure to achieve politically desirable results. Moreover, your identity is yours based on your feelings, which are now prioritized over reasons and even hard evidence. The worst sin is to give offense. Hence all the pap about “microaggressions.”

DEI advocates have tried to impose this irrationalist ideology on institutions by force. With “bias response teams,” “cancellation” of dissidents, etc., they have largely succeeded. Thus, most of the small handful of conservative intellectuals still on campuses self-censor, and conservative students say they are afraid to state their actual views on politically sensitive topics in class, or on tests, or assignments. This further reinforces the hard left echo chamber.

This, then, is what millions of students are accumulating five and sometimes six figures of student loan debt to endure for four or more years. Often, they graduate with degrees that are worthless, whether in the marketplace or as actual knowledge, which implies that what they’ve been compelled to listen to for four years is true.

Back to Basics.

What was higher education — education generally — supposed to be about? Even if it is exemplified almost nowhere today, and even if public schools never really exemplified it at all?

First, the pursuit of truth — to service human flourishing (I like to put it). Here we hit the snag that goes back at least as far as Pontius Pilate’s “What is truth?” Thanks to roughly a half-century of postmodernism, this is a far bigger problem than it needs to be.

We don’t need an intellectually perfect “theory of truth” to have some idea what we’re talking about. We just need to be realists. We’re talking about reality, what exists independently of our prior knowledge, wishes, or will — or the language in which our talk about reality is expressed. In a sense, we begin trying to understand the world around us as children. At least some knowledge of common horse sense truths is necessary to avoid harming ourselves. We learn as children that hot stove surfaces burn. We learn that blueberries are nourishing but that toadstools are poisonous.

Those among us who are lifelong learners never stop pursuing truth. Some truths (such as those above) are easy to come by. Others take a tremendous amount of work. Knowing that truth has eluded us in some arena often constitutes a problem. We are problem-solvers, however. Some of us prove to be very good at it.

To pursue truth is not inherently political, although certain institutional and societal norms will enable and enhance the pursuit of truth. What norms are these?

Freedom of thought, freedom of inquiry, freedom of speech — in every area of the world, society, and life generally, we may see fit to explore because we perceive a problem in need of a solution.

Without the first two, members of an intellectual community cannot realistically pursue what is true. Without the third, they cannot meaningfully share their results, just in case these lead them to question the prevailing groupthink.

Then, because of real diversity — of circumstances of birth and upbringing, background, experience, personal inclination, and so on (not just ethnicity) — differences of opinion are bound to emerge whenever thinking people exchange ideas freely.

It then becomes important to maintain an environment of civil discourse — in which such differences are respected and handled, if necessary, through structured exchanges and debates, in which the parties to any dispute have the maturity to police themselves.

You’d think “smart people” (with PhDs) would be able to do this, to create this sort of environment.

Disrupting public speeches with shouts and insults should not be tolerated. Much less open threats, or just the sense of the potential for physical violence that has come to characterize places like Berkeley, where the administration has paid as much as $500,000 in security to protect an outside conservative speaker in the face of threats (sometimes then cancelling the appearance because that wasn’t enough).

Unfortunately, the prospects for stopping such incidents from occurring doesn’t appear likely, because circumventing the dominance of the campus ideologies that rationalize such reactions especially to conservative ideas.

First, there’s the tenured hard left, activist types who gave us movements like radical “gender feminism” and critical race theory in the 1990s (yes, Virginia, this has been developing that long). Dislodging professors who have tenure, absent obvious criminal behavior or extreme moral turpitude, is extremely difficult, especially if those doing the dislodging are perceived as “angry white male” conservatives coming in from outside and the whole campus has the person’s back. Claudine Gay is tenured in Harvard’s history department; her newfound status as a plagiarist was not enough to send her packing.

Then there are students. Now that Gen Z (born from 1996 to 2012 or thereabouts) is moving through college, we have an entire generation that’s never known anything but identity politics and takes DEI for granted. They’ve been told all their lives that injustice is systemic, that if they are white they benefit from “white privilege” as a central component of “structural racism,” that racism is (as Boghossian puts it) an “everyday state of affairs.” They’ve also grown up with the idea that we’re killing the planet with man-made climate change.

Small wonder members of this generation, whatever their ethnicity, are having to deal with more psychological problems than any of their predecessors. They are angrier, more depressed, and a small but not insignificant fraction have considered suicide.

The situation is even worse. The mindset that sees everything through the lens of systemic oppression and seeks to rectify it with “equity” based hiring itself now threatens people’s lives. It spread to medical education and from there into the medical profession some time ago. It is spreading to occupations such as airline pilots which do not have enough women and blacks to satisfy “diversity” bureaucrats. I recall someone jokingly asking back in the 1990s whether “feminist airplanes would stay aloft for feminist engineers.” As we realize that the DEI crowd is very serious about trying to have proportional representation of women (feminists — Trump-voting women need not apply!), ethnic minorities, homosexuals, and transsexuals, according to their percentage of the population in every occupation, such quips cease to be funny.

Would you want to fly in a plane piloted by someone who got hired through the airline’s DEI office?

How This Disaster Happened. Conservative Organizations Bear Part of the Blame.

Coming back to the beginning. Back in the 1990s when exposés on what was then just called political correctness were beginning to appear, this might have been reparable from the inside. Political correctness and its ideological spawn (e.g., radical academic “gender feminism”) could have been stopped back then with forceful opposition, including class action (as opposed to a handful of individual) lawsuits, had a decisive effort been made.

It wasn’t.

For whatever reason, the few conservative organizations which had influence failed to make use of the resources available to them, which would have included obtaining positions or at least financial support for conservative scholars most of whom eventually left intellectual professions out of frustration when they ended up at bottom-tier institutions, or with marginal, part-time jobs in think tanks, or unemployed.

The vastly better organized (and far better funded) academic left simply took over.

We Need New Parallel Institutions, a Parallel Academia.

By the late 1990s the term parallel institutions was circulating in conservative circles. Again, though, very little was done. A few online entities were created. Only a couple (that I know of) survived. They are professionally invisible.

Today the situation is far more dire. In the face of the rise of foreign powers such as Russia and China, whose strengths are that they take education seriously, the collapse of higher education in the West is an existential threat to our survival — one of several!

The only way we can come back is through the creation and building up of new institutions. I only know of one so far whose founders seem to be doing everything right and are planning to launch their first full freshman class next fall: the University of Austin, presently taking up one floor of a single building in downtown Austin, Texas; and with plans to break ground for a traditional physical campus in the near future.

Other things being equal, the country — indeed, the entire Western world — needs more such efforts. One institution alone cannot possibly do the job of bringing back (or possibly creating) and implementing a philosophy of education that values the pursuit of truth, free speech and inquiry, affirms the necessity of civil discourse, and can carry it forth into society. That is: education and training there can merge intellectual-foundations learning into real world action for the purposes of problem-solving and human flourishing.

I have no idea if the present marketplace will support such efforts, so deep is the cultural Marxist rot in contemporary culture. Will such efforts, assuming their founders are able to get the word out, find networks of support who are willing to invest in them? Will students come, perhaps of all ages, who are fed up with the self-censorious ambience of the mainstream institutions, willing to take a chance on something new? Will accreditation agencies support them, or are they, too, compromised by the DEI worldview (last I heard, most were just as bad as the mainstream institutions themselves)? Will prospective employers place any stock in courses taken, or credentials earned, from parallel institutions?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. But if investors or other sources of funding do not see the value in supporting financially the ideas for new institutions still on drawing boards between now and the end of the present decade, and if prospective students do not come, we can expect the present rot to deepen until it pulls down what is left of Western civilization which will seem to have committed intellectual and institutional suicide.

That’s if a major cyberattack, a physical terrorist attack, another plan-demic, or some other calamity we should have anticipated and circumvented but didn’t, doesn’t do us in first.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored two books, around 25 articles, book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and eventually unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself. In 2012 he moved to Chile. He is married to a Chilean national. They live in a remote location in Chile’s Bío-Bío region.

Steven Yates’s Substack publication Navigating the New Normal is here. Please consider subscribing (it’s still free).

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023), set in a version of H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmos, can be gotten here.

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Could April 8 Be a Day of Terror and the Start of Financial Endgame?

By Steven Yates

March 2, 2024

“In our view … derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.” —Warren Buffett

Those who know me know that where human affairs are concerned, I don’t like making predictions. Given complexity, no one ever knows all the factors leading to a given event, or that could influence it. So I sketch scenarios. Scenarios are not predictions. They offer possibilities. They draw pictures. They suggest that if a specific set of circumstances should align, the event depicted could take place. They gain credibility by noting trends we can see if we’re observing honestly.

A couple of weeks ago I posted an article on my Substack publication Navigating the New Normal from one Sarah Smith, pseudonym of a woman I’ve known for years. She’s done a few things under her real name, but with family to think of, in the New Normal she wants to keep her head down. She’s given me permission to draw on her ideas and resources. I’m uncomfortable doing so without crediting her for drawing the scenario below. I don’t know the probability that something bad will happen on April 8. Sarah assures me, though, that well-connected and well-informed people who have better information than I do are worried. That tells me, the odds are not zero!

Open Borders and the Threat of Terrorism.

What are we sure of? That the Bidenistas want open borders. They threw open the southern border after ousting Trump back in 2020-21. Migrants began massing on our southern border not by the thousands but by the hundreds of thousands. Discovering they could cross the border without consequence, they came in even larger numbers. Different sources cite anywhere from 6.2 million to 10 million illegal migrants entering the U.S. since January 21, 2021. They’ve gone (or been sent) to every major city, where some have made mayhem. Only some are Hispanic. Others entering the U.S. illegally are Chinese nationals (thousands — enough to form an army on U.S. soil!). There are also likely Hezbollah loyalists able to form sleeper cells answering to Iran! Should the U.S. end up in a direct confrontation with that country, these cells could easily be activated!

In other words, it’s as if the Bidenistas are inviting a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, possibly in response to the mayhem “our” war machine has made in the Middle East, or just its unconditional support for Israel.

No one I know of thinks “Joe Biden” is doing this. With his cognitive decline, I doubt he can still find Iran on a map. Does whoever is behind him — Obama? Obama’s handlers? — have a larger agenda reflecting hatred for Western civilization? Some think so.

The Derivatives Bubble: Could a Terrorist Attack Lead to The Great Taking and CBDCs?

A terrorist attack — or multiple attacks on the same day — if they occurred, say, in America’s Heartland, would do more than cause a major economic downturn. They could set in motion cascading defaults that would dwarf what we saw back in 2008. They could burst the derivatives bubble. Financial Endgame would follow.

The derivatives bubble is the largest bubble in human history. Its size exceeds the actual physical wealth on the planet. It is not without reason that Warren Buffett referred to derivatives as potential “financial weapons of mass destruction.”

We are indebted to David Rogers Webb who smoked out what the bursting of this bubble would mean for ordinary people, revealing it in his book The Great Taking which I’ve reviewed and continued to reference.

A 1990s revision to the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) adopted by all 50 states gives special, “protected class” legal status to the too-big-to-fail banks (Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo). In the wake of the complete financial meltdown that would follow, the revised UCC would be used to justify digitally transferring all securities (stocks, bonds, mortgages, pensions, 401ks, etc.) to the too-big-to-fail banks, and it would be legal!

Picture awakening one morning, logging into your IRA or 401k to check its performance, and seeing that to your horror, your account balance is zero! Your money has vanished! In a panic you try to call your broker and discover that your phone isn’t working! Your bank is shuttered, surrounded by police barricades also surrounding every other local bank branch! You still can’t reach your broker. Numb, you try to process all this and wonder what happens next!

It’s the Great Taking! See again Sarah Smith’s article here, or here.

The Federal Reserve and the too-big-to-fail banks will then issue central bank digital currency (CBDC) with the backing of Uncle Sam. I envision “Joe Biden” signing an executive order establishing the new financial system supposedly to deal with the disaster and likely national panic that could end with fresh lockdowns and martial law being imposed. Smaller banks not absorbed by the too-big-to-fail leviathans will not reopen. If you had an account in one of them, your money is simply gone!

David Webb recounts how this happened early in the Great Depression.

Technology has changed, of course. Once you’re back online (having jumped through all the hoops of producing federally issued ID) you’ll be able to download an app into your phone enabling you to obtain your allotment of CBDC! If you want to buy food, you’ll have no choice!

A terrorist attack, or a series of them, could be the first cause in a chain of events designed to leave average Americans penniless and helpless once again!

What would be the best day for such an attack?

How about a day when nearly everyone is distracted by something else, something rare and exciting? Like a solar eclipse! Like the solar eclipse that will darken a large swath of Middle America on April 8! This is the essence of Sarah Smith’s scenario.

More Red Flags Now Than Before 9/11.

Sarah told me in a recent phone conversation that county sheriffs in midwestern states have been placed on special notice by the FBI and intelligence agencies. They pay attention, because there have already been numerous hacks, cyberattacks, and other suspicious events interfering with digital systems. One happened just the other day, on February 22. Although AT&T was especially hard hit, mobile users of multiple carriers were without service for close to 12 hours in some cases.

Sheriffs and police chiefs are being told that the American Heartland is being targeted for special attention by terrorists who entered this country illegally. (I recall encountering such talk during the summer prior to 9/11.) Attacks could be physical and involve deadly violence in shopping malls, or digital, aimed at taking down crucial infrastructure for extended periods, or both.

A total eclipse of the sun will cross the Heartland on April 8. Millions are expected to come from non-eclipse states to see it. States are anticipating huge revenues from hotel fees, other extra business, and sales taxes. They’re balancing this against the risks of large public eclipse gatherings. Sheriffs are preparing, with weekly “eclipse meetings.” “Joe Biden” has refused to meet with their leadership, despite the FBI warning that there are presently more “red flags” than there were before 9/11, and that attacks will come: “it’s not a matter of if, but when.”

Sheriff Richard K. Jones is working hard to prepare the residents of Butler Co., Ohio, Sarah’s home county, in the path of eclipse totality. He held a town meeting to share what he learned at a recent conference. Watch (25 minutes) and decide for yourself if you think alarm is justified.

The UCC and the End of Property Rights.

Securities were called that because they were — well — secure! Once, long ago, when you bought a stock, you were issued a paper certificate: legal proof of your ownership of that stock. Part of your private property.

Not anymore! Not since the mid-1990s (an indication that what we’re seeing has nothing to do with the Meltdown of 2008; long time readers know this agenda didn’t begin yesterday!)!

The Heartland Institute, based near Chicago, defends private property rights, with the understanding that without private property rights encoded in law you don’t have a free society.

The Institute recently issued a detailed letter explaining the change in the UCC, which ended private property rights based ownership of securities. Here’s the key paragraph:

Over the past few years, the world’s largest financial institutions, those often referred to as “too big to fail,” have been quietly preparing for a potential global financial crisis. One of the ways in which they have done this is by lobbying legislators to change the way collateral is held under state laws, to reposition banks to have priority claim over the wealth stored in investments, 401ks, and IRA accounts. The result of their efforts is that Article 8 of the UCC effectively nullifies citizens’ fundamental property rights over their investments.

David Webb talks about dematerialization, an important concept in this context. The basic idea is not hard. Webb tells us at the start of Chapter 2 of The Great Taking:

There are now no property rights to securities held in book-entry form in any jurisdiction, globally. In the grand scheme to confiscate all collateral, dematerialization of securities was the essential first step. The planning and efforts began over half a century ago. That there was some great strategic purpose behind dematerialization is evidenced by the fact that the CIA was assigned the mission….

After the behind-the-scenes changes made to the UCC, all you now have are security entitlements. What does this mean? Security entitlements are a phantom, a kind of fake ownership. Webb again, in Chapter 3:

In order to convey to you what has been done, let me start with an analogy:

Let’s say that you have purchased an automobile for cash. Having no debt against the vehicle, you believe that you now own it outright. Despite that, the auto dealer has been allowed by a newly invented legal concept to treat your car as his asset, and to use it as collateral to borrow money for his own purposes. Now the auto dealer has become bankrupt, and your vehicle along with all of the others sold by the dealer are seized by certain secured creditors of the dealership, with no judicial review being necessary, as legal certainty was previously established that they have absolute power to take your car in the event of the bankruptcy of the dealer.

Now, to be clear, I am not talking about your car! I am illustrating the horror and simplicity of the lie: You are led to believe that you own something, but someone else secretly controls it as collateral. And they have now established legal certainty that they have absolute power to take it immediately in the event of insolvency, and not your insolvency, but insolvency of the people who secretly gave them your property as 8 III Security Entitlement 9 collateral. It does not seem possible. But this is exactly what has been done with all tradable financial instruments, globally! The proof of this is absolutely irrefutable. This is wired to go now.

In other words, your stocks are not really yours! The money in your bank account is not really yours! If you’re paying or even if you’ve paid off a mortgage, your home is not really yours! In a major financial meltdown, all could be taken from you in the blink of an eye to save the too-big-to-fail banks, and it’s legal because it’s in the UCC!

Recall that in the future you will own nothing, have no privacy, and be happy? (And possibly eat bugs.) The next financial meltdown will introduce that kind of dystopia if nothing is done to reverse the changes of the 1990s.

Putting This All Together: What You Can Do.

David Webb is somewhat pessimistic, given the complexity of the financial instruments we’re talking about which are beyond the average investor’s level of understanding, and given how far along this agenda is. But we’re not helpless!

First, if you’ve not yet done so, please read The Great Taking and download the film. Do this while you still can! Here, in one place:

Download a PDF of the book for free. Watch David Webb’s documentary here.

Watch a 37-minute summary of the “Great Taking” book and movie. This will make them easier to process quickly. Take notes on everything.

You’ll find an attorney’s assessment of the book’s legal claims here.

Read Sarah Smith’s article (again: here or here).

The Great Taking is heavily referenced. Its conclusions are irrefutable! Webb is no amateur. He has years of experience in the financial world to back up his claims. The fact that he’s made his book available for free is evidence of how badly he wants this information to get out while there’s still time. He doesn’t care if he makes money from this. He cares about freedoms: your freedoms. Which won’t last much longer if something happens to pop the derivatives bubble and we’re not prepared!

A terrorist attack, or several, on April 8, aided and abetted by three years of Bidenista open borders, with everyone distracted by a solar eclipse, could do just that by causing a cascading financial meltdown that would make 2008 look like a bad hangover by comparison.

Will anything happen on April 8? I don’t know. That’s why I only sketch scenarios. The sheriffs Sarah referenced certainly think it possible; she didn’t simply make all this up. Remember that “it’s not a matter of if, but when.”

It’s an easy mistake, thinking this is just the U.S. Because of how technology has connected the world, cascading events would be global in scope — as would be the response, not unlike the response to the WHO declaring a global emergency back in March 2020 and suddenly the entire world is locking down! Becoming an expat — not that that’s something you can do on the spur of the moment — is no longer an answer!

The U.S. is ground zero, however, because it’s still the world’s largest economy. Donald Trump has only gained momentum as the lawfare attacks on him and on those surrounding him have intensified. A powerful superelite sees a second Trump term as an existential threat to its global dominance and will pull out all stops to keep him from getting back into the White House. Leftist foot soldiers are likely to take to the streets well before November if convictions elude leftist prosecutors, leftist attorney generals, leftist judges. Sarah told me she doesn’t think there will even be an election in November. I pray she’s mistaken, but I can’t prove her wrong.

If nothing happens on April 8, so much the better! But something will happen! Eventually!

Welcome to the New Normal!

Bottom line: the more people who read The Great Taking, the better! Forward this information and the links above to your local, state, and national representatives, your mayors, your local sheriffs, your State Governor. Print the letter linked to above (for convenience purposes here it is again); meet with your representatives, walk them through it. Urge them to introduce legislation reversing the changes of the 1990s and restoring unequivocal ownership rights over securities.

Also share this information with your pastors, deacons, priests, rabbis; send one to your attorney if you have one, and the person who does your tax return. Send it to the chair of your local school board, and to members. Send it to any other decision-makers and influencers you can think of. Have them forward it to local, state, and national representatives. There is power in numbers!

Speak publicly to local groups if you’re so inclined. Hardcopy editions of The Great Taking are obtainable (clothback or paperback). Get your local public library to order one if you can (donate a copy if they can’t or won’t), then begin a reading-and-discussion group and work through it. Do these things now, not tomorrow. These are specific actions you can take, in addition to other measures such as having physical cash on hand, learning to grow vegetables in a garden, and other activities that will enable your personal and financial self-reliance should CBDCs be forced on the world. Of one last thing we can be certain: the too-big-to-fail banks and the globalists behind them will not go down without a fight!

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

This article is also available on Steven Yates’s Navigating the New Normal (Substack). Subscribe to Navigating the New Normal to receive access to exclusive content.

Steven Yates has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

His book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

Winning Arguments in the Narrative Wars (Hint: You Can’t)

By Steven Yates

February 27, 2024

“I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect … they don’t even invite me.” —Dave Barry

A couple of weeks ago I watched a mentoring-type video (no longer available, as its creator only keeps these up for 72 hours, for reasons of his own) on the theme of how to win any argument. As a one-time logic instructor (ghost out of my past) and a narrative warrior (sort of, kind of, my glorious present), I was fascinated!

Intellect versus Basic Beliefs and Mental Prisms

The presenter focused on the difference between intellect and basic beliefs. Intellect is how smart you are, sometimes reflected in strings of university-gained credentials. In my experience, people who are unquestionably smart — some of them light years ahead of me in their specialties — can still believe some incredibly stupid things outside those specialties. Or so they seem!

Basic beliefs are often a product of unconscious conditioning. The process gets started in childhood, long before the child develops a capacity to rationally evaluate an idea or belief system. A few develop this capacity as they reach adulthood, and the results overturn a lot of what they grew up believing.

This happened in my case, and in other folks I’ve numbered among friends and acquaintances over the accumulated years.

Most others sleepwalk into adulthood still seeing everything through the mental prism supplied by the belief system they were immersed in as children and never learned to question.

What they see, they see only in ways that reinforce their belief system. Logicians call this confirmation bias. What doesn’t reinforce their basic beliefs, they often won’t see at all.

That calls forth the perennial question: what happens when people with different belief systems meet, start interacting, and discover how different they are from one another? They have different narratives. Each will have all sorts of questions for the other, but few for themselves.

All too many such interactions descend into sarcasm and ridicule. Examples permeate daily newspapers, letters to the editor, comments sections, blogs, and mostly unmoderated online forums. Very productive stuff!

The unpleasant truth: where basic beliefs are concerned, persuading people to change their minds using intellectual arguments is extremely difficult, and if others aren’t open to being persuaded, it isn’t doable at all. Those across the aisle won’t hear, because they can’t hear. That mental prism I mentioned is screening out everything you’re saying. If you double down, you’re only going to drive them away. This is why most arguments over politics and religion (and sex) are lose-lose propositions.

This applies directly to the narrative wars we’re in.

The Narrative Wars

I don’t doubt that a lot of urbanized, left-leaning foot soldiers in corporate media, the legal system, the entertainment industry, and of course academia, are scratching their heads at Donald Trump’s continued popularity despite those 91 felony charges and civil suits that so far have cost him (on paper, anyway) around half a billion dollars. Trump remains the Republican base’s favorite. That same base is dismissing Nikki Haley as George W. Bush in a dress.

The present-day GOP base’s firm belief is that the allegations against Trump are political, and hence invalid.

What’s the basic belief system here? For many, it’s that they’ve been thrown to the wolves by an Establishment (large corporations including former employers as well as the federal government) that couldn’t care less about them and proves this with its insults about, e.g, “deplorables.”

And since most are white, they see Establishment policies like Diversity-Equity-Inclusion which includes everyone except them, as disadvantaging them educationally, careerwise, religiously, culturally.

A recent group of academics — political scientists, I hear, led by a guy with the unlikely name of Brandon Rottinghaus — has ranked the presidents. They put Abraham Lincoln at the top of their list as the greatest U.S. president. Guess who they relegated to the bottom. I probably don’t have to tell you.

The GOP base is going to respond to what they regard as yet another provocation that this is the best reason they’ve seen this week why no one should pay attention to woke academics.

I honestly believe the academics, and many of their counterparts in media and elsewhere, see themselves as trying to secure “our endangered democracy,” i.e., the “democratic institutions” that constitute “our” Establishment.

If the divisions are this intractable, how does one win any argument? How do you cross the conceptual gulf created by the narrative wars?

You Can’t Win, So You Shouldn’t Try

The unfortunate answer: you don’t.

Your best bet — unless you’re in the business of writing about this sort of thing, like I am — is not to begin arguing.

Remember the old rhyme: a man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still.

Most people are going to believe what they want to believe. They are just following their childhood imprinting.

This will tell them that most of the time they can trust the authorities, at least on “important stuff” including governance. They are going to reinterpret whatever evidence you present in terms of what that mental prism allows them to see.

And speaking of evidence (since every day I see phrases like so-and-so claimed without evidence that…), those locked into agendas or serving such will demand evidence, or imply lack of such, when confronted with something they don’t want to believe. If you point to evidence, they’ll move the goalposts. They’ll either dismiss your claim, denying that it exists or reinterpreting it to fit their prism. They’ll then tell you, “there’s no evidence.”

Continuing the argument is a loser’s game.

If it’s something they believe, or want to believe, they couldn’t care less about evidence.

Example: corporate media and the entire deep state behind it want to believe Vladimir Putin is responsible for Russian political prisoner Alexei Navalny’s death last week. No one appears to have noticed that nothing, no direct chain of causality, connects Putin to Navalny’s death.

Meanwhile, speaking of political prisoners, no one in “legacy” media even mentions the ongoing effort to extradite Julian Assange to the U.S. to face trial for the “crime” of exposing deep state war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan spread across two administrations, one of an Establishment Republican, the other an Establishment Democrat.

Their mental prisms simply won’t let them see it!

See how this works?

Flat-Earthism and Other Christian Mental Prisms

Among my Christian friends are a few folks who now think the Earth is flat.

They think Biblical references to a “firmament in the heavens” (Genesis) and God’s “laying the foundations of the world” (Job) are literal and not figurative, and require a flat Earth.

It’s clear: I’m not going to argue them out of this belief, and I’ve learned not to try.

One of my beliefs is that God created a world that ultimately makes sense, at least some of its truths discoverable by physical science, because He created us with intellects capable of such an endeavor. I don’t see how the technological civilization we’ve built over the past few centuries would have been possible, were this false. But that’s just me.

I’m prepared to respond to claims about the Earth being flat with something like, “That’s what you think? How interesting!” And then dropping it.

Incidentally, I also don’t think there’s going to be a “rapture.” This, it seems to me, is based on an elementary misreading of II Thess 4:16 – 5:2, combined with Matthew 24. My reference here is typically to Gary DeMar’s Myths, Lies & Half-Truths: How Misreading Their Bibles Neutralizes Christians (2000).

I think that when whatever happens, happens, Christians are going to be clobbered right along with everyone else — in the short term, anyway.

Guess what? I’ve never convinced anyone of this, either. I don’t try. (Maybe DeMar, unlike myself a real theologian, had better results disputing dispensationalism.)

Wisdom: A Theory

Wisdom — that which a trained philosopher such as myself is supposed to “love” — surely includes the insight (among others) that humans are more emotional than rational. It has been understood at least since the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote of it in his Treatise of Human Nature (1730s) that emotions are more powerful motives to action than reason. Most if not all worldview beliefs are held for emotional and not rational reasons. In most cases, it does not occur to the believer that his worldview could be false.

This is not to say that reasons are irrelevant, or that persuasion is utterly impossible. But most of the time, what I said above applies: there will be goalpost-moving and reasons either won’t be seen or won’t be seen as decisive.

You have to decide if making an effort is worth your time and energy. That is going to depend on your situation: who are you trying to persuade, and why?

Atheists are convinced that a complete world-explanation is possible without a God. Okay….

In my 60-something years of experience, the atheists I’ve known have usually been more obsessed with God, Christ, religion, etc., than I ever thought of being. I’ve come to find this phenomenon — well — interesting.

I noticed this back in the ‘00s’ when I was dating a woman who confided to me that she didn’t believe in God. At some point I must have said I was a believer. Both of us were supporting Dr. Ron Paul for the 2008 GOP nomination. It’s how we met. But somehow, despite the many practical problems involved in trying to sell reluctant Republicans on Dr. Paul’s messages about the Federal Reserve, the debt bubble that even then was starting to blow up in our faces (think: 2008), the American war machine, etc., every conversation we had somehow went back to religion. I wasn’t the one bringing it up.

The relationship ended after she accused me of “talking down” to her. I was surprised it lasted as long as it did (over a year).

Wisdom also includes knowing the difference between a person’s deeply held beliefs which have become part of their identity versus workaday problems that come our way, about which we can agree are problems (the Paul campaign gave us plenty of those!).

At that point in my own development I’d not yet realized the harsh truth: Dr. Paul was far too intellectual for the emotion-driven American public.

Trump succeeded where Dr. Paul failed because he connected with people on an emotional level. Did he not seem to understand their problems and confidently tell them, beginning back in 2015, “I can fix this!”

Problem-Solving: The Biggest Problem We Face

We humans are, in a very general sense of the term, problem-solvers. The world presents us with an abundance of problems to solve. Some of us get very good at problem-solving in our respective niches. One way of getting rich — or so I am told — is to solve a problem and be able to sell your solution to a lot of people, or to a corporation.

Among our biggest present-day problems are the narrative wars. My counsel, increasingly, is: instead of arguing, walk away. Become independent in as many areas of your life as you can: financial, in terms of food production, in terms of health and safety. Bring family on board to the greatest extent you can (hopefully you’re not “yoked” to a spouse who doesn’t “get it”). Identify like-minded others you can work with locally.

Forget about those obviously aligned with the Establishment. If you can’t get local representatives on board, forget about them.

Ignore leftist pronouncements. Ignore what “LGBTQIAZYXWV+” types are doing if it’s not affecting you or your family. You don’t have a moral obligation to save the world.

If you direct your limited energies into activities you can control, you might soon be in a position to help others.

I don’t know that this it solves the biggest problem, which gives me the most sleepless nights.

And this is?

Science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein’s character Lazarus Long put it this way:

Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

Behind the narrative wars and specifics such as Trump versus Biden is this much deeper clash: between that minority that feels compelled to control whole populations, versus those who want to be left alone.

Whatever actions the latter take have to include defense of their turf. They can’t assume that if they’re nice to the wolves, the wolves will stop being wolves and be nice right back. That’s not how the world works.

Worse still: today’s majority doesn’t much care if they’re controlled, so long as they have sports, Netflix, TikTok, and beer.

Which means: those standing on their demand to be left alone constitute another minority. The “silent majority” some appeal to simply doesn’t exist.

A Remnant

It might be helpful, or at least calming, to realize that both this clash and the dilemmas posed by mass indifference are as old as the human race itself. The prophet Isaiah faced them, when God commanded him to go to a corrupted and decadent Ninevah and preach what the corporatists of his day, were there any, would doubtless have called a message of doom-and-gloom.

God implied that he’d not be listened to and would be lucky if he got out with his hide intact. “Why bother?” he might have asked. The answer:

Unless the Lord of hosts had left to us a very small remnant, we would have become like Sodom, we would have been made like Gomorrah (Isaiah 1:9).

See Albert Jay Nock’s amazing essay “Isaiah’s Job.”

There’s a Remnant out there, a third minority within the majority. Nock wrote of the Remnant:

They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it.

Today’s Remnant has the Internet. They need not be unorganized and inarticulate. Many are probably awake (not “woke”!) and aware. That’s who we are writing for, on Substack, independent sites like NewsWithViews.com, and others.

It’s helpful to realize that history moves in cycles. Civilizations rise. They forget the attitudes, aptitudes, and values that made their rise possible. The majority of their people grow soft, complacent, and entitled. Those motivated by power then move. Initially they meet with little resistance. Civilizations become divided and decadent. The power-hungry encourage both, because divided and decadent populations are easier to control. But they can’t control the Remnant. The Remnant are neither powerful nor power-hungry, though. They can’t prevent a civilizational downturn, or decline.

We’re definitely in a downturn, as consolidations of wealth and power grow and freedom shrinks. Today’s Remnant is still our best hope for Renewal and Rebuilding. Its members don’t think in terms of civil war. They aren’t violent. I’ve inveighed against thinking in such terms. Civil war, if it happened on U.S. soil under today’s circumstances (“blue” versus “red”; urban versus rural; ethnicity against ethnicity) would be nasty and brutal.

The powerful would be the only victors.

Wisdom thus lies in realizing that in the end, no civilization based on accumulated monies and power has ever endured. It invariably falls from within. A “new world order” based on a Great Reset (or a Great Taking) would be no exception. Let’s see to it that the Remnant is ready. This means forgetting about convincing those on the other side, or any majority, with intellectual arguments, and instead reaching out to those who are willing and able to build a future based on responsible freedom.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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This article is also available on Steven Yates’s Navigating the New Normal (Substack). Subscribe to Navigating the New Normal to receive access to exclusive content.

Steven Yates has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

Civil War in America?

By Steven Yates

February 19, 2024

Probably not, but the narrative wars have likely engendered a period of unrest and decline no matter what happens. There remains hope.

[Author’s note: a somewhat different version of this article is available on my Substack, Navigating the New Normal. The updates are due to this being a developing story.]

Last Thursday (Feb. 8), the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on whether or not Donald Trump should remain on GOP ballots. The allegation, as everybody knows, is that on January 6, 2021, speaking to a throng of supporters from the Ellipse, he fomented an insurrection in the disqualifying sense of the 14^th Amendment, Section 3, of the Constitution.

The Court may have decided this case before this has time to go up. I’ve gone ahead with it anyway, because even if (as most of us expect) the Court reverses the Colorado and Maine decisions, we’re nowhere near out of the woods.

While the Supremes seemed more interested in such technical-legalistic matters as whether officer of the United States applies to the presidency, the real question going forward (see here and here) is whether what happened on January 6, 2021 constitutes an insurrection, since Trump told people to march to the Capitol “peacefully and patriotically….” He never suggested anyone go inside the Capitol (it was Ray Epps, possibly among others, who did that!).

This case is unprecedented. We’ve never seen a clash of narratives like this. Those on opposite sides literally do not see the world the same way. They aren’t making the same assumptions about what kind of political system we’re living under. Small wonder some are ready to divide the country — peacefully, if possible; forcibly if necessary. This is where the narrative wars have brought us.

We don’t agree on what really happened that day, six days into 2021. An insurrection, as I explained citing references, is an organized effort to violently overthrow a government. Few who came onto Capitol grounds that day were violent, although there were hotheads on the front lines who broke through barricades, pushed Capitol police to the ground, and broke windows. This was a very small minority of the allegedly 2,000 or so people who entered the Capitol peacefully, some doing no more than walking around for a few minutes and then leaving.

There was no organized effort to overthrow the U.S. government.

So what were they doing? Well over 10,000 people were protesting in Washington, D.C. that day. They had doubts that Joe Biden was elected legitimately. Every effort to pursue the matter through the courts had been rebuffed. Judges did not look at any evidence (e.g., affidavits alleging wrongdoing in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia). They said either, “there’s no evidence” or they used a legal ploy of “no standing to sue.” The Supreme Court refused to hear appeals.

It became as if the use of phrases like conspiracy theorist and election denialism were sufficient to quell the sense of something amiss.

To this day, tens of millions of Americans think Election 2020 was stolen, even if they don’t agree on the circumstances or how the steal was accomplished.

Their reasoning: a man, arguably showing signs of dementia and staying mostly out of public view, trouncing a man able to fill arenas during a pandemic by 7 million popular votes, makes no sense whatsoever.

They now fear that something similar could happen again, in 2024, and in broad daylight!

The Jan-6ers believed they were trying to save democracy. Today we should fear destruction of real democracy, which reflects the will of the people (even those you disagree with), by those gaslighting us with phrases like saving our democracy!

What will happen this November? I honestly don’t know. But there is no reason to think it’s going to be pretty, with an outcome accepted automatically by both sides.

What then?

Civil War? Or massive civil unrest?

I do not think anything that happens will rise to the level of civil war.

Civil wars happen when discourse over fundamental disputes between two factions, both having sufficient resources to exact their wills on the body politic, breaks down. Laws and policy decisions are then disregarded as both sides battle openly and violently for control over dominant institutions, especially mass media.

Is this what we’re looking at? Not quite.

One problem is with both sides having the resources to exact their wills. I do not think Trump’s side has those resources, no matter how much of his own money Trump still has to spend. With efforts underway to cripple him financially, it’s unclear how much he will have when the dirt settles.

The point of the 91 felony lawfare allegations as well as the civil suits has been to render him impotent, and imprisoned, if that’s what it takes to stop him.

To the extent that groups and organizations backing Trump’s side in the narrative wars have some resources and would be able to mount significant national-scale protests if Trump were refused a spot on national ballots, I am unsure how many have the will.

Look at what’s been done to over a thousand Jan-6ers. Most of these people will never get their lives back. Businesses have been destroyed; homes are gone. Some will be unable to find decent work. They have been demonized in corporate media as “Capitol rioters” and “insurrectionists.” This label may well follow them the rest of their lives.

Is this or is this not a major disincentive to mount mass protests, no matter the provocation?

Moreover, in large crowds many of whose members don’t know all others personally and with no way to vet them, infiltration by the FBI or leftist agent provocateurs is a separate risk. Fear of this happening was probably a factor in undermining the Take Our Border Back Convoy which convened at Eagle Pass, Texas, on Feb. 3: instead of 700,000 attendees, around 7,000 showed up, disappointing those who see securing the border with Mexico as a major issue this year.

A recent discussion with a number of legal scholars, political analysts, and national security experts did not feature a single person who predicts a civil war. Some do, however, predict the sort of scattered disruptions that signify civil unrest. I think we will see unrest whatever the Supreme Court decides, in this or in upcoming cases involving Trump.

What I can’t predict is how much, how long it will last, or what the long term repercussions will be.

Most observers think the Court will set Colorado and Maine aside, ensuring that their ruling applies to all 50 states. According to the 14^th Amendment only Congress can invoke the insurrection clause by passing a law, and this isn’t going to happen. This might invite protests from the other side, possibly worse than overturning of Roe v Wade did, because of how the Establishment has presented this situation to the public. Again: “democracy is on the ballot,” Biden has put it. “Democracy itself” is at stake, wax the hysterics (as if the U.S. is really a democracy, which it hasn’t been for a very long time — but never mind that now).

This is how narrative war works.

Assuming Trump is still on ballots as you read this, the globalist-leftist alliance will already be maneuvering full throttle to block a Trump 2.0 administration.

We might see cyberattacks or other false flags to be blamed on Trump supporters. We might even see The Great Taking (see below). Something as sudden as it would be drastic could happen any time between now and November.

I’m not making a prediction here. That would be hazardous. But the fear of Trump 2.0 is palpable.

Bottom line, though: no civil war.

Especially with an Establishment able to command technologies (use of smartphone records, facial recognition, generative AI, etc.) that would make previous tyrants gasp. Plus, I doubt that Homeland Security’s hollow-point bullets have gone anywhere. I’ve seen nothing to suggest that the militarized power centers in the Asylum on the Potomac, if militarized, couldn’t put down any direct domestic challenge to their power with relative ease.

This Is What Civilizational Decline Looks Like.

If we look at the larger sweep of human history, one thing becomes clear: even relatively free societies are very rare. Empires, tyrannies, dictatorships of various sorts, are the norm. In most places and at most times, those in power have done pretty much as they pleased. So is tribalism a norm, almost one of our default settings: “us” versus “them.”

Briefly, Periclean Athens moved towards freedom, but compromised it with slavery, allowed what freedom they had to weaken them in other ways (as Plato observed), the result being the loss of the war with authoritarian Sparta and long-term decline.

The Christian worldview began to create a societal ambience in which there were moral checks on human authority. The powerful couldn’t do as they pleased because they answered to God for their actions. Eventually this ended the idea of “the divine right of kings.” The Christian conviction was that this was a world of physical and moral order. On this foundation rose Western civilization, surely the greatest civilization in human history, via science, technique, property rights, markets, and limits on state power.

By the mid twentieth century we were starting to dismantle the tribal distinctions of the past, via Martin Luther King Jr.’s promotion of judging people “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Those obsessed with the need to control others, and as much of the world as possible, rebelled against the Christian worldview. They’d removed God from the world picture and had learned to use societal and technological systems others had created against them. The scientific-industrial-educational mainstream became de facto materialist. I say de facto because it is not as if many of their managerial disciples reflected on what they were doing. A few did.

The result has been a slow and painful slide backwards towards what the West had partly escaped: tribalism, naked grabs for power, re-enslavement by economic and technical means, and the obliteration of truth in favor of propaganda, gaslighting, and open and unabashed lying.

The Christian conviction of checks on secular power is gone. The sciences, which honestly sought order and explanation, are now The Science, a form of intellectual authoritarianism funded by corporations and government. Technique no longer solves problems for the whole of the body politic but designs algorithms to bring the masses into passivity and control, incentivizing the masses to ensnare themselves (think: nearly all social media).

Property rights no longer exist as such; all are subject to taxation, and even the conditional ownership implied by deeds-plus-property-taxes is being replaced by rent of various sorts, as home ownership becomes harder and harder to afford.

Markets are not free but controlled, because corporations employ hidden incentives or “nudges” of various sorts; the above-mentioned algorithms Big Tech has perfected “know” more about you than you know about yourself and have honed the science of getting you to consume.

Finally, to speak of morality in the halls of Congress is more likely to prompt gales of laughter than serious reflection on where the country is going.

Legal eagles invoke the Constitution which it serves their agendas, as with those using the 14^th Amendment to try to get Trump off ballots. Otherwise, it’s dead.

Is sending money to foreign government fighting wars halfway around the world authorized anywhere in the Constitution? Especially when our own southern border is so porous that thousands of people including possibly dangerous individuals can cross it illegally every month?

Language itself has been perverted. Democracy clearly no longer means government by and for We the People. It is code for one species of elite domination, in which the locus of power isn’t a single figure, such as a Xi or a Putin, but systemic and driven by money. Trump was only able to mount a serious candidacy back in 2015-16 because he could finance his own campaign. Had he lacked those resources, he wouldn’t have registered. Money isn’t everything, of course. It is necessary but not sufficient. If you could literally buy your way into the presidency, Ross Perot and Steve Forbes would have had viable shots back in their day.

Trump had (still has) a great deal of personal charisma, a solid ability to command mass media even if its owners hate his guts, and things to say that resonate with an increasingly disillusioned Republican audience.

He was an existential threat to those who think in terms of global power (globalists) and cultural dismemberment (the brand of hard-leftist that’s obsessed with transgenderism). This is the case even if he has no systematic philosophy of his own. He’s a disruptor by nature. Disruption works, especially when institutions are losing their sense of legitimacy. This loss of legitimacy is characteristic of long-term decline. Many of those behind Trump have no trouble dynamiting (figuratively speaking, of course) something that ceased to work for them long ago.

Trump 2.0 would be an even bigger existential threat to global power and leftist dismemberment because there’s no doubt he’s far more knowledgeable about how to work governing systems now than he was in 2017.

Hence the constant barrage of fear porn from every corporate media outlet, every major magazine, all the dominant political voices in unison.

I’ve no idea how likely a Trump 2.0 administration is. As I’ve said, globalist-leftist power and propaganda will do everything they can to keep it from happening.

What we can be sure of is that should Trump be reelected, it wouldn’t guarantee anything. Anyone who thinks this will quell globalist-financed leftist street protests, probably violent, even if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, is kidding himself.

The next year, 2025, could turn out to be more volatile and violent than anything 2024 served up.

The next administration will face combined challenges: rising homelessness, the debt explosion, the southern border, fentanyl, continued demands by foreign leaders with an entitlement mindset like Zelenskyy, continuing unrest in the Middle East, the possibility of China encircling Taiwan, and more.

I have no trouble envisioning complete paralysis.

The U.S. rose empowered by the magnificent thoughts of the James Madisons and George Washingtons and Thomas Jeffersons of the day. There are no thinkers of that caliber anywhere to be found in our present-day political or moneyed classes. Nor is the view that directed hard work is what builds and sustains civilizations the prevailing one, and even if it were, today’s institutions are designed to reward political connections and politically correct ideology far more than hard work. The latter is a threat to those who have learned how to exploit and profit from the present system.

This is what civilizational decline looks like.

What Happens Next?

I don’t like making predictions. So, I just draw scenarios, and I’ve never had so many in all my pockets at one time. I’ve even heard serious suggestions that there might not even be an election this November.

What do we see? Two mighty forces on collision course!

Those tendencies conveniently labeled “populism”: ordinary people rising up against powerful elites everywhere: in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, The Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Israel, and elsewhere. In a few countries (India, Hungary, Italy), counter-elites have won public office. Counter-elite Jair Bolsonaro was in control in Brazil but tossed by corrupt leftists who are trying to imprison him. A counter-elite named José Antonio Kast, a conservative, could become president of Chile if he decides to run in Chile’s next election (2026). Chile’s presently-dominant leftists are also struggling with inflation and dysfunction.

You know the counter-elites and their supporters because globalist-controlled corporate media demonizes them as extremists, conspiracists, white supremacists, protofascists, spreaders of misinformation, etc., etc.

Globalists (WEF/Davos, the UN/WHO axis, big foundations / funding networks such as Soros’s and Gates’s, others) doubtless fear the unraveling of everything they’ve spent lifetimes working towards. If they lose, they could end up hanging from lampposts! They damned well know it!

It is important not to underestimate what these psychopaths might be capable of! Some do that. (Example here.)

I’m thinking again of The Great Taking. Download the book for free here; David Rogers Webb discusses the book at length here; read my commentary here; lengthy interview with Webb here; another very worthwhile discussion here. We’re hearing warnings of possible cyberattacks, conceivably at the hands of some of those who entered the U.S. illegally which include Chinese nationals as well as Hezbollah sleeper cells awaiting activization on command from the disrupted Middle East.

A single, well-planned and well-placed cyberattack could cripple American infrastructure, take down part or all of the Internet for a time, and bring the global financial system to its knees.

Forget bitcoins and other crypto. Your wallets will be useless pieces of paper.

CBDCs would be introduced as the “fix.” If covid-19 was the biggest power grab we’d ever seen, CBDCs would quickly surpass that.

You’d be allowed back on a vastly more controlled Internet with government-issued ID (e.g., a passport). No more anonymity.

CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) would then be downloadable via an app in your phone and could be programmed to work only during a specific time duration (to ensure that you consume), to purchase certain goods or services but not others (to ensure that you consume what those in power want you to consume), and to function only within a given radius (in case the programmers have been told by their masters to restrict peasant movement, as in the “sustainable cities” WEF globalists envision).

Cash would, of course, disappear as a casualty of the financial calamity. Cash can’t be tracked or traced or monitored.

Few would be in a position to resist — presumably mass starvation is not an option! Those stuck in big cities would find themselves in a dystopia that would make present-day China look like a paradise by comparison.

Dissent? Your CBDC would be turned off, so that you can’t buy food.

Hope.

There remains hope, of course, and it is important not to lose sight of this.

We also learn from history that events move in long cycles. Civilizations rise, then they decline and fall. Most fall from within. Discussions of how cycles work are readily available (start here). There are conditions on a society’s existence, and if those conditions cease, it finds itself living on borrowed time.

Economies based exclusively on debt eventually collapse. The track record is 100 percent.

“Prophets” try to point this out and draw attention to the problems. Initially they are dismissed as “doomers-gloomers” and denounced in controlled media. The masses are either too insouciant to listen or just too busy trying to survive.

But “prophets” always find a following that has figured out the truth. Some refer to this following as a remnant (Isaiah 1:9). This remnant will build up a new society, restoring values and practices that work.

We are clearly in a decline phase. Our “prophets” are increasingly listened to. There are remnant communities already out there, organizing a “parallel economy” mostly outside the grid. Others are in the planning stages.

Such groups, like the Amish, would be far less affected by a Great Taking.

The future, I submit, lies with those who can take charge of their own educations and lives, learn to sustain themselves growing their own food so that they don’t need CBDCs or even cash for purchases, developing barter systems where necessary.

They will be closer to the natural order and therefore closer to God, the Creator and Author of nature and therefore of real sustainability before globalists hijacked that term and used it for their own insidious purposes.

One thing is for sure: building communities outside the power systems and sustaining them while riding out whatever occurs will take resilience. How many of us are working on that?

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

Steven Yates has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

Claudine Gay and the Collapse of DIE Ideology, Part 2

By Steven Yates

January 4, 2024

[Author’s note: the material below represent the conclusions of this author and should not be attributed necessarily to NewsWithViews.com or its editors.]

“It would be my greatest sadness to see Zionists (Jews) do to Palestinian Arabs much of what Nazis did to Jews.” —Albert Einstein

Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) ideology is riddled with inconsistencies and outright hypocrisies. Consider:

Are Palestinians an “Oppressed Group”?

Students educated in the Ivy League DIE environment thought so. This turned out not to be the case, and if one thinks the matter through, it’s not hard to see why not.

The most powerful lobby in the U.S. is AIPAC (acronym for America-Israel Political Action Committee). Many neocons have dual American-Israeli citizenship. For a time they were the Republican Establishment, promoting war in the Middle East on false pretexts (e.g., Iraq, over WMDs that did not exist), and then came to wonder why they aren’t trusted. One of the most powerful watchdog groups is the Anti-Defamation League, founded the same year as the Federal Reserve — 1913 — and ready to accuse any criticism of Israel as a sign of the critic’s “antisemitism.”

Whether anyone is comfortable with the admission or not (and I admit, I am not), Jews are easily the wealthiest and most powerful identifiable group across corporate media, politics, the entertainment industry, and higher education. Less than two percent of the U.S. population controls over 90 percent of these. Even Donald Trump bows before this less-than-two-percent.

One of the unwritten rules of academia, therefore, goes something like: hands off Israel! Never mind the attempts at boycotting the Jewish state, or movements favoring “divestment.”

Ask Steven Salaita, who is part-Palestinian, a scholar with a number of left-leaning works to his credit. He learned this the hard way. Salaita had accepted a teaching position in Native American Studies at the University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana — presumably a left-leaning institution in a left-leaning state. Following severe criticisms of Israel on Twitter in the wake of Israel’s bombardments of Gaza in 2014, he found his signed contract abruptly withdrawn. He’d already resigned from a previous position and arranged to move to Champagne-Urbana, Ill. with his family.

Salaita filed suit against the university. What came out during the discovery process was that wealthy Jewish donors had threatened to withdraw their donations if Salaita stayed. Money talked.

Salaita found himself jobless. The university settled the lawsuit for $875,000. This did not save his academic career, and he retrained as a bus driver.

Eventually he found a teaching position: overseas, at the American University in Cairo.

Palestinians generally do not appear to count as an “oppressed group” in the American DIE world despite having been kicked violently off their land in the Middle East when (primarily Jewish) global elites created Israel almost three quarters of a century ago and ruthlessly suppressed ever since. Gaza, where over two million Palestinians ended up settling and surviving as best they could, was one of the worst places in the world to live before the recent hostilities began.

Is Israel an “apartheid state”?

Not to Christian Zionists — those who believe present-day Israel is a fulfillment of God’s Old Testament promises, so that present-day Israel has something to do with the Israel of the Old Testament besides geographical location.

A writer whose judgment I’d trusted accused me of falling for “Marxist propaganda” when I invited a number of Christians in my general orbit to consider seriously the apartheid state allegation, in the context of questioning this relationship. But surely the Palestinians have “a few” legitimate gripes — far more, in fact, than American blacks have against American whites, or women against men. There are writers of an intelligent left who have defended the Palestinian cause, but they are few and far between in comparison to those who defend every black cause, every feminist cause, every gay cause, and now every “trans” cause.

The Diversity Most Worth Having …

… is a diversity of ideas, a diversity in thought, not a mere diversity of faces and lifestyles.

However uncomfortable this is. Truth doesn’t have to respect our comfort zones.

We need a diversity of worldviews, as well as political and socioeconomic philosophies, in an environment in which those with differing opinions are encouraged to communicate with one another in a spirit of mutual interest and cooperation, not conflict and hostility.

Critical reflection on our own ideas, and their mutual examination in light of the ideas of other, makes them better. Or shows what is wrong with them and why they ought to be scrapped. Either way, we get better.

This militates in favor of pluralism.

It supports the idea of institutions welcoming both Christianity and alternatives to it, and rejecting the unbridled hostility to everything Christian we see in contemporary academia and culture.

It supports conservatism as well as liberalism and even leftism. It rejects the subtext accompanying every job description such as the one above: no conservatives need apply!

Believe it or not, there are folks out there who self-identify as leftist whom I don’t consider crazy. This is because they get some things right. They have their eyes on power systems, destructive processes, and dysfunctional arrangements. Their criticisms are pragmatic rather than moral. They understand, e.g., that massive and worsening economic inequality is destabilizing if those at the bottom can claim credibly that those at the top “cheated” to get there.

If you need an example of such a thinker, consider Greek author and economist Yanis Varoufakis, best known for his brief stint as Finance Minister with the Syriza Party in 2014. He tried to stand up to the powerful European Central Bank, renegotiate his country’s debt, and work to end the austerity that had impoverished Greece. He’s now an economics professor at the University of Athens and helps head up a pro-democracy organization in Europe (DiEM-25); and yes, he is a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause.

How did I learn of him? Back in 2015 I penned an essay entitled “Technofeudalism Rising.” This essay is no longer available (for whatever reason). A year or so ago, I learned that Varoufakis was working on a book entitled Techno-Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, published late last year. Naturally I was more than merely intrigued. But that’s a longer story than I can get into here.

Varoufakis is no Christian. He thinks the EU can be reformed. He has other ideas I can’t countenance. I read him anyway, because (1) he’s a colorful writer who integrates family history and personal experience into his narrative, as I sometimes do, and as opposed to abstract argumentation, and (2) he’s doubtless right that the Anglo-European oligarchic structures of economic power are sweeping us all into a feudal-type order based on what he calls “cloud capital.” In this order “you’ll have no privacy, own nothing, but be happy.”

A close examination of Varoufakis’s narrative and conclusions alongside those of — shall we say — more mainstream economists, would illustrate the kind of diversity I want: a diversity of ideas, of thought, of worldviews.

But where, and how?

We Need New Institutions.

I don’t think American academia is reformable from the inside. Well-publicized horror stories have multiplied over recent years. Nothing here is new. Claudine Gay is just the latest embarrassment, and she continues to have a parade of defenders decrying the “racism” of the “conservative movement” that let to her ouster. You’d almost think conservatives had social power beyond a few think tanks!

Job descriptions such as the one above continue. They are crystal clear about the kind of person they want. No conservatives need apply! I chose that one because in writing DIE directly into the institution’s job requirements, it was unusually explicit.

Trying to reform institutions through what amount to hostile takeovers is not worth it, and not likely to succeed in any event. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis tried to do this with New College, located near Sarasota, Fla. Instead of reforms, the institution faced faculty resignations and turned into a war zone. Is this really the sort of environment where quality education in the above sense can ensue? DeSantis, as do so many (and as I did!), underestimated the power of the cultural left, in both woke corporations such as Disney and in academia.

We need new institutions — parallel institutions, as one element of a parallel economy, based on assumptions of the desirability of human freedom (especially freedom of speech and inquiry), free markets instead of corporatism and technocracy, and, I’d argue, a study of those things we did right back in the 1940s and 1950s that made the U.S. economy the strongest in human history — without today’s computing power, mind you! — and set us on track towards even better things. If there’s a role for government in this, then let’s review those areas where government is credited as having helped out in some way and find out, again, what went right and why. Can we do things better the next go round?

Can we circumvent what then threw us off track: e.g., elitist maneuvers that were already paving the way for a more controlled society working especially through public schools (the “progressive education” movement), creeping collectivism more broadly, encroaching secular materialism and the Jacobinism and death culture that invariably comes with that.

To date, we have one institution that fits the bill as the kind of parallel institution I have in mind. It’s called the University of Austin (UATX), based in Austin, Texas, had held a few well-received programs, and plans to admit its first regular class of students fall semester of this year. UATX has received thousands of inquiries from faculty elsewhere. This is a sure indication of the level of discontent that exists within mainstream academia and a sign that one such institution is not enough.

As the slow and painful collapse of DIE-driven institutions continues in the wake of the Claudine Gay debacle, new ones must arise to pick up the ball. Other things being equal, they will cease to be parallel institutions and become a new educational mainstream.

You will know, finally, that if — say — a black woman sits in the president’s chair at one of these institutions, she will be there because of hard, honest work, and not because she checked a box.

*My inversion of DEI to get DIE is deliberate, of course.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

Steven Yates has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

Claudine Gay and the Collapse of DIE Ideology, Part 1

By Steven Yates

January 28, 2024

“Racism is not dead, but it is on life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists’” —Thomas Sowell

“The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.” —Thomas Sowell

The recent exposés on Claudine Gay, Harvard’s former president and current embarrassment, illustrate what we critics were saying about affirmative action decades ago: it promotes unqualified people into positions of responsibility, hurting their institutions.

Claudine Gay is such an obvious case of a Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE) appointment that I’d think even leftists would be appalled.

J.D. Vance’s tweet wasn’t atypical of conservatives noting the obvious: “She got her job not through merit, but because she checked a box.”

That would have been something she couldn’t plagiarize, one of the cardinal sins of academia at which she’d been caught red-handed.

Ms. Gay will be returning to her tenured faculty position.

What I am reasonably sure of: had I been caught copying from the writings of others in my doctoral dissertation, or articles for academic journals, without giving proper credit, it would have meant the end of my career aspirations as a professor which turned out to be unexciting in any event. I’m just another white guy, after all.

What led to this was Ms. Gay’s awkward response to allegations of antisemitism at Harvard in the wake of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Pro-Palestinian student protests had erupted on a lot of campuses including Harvard where a well-publicized letter by “33 student groups” (names withheld) blamed October 7 on Israel, noting the longstanding humanitarian crisis in Gaza and holding Israel “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” and that “the apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years.”

The letter, which appears to have been scrubbed from the Internet, was read as implying that Israeli victims of Hamas “deserved it.”

To say this prompted an explosive reaction in the Harvard community doesn’t begin to cover it. Students associated with the letter found themselves doxxed. Donor money was withdrawn. Job offers were rescinded. Etc.

Jewish students claimed they felt threatened.

On December 5 (useful timeline here), Ms. Gay and two other university presidents on campuses that had experienced pro-Palestinian disruptions, Liz Magill at the University of Pennsylvania and Sally Kornbluth at MIT, were grilled by Elise Stefanik (R-NY) who asked point blank, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment?”

Ms. Gay’s reply: “The rules around bullying and harassment are quite specific and if the context in which that language is used amounts to bullying and harassment, then we take, we take action against it.”

She’d evaded instead of answering the question.

Ms. Magill and Ms. Kornbluth supplied similarly evasive responses. Rep. Stefanik called for their resignations.

The next day Ms. Gay tried to clarify: “There are some who have confused a right to free expression with the idea that Harvard will condone calls for violence against Jewish students. Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard. Those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.”

On December 9, Ms. Magill resigned her position under similar circumstances.

She, too, will return to a tenured faculty position.

Harvard continued to back Ms. Gay as allegations of plagiarism unrelated to the above kerfuffle began to surface, including in her dissertation. Now on national radar, she scrambled to get corrected a number of past publications, trying to minimize the worsening damage to her reputation and that of Harvard.

More allegations came. On January 2, she resigned and issued this embarrassing statement:

“This is not a decision I came to easily. Indeed, it has been difficult beyond words because I have looked forward to working with so many of you to advance the commitment to academic excellence that has propelled this great university across centuries.”

Academic excellence? What does that phrase even mean these days?

Affirmative Action.

I’ve been writing on affirmative action for over three decades now, including what was, unfortunately, my first book. I say unfortunately because the book nearly ended my academic career. I was naïve, with no idea of either the power of the academic/cultural left, or the degree to which more responsible academic liberals hesitating over rising pseudo-subjects like “feminist ways of knowing.” Such claims as that race was a “lens” through which populations see the world were rising in prominence in academia, so that the ”dominant” group (white males) sees the world one way and that “oppressed” groups (everyone else) sees it another. One of my favorite queries in response to such projects was whether airplanes would fly, or bridges stand, for feminist and “Afro-centrist” scientists and engineers.

“Movement” conservatives, too, were terrified of being called racists. This has been their Achilles heel from the start. I’d hoped for backing from outfits like the Heritage Foundation, but found none.

Go back to 1971. That year, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision, Griggs v. Duke Power. This decision ended the right of a company to administer competency tests which plaintiffs contended were discriminatory. This effectively changed the meaning of discrimination from an action taken by an individual or organization to a statistical imbalance.

This bureaucratic way of looking at discrimination led to pseudo-concepts such as underrepresentation, or underrepresented groups, and from there to equity, which is not the same as equality. Equity presupposes policies that correct the imbalance even if these policies mean differential treatment of individual group members. The bureaucratic requirement: representation in organizations and on governing boards reflective of percentages in the general population.

Something that has never existed in any multi-ethnic society anywhere in the world.

This, and many other inconvenient truths are ignored, as prolific author Thomas Sowell who researched the matter thoroughly during the 1980s and 1990s informed us in numerous books. Sowell penned articles like “Affirmative Action: A Worldwide Disaster” where he argued persuasively that the range of policies going by that name, no matter how well-intended, (1) invariably provided favors to some groups at the expense of others; (2) encouraged resentment by those others that might have been mitigated by education for actual nondiscrimination; and so (3) make racial hostility worse, not better, not merely reinforcing undesirable racism but creating conditions for eventual violence between favored and nonfavored groups.

I argued in Civil Wrongs that this is what we’d seen: not an alleviation of distrust and conflict between groups but more of it. With more groups aboard the affirmative action bandwagon (invoking yet another academic pseudo-concept, intersectionality), the kind of tribalism we’d once hoped to transcend had roared back in the guise of identity politics. By the 1990s this included radical feminists and “gendered” this, “gendered” that; homosexuality and the rise of fake phobias (homophobia); and by the 2010s, transgenders and the notion that men can become women and women can become men — and boys, girls; and girls, boys! — through “gender affirming care.”

Pointing out that this is biologically nonsensical can be career-ending in the present environment! Those arguing against allowing biological men to compete in women’s sports are pilloried with accusations of transphobia: the fake phobia that emerged during the 2010s. Former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines is the best known example of someone who faced physical attack by militant transsexuals when she criticized their participation in women’s sports at San Francisco State University.

This began in the policy world with preferences for some at the expense of others. The intellectual world had given us the cultural Marxist notion of straight white Christian “cisgendered” (yet another ridiculous pseudo-concept) males as the “historical oppressors” of all these other groups.

Truth: there are many workplaces and other environments where whites and blacks, men and women, work together and get along just fine because they are at work on common problems.

Activists and professional publicity hounds, however, fan the flames of mutual distrust at every opportunity, often with brazen dishonesty. Corporate media feeds on this because it gets clicks. Just look at how the George Floyd conflagration was handled. It’s clear that Derek Chauvin had no chance whatsoever of getting a fair trial. He is, for all practical purposes, a political prisoner of the DIE mentality.

DIE Begins to Collapse. How Much of Academia Will Go Down With It?

American academia is losing credibility.

The reasons for this go beyond dogmatic commitment to DIE — which, so far, has continued even though a more conservative Supreme Court has struck down affirmative action as unconstitutional (it always was, as it violates the constitutional concept of equal protection under the law).

One can look at how academic institutions handled the covid fiasco, for example, how they hopped uncritically on board with masking, lockdowns, and then the mRNA shots.

Or one can just note the ridiculous expense of getting a degree now. When I was an undergraduate (1970s), you could attend a public university for around $500 per semester and a good private one for perhaps three times that. Compare that to today’s fees of sometimes $10,000s per year, and many wonder if listening to leftist professors for four or more years is worth being saddled as much as six figures of student loan debt (the debt is paid to the federal government but was originally backed by banking leviathans such as JP Morgan Chase which aren’t about to allow it to be written off!).

I digress slightly. The population of men on campuses has been dropping for well over two decades now. At some campuses, women now exceed 60 percent of the student body. The anti-male sentiment of academic feminism, now prevalent in the humanities and social sciences, is the elephant in the front room.

Men are being polite. They aren’t going where they aren’t wanted. How comfortable can they be in an environment where one of the official dogmas is that they are latent rapists: where they hear that one out of every four women will be sexually assaulted during their college years?

Whites are also the one group whose status or standing in society is dropping. For over two decades now we’ve been hearing more and more about “deaths of despair”: premature deaths from treatable conditions, opioid and fentanyl use including overdoses, and suicides.

Working class whites now subsist in a culture that blames them as a group for history’s mistakes, like slavery. It claims they still benefit, in ways they find utterly invisible, from “systemic” or “structural” racism: the first premise of the critical race theory that began to come of age during the politically correct 1990s. Public school administrators deny belligerently that their schools teach this to white children although they’ve been caught numerous times, especially during the covid lockdowns when education went online and parents could see for the first time what had been going on in a lot of classrooms.

One of the ploys has been to eject parents from public school board meetings and threaten to accuse them of “domestic terrorism.”

In what ways, though, are white people they responsible for the black crime rate in Southside Chicago: for the fact — for fact it is — that black lives often don’t seem to matter to other blacks.

I have the strong impression that they mattered far more in Dr. King’s day, and that this exemplifies the utter failure of DIE ideology — assuming its goal ever was to benefit the black community and not simply provide a road to influence for a few unscrupulous opportunists (white as well as black).

What is clear is that most of higher education is determined to hang onto DIE no matter what. Give a close reading to this job listing which came my way just the other day (though I’ve not applied for an advertised academic job in over ten years now I never unsubscribed from this list).

At [redacted] Community College we value the ability to serve students from a broad range of cultural heritages, socioeconomic backgrounds, genders [sic.], abilities and orientations. We prioritize applicants who demonstrate they understand the benefits a diverse student population brings to a community college. The successful candidate will be an equity-minded [sic.] leader committed to student success achieved through collaboration with faculty, classified staff, administration, students and community partners who are also dedicated to closing equity [sic.] gaps.

An equity-minded individual is a person who:

Understands the importance of holding ourselves accountable as educators for closing equity gaps and engaging in equitable practices;
Reframes inequities as a problem of practice and views the elimination of inequities as an individual and collective responsibility;
Encourages positive race-consciousness [sic.] and embraces human difference;
Supports institutional practices that both develop and sustain culturally responsive teaching and learning environments; and
Strategically builds support for and participation in equity-related initiatives across both our internal and external communities.

Just like a single Supreme Court decision reversing Roe v. Wade didn’t circumvent the pro-abort death culture that doubtless cost Republicans in the 2022 midterms, a decision striking down affirmative action requirements on constitutional grounds isn’t going to thwart the antiwhite racists (“antiracists”) who have risen to prominence over the past decade or so, especially when the above-mentioned opportunists can parlay DIE programs and consultations in corporate America into six-figure incomes.

Meanwhile, DIE itself is riddled with inconsistencies and other outright hypocrisies.

*My inversion of DEI to get DIE is deliberate, of course.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

Steven Yates has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

German Farmers Revolt Against Policies Enhancing Globalism and Climate Hysteria

By Steven Yates

January 23, 2024

What we can learn from the German farmers, including what we aren’t supposed to infer about what is possible.

For much of this first month of the new year, protesting farmers have practically shut down Germany. They’ve used trucks and tractors to block major highways in and out of Berlin and several other major German cities. They’ve received massive popular support and been joined by others in “low tech” professions (electricians, rail workers, etc.). Additional support has come from their counterparts in The Netherlands who have been fighting this same battle for over a year now, and from Poland and the Czech Republic.

American media only began noticing the protests after they had been going on a couple of weeks. You’d think the world’s largest protest movement shutting down Europe’s largest economy would be an international story on every home page. You’d have been wrong. I think American media began covering what’s been happening in Germany because they had to know alternative media was on it, and that the truth was going to get out one way or the other. If anything, American corporate media outlets (CNN, MSNBC, the rest) ignoring something like this hurts their credibility even more than it’s been hurt already.

What we’re seeing amounts to a mass revolt against planned budget cuts aimed directly at farmers announced near the end of December by the (pro-globalist) Olaf Scholz government that took the reins in Germany last year. The cuts were to include subsidies for diesel fuel and tax exemptions for tractors and other farm equipment.

These cuts — equivalent to massive tax hikes — would cost farmers thousands more euros per year to operate. Their contention is that this would cost them their livelihoods.

The mass protest has all but shut down Berlin and other major cities. In what coverage we have, one sees signs, mostly in German but a few in English reading, “No farming, no food!” and “No farmers, no future!”

Another reads, “When farmers are ruined, food has to be imported.”

In a few cases the revolt has led to calls for new elections, deeming the coalition Scholz leads “incompetent.”

It might be worth noting that these people have been outdoors, sometimes for days at a time, enduring brutally cold weather with subfreezing temperatures. It’s clear: they mean business. We’re seeing people who don’t think they have anything to lose, revolting against “their” government.

The backdrop here is that Germany’s economy is in catastrophically bad shape. Official numbers show that it contracted last year. German citizens have seen huge spikes in energy costs, higher taxes, and massive inflation. A lot of this is due to what happened to Nordstrom last year. Germany’s budget for 2024 made these cuts to absorb tens of billions of suddenly-unavailable euros after the German constitutional court ruled against a proposal reallocating unused emergency covid-19 funds to agricultural and related sectors. That was in November.

In the wake of the present outrage the Scholz administration has backed down a little, retaining tax exemptions for farming vehicles and announcing that subsidies for diesel fuel would be curtailed little by little instead of eliminated all at once as was the original plan.

To the farmers, this was not good enough. They’ve continued the protest.

Joachim Rukwied, president of the German farmers union, stated:

Agricultural policy is being made from an unworldly, urban bubble and against farming families and rural areas. We demand the complete withdrawal of these tax increases without ifs and buts.

The Urban-Rural Divide.

Among the elements in play here is a divide paralleling the one in the U.S: urban versus rural. The former look down their noses at the latter. The latter see the former as clueless about where their food comes from and what it producing it involves.

The latter’s fear is palpable: “right wing” parties such as the Alternative for Germany (AfD), already gaining in popularity, will capitalize on this.

It is important to note that the farmers themselves deny being right wing. “We are not right-wing extremists!” said one. They are just trying to survive in an environment that is increasingly hostile to their interests.

Nevertheless, we’ve seen a reaction not unlike the borderline-violence of the Justin Trudeau regime in Canada against the Canadian Trucker Convoy back in 2022. Those truckers were protesting an unprecedented covid-19 vaccine mandate. Most were, as is usually the case with patriotic groups, peaceful. A few got out of hand. Someone vandalized a memorial statue. The Canadian government and media treated these outliers as the norm. This is typical of corporate media generally.

Remember (Young Global Leader) Justin Trudeau’s words, having slandered the Trucker Convoy in his country as full of “far right white supremacists”:

“Freedom of expression, assembly and association are cornerstones of democracy, but Nazi symbolism, racist imagery and desecration of war memorials are not.”

He then invoked Canada’s rarely used Emergency Powers Act in order to quash the protest by brute force. Banks proceeded with a chilling move: freezing the accounts of those associated with the protest, indicating the degree of private sector cooperation with government (a hallmark of corporatism, the polite term for the merging of governmental and corporate power global elites have furthered).

Returning to the situation in Germany: like other Western governments, the German government has sent money to Ukraine, and like other Western governments, Germany’s Establishment has funneled resources into so-called green initiatives for what some call a “green transition” to fight “man-made climate change.” Such official narratives are taken for granted in corporate media. The first continues to demonize Russia without recognizing that sanctions against Russia have backfired and hurt millions of common people, especially farmers for whom the cost of fertilizer (which comes from Russia) has skyrocketed to near-unaffordability.

The latter continues to smack of invocations of The Science that were seen during plan-demic years to justify authoritarianism. I’ll return to this point.

If Rural Populations Are Moving “Rightward,” Is It Hard to See Why?

Suppose we grant, for the sake of argument, that rural populations worldwide are indeed moving “rightward.”

Why would they do so?

Because “the left,” which long ago defended the interests of working people against those in power, no longer does. It has instead allied itself with globalism and become part of the urban money-and-power structure. Leftists do not seem bright enough to realize that those at the very top of this structure couldn’t care less about the fetishes that drive much of “the left” today (e.g., gender-bending).

In other words, working peoples the world over are turning, at least somewhat, to “right wing populism” because self-identified leftists dropped the ball. They joined the enemy. In most cases, they became the enemy. Parties like the AfD in Germany, Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in The Netherlands; and obviously the Trump-led Republican Party on our side of the Atlantic (also figures like Jair Bolsonaro who is now persona non grata in Brazil courtesy of that nation’s leftist Establishment) have picked it up.

The mass protest in Germany suggests just how despised the urban elites are, even by those who don’t know the behind-the-scenes players. German farmers aren’t further a political agenda of their own. They’re too busy trying to survive. All they want is to be able to sustain their businesses, feed their families, and pass their legacy on to their children.

Or as I’ve said in articles past; what they want is to do their work, deal with those in their orbit peacefully, and otherwise be left alone. They’re up against people and forces that don’t gain power and profit from leaving them alone. Subsidies? It’s hardly their fault that structural factors have made such practices necessary in the West’s increasingly neofeudal brand of elite-controlled hyper-capitalism.

There is good reason to believe that globalists want to do a slow controlled demolition of farming as an industry.

Why on Earth would they want to do that?

Because farming — family farming, not factory farming — enables independence, for the farmers themselves, their families, and local and national economies. It enables health; it enables freedom. Globalists don’t want either one. They don’t want independent commoners, or thriving local or national economies. They want a single, globally seamless, mass consumption “marketplace” (including processed foods and other things they’ve specified) under the control of their corporate leviathans. They are wealthy enough to also control governments who decide such things as subsidies, and also set immigration policies able to dilute the voices of native populations.

The long and the short of it: they want serfs, of whatever nationality and ethnicity, who will depend on them for the necessities of life, including food, which means believing what they are told to believe and doing what they are told to do, and it all be legal.

Very likely, they want fewer of these serfs. Enter the covid-19 shots on top of decades of unhealthy food, diminished economic standing of entire populations, readily available illegal drugs, all leading to hopelessness and a rising suicide rate on top of whatever damage the others are doing. You have a recipe for eventual depopulation.

Liberals and lefties who don’t know any better — they aren’t the brightest lights in the harbor! — are either in denial or are going along with this scheme.

But What About the Climate?

But what about the climate? will scream some of these latter. Burning diesel fuel harms the planet!

I’m not an authority on so-called climate science, which is why I’ve not written about it very much. But Malaysian astrophysicist and engineer turned climate skeptic Dr. Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon is, and maybe we should listen to him when he denies that anyone has established a solid causal connection between the use of so-called fossil fuels generating carbon dioxide, and rising average global temperatures.

It is past time to ensure that alternative points of view have a place at the table versus what has become another dominant narrative, another domain of The Science, which is that human activity, including farming activity, is killing the planet — so we either rein it in or else.

Unfortunately, climate change has become another of those issues, like race and sexuality, about which open and rational international dialogue and debate have become all but impossible because one side insists it has Absolute Truth (“Settled Science”) on its side, and cites another mantra, false equivalence, to shout down critics.

Call me an amateur climate skeptic if you want, but it’s clear to anyone who looks into the history: efforts by globalists to use environmental concerns as a path to power go back at least to the early 1970s. Remember the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth? Or the predictions of biologist Paul Ehrlich in works such as The Population Bomb? These efforts made numerous predictions which have proven groundless.

Lessons for Americans the Globalist Elites Don’t Want You to Learn.

There are important lessons here for Americans, depending on what transpires this year and could interfere with Election 2024 being free and open. Within these lessons are the reasons American corporate media don’t want you paying the plight of German farmers any attention.

The lessons are about how to have an effective and mostly spontaneous mass protest that is peaceful. It is peaceful because its leaders and participants don’t want to hurt anybody. Again: they just want to conduct their business and otherwise be left alone. A peaceful mass protest will be effective if it shuts down society to the point where those in power have no choice except to listen.

Our situation doesn’t directly involve agriculture — yet!*

It involves ensuring free and fair elections. It involves we the people, not courts or elites, deciding who will be on ballots in November, and whether we’ll even have an election if it looks as though Trump might win or if the global elites will orchestrate another emergency, fake or real.

I don’t think it likely that the Supreme Court will kick Donald Trump off primary ballots nationally or allow any individual states to do so — especially with the clear support he has (he won resoundingly in Iowa).

Having said that, I don’t think the odds of a ruling favorable to Trump rise to one hundred percent.

The GOP base has to be prepared to take to the highways of America in a fashion identical to that of German farmers, shutting down major thoroughfares wherever possible (leaving lanes open for deliveries and emergency vehicles as the Germans did), should Trump be removed from ballots against people’s will. Such a movement has to be prepared to weather media hostility and possible violence from leftists as well as from authorities themselves.

As I’ve stated multiple times: those who got their power back on January 21, 2021, are likely to do anything to keep Trump 2.0 from happening. They have plenty of cards left to play. Some we’ve probably not seen yet.

Germany’s farmers have shown Americans what to do, and how to do it peacefully.

This includes policing themselves with a few simple rules: no violent rhetoric! No calls for violence against any federal or state officials, or against police! Trump’s legal team has warned of “chaos and bedlam” if we see election interference coming from Democrats or the Democrat-controlled legal system or others with real power. Corporate media have interpreted this as calls for violence. Naturally.

What this means the necessity of keeping the hotheads on their leashes. A handful got out of control and broke windows or fought with police on January 6, 2021. Now, over a thousand Jan-6ers are in prison, their lives ruined. More to follow.

Those professing conservatism should police themselves above all else. If there is violence, let leftists start it. Today’s smartphone technology is able to record and upload confrontations to the Internet instantly. This promises transparency which corporate media only discredits itself further by disputing, or by describing as “baseless conspiracy theories” or “white supremacy” when it is nothing of the sort.

The harsh reality remains: none of us will have corporate media on our side or backing moneyed interests (e.g., Big Tech) on our side — any more than the German farmers do. But like the farmers, we have truth on our side. In the long run, the one that counts truth always has a way of coming out.

*This said, it does seem reasonably to wonder what Bill Gates wants with all that farm land he’s bought up.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

Steven Yates has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His latest novel, an adventure into a possible world of 10,000 years ago, can be obtained here.

Who I Am, What I’m About, 2024 Edition

By Steven Yates

January 10, 2024

“Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Psalm 90:12
“We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it.” —Seneca
“Only the educated are truly free.” —Epictetus
“Money is an extremely efficient control system. People order themselves upon money incentives, and thus difficult, dangerous and energy intensive overt physical control need not be employed broadly.” —David Rogers Webb

Welcome to 2024, readers! The year we’ve all been waiting for! The year that will make us or break us! Literally!

Five Principles Going Forward.

Every January I now try to do this: write a reflection piece about who I am and what I’m trying to do. It helps me think more clearly, and I hope it helps readers.

Who am I? A guy with too much formal education who left academia over ten years ago, went overseas, but has returned periodically to his homeland and stays in close touch. I thank God daily for the Internet, which makes this arrangement possible.

I’m married to a foreign national. No children. Two cats. We live in a place that would be very difficult to find if you didn’t know exactly where you are going.

There’s not much else to tell about my personal life. It’s not that interesting. Sometimes my wife gets annoyed at my computer time.

Checking last year’s column, I see that I wrote mostly about the past. There’s a place for that, but this go round, I’d prefer to emphasize the present and future, especially as for many, the future doubtless looks dark and menacing.

Election 2024 is already fraught with tensions. This will be the year’s front-burner concern unless something even more divisive erupts. It’s not the only valid concern. Our financialized money political economy is powered by a debt bubble that balloons larger every year: the national debt just crossed the $34 trillion threshold. This system favors mega-billionaires and works automatically against the best interests of everyone else, be they Republicans or Democrats; be they Establishment Republicans or Trumpists; be they white, black, Hispanic, or Asian; male or female; straight or gay or whatever.

Some worry, finally, over whether generative AI and other disruptive technologies are going to take away jobs and cause more technological unemployment.

There’s plenty to be anxious about.

So I’d like to emphasize principles we can formulate now, today, and take with us as guides, going forward. Such principles might gain us perspective on what we can do, focused on what we can control. While many such lists are circulating, especially since Jordan Peterson published his 12 Rules for Life (2018), mine is shorter. I think I can get my “rules for life” into a single article. At least, I shall try. These are intended to work together and form a single, unitary tapestry.

Truth Matters. Seek it as best you can. Do not avoid it, as doing so can bring you long term and sometimes short term harm. Acknowledge it when it looks you in the face. Do not sugar-coat it.

Be humble about proclaiming it, though, since not all truths are straightforward, and what may be obvious to us is not necessarily obvious to the next guy and looks downright crazy to the third. Recognize that we all get things wrong sometimes. Changing your mind is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of intellectual honesty and growth.

Be empathetic. Some truths hurt. Those who need to hear a painful truth may not be ready. Be sure of a greater good to be achieved in telling it.

The best means, historically, of teasing out truth: free inquiry, freedom of speech about its results, civil dialogue and structured debate when we disagree. Truth isn’t political per se. It just is. Seeking it, learning it, communicating it, and preserving it should try to transcend politics / political economy. At one time, this was the primary mission of higher education in America.

How do we resolve disputes where we remain at loggerheads, e.g., between those who believe in God’s dominance versus secular materialists?

Maybe we don’t. Not absolutely. But we come away from fair-minded exchanges of ideas with better opinions, and perhaps with more truth than we had before!

What I’d contend is that if a dominant theory, narrative, worldview, etc., articulated or merely embodied in a range of institutions and cultural practices, is corrupting them, leading persons and groups to self-destruct, or taking civilization itself on a destructive course, we should question this theory, narrative, or worldview.

Freedom Matters. Claim it, responsibly. You may have to fight for it. As the saying goes, freedom isn’t free. We’re having to fight for freedom of speech right now. The fight is worth it. If you don’t have free speech, you can’t defend anything else.

Note, though, that responsible freedom is not the freedom to do anything we please. It is not all or nothing. It is freedom within the bounds of practicality and morality. It’s easy to overthink this. I’ve made that mistake.

Don’t treat freedom as a technical, academic abstraction. You’re technically free to quit your job if you dislike it. But doing so might not be practical. So exercising that technical freedom might not be responsible. Determine what would make the choice more practical. Do that instead.

Responsible freedom is not freedom exercised at the expense of others, by coercing them or petitioning a more powerful entity (government or a corporation) to do so. When we coerce others, or attempt to get someone else to do so, we destroy their freedom. We devalue them. We treat them as beneath us, as less than we are. This is immoral.

A key to increasing one’s freedom is learning to do more. Be open to opportunities to acquire new knowledge or skills. Be a lifelong learner. Learn something new every day if possible, whether you use it today or not. You may discover a use for it tomorrow.

It’s true that some people don’t want to be free. As H.L. Mencken put it, they simply want to be safe. There will always be those who sacrifice freedom for security. This is probably the majority. There’s nothing we can do about that except avoid that road ourselves and try to convince others to avoid it.

Human Connections Matter. Seek them out, build them, nurture them, maintain them: family, friends, neighbors (if they will permit it), fellow churchgoers (if you attend church), professional associates, others who share your interests and values.

Here’s our predicament: we’re too isolated from one another.

Atomized.

The breakup of stable families has contributed to this, as has the decline of stable marriages and the fact that millions of men and women are electing not to marry. I attribute some of this to feminism, although economic factors and social media have atomized us just as effectively.

While marriage may not be for everybody, the point is, we are social beings. We aren’t wired psychologically to exist in isolation. This is why many observers now consider solitary confinement to be a form of torture.

How do we establish, or improve, our connections to others?

Start by seeing them, and yourself, as having intrinsic value: created in God’s image. Act accordingly. Again, it’s important not to overthink this. If you don’t believe in God, the onus is on you to find some other basis for committing to the intrinsic value of persons. The point is, to create that commitment and embody it in our lives and day-to-day interactions with others. We need to stop looking down on “those people,” whoever those people might be. I’m not necessarily talking about other races or ethnic groups here, or men, or women, or whatever other categories someone might think are real.

I’m talking about those who serve you food in restaurants, hand you hotel keys, or clean your rooms. Those who empty the trash in our workplaces at the end of the day, or clean the floors. Those who drive Ubers for a living.

All are human, and what I’ve learned is that basic one-on-one kindness goes a long way.

Since none of us truly knows what is occurring inside another person’s head, when sizing someone up I go off observation as much as possible. How does the person routinely treat others. Does he tip the waitress or the Uber driver? Does he hold the door for the person behind him. Is she respectful of those whose jobs require them to deal daily and hourly with strangers (e.g., store clerks)? Does he drive courteously? Is she attentive, or always checking her phone?

How does she respond if a baby starts crying nearby? Does she accept that babies cry, it’s what they do? Or does she visibly grit her teeth and struggle to avoid losing it in public?

Also: how does the person treat animals? One of Jordan Peterson’s more interesting rules goes something like: “Pet a cat when you encounter one in the street.” If the cat will permit it, of course. If you don’t like cats, try dogs. I tend to not trust people who are unkind to animals, or don’t at least smile at the sight of someone walking a small dog outdoors. Oh, if it’s you walking your dog, it goes without saying: clean up after it.

Kindness to little animals won’t change the world, but you’ll feel better, and this might brighten your world.

All these, and others, are measures of a person’s mindfulness, of their adult awareness of the world around them and how their actions might affect others.

They indicate the intrinsic value we place on others: lived, rather than intellectualized about.

The Shortness of Life Matters. However disquieting the thought, our time on this journey called life is finite. Yet we often act as if our days weren’t numbered. Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher, pondered the “shortness of life” in a must-read essay on the subject. He noted how the problem isn’t so much life’s shortness as the amount of time we waste.

Time is the ultimate scarce resource. Each day, once it passes, is gone. You’ll never get yesterday back. Much less last year.

The lesson for us is to assess how we’re using the time we have. There are some excellent guides out there on how to structure your time. They begin with self-assessment. What do you wish to prioritize? Well, what are you best at? And what really drives you? What is it that you get out of bed in the morning thinking about, and don’t have to be motivated from the outside to do, as by the prospect of a paycheck?

How can you spend more time doing things that really get you “in the groove” and less time doing things you are indifferent to, or hate? How can you better delegate, to avoid the latter? Can you arrange your days in ways that enhance all this?

Are you aware of the disadvantages of “doomscrolling” on your phone or checking email first thing in the morning? Are you in control of your social media accounts, or are they in control of you? Did you know that if you have a free account, you’re not the customer. Social media corporations’ customers are their advertisers. You are the product. Act accordingly.

We are what we do habitually, to paraphrase Aristotle. There are some good books out there on great habits and how to cultivate them. My favorite these days is James Clear’s Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (2018).

Little to do with politics, but everything to do with having a better life!

Focus Matters. These days I often find myself meditating on the first principle the ancient Stoics insisted on. Paraphrasing Epictetus now, “Some things are up to us, and some things are not up to us.” Not up to us are traffic, the weather, what the economy is doing, what the neighbors might be doing, the opinions of others generally.

Up to us are our responses to these.

Epictetus thus counsels: focus your life energies on what you can control. What you can’t control, note it to the extent it affects you, but don’t react emotionally. The point is not to be emotionless. That’s a misunderstanding. The point is to control your responses and channel your efforts in directions where you can do some good.

This is harder than it sounds. Try it.

We writers are a special case. We place our written thoughts before strangers (or near-strangers). Some won’t agree with us, especially if our opinions are outside-the-box and controversial. Review my article on how Tucker Carlson deals with this. Whether you like him or not, I don’t think you can fault his idea that losing sleep over the opinions of people who couldn’t care less about you is a bad idea.

None other than Donald Trump could take lessons here. He sometimes reacts in ways he shouldn’t. Most leftists may not be prizes as human beings, but I’d have avoided calling them “vermin.” That’s just one recent example.

When all is said and done, though, I’d prefer to give Trump a break. Consider the quantity, level, and volume of sheer, venomous hatred that’s been slung his way since 2015! I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this directed at one person who’s gone into politics in America.

The problem: when he reacts as he does, he gives ammunition to the haters.

All that said, there’s little in politics you can control. To some (libertarians and anarchists), this is why voting is pointless. I’ll admit to having pondered, What if “they” held an election and no one showed? Won’t happen, of course. Most who live in so-called democracies believe voting matters. It’s part of the mass psychology of modernity. The participant has a sense of control, or at least, of having done the right thing. I’ll confess to having straddled the fence here. There might be an argument to be made that by not voting, we peasants relinquish what little voice we have in our so-called democracy (which was founded as a constitutional republic).

There are areas of our lives where our control is larger, and perhaps we should focus on them. Our chances of being heard at the local level, for instance, may be greater. Control increases still more when we forget politics and act under the radar.

What about the immediate and near future? It’s now cliché to state that we’re moving into a turbulent year. It might be the most turbulent since the late 1960s or 1970s. Those old enough probably remember race riots, massive antiwar demonstrations that occasionally led to homicide-by-government as at Kent State, suspicious political assassinations.

One big difference is that back then the overall mood of the country was optimistic. I don’t sense much optimism now. What I see and hear and read, daily: climate hysteria, hysteria over Russia, China, Hamas; hysteria-to-the-nth-power over the prospects of Trump 2.0 taking the reins in January 2025.

The Supreme Court has what may be its biggest decision in history looming, more momentous than Roe v Wade. My understanding is that oral arguments are scheduled to begin on February 8.

The Court must strike down what happened in Colorado and Maine!

If it does not, these unilateral moves, trading on an official narrative about January 6 and insurrections, will precipitate chaos! I may have to eat my words about the low likelihood of civil war on the streets of America!

The globalist-leftist power elite and its foot soldiers are doing everything they can to thwart a Trump 2.0. They still have gambits to play. Some we’ve probably not seen yet.

Think of the Great Taking, which would begin with a purported banking emergency and end with the institution of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), digital IDs, and other elements of total population dominance. All to destroy freedom of speech, prevent Trump 2.0, and prevent the eventual rise of another Donald Trump.

What can you do about any of this? David Rogers Webb was honest and straightforward by saying: nothing! Not directly, anyway. It’s doubtful any of us have identified the most powerful actors (even Soros could be a bit player next to those with real power who choose to remain unknown).

There are things you can do. If you’re able to communicate information to others, e.g., forwarding this article to others will do for a start. Or subscribing to my Substack, Navigating the New Normal.

You can also work on projects that will help extricate you from the grid. These include growing vegetables, raising chickens, developing other skills that were commonplace a couple centuries ago but have atrophied during the industrial era. Those with such skills are positioned to survive, if, say, a cyberattack were to take down portions of the grid for an extended period of time.

I confess I’ve grown a tad skeptical of cyberattack-based scenarios, though. Such an event would result in too much that foot soldiers of the power elite would have their hands full trying to control. Riots would envelope cities. People able to live off the grid couldn’t be easily monitored.

Organizations like the WHO playing off climate hysteria and declaring a global “health emergency” seems more plausible, as a means of locking down the planet and instituting total control, especially over speech and information. They’ve just invented an Orwellian new category, “malinformation”: information that may be true but encourages distrust of authority!

You can’t make this stuff up!

In an orchestrated deflationary event, banks would close (possibly be surrounded by armed private security) and currency would literally vanish.

You would awaken the next morning, boot up your computer, and find yourself staring at a screen ordering you to set up your global digital ID.

Don’t want a global digital ID? You don’t get past that screen.

No digital ID, no access to your bank account! If you still have a bank account!

No more cash. So unless you’ve jumped through these digital hoops, you can’t legally buy food or pay your mortgage or even keep the lights on.

Are we seeing the value in being able to live independently of the grid, by not depending on the increasingly digitized money political economy for life’s basic necessities.

Getting such points across to those who believe they will benefit from them is part of what I’m doing here.

Bottom line: it should have become clear long ago, even before the plan-demic, that we’re in an information civil war of historic proportions: a war about what the truth actually is!

To one side, I’m spreading misinformation (or is it malinformation), conspiracy theories, or “alternative facts.”

To the other, I’m a truthteller urging a humane worldview based on the intrinsic value of the person, and calling for an end to centralization or consolidation of power and resources in the hands of a tiny globalist superelite, whom the majority of leftists serve without even knowing it (they aren’t the brightest lights in the harbor!).

This superelite controls the bulk of resources; it controls financial networks, corporate media, all the major universities, professional organizations national and international, and at least the start of the social media era, Big Tech as well as Big Pharma.

But all is not lost! The good news is that the plan-demic woke a lot of people up! Others were awakened before, when political correctness morphed into “antiracism,” i.e., antiwhite racism. There is now a lot of intellectual and journalistic firepower on our side, and it crosses the political spectrum from intelligent and well-informed writers who would self-identify as left-of-center (Glenn Greenwald, for example, or Bret Weinstein) as well as those on the right (Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon) and those somewhere in the middle (Paul Craig Roberts, Bari Weiss, others too numerous to name). Not all of these voices will agree with one another or with me. But they are all contributing useful information and ideas.

Behind the information civil war is then the cold war between the global consolidators (superelite) and those of us who want to be left alone, and who might embrace principles such as those I’ve outlined above.

What characterizes super-elitism is this strange psychological need to control others. Money is how global power elites keep score. They are materialists, consciously or not. Their de facto worldview is of a godless cosmos in which power gets the last word, in which they are Übermenschen wielding both financial and technocratic power to remake humanity in their image (an ideology now called transhumanism).

In achieving this, anything goes. It might be good to remember that anything, which includes assassinations and genocides.

Thus finally, behind the cold war over global consolidation is a cold war over worldviews. Unless we challenge materialism as a worldview, the latter’s effects will continue as the death culture and death economy darken prospects for average participants. The superrich will continue getting richer and more controlling, even as the death culture / death economy continues fomenting wars and then profiting from them, slaughtering unborn children, kicking those it doesn’t slaughter out of their homes, or entrapping them in mountains of inescapable debt.

In a future in which human life has no intrinsic value but is expendable if inconvenient, as the saying now goes, you will own nothing, have no privacy, but will be happy. (Whatever this last is supposed to mean. Oh, right. Big Pharma will keep us peasants supplied with plenty of drugs!)

Regrettably, most people won’t try to grasp or act on any of this until it’s too late. They never have. Some of us warned of the most likely consequences of runaway political correctness over 30 years ago. The silence was deafening. Now, the need for new institutions to replace the increasingly discredited old ones is palpable.

You can take charge of what you can control, if you make the necessary choices now. That’s the message I want to communicate as this new and likely turbulent year gets underway.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

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Steven Yates has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

Donald Trump and Antifragility

By Steven Yates

December 27, 2023

“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors; and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile.

“Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.” —Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012)

To my mind, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book Antifragile is one of the most important of the new millennium so far. Dense and demanding, but rich and encyclopedic, this book is a must read for those wondering how the world of the 21^st century could work if allowed to do so — whatever your ideology or perspective.

The basic idea is not especially complicated. If something is fragile, it breaks easily. Think of your average wineglass. My wife accidentally knocked one off our kitchen counter the other day. When it hit the floor, it shattered. That’s fragility.

If something is resilient, it doesn’t break when you drop it. Wood and plastic implements are resilient. I accidentally dropped a burger flipper a couple of weeks ago. I picked it up, cleaned it off, kept using it.

People can develop resilience (informally called “grit”) and weather a lot of personal storms that cause the emotionally fragile to go to pieces.

If something or someone is antifragile, though, it/he/she benefits from opposition, struggle, stress, disorder, unpredictability. In human life, this is a choice we can make, even if most people never make that choice.

Author and latter day Stoic philosopher Ryan Holiday wrote a book a few years ago that I also recommend: The Obstacle Is the Way (2014). Ryan’s basic claim: we’re all going to encounter disappointments, setbacks, obstacles, even failures. We have no control over these, because we don’t control the circumstances that lead to them. What we have control over is our responses. We can allow failures to stop us in our tracks, or we can learn from them and get stronger, more knowledgeable, better.

The most basic Stoic adage is that we can distinguish what we can control from what we can’t control. We get into trouble when we confuse the two.

We cannot control the opinions of others, any more than we can control traffic, the weather, or what the economy is doing. Which is why we shouldn’t worry about them but just let them go. Learn from them if possible; otherwise, forget them.

And then continue with our goals, which we control.

In other words, to be antifragile is not just to survive opposition, but to thrive on it, to get stronger from it, having used it as psychic fuel.

Kind of sounds like Donald Trump’s campaign to recapture the presidency, doesn’t it?

And why, contrary to the official narrative, the Colorado Supreme Court may have just handed him the presidency — a lot of other things being equal, of course.

It’s clear, from Trump’s rising poll numbers and Biden’s falling ones, that if the election were held today, and making the (admittedly tall) assumption it was honest, Trump would win in a landslide!

As Frank Luntz of all people (of CNN) recently conceded, “Donald Trump thrives on negativity…. I’m convinced that his polling numbers are going to go up…. Trump is gaining. The more he is prosecuted, the more he is condemned, the higher his numbers go, as people rally around him.”

That’s antifragility! Trump is antifragile! Intentionally or instinctively!

Consider: when the globalist-leftist alliance controlled FBI raised his house gestapo-style in Mar-a-Lago in August of 2022, his poll numbers went up. When Trump was indicted by the New York City Grand Jury early this year at behest of a corrupt, Soros-backed (Democrat) attorney general, his poll numbers went up further. His prosecution at the hands of more Democrats in Georgia has helped his numbers even more. And finally, despite his prosecution in the Asylum on the Potomac for his supposed involvement in the January 6 “insurrection,” he’s now leading Biden in all but one of the swing states, and as if this writing he’s leading Biden nationally by around 10%!

There is no reason to think this Colorado Supreme Court decision declaring that Trump’s name will be removed from the state’s primary ballot is going to be any different, and so far, it hasn’t been different.

His supporters — the “deplorables,” the “uneducated,” etc., etc. — recognize that every bit of this is political. The New York charge is substanceless. Judge Arthur Engoron, clearly no mathematical genius as shown by his blithe dismissal the other day of an actual expert on how these sorts of finances work, clearly has nothing. He’s unilaterally declared Trump and his organization guilty of fraud without a real trial because somehow, I have to suspect, he knows his case is a nothing-burger.

He is, in a sense, “just following orders”: those with real power want Trump stopped.

The same is true of civil cases like those of E. Jean Carroll, who can’t even remember the year of the alleged “sexual assault.” Her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, is one of the most powerful people in the legal profession, however.

Everything they’ve done to date, Trump and his base of support has turned around on them, the result being that Trump has gotten stronger and his likelihood of defeating Biden in any actual free and fair election has only increased.

Trump is now stronger than he’s ever been!

I’ll say it again! That’s antifragility!

Coming to the Colorado Supreme Court decision which has thrown a lot of people because once read carefully and completely, it isn’t really a decision at all!

Four leftist justices unilaterally declared that Trump should not appear on the Colorado primary ballot because he’s an “insurrectionist,” although he’s not been charged, much less convicted, of any such crime.

It fits an official narrative, though, and this should indicate how important official narratives are.

Can you now be punished for a crime you’ve not even been charged with, much less convicted of, because it fits a narrative?

Apparently, in the New Normal, if your name is Donald Trump, you can!

So much for the much-vaunted rule of law.

The Colorado Supreme Court went on, however, to stay their decision until January 4 of next year, giving the U.S. Supreme Court the opportunity to weigh in on the matter. In other words, Trump’s name is still on the Colorado primary ballot. The ruling means nothing until the U.S. Supreme Court acts on it.

The leftist Democrats behind this ruling understood that Trump’s legal team was going to appeal immediately.

It’s as if they see this whole thing as theater, and themselves as bit players.

Does anyone really believe the Supreme Court is going to let this decision stand?

If they did, leaving the matter of whether to retain Trump on their primary ballots or remove him, other “blue” states would quickly follow Colorado’s lead. Something like 14 states are considering such moves, although they’ve been rejected in Minnesota and in Michigan. The most likely result would be a totally unprecedented state of affairs where some states would have Trump on their primary ballots and others wouldn’t.

That would precipitate chaos! Even liberals ought to be able to see that!

Or the Supremes could also declare Trump an “insurrectionist” in the manner of Colorado — Because We Say So — despite the absence of any actual conviction in any court of law (conviction corporate media never used to count). That would kick him off every primary ballot in every state, on 14^th Amendment grounds.

This would mean two things.

No one is reading the 14^th Amendment completely, as I’ve explained elsewhere (see also here).

But beyond that, any such decision would end any and all remaining pretenses that the U.S. is really a democracy. Permanently.

I’ve contended, also elsewhere (numerous places), that the U.S. is more of a plutocratic oligarchy than a democracy, but never mind that now. The pretense exists that Trump is a “threat to democracy,” and that keeping him off ballots therefore “secures democracy.”

When every other gambit has failed, said elites (or, more exactly, their visible servants) would have ended the right of the (probably) 90 million or so people ready to cast ballots for Trump to do so.

Does a real democracy do that?

No, of course not! As is typical of our New Normal, the truth is exactly the reverse of the official narrative, as should be clear from the application of simple logic. You do not preserve democracy by denying people the right to vote for the candidate of their choice.

Reading well-heeled corporate mainstream media, from The Washington Post to The Atlantic Monthly, it’s clear how fearful its owners are of Trump 2.0.

Why?

Because whatever his faults which I don’t deny, Trump is the person presently feared the most by GloboCorp, the Establishment, the ruling globalist elites, as well as their many leftist on-the-ground foot soldiers in government, media, academia, and elsewhere.

He is the biggest existential threat to their plans for total global domination to emerge in our lifetimes.

The vast support Trump has out in the hinterlands is an indicator of the degree to which the ruling elites are despised.

He is feared all the more because he’s unquestionably a lot less naïve now than he was back in 2017. Back then, he didn’t know who to appoint. Some of his appointees turned out to be worthless, or worse: they sold him down the river.

Were he to win in 2024, he’d refuse to appoint people he doesn’t know well, whom he isn’t sure are on board with his policies, and who might therefore work to undermine him. One of his first acts, which he’s already promised, will be to end the disastrous open borders policy that characterizes the Bidenista era. He is also just liable to end the equally disastrous sending of billions to that cesspool of corruption on Russia’s border, meaning that the war there will be ended in days, not months or even weeks. This will save lives on both sides. Trump will recognize that Putin’s motive, all along, has been to promote the interests of Russia, and of ethnic Russians, not to dominate the world. The future of NATO, a Cold War era alliance that has outlived its usefulness, will be in doubt.

This, among other policies of a Trump Administration 2.0, will end everything the globalist-leftist alliance wants, including the authoritarianism which they’ve projected onto everyone who has worked against them.

GloboCorp is increasingly up against a wall. Could it prevent the scenario above?

Yes, but not without giving away the game.

Frankly, I think this the globalist-leftist alliance very dangerous!

Because even antifragility has limits!

When 2024 gets here in a few days, we enter probably the most dangerous period any of us have seen in our lives. Whatever happens with some of the scenarios I’ve sketched, the country and possibly the world are going to look very different a year from now than they do today. I don’t believe the ruling elites want to assassinate Trump. But only because that could cause repercussions they’d have a very hard time controlling, and by doing so, they’d give away their game all that much faster. They might decide that they are close enough to their goal of global dominance — technocratic world government serving their corporations, and a fully digital currency operated through their central banks — that they might just say, in effect, “The h*** with it!”

At that point, all bets are off!

Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

Steven Yates has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

The Harder Road Away from “World Order”

By Steven Yates

December 22, 2023

Sidney Secular’s short piece last Friday brought forth a few thoughts, in light of items I’ve encountered recently about Rome’s long and painful decline.

The Roman republic ended with the rise of the Caesars. That was shortly before the time of Christ. The empire expanded and continued, lurching from crisis to crisis, for almost five more centuries. Contrary to some Hollywood-esque depictions, Rome did not undergo a sudden and relatively unstructured collapse, so much as fade into irrelevance (except for the Vatican in its midst, of course). Its eastern offshoot, based at what is now Istanbul (originally Constantinople), continued for several hundred more years.

While comparisons between Rome and the U.S. are a dime a dozen, the question seems salient: will America’s decline be similar? Or that of Europe, since as should be clear from events there, the confrontation shaking America extends well beyond our shores.

It’s common to picture a violent confrontation coming between left and right. A civil war, in other words. Or an economic collapse.

Probably Hollywood stuff. Because Mad Max movies attract audiences.

What we can say for sure: two broad factions are battling for control over narratives as well as political-economies: those who want more global consolidation, versus those who don’t. Calling this a battle between leftists and rightists oversimplifies this. There are people “on the left” who don’t want global consolidation; there are people “on the right” who quite comfortable with it so long as they are the ones running it.

Those who want global consolidation are globalists, obviously; those who don’t are localists (one might call them, although globalist-controlled corporate media prefers for the latter terms like nationalists, nativists, xenophobes, white supremacists, racists, etc.).

Writers who support global consolidation have spoken quietly of “the hard road to world order” and advocated stealth in eroding national borders for a very simple reason: almost no one outside elite inner circles shares their goals. A few naïve academics see the sort of “global governance” the UN advances as akin to a natural evolutionary process. Globalists don’t care what their agenda does to common people.

Most want economic stability, cultural normalcy, and border security. They don’t want chronic disruptive change, instability, chaos.

Big Tech doesn’t get this. Silicon Valley is full of geeky types who follow the adage, “Move fast and break things.”

And naturally, most people don’t want war. Unlike the elites, they have no psychological need to support wars on the other side of the planet which advance only elite interests.

As I contended last week, a desire to rule all of humanity is not normal!

The problem now is, the agenda is so far along that not only is stopping it proving very difficult, but even if that agenda disappeared completely, nations and communities restoring the political values and cultural norms that originally built them is not going to be easy. They’ve been destroyed in all but a few of us, a generation that is rapidly aging (the youngest of us are in our 60s). The unsettling fact is, we’re not going to be around that much longer.

Meanwhile, two generations, Millennials and Gen Z, have grown up / are growing up never having known a world without political correctness, now called wokeness.

Many of their number take, e.g., “group rights,” for granted, and react angrily against attempts to curtail them.

Meanwhile, there are a few younger folks who never had anything specifically ideological in mind, just a desire to be left alone. They don’t appreciate being told they are racists when they express this desire as best they can.

It’s not hard to see more militant subgroups within the two, those who want to be left alone and those who won’t leave them alone (e.g., by moving illegal aliens into their neighborhoods, or by forcing “transgenderism” on their kids in government schools) coming to blows in the near future.

These, as Mr. Secular observes, would be skirmishes. Not a civil war.

He’s right: very, very few of us are up for that. Too many Boomers and Gen Xers are spoiled, distracted, lethargic. And speaking of distractions, too many Millennials and Gen Zers aren’t likely to put their smartphones down long enough to fight a civil war.

The latter are far too entitled.

I recall when I was teaching, especially in “flagship” universities, the students who believed themselves entitled to good grades just for showing up.

We live in an attention economy, moreover. Leviathan corporations control it, and they know more about you than you know about yourself, because their algorithms track your online activity. They automatically construct your feeds accordingly, to keep your attention as long as possible, advertising along with it, so you’ll be likely to purchase the goodies tailored to your interests they put in front of your eyes.

We’re easily thrown off track by email, messages, notifications, etc. Thanks to smartphones, we’re literally on call 24/7.

Small wonder many of us are lethargic mentally.

We’re also lethargic physically. Bad food is a massive contributing factor. The nutritional content of what is to be had from grocery stores has been dropping for decades. Don’t even get me started on processed foods filled with mildly-addictive flavor-enhancers and preservatives. Why preservatives? So they could be transported over sometimes thousands of miles in accordance with globalist political economy, as opposed to being grown or raised locally.

Many people have poor time management (i.e., self-management) skills and an inability to focus on what we can control, as opposed to what we can’t control.

Small wonder we’re easy prey for the corporate state.

Moreover, as Mr. Secular also observes, both “reds” and “blues” are too busy squabbling amongst themselves over priorities to organize in a fashion necessary to fight a civil war.

So what happens next?

I’ve sketched over a dozen scenarios. Some I’ve discussed, some not. Curiously, the outrageous ones (e.g., this) received the most responses.

What happens long term might be far more mundane, and look more like Rome’s long term fade-out than something Hollywood might concoct.

I’m unconvinced, first, that Trump will be allowed to win again.

I hope I’m wrong.

But the leftist-globalist alliance has learned from the results, so far, of three years of lawfare machinations that its loyal servants in both corporate media and government can demonize election critics, imprison stolen-election protesters most of whom were peaceful, and financially destroy those who refuse to shut up.

This militates against the likelihood their being another January 6 — even if the election is stolen in broad daylight!

The Establishment plan is to tie up Trump’s schedule next year with court dates, and try to drain his finances.

Meanwhile, controlled media are frantically demonizing him and his associates as hatching a plan to “end democracy.”

Sadly, by calling leftists “vermin” and saying he’d be a dictator “only on Day One,” in the present environment he’s not helping himself.

And whether Biden is somehow able to continue as president or the Democrat Party puts someone else in there (Gavin Newsom is the obvious choice), the left will continue its path of domestic destruction, as open borders policies allow more illegals who do not share American values or speak English to enter and colonize the country. Education will continue to unravel at all levels, although a few parallel institutions (e.g., the University of Austin, scheduled to begin offering courses next fall) will strive to educate a small community to maintain sound values.

The foreign wars will continue, and further drain American resources. Among the most disruptive scenarios I can imagine is if the idiots in the Asylum on the Potomac invent some pretext to launch a war against Iran. Teheran responds by mining the Strait of Hormuz. The price of oil immediately skyrockets. Gas in the U.S. shoots up not to $4/gallon but twice, three times, or even four times that!

Instant economic paralysis!

Not to mention the likelihood that among the migrants leftist policies have allowed to enter the U.S. are networked with Hezbollah, backed by Iran, who would start launching terrorist attacks in American shopping malls and sporting events!

What would happen next probably wouldn’t be pretty!

Another national lockdown! For your safety, of course!

Fortunately, common knowledge that gazillions of barrels of oil pass through the Strait of Hormuz every day probably saves us from this scenario, however badly neocon hotheads might want a war with Iran.

That brings us back to … America doesn’t collapse catastrophically but simply fades out, long-term. As did Rome.

Bottom line: unless there is a massive turnaround in America, a spiritual revival and recovery of the values that built the country, America’s standing as a world power is finished. It won’t take a civil or any other kind of war.

All it might take is the gradual end of the dollar hegemony, via an end to the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency.

The prevailing standard of living, depending as it does on this status, would drop. There would be nothing to sustain it.

The U.S. government would be seen for what it is on the world stage: a parade of clowns overseeing dysfunctional institutions.

We might find out how bad the Executive Branch might get if Kackling Kamala ever becomes president. At this point, I would not regard her chances as zero. Especially if the Democrats really do keep Biden where he is.

All that has to happen is for him to “win” next November, and then die in office.

President Kamala Harris!

Excuse me while I run to the bathroom!

It has been “a hard road to world order” by the elites — because it was hard to build the kinds of systems the globalist project required and keep it under wraps. There were always a few smart people out here in the hinterlands who figured out at least some of what was going on, articulated clearly what they saw, often naming names, with a few able to mount some level of resistance even if they couldn’t stop the process.

The Internet made that road harder … suddenly, defenders of alternatives to official narratives in every field or endeavor had a means of getting the word out to as wide an audience as they were able to reach.

When Trump upset Hillary in 2016, the globalist-leftist alliance panicked and scrambled to get control over information back. On social media platforms, they called this content moderation. We entered an era of censorship and gaslighting. The wealth consolidation of left-leaning Big Tech corporations helped this process immensely.

A road away from “world order”?

It’s likely to be even harder — harder for us than building “world order” has been for them. The political system may be corrupted beyond hope. Mainstream education is equally useless. I would place what hope exists in homeschooling and in emerging parallel institutions, which may function as monasteries once did during medieval times. They preserved values gleaned from the ancients through the dark years precipitated by Rome’s fade-out. If America fades out and does not flame out, we’ll need institutions able to do the same thing.

We have to know where we’re heading. There’s much to be gained in asking: (1) What kind of society do we want? and (2) What are we willing to do, and perhaps go through, to build it?

We need an account of what a healthy advancing civilization looks like … versus the causes of instability and deterioration. This goes beyond what I can do in this piece, and beyond what I’ve said previously about collapsed credibility of dominant narratives (“Globalization will make us all rich” “Diversity is our strength” etc.). I hope to pen some proposals early in the upcoming year. I can only pray to our God they amount to more than shouting in the wind.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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Steven Yates has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).

Tucker Carlson’s Cure for Stress and Key to Happiness

By Steven Yates

December 11, 2023

One of the most hated men in media suffers “zero stress” because of it. Here’s why.

I began streaming episodes of Tucker Carlson Tonight a couple of years ago, having read his book Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution (2018). If you haven’t read this book, you should.

His show on Fox News had already become the most watched of its kind.

Obviously, Tucker Carlson is polarizing. This is because he’s hated by the ruling elites, their servile employees and disciples up and down corporate media and among left-indoctrinated populations (young, urban, “diverse,” “educated,” etc.) — but loved by an audience that craves often unpleasant but always truthful information, presented in a manner that is positive, upbeat, and sometimes even funny.

The man clearly loves what he’s doing, loves his life, enjoys serving his audience, and seems genuinely happy!

Fox News abruptly canceled Tucker Carlson Tonight back in April under circumstances no one has revealed. This was on the heels of Fox’s settlement with Dominion, so many suspected a connection. None was proven, so we don’t know; Carlson himself denies knowing what transpired. Obviously, it wasn’t a purely business decision. With Carlson’s departure, Fox lost a lot of viewers.

What struck me was how gracefully he handled it. He didn’t react angrily, or strike out at his former employer. “It’s not my company,” he told podcasters in one interview. Landing on his feet, he created Tucker on Twitter (now Tucker on X) and kept on as if nothing fundamental had changed.

A moment of self-disclosure: I lost the best teaching job I had (early 1990s) because a senior faculty member went behind my back. I’ll spare you the details, except to say: when I learned the truth (two years later), I wasn’t a happy camper! Not for months! No, make that years!

My inability to forgive and move on cost me. My recollection of that era led me to want to know: What was Tucker’s secret?

Well, thanks to Sasha Stone on Substack, we now know. It’s an epiphany!

Not only do we learn Carlson’s secret of happiness and how to move on, but we gain insight into why our national and global ruling classes are so horrible — why everything they touch, they ruin.

A double-whammy, in other words!

Carlson’s secret: care only about the opinions of people who care about you.

Corollary: do not anguish over the opinions of strangers. The opinions of people who don’t know you, don’t care about you, and never will, shouldn’t matter to you.

Choice quotations:

“The opinions of people you don’t know mean nothing.”

“Never hand emotional control to people who don’t love you.”

“Keep the circle of people whose opinions you care about really small. Pay very close attention to what they think, and ignore everybody else. In my case, obviously, I’m one of the most hated people in the world, and that causes me zero stress.”

“Everybody cares what other people think. Make the decision who you hand that power to.”

Who should you hand it to? Family, for sure. If your spouse hates what you do, you should pay attention (!). If your children don’t respect you, you’ve done something wrong. Feedback from close friends, colleagues or work associates, employees: these matter. Neighbors? Possibly. Depends on the neighbors. The resulting orbit whose opinions you should care about will probably be fewer than twenty people.

What about the rest?

Especially if you’re a writer, hardly famous (!), who’d like to expand (or build) an audience!

I’ve no idea how many people see what I write. I have no access to NWV stats. A select number of readers email me semi-regularly. A handful I’ve gotten to know a little. Most enjoy my articles. One or two do not.

Carlson’s point still seems valid, even for guys like me. To obsess over negativity from strangers is a recipe for stress and anxiety — even for relatively unknown writers.

I was recently motivated to do some thinking about who I am writing for — especially as my output goes all across the map, from political economy to personal development to paranormal fiction! What came to mind: (1) Readers suspicious of vested authority, including so-called “experts.” They realize that, at best, “our” political class is as self-interested as everyone else: more so, however much they try to hide it. Many “experts” are where they are for political reasons. Look at Dr. Fauci. Lauded not just as a doctor but “the nation’s Number One Expert in infectious diseases,” he hasn’t treated a patient in decades. He’s an upper-echelon career federal bureaucrat. His enjoyment — if it really is that (and I have my doubts) comes not from serving people but wielding money and power, and in ways that unleashed destruction.

Many of us concluded long ago that trust in authority should be earned, not given away for free.

I’d love to connect with more such people!

Because (2): bad experiences with authority open minds to new options. I’m writing for readers interested in learning more about them. Even if they aren’t about to let a writer they don’t know personally lead them by their noses. (Not that I’m trying to do that.)

The Hidden Psychology Of “Our” Ruling Class Explains Why It Ruins Everything It Touches.

We have, in Tucker Carlson’s ensuing words, an account of why “our” ruling class is so disgusting (his word).

It’s not simply that political and corporate elites want to control others, or get rich through corruption or “passive income,” i.e., income gained without having done any work that genuinely serves others.

Some may be born sociopaths. Others may have become sociopathic because they are emotionally damaged. This compels the worst of them to seek absolute power. The more modestly damaged aren’t content unless they have adulation from masses of strangers.

How does this work?

Earlier this year, a friend and I did some deep dives into the psychology of the desire to control others. I’d vaguely known: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, all grew up under fathers who beat the daylights out of them.

It’s common knowledge: abused children frequently become abusive adults. The neglected become narcissists or develop other personality disorders.

I’ve seen this firsthand. I’ve encountered and even sometimes worked alongside people who were highly intelligent but also opportunists unafraid to use people and situations to get what they wanted. They weren’t self-aware enough to see what they were doing, why others eventually steered clear of them, why their marriages failed, or why in a few cases they even ran afoul of the law.

It’s a matter of degree. Those damaged beyond repair as children learned only violence and hatred. When they got absolute power, they exacted maximum damage on their countries, sometimes sending millions of people to their deaths.

They hate people, because they hate themselves and the world generally.

Sometimes the damage is more modest. Parents were emotionally absent, or families were dysfunctional. These are the folks who live for the adulation of people they don’t know, whose problems they don’t know beyond a few superficials, and whom they can’t possibly care about as persons.

While individual cases doubtless differ, as a group these folks seek attention from strangers because they never received any genuine nurturing as children.

Tucker Carlson called this “the darkest sickness of all.”

That’s “our” political class — even those who see themselves as well-intentioned (doesn’t everybody?).

This need for adulation, even love, from strangers isn’t tied to party affiliation or even ideology, although I suspect it afflicts those on the left more than it does those on the right.

Bill Clinton came from a dysfunctional family.

Donald Trump? Hero to many, but also (sadly!) damaged. His father, Fred Trump, was not a nice person, and his older brother Freddy Jr., cut from a different piece of cloth altogether, sank into alcoholism under their father’s verbal abuse and died tragically at age 42. The Trumps were rich and talented, but also dysfunctional. These are not mutually exclusive.

Carlson implies that when those who seek adulation from strangers don’t get it — the strangers don’t simply fall in line — this tendency easily morphs into a desire to control them. They then rationalize this by proclaiming their Love for the People.

Which is complete BS, of course. This is clear in how they treat the people around them.

Karl Marx’s children nearly starved to death.

Hillary Clinton has a reputation for verbally abusing those under her, and on at least one occasion got physically abusive with her husband. Not because Bill philandered with an intern, mind you, but because he got caught. Hillary’s childhood and upbringing seems fairly normal, suggesting that she was born a sociopath.

Love Trump or not, the world dodged a massive bullet back in 2016 when the country did not anoint her the First Woman President!

Biden family dysfunction is seen in his son Hunter. The man is an utter mess!

Marx proclaimed the “collectivity” of humanity as its essence.

Hillary wrote (or had ghostwritten) a book entitled It Takes a Village (1996), and was heard to say, “It takes a village to raise a child!” She’s a hardcore collectivist who Loves The People.

Tucker Carlson, in a pivotal moment from the talk referenced above:

“It’s all a lie. There’s no The People. There’s just people, with names, fingerprints, unique histories and desires, and weaknesses that need bolstering. They’re individuals, and that’s all there is. God didn’t create groups of people at once. No woman ever gave birth to a community.”

The plain truth: abstract collectives do not exist. Only individuals: you, reading this; me, having written it; the people around us we care about; neighbors; coworkers or other associates; etc. All with their own unique life trajectories!

They fight different private battles. Beyond shared superficials like having food to eat, a roof over one’s head, electricity, work sufficient to sustain these, what keeps you awake at night is probably different from what keeps your neighbor awake at night.

My point here, following Carlson’s: members of the political class — and globalists even more so — don’t get this because they can’t.

Thus their attraction to top-down solutions, sometimes to “problems” which aren’t real.

We’re not talking mere sin here, although in a fallen world, that’s doubtless a factor. I firmly believe most people mean well, even if they need God’s grace. Very few people deliberately try to hurt others, or take pleasure in their suffering.

I could make a compelling case that our globalist and political classes fundamentally hate humanity, and that this is reflected in their beliefs and in their policies.

The point is, we’re dealing with a fairly small group, all with genuine privileges, most of whom have a deep psychological compulsion to be followed, adored, loved, by strangers. When they don’t get this love, their compulsion morphs into a need for control. Subconsciously they hate people. They hate the human race in the abstract, because they hate themselves.

It should be clear: this makes them very dangerous, because when they get power, the results range from the constrained dysfunction we see in Congress to the utter disaster that would occur if the world followed, e.g., globalist dictates to end the burning of fossil fuels for energy in response to the “climate emergency.” These people, in their bid to save the world collectively from itself, elevated a teenage girl to the status of “climate expert.” That’s indicative of how irrational they really are.

Tucker Carlson’s Counsel Revisited.

What can you, as a person, do? What can I, as a writer, do? It all comes back to that.

You can remove yourself from the political and globalist class’s sphere of influence as much as you can. Unless you’re someone like me who writes about these things, you can ignore most of what they do if it doesn’t affect you.

In my case: some will respond, many won’t, so what?

Returning, then, to Tucker Carlson’s counsel, especially relevant as we near the start of what may well be a volatile year.

Make the decision to care about people who care about you, or who you are in a position to help. Don’t hand emotional control to strangers. Otherwise, you’ll suffer chronic insecurity, stress, and anxiety.

Not only that, you’ll be prone, however modestly, to what afflicts our ruling elites.

For many, this will mean making peace with having had abusive or emotionally absent parents. Or having grown up in a dysfunctional family.

Awareness is the first step.

The second is to absorb this, also from Tucker:

“You were put on this Earth to serve the people right around you.”

Not masses of strangers in foreign lands, or even the masses of strangers in your own.

Keep the range of people whose opinions you care about small. Never hand de facto emotional control to others who don’t care about you. Those others don’t know you, don’t know your situation, any more than you know theirs. The conditions for meaningful caring simply aren’t there.

It may sound harsh, but there’s no rational way to care about The People or “the world as a whole”!

This isn’t a license for indifference to those outside your circle but whose paths you cross.

Be kind to the housekeeper in your building, if you live in one. Even if she speaks broken English. Tip your waiter or waitress. Respect store clerks and cashiers. These people’s jobs and lives may make yours look like paradise by comparison.

Be a good human being.

I think our Creator demands this of us. Did He not create us — all of us — in His image?

This means accepting limits.

For most of us, our best bet in “denting the universe” is to make a positive difference in the lives of the people we are in a position to affect for the better. If we’re not serving them, we’re not serving our Creator.

Limitedness is normal. Localness is normal. I don’t think any human being or human institution was meant to have global power. That’s not normal.

We’re not wired for it — designed for it if you prefer.

Which is why honest histories of such efforts record only mayhem, destruction, and suffering.

Maybe the best answer to global, political and corporate ruling classes is: don’t be like them. Don’t be anything like them.

Just work on yourself and be a better you. I think you’ll find in this the key to happiness.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

Steven Yates’s Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

Should you purchase any (or all) of these from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit this).

Javier Milei: Making Argentina Great Again?

By Steven Yates

December 1, 2023

Javier Milei wins Argentina’s presidency: history’s first anarcho-capitalist president!

Last Sunday, November 19, 2023, Javier Milei made history. He decisively defeated his rival, Sergio Massa, Argentina’s Peronist Economy Minister, by a comfortable margin of 55.89% to 44.10%.

Milei has a reputation for eccentricity. Massa doubtless thought this would hurt him with voters. He was wrong. Argentinians clearly had had enough of a regime that had run the country of 46.6 million into the ground, with rising unemployment, 40% of the population now beneath the poverty line, and the inflation rate a whopping 140%!

Milei’s an outsider, a counter-elite, like Trump was — though unlike Trump he’d previously held an office. It’s no surprise that Trump told him (via Truth Social), “I am proud of you.” A colorful character with trademark bushy hair, once a member of a rock band that performed Rolling Stones covers, he became an economist and a television personality with a penchant for cultivated outrageousness. He is skilled at using media (including outlets that hate his guts) — just as Trump is. Small wonder pundits are alarmedly comparing the two.

He’s also the first self-described anarcho-capitalist to win a national election. What is anarcho-capitalism?

The term was coined by flamboyant libertarian economist and prolific writer Murray N. Rothbard. As a moral as well as economic philosophy it advocates for a society based on voluntary transactions and contracts — unfettered free markets — neither interfered with nor subsidized by the state. Its core moral value is the non-aggression principle (NAP): no one may initiate force or violence against another individual or group, nor enlist others to do so on one’s behalf. Physical force or violence is morally justified in retaliation against its initiation by another.

Property rights are then economic claims, limited only by the NAP (you can’t murder or enslave someone on your property).

As some libertarians put all this: everyone is the sole owner of his/her life and the fruits of his/her mind and labors. No one has a moral claim on the lives or the fruits of the labors of others.

To libertarians, this sounds idyllic. They imagine a world of unfettered freedoms in which all may flourish in their own way, living life according to their own choices and not the choices of someone else, absent coercion and violence. Various forms of libertarian thought, an extension of classical liberal thought, date at least to German economic thinkers such as Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises of the Austrian School; and a few Americans ranging from Murray N. Rothbard, originally an acolyte of Mises, to philosophers such as John Hospers and the novelist / philosopher Ayn Rand.

I don’t know how many people who voted for Milei actually subscribe to this philosophy. Probably they just want a change in direction from the Peronists. Can anyone blame them for that? No one in his right mind, after all, who knows anything of the current situation in Argentina, thinks the country could keep going in the direction its Sergio Massas have been taking it.

Some history.

Once, long ago, Argentina was the most prosperous place in South America. Like other Latin American countries, it was settled throughout the 16^th, 17^th, and 18^th centuries, primarily from Spain. Under the Spanish Empire the country became the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata. The country fought a six-year war for independence beginning in 1810. Decades of civil strife followed, however.

But by the end of the 1800s, economic growth based on an essentially classical liberal economic model led to rising prosperity. Noted for its natural resources which include oil, coal, natural gas as well as minerals such as silver, gold, copper, and lead, by 1880 Argentina had the seventh highest average per capita income in the world. The country’s name derives from argentum, Latin for silver.

The prosperity didn’t last — possibly because while the country had adopted a kind of classical liberalism, its political structure retained civil or Roman law (like Chile and other Latin American countries) instead of English-originated common law. Civil law both presupposes, and fosters, an environment of distrust that undermines the efficiency of markets and grows government via bureaucracy.

Argentina suffered during the Great Depression, just as North Americans did. North Americans bounced back. The U.S., following its victory over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in the Second World War, built the strongest economy the world had ever seen.

Despite having the second largest economy in South America, Argentina struggled. Two figures emerged at its helm in the 1940s: Colonel Juan Peron and his wife Eva “Evita” Peron. Thus began the first “Peronist” period, which ended in 1955 when Juan Peron was driven from power and fled into exile. Another period of instability ensued, ending with Peron returning in 1973: interestingly, the same year El Golpe in Chile toppled Salvador Allende and instilled the military rule of Augusto Pinochet, who ruled that country for the next 17 years but oversaw the rebuilding of its economy along a Friedmanite model.

Peron had no such luck. He died the following year. His wife tried to take his place. She couldn’t hold things together, and more instability resulted, characterized by left-versus-right armed conflicts. A military junta seized power in 1976 and began the so-called “Dirty War” which tried (unsuccessfully) to purge the country of leftists. This junta had to step down in 1983 following the Falklands fiasco the year before. When the dirt settled, its leaders were in prison.

Argentina became a democracy — or, at least, that was the intent. In 1989, the next Peronist, Carlos Menem, was elected president. Three years later, the Argentinian peso became the country’s official fiat currency, pegged to the dollar. A centrist government rose in the 1990s. This didn’t last, either. Amidst a massive recession and rising public debt, the Peronists returned in 2001 amidst the general strike of that year which brought the country to a standstill. Initially, for the Peronists, things did not look good at all! In December of that year, the banks shut down amidst a near-collapse of the currency and the withdrawal of $1.3 billion in aid from the IMF.

Riots ensued. Then things got worse. The following year, the country defaulted on an $800 million debt repayment to the World Bank.

A more “modest” Peronist, Nestor Kirchner, became president in 2003. Negotiations begin with the IMF resulting in an agreement to repay just the interest on its loan. This boosted the economy, and a couple of years later, Argentina repaid its debt.

Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, Nestor Kirchner’s wife, succeeded him as president in 2007. By this time the country was again enjoying relative prosperity — relative to its recent past, anyway; for as with the U.S., it was debt-based and not sustainable. The financial crisis of 2008-09 sent everyone, everywhere, into a tailspin. The Argentinian government improvised, and things seemed to be turning around. But in 2013, the IMF censured the country for reporting false information on inflation and economic growth.

The following year, an Argentinian, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, became Pope Francis, putting the country in the limelight despite that fact that both its economic and cultural problems were again worsening. Pope Francis became the first Latin American to rise to this stature.

The Argentinian peso continued its slow, agonizing tumble towards oblivion. Cristina Kirchner remained a key figure on the political scene, though she’d become a lightning rod: she had both fervent defenders and equally fervent detractors.

In 2019, Peronist candidate Alberto Fernández became president, ousting his predecessor the conservative Mauricio Macri who was unable to put the brakes on general deterioration. We’re almost to the present — to a weary Argentina clearly in decline (laws legalizing abortion, etc.), a government having fallen into complete dysfunction, with poverty soaring and inflation leading to the point of civil unrest. Voting is obligatory in Argentina — and voters were looking outside the standard political categories.

What the Peronists seemed to believe was a confusing and confused mixture of Argentinian nationalism and governmental interventionism, hailed by its leftist defenders for its social programs and by its openness to feminism, abortion, and “gay rights.”

Arguably Peronism has been a decades-long disaster for the country that has run its course.

Can Javier Milei fix things? That’s the question Argentinian voters overwhelmingly gambled on last Sunday. Who is he?

Who is Javier Milei?

He’s been described as a “populist,” typically by his detractors. The Peronists were also described as “populists,” suggesting the meaninglessness of that term.

Born in 1970, Milei studied economics at institutions like Universidad de Belgrano, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and CEDES/IDES. He became a head economist for Corporación America, one of the country’s largest business conglomerates which runs its major airports among other large endeavors. He has authored around 50 scholarly papers and several books defending libertarian economics (his political party is known as La Libertad Avanza). Possibly being in the rock-and-roll band prior to becoming an economist and a television personality schooled him for life in front of an audience. He has been both hailed and decried for his outbursts against government spending.

As with Trump, his detractors in mass media could not argue with a salient fact: he boosted ratings. In this New Normal, outrage tends to do that. During his recent campaign he would wield a chainsaw at rallies, symbolic of his plan to axe government programs, close the central bank, and scrap the peso, replacing it with the dollar (!). He’s unmarried, and the owner of five mastiffs named after the economists he most admires.

To the best of my knowledge, none of his writings have been translated into English. Hence besides what everyone now knows, I don’t know his full worldview — whether it is Christian-leaning or premised on materialism. Having sided with cultural conservatives, he has vowed to put Argentina’s recent legalization of abortion to the test of a national referendum. He’s described man-made climate change as a “socialist lie” and denounced Pope Francis as a “filthy leftist” and “the representative of malignance on Earth.”

Here is what he says about leftists generally (I have this translation from a current Tom Woods letter):

“If you think differently from them they will kill you!… You can’t give sh** leftists an inch. If you give them an inch they will use it to destroy you…. You don’t negotiate with trash because they will end you!… We’re not only superior economically, we are morally superior, we are aesthetically superior, we are better than they are at everything. And that triggers them. And since they can’t beat us with real arguments, they just use the repressive apparatus of the state, with loads of taxpayer money, to destroy us. And yet they’re still losing!… Leftists are losing the cultural battle. For the first time ever, they are cornered.”

As the saying goes, holy horseshoes, Batman!

I think he exaggerates with that last — the battle against cultural leftism is far from over as he might find out if he puts abortion to the test and loses. What we can say for sure: he’s definitely not part of the leftist-globalist alliance of convenience!

Which is why I think of him as a counter-elite, using Peter Turchin’s vocabulary, just as Trump is a counter-elite. He wants to purge Argentina’s “political caste,” akin to Trump’s call to “drain the swamp.” He is planning “economic shock therapy.”

His argument against the central bank is that it prints money, money printing being the root cause of inflation. This seems to me correct. Money printing is inflation. What is inflated is the amount in circulation, which debauches a currency’s value. The reasoning is straightforward: the more you have of any desired good, the less value individual units of that good can command.

Prospects for a better Argentina?

My sense: Milei’s proposals for what Trump has called “making Argentina great again” provide a necessary condition for such, but probably not a sufficient condition.

They may be essential steps to a better Argentina, but what’s needed is more: a worldview transformation — which Latin America generally needs (also North America and Europe): explicit rejection of materialism as a worldview and a re-embrace of the kind of Christendom which proclaims individual persons not simply as “owners of their own lives” but as having intrinsic value as creations in God’s image — deriving their moral value from this and not mere economic value from what’s in their pocket or wallet or bank account or portfolio, or derived from class or group identity, or from any other contingent source.

Maybe Milei’s instincts lead toward something like this. Maybe not. He doubtless knows he won’t be able to make sudden, axe-wielding moves overnight, because doing so will lead to still more dislocations. Economics is downstream from culture, and cultural change cannot be made overnight. None of the countries of the West got into their present messes overnight, and none will get out of them overnight.

I don’t know what Milei’s policies will reflect over the long run, or if he’ll even be allowed by the remaining elites still in power in Argentina to enact them. But without both ingredients — political decentralization reducing the size and capacity of governmental and corporate elites to reign supreme, combined with a worldview appropriate to who and what human beings are — his term will only take his country part of the way.

At best, after an initial rough ride and reemergence of prosperity, it won’t be enough. What Turchin calls “wealth pumps” will emerge and redistribute wealth upwards into the hands of a tiny corporate elite, and the result will be another eventual burst of the kind of unrest Chile experienced starting in late 2019.

But one must begin somewhere. The fact that Milei is being demonized across globalist and left-leaning corporate media I see as a good sign! In any event, he takes office on December 10 (the 40^th anniversary of the end of Argentina’s military dictatorship). Thus will begin the biggest test we’ve yet seen on the world stage for the kind of anarcho-capitalist economics Milei represents. He’ll need more than charisma and chainsaws to lead his country out of its present cul-de-sac. That is going to take some doing!

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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If you enjoyed this article, consider becoming a Patron if you feel like supporting my writing.

Also, if the ideas discussed in this article seem important to you and you’d like to see them further developed, see my book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021), available here and here. My earlier book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) is available here.

My new novel The Shadow Over Sarnath has been published and is available here.

We Still Have a 14th Amendment, but Do We Have a First?

By Steven Yates

November 24, 2023

The Strange Case of Douglass Mackey

Douglas Mackey, an ordinary guy with a degree from Middlebury College in his native Vermont, might be on his way to prison. His “crime”: making fun of Hillary Clinton and Clinton voters on Twitter back in 2016.

He was taken into custody by the FBI exactly seven days after Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021 — almost five years later — and not told why.

Welcome to the New Normal, an era of events you couldn’t make up if you tried.

Tucker Carlson, ever the intrepid media counter-elite since his ousting from controlled opposition Fox News, recently talked to Mackey on Tucker on X (formerly Twitter).

Who is he? He’d been working as an economic researcher in New York. He was posting pro-Trump memes, links to articles, etc., under a Twitter screen name.

Mackey seems to exemplify the sort of guy I’ve talked about: someone for whom all the official ruling elite narratives had collapsed — lost all credibility — and to whom Donald Trump therefore appealed as “a breath of fresh air.”

He simply assumed he had rights under the First Amendment, i.e., to criticize, or make fun of, a member of America’s ruling class. Or anyone still naïve enough to vote for them.

Hillary is as ruling class as it gets.

Mackey posted a meme addressed to Hillary votes stating that they could text their votes to a certain number.

The meme read, word-for-word: “Save time, avoid the line, vote from home; text ‘Hillary’ to 59925 and we’ll make history together.”

He didn’t create it but found it: one of several such memes then floating around online.

He told Tucker it was intended as a joke, an expression of a kind of dry humor too subtle for our ruling class and its foot soldiers.

On national television, Hillary called it “a very deliberate effort to mislead people about where and how to vote … going from speech to action meant to subvert the election …”

Algorithms, she said, sent the meme to thousands of people who, she assumes, doubtless unintentionally, were too stupid to get the joke. (Did she honestly think Mackey controlled algorithms on Twitter?)

This, from the person who supported the largest election subversion effort in U.S. history: the Russiagate hoax. British intel operative Christopher Steele — architect of the infamous Steele Dossier — turned out to be working for her, after all.

Given that he’d used a screenname, how did anyone find out his identity? He related to Tucker how he’d been doxed by a reporter at leftist HuffPo who had contacts inside the Twitterverse, which at the time was still mostly a hard left echo chamber.

Mackey related how four FBI agents and six police officers awakened him banging on his door at 7 am one week after Biden’s inauguration, without any prior warning. He was handcuffed and forcibly taken into custody, and not told what the charges against him were. Still pondering what he could possibly have done, he was put in leg irons in jail. Because of plan-demic (covid) restrictions he interacted with a public defender on Zoom. Seems the public defender didn’t know the charges, either.

He was in disbelief when he found out at his arraignment what they were.

That this had something to do with his posting a meme that made fun of Hillary voters had never occurred to him. Especially as four years had elapsed.

But Democrats were back in control of the Executive Branch. That meant the ruling class was back in power.

The political environment was very highly charged, moreover. January 6, which the ruling class and its controlled media were already branding an “insurrection,” were fresh in everybody’s minds. The Asylum on the Potomac had been turned into an armed camp, we were told, to protect the newly instilled regime from the thousands of “white nationalists” elite-controlled media said was out there … somewhere.

Mackey relates how he was arraigned, released on bond, then put out on the street. He had to get home on his own, twenty miles away, in the middle of a big city. He didn’t have his wallet or his phone. He’d been told, crazily, “You won’t need those.”

As the case worked its way through the courts, he assumed he’d be found innocent, but in March this year he was convicted of — are you sitting down? — “Conspiracy Against Rights stemming from a scheme to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote.”

So-called “fact checkers” insist that this case isn’t about Mackey’s right to free speech, about his use of the meme itself, but rather about his purposefully putting out inaccurate voting information that crossed the legal line.

While contending that some 4,900 texts had gone to that number (59925), the court couldn’t find anyone able to testify to actual harm, of having been deprived of their right to vote.

A jury thus found him guilty on the basis of … nothing!

There was no harm done, nor malicious intent.

Leftists don’t require themselves to produce substantive evidence, of course. Ruling elites don’t base their authority on evidence. They do what they do because they can.

And they assume they can get inside the heads of those they accuse, psychoanalyze them, divine their motives. I’ve seen this over and over. This is the basis of the claim that all white men who criticize affirmative action are closet racists and misogynists.

Only conservatives are told that their claims about, say, a stolen election, are “baseless” and “without evidence.” And then called election deniers.

The legal eagles in Brooklyn had found twelve people who would convict based on a fabrication: that Mackey had conspired with other “Twitter influencers” to deceive Hillary voters and thus interfered with the election.

He was at risk of going to prison for a maximum ten years!

In October he was sentenced to seven months.

Leftists are celebrating his conviction and prospective imprisonment!

Another “defeat” for a Trump supporter!

Mackey has appealed, obviously. Unsurprisingly, he’s short on cash and having to crowdfund.* The entire episode, beginning with his doxing by HuffPo, has been extremely stressful on him and on his family.

In his Tucker Carlson interview, he was remarkably stoic. “No use for self-pity,” he says near the end. His dry sense of humor has doubtless helped him immensely.

But this is the New Normal we’ve all having to navigate in various ways. Someone who had supported Trump by poking fun of one of the left’s heroes, Hillary Clinton (or her voters), is threatened with immanent jail time for spreading “election misinformation.”

Do Americans even still have a meaningful First Amendment?

Trump’s criticisms of the 2020 election, as well as those that came from his legal orbit back then, are being held against him in the Democrat-controlled (i.e., ruling class controlled) courts — in the Asylum on the Potomac and its branches in New York and down in Atlanta.

Even a former President of the United States isn’t afforded First Amendment protections.

Controlled corporate media outlets (The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, ABC, NBC, NPR, HuffPo, Salon, Time, The Atlantic Monthly, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlanta Journal/Constitution, the Miami Herald, and countless others) have spilled gallons of ink and used equivalent bandwidth space trying to foment abject terror of a Trump 2.0 administration that would begin on Monday, January 20, 2025.

It will be authoritarian, autocratic, proto-fascist, or full-on fascist, etc., etc., they shriek. It will “end our country as we know it,” Hillary recently warned hysterically.

You’re not supposed to notice that if you’re in the U.S. you’re living under an authoritarian regime now, under political-economic ruling elites that have largely gutted the right to free speech both online and offline. The ruling class has similarly gutted freedom of assembly (as when parents are arrested at school board meetings and threatened with domestic terrorism charges for protesting their kids being “educated” about transgenderism); the right of those accused to be informed of the accusations against them and allowed to confront their accusers without being railroaded; the right to privacy and security in their homes; and many more.

The Bill of Rights, a correspondent angrily told me a couple of weeks ago, is dead! America is a de facto police state!

But we do have a 14^th Amendment! Attempts to have Trump’s name removed from state ballots are failing, one by one. They’ve failed (so far!) in both Minnesota and Michigan. Last Friday, a Colorado judge refused to remove Trump’s candidacy, but still endorsed the official narrative that Trump fomented an insurrection. That leaves the door open for appeals by leftist groups trying to block the one person who poses an existential threat to their cultural dominance and ruling elitism generally.

No one in his right mind thinks this battle is over.

It’s a cliché that those who play with fire sometimes get burned. I’ll only say that if any such effort succeeds, anywhere, it could lead to a social explosion. I sometimes think that’s what the left wants. Especially when the candidate the left wants to block is leading the field for the opposition party.

Oh, I missed something earlier.

This, posted to Twitter on Election Morning, November 8, 2016, from someone going by the name Kristina Wong. She is posing as a Trump supporter, wearing a MAGA hat. “Hey Trump supporters!” the text portion of the tweet reads. “Skip poll lines at #Election2016 and TEXT in your vote! Text votes are legit. Or vote tomorrow on Super Wednesday!” In a video she says to vote for Trump that day (not Tuesday!).

I thought the case against Mackey was based on text votes not being “legit.”

Wong — or whatever her real name is — not only has not been arrested and charged for trying to “mislead” Trump voters or on some other “election subversion” charge, she has not even been ordered to remove the tweet, which remains online for all the world to see!

The cynicism and hypocrisy of leftists never ceases to stagger me. You’d think I’d get used to it.

*Warning: on attempting to access Mackey’s crowdfunding page the antivirus software on my laptop responded with a garish RISKY SITE warning. That’s the sort of thing that will discourage most would-be visitors from accessing the site. I wonder if even antivirus software firms are now owned subsidiaries of the ruling class. Who knows?

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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If you enjoyed this article and feel like supporting my writing, please consider becoming a Patron.

Also, if the ideas discussed in this article seem important to you and you’d like to see them developed further, see my book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021), available here and here. My earlier book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the America Republic (2011) is available here.

While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, my novel of cosmic horror The Shadow Over Sarnath has just been published. To learn more, or to read a few fragments, feel free to shoot me an email.

A Look Behind the Latest Republican Rout

By Steven Yates

November 18, 2023

What happened?

There was an off-year election last week. So-called abortion rights were on the ballot in Ohio; a legal right to abortion got added to Ohio’s state constitution. There were governors’ races in Kentucky (the Democrat won) and Mississippi (the Republican won). The General Assembly in Virginia was up for grabs and Democrats won out. Abortion was a factor there as well.

To listen to the pundits, the defeats were a complete surprise for Republicans.

I wasn’t surprised at all.

I’ve been advising people since Dobbs (which reversed Roe v. Wade) that no Supreme Court decision, or law passed, or policy enacted, would reverse the death culture.

Death culture? Any culture which regards human life as expendable because it has become inconvenient, or an unwanted expense. Perhaps: any culture that sees a human being as some kind of societal construct, instead of having a complete set of human DNA (the biological criterion). The expendability of human lives will follow easily.

I’ve emphasized from the get-go what numerous writers have stated in various ways: political economy is downstream from culture. I then add: culture, in turn, is downstream from worldview. What does this mean, exactly?

It means that worldview considerations dominate, identified and acknowledged as such or not. Your worldview tells you — even if you’re not conscious of having one — what is true or real, who we are and how we came to be, what is of value in life, and how we ought to live, including how we should treat our fellow humans.

Answers to these questions are embodied in our lives, our institutions, and today, in voting patterns.

Traditionally, philosophy was the enterprise concerned with such matters, but with rare exceptions, academic philosophers dropped this ball long ago.

Some of us have tried to pick it up again.

Materialism.

Cutting to the chase: materialism is the dominant worldview in the West. Another term you could use for it is naturalism. It became dominant gradually, displacing Christendom — marginalizing it in such a way that (1) Christian traditions, holidays, and practices such as churchgoing remain, but their capacity to influence the body politic is minimal; (2) many churches got corrupted by pop culture (consider the places where you’re unsure if you’re at a church service or a rock concert); finally (3): attempts to reverse the decline in godly influence are denounced as efforts to establish a theocracy. Christians who actually achieve stature in public life, such as our new House Speaker Mike Johnson, face a wall of distrust.

Materialism (or naturalism) says that nothing exists except this world. There’s no “god.” There’s nothing special about humanity. We’re animals like other animals, differing only in complexity, having emerged from a process that did not “have us in mind.” There’s no soul and no afterlife: no Heaven and no Hell.

The nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was the first to fully recognize the implications of removing God from our world picture. Everything God’s existence gave meaning to falls with Him.

Materialism, if worked out consistently, discards over 2,000 years of Western ethics, which was Christian at its foundations, pulling in Aristotle and the Stoics at key points. Nietzsche’s term for the consequences of this Real Great Replacement was the advent of nihilism. Nihil is Latin for nothing. It means belief in nothing. Nietzsche advocated filling this nothingness with a new ethic: of strength, health, prowess, bravery in the face of material reality’s indifference to whether we live or die. He called this a “revaluation of all values.” The one who best embodies this new ethic will be the Übermensch (“overman” or “superman”), as opposed to “last men” who flee the new order in favor of continuing their mundane lives of servitude to the old (today he’d call them “bitter clingers,” I suppose).

Nietzsche was wrong in one fundamental respect. When we abandon God, we don’t believe in nothing. We believe in anything. Different populations substituted surrogates for God: the state (a big one, for Marxists and also for neocons), money and massive accumulations of wealth (a big one for capitalists), pleasure (think of the sexualizing of modern culture), happiness, self-actualization (Maslow), Reason (cap-R; think Ayn Rand), a few more.

None have worked, and we’ve floundered — and moved inexorably toward technology-based soft tyranny.

What does all this have to do with the past few election debacles?

Behind the abortion issue.

Behind the argument over abortion is an argument about the nature of human life and its intrinsic value. Is human life to be defined genuinely scientifically — that is, biologically, as a complete set of human DNA? Then, does every human being thus understood have intrinsic value, having been created in God’s image. Or not?

Millions of women (and plenty of men) have made their choice. They’ve sided with the materialists. They don’t even know it, because philosophical education is now so impoverished. They speak in euphemisms such as “women’s reproductive rights” and invoke “choice,” often as casually if they were talking about where to have dinner, not a decision to violently end an innocent and completely defenseless human life.

This is what is electing Democrats in 2020s America!

No Supreme Court decision is going to change this. It can’t be changed by fiat.

It can’t be changed in the way some Christians want to do, by challenging Democrat victories and outlawing abortion.

That’ll just invite more pushback.

How do you change a culture from one of death to one of life?

One thing we can be sure of. It can’t be done by force.

Not even brute force can change a society’s worldview, if its adherents psychologically dig in their heels.

The Soviet Communists spent 70 years trying to eradicate Christianity. Russia today, with Orthodoxy, is one of the most Christian nations in the world. A reason, I strongly suspect, that the country is so violently hated in our secularist Establishment.

Chinese Communists have continued suppressing all but a watered down, state-approved “Christianity.” The real thing stubbornly remains the fastest growing faith in China.

Make no mistake about it: cultural Marxism / Maoism in the West is at war with Christianity — not “capitalism” which it uses shamelessly as it can. Cultural Marxism is a form of materialism, its foot soldiers too poorly educated to recognize the fact. (I consider anyone who can’t define a woman or who believes one sex can be changed into another to be poorly educated.)

This doesn’t leave them politically ineffective. They’ve been very effective.

How Worldview Replacement Happens. Eugenics.

It might be instructive to examine how the great change from Christendom to materialism was accomplished in the West. The change wasn’t just intellectual, but also organizational and propagandistic.

For example, “Darwin’s bulldog” (Thomas Henry Huxley, father of Sir Julian and Aldous) sold Darwin’s theory to the scientific community: vigorously persuaded scientists to embrace it, to incorporate it into their very conception of science.

This embrace had little to do with actual scientific or empirical evidence, which was skimpy at best and nonexistent at worst. We had no evidence whatsoever that life could come from nonlife naturalistically. This gave Darwin himself sleepless nights.

But as physicist Max Planck observed:

“A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Whether he’s talking about truth or not, Planck was onto something.

More recently, philosopher and historian of science Thomas S. Kuhn destroyed the idea that the replacement of one theory in physics by a later theory is a matter of evidence-based logical argumentation (in his landmark tract The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [1962]).

Worldviews, we can be assured, are “laxer” intellectually than theories in physics!

Materialism, finally, offered liberation from the behavioral and policy strictures Christianity imposed on society — especially on its leadership.

Eugenics was one result. This is the idea that superior races should rule, that it would improve the human “stock” if inferior races are not allowed to breed. If troublesome enough, inferiors can simply be exterminated.

“Discredited” when the Nazis made use of this evil notion, I would argue that eugenics has come back.

No one dares call it that, of course.

The idea that there are just too damn many people in the world is a prevailing one in GloboCorp — the globalist predators, the power elites, the Great Resetters, architects of the “fourth industrial revolution,” call them what you will.

It’s true: there are too many people to control technocratically.

So force them to take poorly tested “vaccines” for a lab-made virus? So they begin to die from a range of conditions, some almost immediately, others over a long enough period of time to supply plausible deniability?

If that’s not eugenics, wielded primarily against the elderly and other “useless eaters,” then pray tell, what is?!

Materialism was furthered indirectly by people whose only interests were money and power, as when the Rockefeller Foundation bankrolled efforts to understand how “the masses” could be more easily incentivized, made into better consumers, obedient to political authority, and so on.

Government (“public”) schools were key. The Rockefellers created endeavors such as the General Education Board (1903), then bankrolled John Dewey’s Progressive Education which held that the role of education in a “changing world” is socialization, i.e., mental conformity, not critical, independent thinking.

Finally were decisions, many of them by the Supreme Court, to remove Christianity from government schools on spurious First Amendment grounds.

In other words, the process by which materialism replacing Christianity in America wasn’t fundamentally intellectual. It wasn’t logic-based; it wasn’t evidence-based. It was a matter of money and policy. The perpetrators got away with it!

That militates against the idea that we should expect to dislodge its grip with intellectual arguments.

What is to be done?

If Supreme Court rulings and political actions won’t work, and intellectual arguments won’t work, then what will?

This, I think, is one of the great dilemmas of our time!

Making matters worse: we anti-materialists don’t have any billionaires on our side that I know of. No, the Kochs aren’t interested in this, they’re neocons and therefore materialists who don’t know it, like many in well-heeled foundations, even those labeled “conservative.”

So we can’t expect anyone to bankroll us. At least, I stopped expecting that some time ago.

Our books aren’t going to gain a broad readership, because we’re not sexy or entertaining.

Roughly four years ago, a friend showed me a quotation that brought me up short. It came from architect, inventor, and systems thinker R. Buckminster Fuller:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

We need to build new models. They need to make the existing ones obsolete.

They need to undercut the dominance of central banks and other leviathan corporations, political classes, current educational structures, industrial food production, industrial medicine, etc.

I’ve since learned that such efforts are already underway in every one of these areas.

The situation is not as bad as it looks at first glance! There’s hope!

What we have to do is get the word out, in ways that will vary depending on what each of us can contribute. I’m a writer, so I write. Others make videos and movies because their skills lie in those areas. Homeschooling continues to surge. Private schools and even wholly independent universities are starting to appear (the most recent I know of is the University of Austin in Austin, Texas).

In another arena, others are establishing independent farms and building agrarian communities. Those who can grow food will be better positioned to survive the Great Taking when (not if) it occurs.

It won’t be easy. Nothing worthwhile ever is.

The road back to independence guided by a worldview that places God at the center, respects the divinely-ordered Creation, and sees persons as having intrinsic value won’t be easy.

Scare tactics work. It’s how the power elites were able to lock down most of the planet back in 2020, working through public health bureaucracies in every nation!

They used fear to force the mRNA shots on reluctant populations, including fear of unemployment.

This works both ways, however.

While the matter calls for a separate article, a second Trump presidency absolutely terrifies the Establishment and its punditry.

Trump will “end democracy” and establish authoritarian rule, says (well paid) pundit after pundit.

The other day, Hillary Clinton pontificated that Trump 2.0 would be “the end of our country as we know it.”

But if that means ending something circling the drain, its borders destroyed, its energy independence undermined, its middle class a thing of the past, the value of its currency gone, suffering from probably the worst mental health crisis in its history, and its only prospect a slow and painful integration into “global governance” as well as a reduced standard of living, wouldn’t that be a good thing?!

The rest of Hillary’s rant is projection.

The telos of materialism is totalitarianism. Because power — the capacity to control other people — is what will get the last word.

Look at China, where covid was hatched (bankrolled by Fauci and his henchmen).

Covid, in the West, was just a steppingstone.

I think that if we can make such points which are fully documented in books such as that of the Breggins, we might have something.*

A parallel economy has begun outside presently-dominant institutions. What I’ve seen of it is far healthier than the “above ground” economy the pundits routinely assess.

I’d like to see a revival of interest in philosophy alongside this parallel economy, especially the kind of philosophy that asks, and answers, “What’s a good life.” I’m happy to report: there’s significant interest out here in the hinterlands. Even YouTube has dozens of channels devoted to the subject. They get thousands of hits — not up there with celebrity and entertainment channels, obviously, but not nothing.

This might not stop the globalist predators. But it will continue to slow their progress to a crawl. Given that time is running out for them for various reasons — counter-elites (Trump is an example, and also Tucker Carlson) are not going anywhere, and their base of support grows by the day alongside those who are simply ignoring globalism as they tend their corner of the parallel economy. That might be enough!

*When attempting to access Dr. Breggin’s website my Google Chrome browser kept giving me 403 Forbidden. Online censorship, which barely existed before the Trump upset in 2016, will continue to be a challenge.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

If you enjoyed this article, consider becoming a Patron if you feel like supporting my writing.

While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, my novel of cosmic horror, The Shadow Over Sarnath, will be published this month. To learn more or to read a few fragments, feel free to shoot me an email: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.

Trump and the 14th Amendment: Reiterating

Steven Yates, PhD

November 3, 2023

An Open Letter Sent to Donald’s Legal Team in Colorado

This will be short. I promise. Those claiming that Trump is disqualified from running for the presidency next year because the 14^th Amendment, Section 3, bars anyone having engaged in an “insurrection” from running for (or holding) public office, haven’t read the entire Amendment.

I’m not a lawyer or law professor or other legal “expert,” but I can read plain English.

Section 5 of the 14^th Amendment specifically designates Congress as authorized to make this judgment, not any court — state or federal.

What Section 5 states: “The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

If Judge Wallace rules that Trump’s name cannot appear on the Colorado ballot next year, the ruling will need to be appealed immediately to the Supreme Court with this information, lest the ruling be precedent-setting (Minnesota, Michigan, elsewhere).

If the Supremes follow the Constitution, they will drop everything else and reverse the Colorado ruling immediately.

If, on the other hand, Judge Wallace decides in favor of keeping Trump’s name on the ballot and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington appeals that decision, the Supreme Court should decline to hear the appeal.

My longer article from September expands on all this, including whether the claim that Trump is an “insurrectionist” is true or media narrative.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

The Age of Mediocrity Supremacy

By Steven Yates

October 28, 2023

“One thing that every late-stage ruling class has in common is a high tolerance for mediocrity. Standards decline, the edges fray, but nobody in charge seems to notice. They’re happy in their sinecures and getting richer. In a culture like this, there’s no penalty for being wrong. The talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way.” —Tucker Carlson, Ship of Fools (2018), p. 83.

Mediocrity supremacy? Why not? In this age of paranoia about “supremacies,” this one is real.

Carlson settles on author and arch-warmonger, Washington Post columnist, and Council on Foreign Relations member Max Boot as his primary example.

Boot has defended every ill-advised foreign war of the past 20 years, and then some. He’s promoted ventures that even the pro-war Bush and Obama administrations 2001–2016 weren’t eager to pursue. He didn’t just favor launching the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq following 9/11, but went on to urge invasions of Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, North Korea, and Ukraine; probably more.

In other words, this lunatic would have Americans fighting wars on a dozen fronts at once, saying we have the money, the weaponry, and the manpower.

I couldn’t turn up evidence Boot has ever been on a battlefield.* He’s an academic type, with degrees from Berkeley (1991) and Yale (1992); and past tenure at superelite outfits like the CFR.

I’ve not seen anything Boot has written this month, but I’m sure he’s salivating at the mouth over the prospects of bombing Gaza into a new Stone Age.

Mainstream corporate media loves him, of course. This is evidenced by his regular columns in the über-Establishment Washington Post. He was hired there in 2018, doubtless paid an income that vastly exceeds anything your present humble narrator can ever expect. He once wrote a column entitled “What the Heck is a Neocon?” which appeared in several “conservative” publications (Wall Street Journal, National Review) shortly after 9/11. How intellectually dishonest do you have to be to write something with that title, having simultaneously penned “The Case for American Empire” (Weekly Standard, October, 2001)?

Boot is just one example, though, the one Carlson singled out to begin his chapter, on how America’s ruling elites embraced the U.S. war machine to the point where the Republican and Democrat Party Establishments’ foreign policies were virtually indistinguishable (as they’d become indistinguishable on trade policy and monetary policy).

The Republicans in the House surely qualify as mediocrities. It took them four tries to settle on Mike Johnson as Speaker; his and other names floated after the candidacies of Steve Scalise and Jim Jorden crashed and burned are practically unknown outside their districts. Kevin McCarthy was a mediocrity. Scalise and Jordan might have been better choices. Who knows? The latter is pro Trump, and that killed his support from TDS types in both parties.

House Republicans doubtless went with Johnson out of desperation! At least he’s said to be a conservative!

How can I deride all these people as mediocrities with such confidence? Because that’s pretty much all you have in today’s Asylum on the Potomac. The last statesman to grace Congress retired in 2013. That was Dr. Ron Paul.

The present Republican Party’s critics, including some of its own (think Liz Cheney), are trying to blame Donald Trump for their recent woes.

This would be mediocrity supremacist criticism.

Had there not been a sense of suffocating mediocrity throughout the political Establishment — both parties, going back at least two decades — there wouldn’t have been a Trump presidency.

In a system where there are actual statesmen who aren’t simply ignored (as Dr. Paul was), where competence and beneficence are core values, a complete outsider with no previous political experience wouldn’t have gotten to first base. Voters would not have supported him. The Hollywood Access tape, moreover, might actually have doomed his candidacy.

But as was said when Bill Clinton was the target, we weren’t electing a saint. Funny how serious personal flaws (some of them involving proven abusive treatment of women) don’t seem to matter when a Democrat is in the White House. But that’s not my subject today.

This is an age of mediocrity supremacy. Mediocrity is supreme in the Asylum on the Potomac. Not merely accepted but expected.

You could probably get elected to office today if you have money and connections and aren’t mediocre, but your ability to get things done and advance would be strictly limited.

One of the characteristics of mediocrity supremacy is promotion of its own based on personal networks, not real accomplishment. What, after all, did Joe Biden really accomplish in all his years in Congress? We know what he’s done since January 21, 2021!

Mediocrity supremacy screws up everything it touches.

One way to recognize it is to see how those in its grip blame others for their failings, or for the failings of those under their wing. For example, woke academics (academia being another haven of mediocrity supremacy!) blame racism / white supremacy for black teenagers’ leaving high school unable to do basic arithmetic.

Math is now racist!

Blaming Trump for the present predicament in the Republican Party is a much larger-scale example.

Or for the present divisions, in a country whose Establishment:

(1) – spent a quarter century outsourcing its manufacturing base to cheap labor countries (especially Communist China) so its corporations could get richer;

(2) – opened its borders for cheap labor (Republicans, corporations again) and votes (far left Democrats) while

(3) – it claimed it was fighting a “war on terror” (think a minute about squaring that circle); moreover, it

(4) – has almost destroyed the value of its currency through money printing, causing massive inflation; all the while

(5) – waging wars in Afghanistan (utter disaster) and Iraq (utter disaster), sending hundreds of millions to Ukraine (ongoing disaster) and now promoting the same for Israel (a disaster unfolding as I write).

Another way of recognizing mediocrity supremacy is the mediocre’s lack of basic reasoning skills.

Recognize how global elite dominance of as much of the world as possible through central banks, other financial institutions and networks, their capacity to control money flows more broadly, as well as construct official narratives through media corporations they own and control, and you’re a conspiracy theorist.

Criticize the prevailing narrative that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked,” and you’re a cheerleader for Putin (or some equivalent).

Criticize the narrative shaping up in the post October 7 Middle East, and you’re anti-Semitic.

Criticize modern materialism — which I am one of the very few who are doing — and you’re promoting “Christian Talibanism” (or something like that).

It’s shoddy reasoning to attribute malicious intent, mental aberration, or simple ignorance, to those who refuse to get on board with more saber-rattling, more money printing, more money thrown down overseas bottomless wells, more condemnation of “white supremacy” (if it really exists, show me where, outside a handful of enclaves of a few hundred or so remaining KKK-type outcasts who aren’t even allowed to meet in the local Denny’s).

I once taught university-level courses in deductive logic. Supposedly, such courses are still taught. Evidently the modules on fallacies are falling on deaf ears.

Our political-economic ruling elites are not motivated to think in such terms. They are well on the way to having the power they crave. They hate Trump because he can’t be controlled. They have their trained foot soldiers in the legal system. The ruling elites are terrified that next year he’ll manage to claw his way back into the White House.

Hence all the hysterics about how he’s a “threat to democracy.” As what Peter Turchin** calls a counter-elite, he’s a threat to them.

No one ever said Trump was perfect, or even the ideal person to carry the torch of counter-elitism.

It may be that he’s a mirror of sorts, held up and revealing our visible political class and its mass media foot soldiers to themselves. They don’t dare look in that mirror!

Trump probably did arrange to have hush money sent to buy the silence of a porn star with whom he had a one-night stand, which is kind of uncouth (but not illegal!). Given our culture’s fascination with sex, is the rise of someone who would do this really all that surprising?

Did he inflate the value of his New York properties? I don’t know. Maybe. Deciding those matters is well outside my areas of expertise. But one thing is for sure: the Democrat lawyer going after him promised her constituents that she would “get Trump.” Think about that.

Given that Dr. Paul was “too intellectual” for our mediocre world, we’ve had to take what that world delivered. It delivered Trump, who galvanized those conscious of (1) through (5) above, and also of one other thing Trumpism threatens: the diversity-is-our-strength mantra.

Did he call on his supporters to riot at the Capitol and “overturn a free and fair election” on January 6, 2021. I’ve written enough about this in the past that I hope I don’t need to belabor the issue. What might be useful to add to previous discussions, though, is that increasing distrust of elections coming from counter-elites is something we might expect in a mediocrity-supremacist political economy.

Mediocrity supremacy is baked into our New Normal.

Sadly, it’s also baked into the mindsets of a lot of voters, who would have rioted en mass by now at all the money our political class has sent to Ukraine, given how the rising cost of living in the U.S. is pricing Americans out of their homes — literally!

Cui bono? Who benefits? That’s always the question.

The global ruling elites in (and atop) the world’s central banks are not mediocre. They’ve very smart and very capable, to have planned out the decades-long strategy mapped out in The Great Taking which I discussed last week. They understand the incentives to which most people respond, and will doubtless have a range of freebies and other goodies in place for the early adopters of CBDC, which heralds total control and loss of financial privacy.

They understand, finally, that keeping “the masses” as insouciant and distracted as possible will further instituting a techno-feudalist political economy in which there are global superelites, national elites, and technocrat administrators; but within which counter-elites will no longer be tolerated.

Nor will there be a middle class. Just privileged rulers and permanently cash-strapped serfs.

*In fairness, neither has your humble narrator. But your humble narrator has not championed destructive wars of choice in foreign nations none of which is a genuine threat to legitimate U.S. interests.

**Turchin’s book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (Penguin Press) is arguably the second most important book of the year, after The Great Taking by David Rogers Webb.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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My Substack is here. Please consider subscribing. And if you approve of what I do, consider becoming one of my Patrons.

My cosmic horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath is due out on October 31. For details, stay tuned.

The Great Taking

By Steven Yates

October 24, 2023

Everything’s going according to plan….

[Author’s disclaimer: the author is not a financial advisor, and nothing in this article should be construed as financial advice. Consult a trained and trusted professional before pursing any of the suggestions in this article.]

Well (some of you might be thinking), that didn’t take long. My “silence” lasted less than a month. Intended to last until the end of the year, it was predicated on nothing major happening during the interval. Major things have happened. I’m not referring to the deadly Hamas-Israeli clash, though I’ll have a few words to say about that at the end here, and doubtless more later.

I’m referring to my encountering what I think will be the most important book of 2023.

A friend drew my attention to it: The Great Taking, by David Rogers Webb, whom I’d not previously heard of. The friend did not want to be identified, as she is one of many folks who are well-informed but keeping their heads down.

What is The Great Taking about? Let me hand Mr. Webb the mike:

It is about the taking of collateral (all of it), the end game of the current globally synchronous debt accumulation super cycle. This scheme is being executed by long-planned, intelligent design, the audacity and scope of which is difficult for the mind to encompass. Included are all financial assets and bank deposits, all stocks and bonds; and hence, all underlying property of all public corporations, including all inventories, plant and equipment; land, mineral deposits, inventions and intellectual property. Privately owned personal and real property financed with any amount of debt will likewise be taken, as will the assets of privately owned businesses which have been financed with debt. If even partially successful, this will be the greatest conquest and subjugation in world history….

Private, closely held control of ALL central banks, and hence of all money creation, has allowed a very few people to control all political parties and governments; the intelligence agencies and their myriad front organizations; the armed forces and the police; the major corporations and, of course, the media. These very few people are the prime movers. Their plans are executed over decades. Their control is opaque…. To be clear, it is these very few people, who are hidden from you, who are behind this scheme to confiscate all assets, who are waging a hybrid war against humanity (pp. 1-2).

How does this differ from what, e.g., G. Edward Griffin put forth in The Creature from Jekyll Island (1994)? It goes well beyond that. (1) The game plan is far more advanced now than when Griffin was writing, and we learn that those we’ve been naming as visible players, such as Klaus Schwab or George Soros or Bill Gates, are frontmen allowed visibility because they do what they’re told. (2) Griffin has suffered the fate of all outsiders, which has been to be branded a “conspiracy theorist” when not simply ignored. Webb was an insider, working on Wall Street where he rubbed noses with billionaires including Soros at one point. Coming out of a working class background, he taught himself a great deal of what he knows and became the successful manager of a hedge fund based in his home city of Cleveland. The Prologue of The Great Taking, at first glance lengthy and ponderous, builds credibility and demonstrates command of his subject matter, including what motivated him to research all this and then write about it: the desire to care for his family.

My friend aggregated the following (I’ve done some light editing):

LEGAL CODE NOW IN PLACE FOR FEDERAL RESERVE TO CONFISCATE ALL ASSETS

Investment advisor Doug Casey says of the Great Taking, “It’s a scheme of central bankers to subjugate humanity by taking all securities, bank deposits, and property financed with debt. David Webb, a former hedge manager and Wall Street insider, has blown the lid off a diabolical plan more than 50 years in the making in a shocking new book.”

The bond market froze over the last few weeks. The derivatives market [valuation: now well over a quadrillion; that’s 1,000 trillion, dollars, exceeding the world’s entire GDP several times over] is set to implode. When these global markets collapse they will cause cascading defaults. One bankruptcy will cause other businesses and individuals to go bankrupt like falling dominoes. In anticipation of the collapse, the Federal Reserve and other central banks have worked to pass laws that will ensure that the biggest banks end up owning all assets. We have all heard that these banks are “too big to fail,” but we did not realize that they were given a special “high priority” legal designation that allows them to confiscate property electronically and without going to court.

Attorney Ellen Brown offers a more detailed legal study of David Webb’s evidence and concludes, “It sounds like a conspiracy theory but it is all laid out in the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), tested in precedent, and validated by court rulings.”

The Great Taking by David Webb is available for free.

It’s just 130 pages, and outlines how all assets will be confiscated and transferred to “high priority” or “too big to fail” banks. Everyone will be impacted, from factory workers, truck drivers, doctors and nurses and other professionals, naïve Congresspeople, even a lot of billionaires not all of whom are insiders after all. EVERYONE.

People will lose their homes, mortgages, pensions, and 401Ks.

The legal constructs needed to make wholesale confiscation possible have happened gradually and quietly. However, the first hint that our legal system had been transformed happened when Lehman Brothers went down in 2008. Investors were shocked to learn that they were “unsecured creditors.” Investors learned that the stock and bond assets they thought they owned had become Lehman’s collateral. Thus, upon Lehman’s bankruptcy, investor assets were electronically transferred to JP Morgan Chase, a “high priority creditor.” Federal laws and state UCC laws are now fully implemented that make any assets not in your personal possession (bank balance, stock shares, bonds) into assets owned by others (your bank, broker, and asset manager) in your name, and subject to being used to satisfy their debts upon their bankruptcy. Unfortunately, you are last in line when that happens. (This is similar to the set of changes that were made to bank deposits, but now apply to securities.)

David Webb is a former hedge fund manager who went down a legal wormhole trying to figure out the safest jurisdiction for his own assets. That journey allowed him to uncover the legal changes, in both states and nations, that have made confiscation possible without going to court. Webb talks about this here.

You’ll find a lengthier but still-accessible discussion of The Great Taking here.

Steven again. Some of the terminology in the book itself and in these videos may be intimidating. Even after reading The Great Taking twice I’d have trouble explaining fully why you might be an “unsecured creditor,” or what a “credit default obligation” is, or what “dematerialization” is — although this last has to do with the fact that once, long ago, if you bought a publicly traded company’s stock you were issued a physical certificate. I recall my dad having such certificates, which he kept in a safety deposit box at his bank. Everything is now digital — which means it can be easily transferred, or made to go poof, with the right mouse clicks by a central banker.

Rather like covid-19(84), this is global in scope, and is very far along: far more so than when Griffin wrote Creature.

Readers will want to know what to do, and I can’t blame them. As the tagline goes on many a horror flick, “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

I don’t recommend giving into fear paralysis. First, download and read The Great Taking. It’s free, remember? Physical copies of the book are obtainable, and I’d get one of those even if it’s not free. Or just print the 130 page PDF to get a hardcopy. The point is, to have something that will survive should the Internet go poof for a time. Parts of it will be tough slogging if you’re not financially savvy. I’d tough it out. Read the book multiple times.

Note that when all is said and done, despite his having made a ton of money on Wall Street and then with his own hedge fund, David Webb remained one of us: basically a traditional guy, instinctively supporting the values of family and home he grew up with (and that money should be subordinated to those relationships), in protecting his employees, and in an economic system based on genuine freedoms, not control systems. He stumbled across all this trying to find ways of helping those he was close to. He learned, among other things, that the Federal Reserve had already pulled stunts like this early in the Great Depression, which saw bank closures (“holidays”) — after which only Fed-approved banks were allowed to reopen. People with deposits in banks that remained closed were out of luck! They lost everything!

Today, with the Everything Bubble, Webb argues, it’s about to happen all over again, and on a much larger scale! A debt-based “fiat” money political economy is inherently unstable and bound to collapse, but the collapse can be controlled. As he says of the economic-financial ruling class mindset, once they have done maximum damage both through massive inflation followed by massive deflation:

…The financial system must be restarted, so that we can provide credit to you again, create jobs and get the economy growing, whatever it takes!

This time, what it will take is all of your property, or what you thought was your property. Here is your Central Bank Digital Currency deposited on your smart phone, so that you can buy milk. Noblesse Oblige!

Money is an extremely efficient control system. People order themselves upon money incentives, and thus difficult, dangerous and energy intensive overt physical control need not be employed broadly (p. 2).

A lot of freedom believers don’t get this last. Zero free-market absolutists with an “economic point of view” seem to get it. They do not see society as larger than its economy, as containing markets as opposed to being just one big mass-consumption marketplace. A conservative in my sense sees economics as “downstream” from culture, and culture as “downstream” from worldview. The free-market absolutist thus focuses exclusively on government as the root of all evil (not that it generates much good; there is enough truth in the free-market absolutist stance to leave many observers confused). He or she doesn’t appear to realize that the Federal Reserve and other central banks, the Bank for International Settlements at the center of the global central banking octopus, are all private corporations. Who reaped the greatest windfalls from the covid fiasco? Private corporations. Big Pharma, Big Tech, a few others. There’s truth in the version of the Golden Rule which states that “those who have the gold make the rules.” Once the economic-financial ruling class has ordered all gold confiscated from the hands of the peasantry, of course (done during the Great Depression and able to be done again — at gunpoint if necessary!).

Government has the guns, but those who control money tell government where to point them. Government is just a political class and an army of servile bureaucrats and other underlings, after all. Most haven’t had an original thought in their lives. They’ll do what the private ruling class tells them to do, and they won’t ask questions.

(In this view, the most basic reason Donald Trump is hated has nothing to do with his personality or what he said on a tape years ago or how he treats women or the “real” value of his businesses or what he said on January 6, 2021. It has everything to do with the fact that the globe’s real would-be rulers can’t control him.)

Second, then, help expose this evil scheme, far and wide! Forward this article, or the link to The Great Taking, to all your contacts, everyone in your personal network. The more people who read the book — multiple times — the better!

Then what?

Third, work at extricating yourself from dependence on supply lines for food, etc., and thus on the money political economy. Start a garden and grow food (we’re learning to do this!). You can learn here. We need to be able to do more for ourselves, because if the ruling elites pull the plug on the Everything Bubble, supply-line ruptures are a given. Learning to defend yourself and your own might be a good idea as well. Get some weapons training if you are so inclined; it goes without saying, weapons are for defensive purposes only! (I’m not saying make a huge show of any of this. Don’t broadcast your plans; don’t carry weapons around visibly, or wear camouflage clothing, or do anything to attract attention. People get into trouble by making spectacles of themselves. Your best bet if you want to be a real survivalist is just to blend in while you educate yourself and your loved ones about what to do and then start taking actions quietly, quietly.)

Some are going so far as to obtain their own generators to power their homes off the official grid.

Fourth, establish community where you are. This may seem dicey in light of the third, but we need to surround ourselves with like-minded others, to share information and resources, trade for what we can’t supply ourselves, and otherwise divide our labors. You can’t do this in isolation. The “lone wolf survivalist” is a myth. People need to know their neighbors, but in a broader sense, to know who has their backs and who doesn’t. Very likely the majority of those in any community just won’t get it — or if they do, it will be too late. You need to find the few who do get it.

Miscellaneous: get out of debt if you can. Those who owe, will pay the most when things go to pieces. The banks will take your home or car, take what they say you owe (plus interest, “service” fees, etc.), and you might get the rest if you’re very lucky and they’re feeling generous.

Don’t look for shortcuts, and be wary of schemes including people trying to sell you gold or silver if they don’t supply the physical metal up front (I had a bad experience with one of those a number of years ago). When investing, avoid like the plague anything with very low risk and a very high rate of return. A lot of free-market absolutists and other freedom believers are promoting bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency. It seems to me that the supposed inventor of bitcoin (or, more exactly, the blockchain technology platform on which it operates), Satoshi Nakamato is supposedly his name, should have become a global hero, his face plastered everywhere, the year of bitcoin’s meteoric rise into the tens of thousands per coin. Instead, no one knows what he looks like, or if there even is such a person! The bottom line here: no one knows where this thing came from! Bitcoin is — again! — entirely digital, moreover. There are no physical “coins” you can hold in your hand, like gold and silver, just colorful “wallets” with identifying information.

Me, I will stick with gold and silver — the physical metals — because with crypto, I suspect a trap. Its defenders will say I don’t understand the technology, that it can’t be inflated like the dollar, is designed to be decentralized and operate outside the central banking system, etc., etc. The response is that if the plug gets pulled, you’ll still have a paper “wallet” or two that won’t be usable for anything, and whatever you invested to obtain that “wallet” will be gone: poof!

Finally and perhaps most important of all: get your worldview right.

To make a long story short, unbridled materialism as a view of the universe, applied to more and more areas of human life, got us into this predicament. It won’t get us out.

This was once a Christian civilization. The idea that the universe is intelligible at all is Christian in its origins: a created order, not a place of randomness and chaos. This is one of the primary reasons science developed in the West and nowhere else (other peoples developed successful crafts, sometimes with great sophistication, but not explanations). Materialism replaced Christianity as the West’s guiding worldview, with a resulting focus on this world. So while our economies and our technologies got “better and better,” supplying more and more creature comforts, ethically and psychologically we were cast adrift, hurled into the abyss of Nietzsche’s “advent of nihilism.”

The idea of human beings created in God’s image supplies the best available foundation for the idea that we all have intrinsic value, from unborn babies to the most infirm of the elderly and everything in between: white, black, Hispanic, Jew, gentile; male and female; believer or unbeliever; etc.

The important thing to realize: absent such a worldview, power gets the last word, and as David Webb puts it, it can risk no pockets of resistance (p. 58).

What you can do, in that case, is recognize God’s sovereignty in His world, whatever He permits because of humanity’s sinful state. He allows nightmares such as this to unfold in order to work His will, that He be glorified, that we recognize our dependence on Him and come to Him. He never promised us trouble-free lives in a fallen world, but His Kingdom will triumph in the end. If you do not know Jesus Christ, I would advise you to discover Him in the Scriptures. Ephesians 6:10-20; Romans 3:23 and 6:23; John 14:6; Revelation 3:20; and elsewhere.

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A slightly different version of this essay is on my Substack, which has been revamped and retitled as “Navigating the New Normal” which we are all having to do. Please consider subscribing. And if you approve of what I do, please consider becoming one of my Patrons.

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On October 7, Hamas launched a deadly attack that killed approximately 1,400 Israelis and took almost 200 hostages. Why Hamas did something that on the surface looks so boneheaded: we don’t know. They had to know that the Israelis would retaliate in an equally deadly fashion, and they have. I therefore suspect hidden actors, and given the material we’ve just seen, I don’t think they’re the Iranians.

Among the things that advances the agenda of the economic-financial global ruling elites is creating as much chaos and instability in the world as possible, through a combination of terrorism, fomented wars, “color revolutions,” and forced migrations of helpless populations.

Life in Gaza City has gone from bad to catastrophic, Israel having ordered a logistically impossible evacuation amidst air bombardments, in preparation for a ground invasion that could come any day, its most likely purpose rooting out and destroying underground Hamas facilities.

Thousands of people have been killed on both sides. With Gaza cut off from shipments of clean water, food, and medical supplies, evacuees—common people like you and me, many of them injured, many of them children, a few pregnant women—are just trying to survive.

I felt called to do something, so I created a fundraiser this past Monday. It’s chancy, involving myself in this, and it received a hostile reaction on LinkedIn (of all places!), but I decided I cannot sit in the safety and relative seclusion of my apartment and do nothing.

In light of all this, please consider donating to help the struggling people trying to flee northeastern Gaza. Remember: not every Gazan is a member of Hamas! Again, they’re just trying to survive. So this is not about “taking sides.”

If you feel inclined to help out, here’s the link. Thank you in advance.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

Going Silent (for Just a Little While)

By Steven Yates

September 29, 2023

Sometimes a hiatus just feels right

Due to recent circumstances, including a health issue requiring my immediate attention (what I think of as a major wake-up call!), and events — items just come my way, learning materials just encountered which I’m still processing — I’ve decided to take a short hiatus from article writing. Another way of putting it: I need to go silent for a short time. I’ll definitely return, no later than late January.

But not before sharing some recent reads. Caitlin Johnstone (recommendation: go to her Substack and subscribe right now; I’ll wait) has become one of my favorite online writers. While I don’t agree with everything she says, her perspective on the passing show merits a place at the table. For example, she recently connected these dots:

It’s so hard to live as an authentic human being in a civilization whose every molecule is wrapped around something as vapid and soulless as corporate profit.

It’s what most of us pour most of our life force into. Most people work all day generating corporate profits to pay bills that go toward corporate profits and pay off loans from giant banks for their corporate profits or rent from real estate giants for their corporate profits. Then they come home, eat some products from giant megacorporations that they purchased at a supermarket chain, and unwind by watching entertainment created by corporations to draw as many eyeballs as possible or scrolling through social media platforms designed by corporations to be as addictive as possible. We do this while being surrounded all day by advertising designed to pull us into generating more corporate profits.

Corporate profits are our life. Corporate profits are our religion. Most of us pour more of our energy into generating corporate profits throughout our lives than the most pious monk pours into worshipping any deity. Not because we want to, but because we have to. We were born into this bizarre civilization where everything revolves around corporate profits instead of love, relationships, connection, thriving, purpose, or personal depth.

Is it any wonder then that so many of us are suffering from addictions and depression and anxiety?

Well, is it? Has she not just peered inside a “hustle culture” which measures success by how much is in your bank account (stock portfolio, real estate holdings, other investments, “side hustles,” etc., etc.)? He who dies with the most toys wins, right?

Are we, or are we not, servile to a relative handful of global corporations in just the above sense, if not as employees than as consumers? Even more so than we are slaves of the tax man? Are they or are they not making matters steadily worse via technology with built-in obsolescence, and steady moves towards a subscription business model heralding a dystopian future “in which you’ll own nothing, have no privacy, but be happy [or the beatings will continue]”?

We’ve been encouraged, almost from childhood, to make money our real religion, and for some “hustle culture” participants, it is just that. They measure their worth as persons by what’s in their bank accounts and portfolios and 401(k)’s. Those who don’t worship at the altar of dollar signs are still committed because of industrial (and post-industrial) civilization’s ever-present encirclements: make enough money or know someone who does or end up homeless (or worse).

There are people out there who will respond to such sentiments with: “You must be broke!” Or even, “You’re some kind of closet socialist!” I’m neither, and I would attribute such emotional responses to the collapse of critical thinking skills in the West. Those with real power, as George Carlin observed in his best routine, do not want a population of critical thinkers, and never did. Such a population would neither make them money nor serve their other interests in maintaining narrative control. Money is one more narrative, after all; and believe it or not, there are cultures that have prospered without making it their center of gravity.

Speaking of narratives, Caitlin also recently dropped these insights:

The more inner work you do and the more awareness you bring to your own inner processes, the more you understand how thoroughly human consciousness is dominated by mental narrative. And the more you understand how thoroughly human consciousness is dominated by mental narrative, the more acutely aware you become of how much power someone could gain over other humans by controlling those narratives.

Those who haven’t done a lot of inner work tend to hold the assumption that everyone is basically perceiving reality as it actually is, and is then either forming good worldviews or bad worldviews about reality based on how good or bad they are as human beings — with “good” of course defined as “closely aligned with my own worldview” and “bad” defined as “distant from my own worldview”.

But the more inner work you do the more untenable you find this position. After a while you start to understand that nobody is seeing reality as it actually is — including you. Instead, what we’re actually perceiving is a bunch of mental stories we’ve formed about the world based on information we’ve taken in through highly distorted perceptual filters based on our conditioning, biases and cognitive habits.

What ensues is a discussion of how we humans aren’t “rational animals” as Aristotle believed. We are emotional beings. I hesitate over a few details of how Caitlin frames this, but her main point is one I’ve made, and would extend: the capacity for reason is part of our default setting, but not its use, which must be learned about, motivated, cultivated, directed, and then focused so that it solves identifiable problems — and this, too, is key: without the assumption of its being a philosopher’s stone that will solve all conceivable problems, everywhere, including how to build Utopia for everyone (and then corral them into it either at gunpoint or by threatening noncompliants with starvation!).

At present I’d say we’re not doing too well with this capacity.

For most of the past year I’ve been participating in a program put together by a friend of mine called Philosophy of Responsible Freedom. He has his own Substack, as are more and more thinkers who aspire to such ideals. It is also worth more than a mere passing glance. You’ll find a huge archive of materials for that program, which rely heavily on superbly done Academy of Ideas videos.

And just recently (less than two weeks ago!), I discovered The Grow Network, whose intent is similar (to be freeing) if involving very different subject matter and methods, and whose online materials I’ve begun perusing with the hope of getting involved.

Because it’s one thing to sit at my computer and intellectualize about freedom; it’s quite another to do something to bring it about, for myself and for others.

It’s one thing to talk about narrative control; it’s another to find ways of shattering that control.

It’s more than watching a film such as The Matrix (though that’s hardly a waste of your time; everyone should watch it at least once — don’t worry about its mostly execrable successors!)

What does it mean to be responsibly free? A working answer might be useful if you’re going to answer the faceless forces of corporate-state globalism; and if you have a working answer you might want to teach it to others — why I got involved in Philosophy of Responsible Freedom in the first place.

What it means to me at present is not simply having abstract principles I’ve memorized and claim to live by, though again, formulating basic core values is useful. One of the biggest mistakes of Western philosophy, though, is its need to reduce everything and everyone to abstractions, usually dichotomized: Plato’s “essential” vs “inessential”; René Descartes’s “mind” vs “body”; Immanuel Kant’s “noumena” vs “phenomena”; behaviorism’s distinction between “free will” and “determinism.” These are pivotal figures and modes of thought in the Western history of ideas which shaped modernity, sometimes at its worst: scientism (worship of The Science), technocracy (worship of “the experts”), materialism (a worldview, not a conclusion of any actual science), corporatism (dominance of the global landscape by the “values” of money and power, and by those wielding them), and the belief that we’re making progress and haven’t been going backwards, educationally, culturally, psychologically, and spiritually!

I submit that we either escape from this “matrix,” or our civilization follows Rome into the dustbin of history no matter who wins the next election (“fair and square” or not), and whatever may be true about the climate.

I consulted The Grow Network videos on the true meaning of wealth. Turns out, it has nothing to do with money, and surprisingly, can be applied directly to the responsible freedom question.

Put in my own words: real wealth is a mindset borne of harmonious integration of oneself into one’s environment as it is (not as some narrative conceives it).

This integration is physical, biological, psychological, and spiritual, operating at levels of personal health, family, community, meaningful work, and purpose. It involves having your health; being surrounded by a strong and supportive family; being part of a great community with positive, life-affirming values; personally meaningful work that is also of value to others in that community; and purpose deriving from a sense of connection to the larger universe (and the Power behind it). It also involves perspective so that you don’t “sweat the small stuff” by raging at other vehicles in traffic, gritting your teeth standing in line in stores, etc.

You can be wealthy without being a billionaire!

Is that good news or what?

(Likewise, you can have tons of money courtesy of “hustle culture,” but if your frenetic “wealth-producing” actions wreck your marriage, alienate your kids, ruin your health, and threaten to send you to an early grave, are you really wealthy or are you playing a substanceless game?)

Each of these could be an article in itself, so I will expand on just the first and the last.

Health is not mere absence of illness. It is the capacity of your body systems, working together, to either repel, or absorb, self-modify, and gain strength from, the variety of sources of potential disruption out there, toxins as well as viruses.

Note that this definition doesn’t apply just to humans but to systems of all kinds: we can speak of the health of a family, a business, a community, an economy, or a society, and we can say many of the same things about the need to repel, or absorb and make use of, possible sources of disruption. (Those seeking a deeper dive into systems thinking and health can find it here.)

Purpose (the fifth item listed above): a sense of not merely existing but having some reason for doing so, found outside oneself. Found where? Plenty of people with this sense have not found it from intellectualizing but from living, acting in the world outside their heads.

It involves consistently solving problems for oneself and others — being able to take care of oneself and loved ones in one’s environment, which increasingly might mean being able to grow or cultivate most of one’s own food. Keep in mind that the nutritional content of corporate-manufactured and grocery store food has been dropping for years, while its level of toxicity has been going up: meat from factory-farmed animals loaded with bovine growth hormones; frozen “foods” laced with preservatives and flavor enhancers; GMO “food”; etc., ad nauseum.

Keep in mind, too, that Bill Gates (who isn’t a farmer any more than he is a scientist) isn’t buying up all that farmland for no reason at all, so the window of opportunity for gaining this kind of independence might be starting to close!

Finally, many of us have found purpose through identification with the Creator of our privileged planet. I don’t know what to tell the materialist who sincerely believes that The Science made God obsolete, except to note that this mindset has thrown us all to the wolves, ethically speaking. Nietzsche was the first major philosopher to figure out that the “death of God” changed everything, because it meant the death of everything (historically, culturally, psychologically) to which God’s existence made meaningful, including ethics as it had understood itself for well over two millennia.

Summation: as corporate elites increase their level of money and power at the expense of the rest of us, wars (e.g., Ukraine) threaten to go nuclear courtesy of the idiots and psychopaths at the helm of the U.S. war machine, the debt bomb threatens to ignite and send everyone dependent on a monthly paycheck to the poorhouse, and the planet itself grows ever more toxic outside the systems we create for ourselves, the clock is ticking.

Events are about to happen, and processes are in motion, that are worth watching. Next month, Argentinians hold an election offering them an opportunity to reject over two decades of Peronista hard-leftism that has left that country in a shambles. Javier Milei, a self-declared “libertarian liberal,” promises to dismantle the Argentinian deep state. He likes Trump, which has led some to favor him and others to denounce him as another “right wing populist” (narratives again, as predictable as night following day).

A Milei victory in Argentina is a necessary step in the right direction, but not sufficient for recovering true societal health (and wealth, which Argentina once enjoyed, in spades!).

For as Patrick Deneen has argued at length in a recent magnificent book (Why Liberalism Failed, 2018), liberalism in whatever form is not enough. Because, again, responsible freedom is not the absolute freedom of the individual to make all his own choices and lay out all his own rules, answering to no one except himself (herself).

Why not?

Because eventually, a society which tries to live out this ideal will embrace more and more policies that undermine its own founding principles, eventually eliminating (because they aren’t “marketable”) civic virtues that must be in place for civilized living to sustain itself at all.

Finally, liberalism at its apotheosis (the individual becomes his own god) rejects laws of nature themselves (e.g., the fact, for fact it is, that aside from very rare chromosomal abnormalities there are two and only two biological sexes, they aren’t interchangeable because there are things each sex does better than the other, and that one can’t be turned into the other through some magical invocation such as “gender affirming care”).

Sir Francis Bacon had the right idea when he said that “nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”

A society that instead declares de facto war against nature will learn the hard way (as the West is having to learn) that nature wins every time.

Freedom in the absence of an adequate worldview, is not responsible, as it will never be enough; and eventually it will cause its possessor(s) to self-destruct.

I know not what will happen on the home front, except that I think we can expect (1) the narrative war between Trump and his base of support versus the (corporate-state, and moneyed) Establishment will continue, and that (2) nearly everything the latter says will be a lie.

I sense a lot of dread over what might be coming, much of it focused on the next election, some of it a more generalized sense of a world gradually unraveling as more and more people lose control over their lives. (Any day now, AI is likely to start serving up the biggest storm of technological unemployment in history!)

When I return, I hope to have some constructive suggestions for mitigating all this dread. They will involve disengagement from processes none of us can do anything about, in favor of focusing on what we can control.

That will be enough. Going silent now. But before I do, I invite you, readers, to keep in mind (a teaser of things to come, perchance): when you have your health, when you are surrounded by strong and supportive family, when you are involved in a stable community with sound values, doing work that is both personally meaningful and of value to others — when your purpose includes a sense of participating in, not opposing, the works of the Creator — and you have perspective so that you “don’t sweat the small stuff” (from traffic jams to elections!) — you are truly wealthy and living abundantly.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
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In 2021 I published my book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory. Here, in three parts, are reasons you should think about reading the book if you’ve interest in the role worldviews play in civilization, and in shaping our lives:

Part I. Part II. Part III.

Trump, His Enemies, and the 14th Amendment Gambit

By Steven Yates

September 19, 2023

The effort to keep Trump off next year’s ballots has gotten traction in two states as of this writing: Colorado (where the left-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a lawsuit on September 6) and just this past week in Minnesota (lawsuit by a group calling itself, amazingly, Free Speech for People). Both appealed to Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment as barring Trump from being allowed to run for office again. It seems likely that other states controlled by Democrats will soon initiate their own efforts, and that the issue will come before the Supreme Court.

Trump’s enemies, which include Establishment Republicans as well as Democrats, will say they are “safeguarding our fragile democracy” or something equivalent, even though Trump remains far and away the leading candidate for the GOP nomination next year.

Yes, they’re serious about squaring that circle.

But heavyweight Constitutional scholars have weighed in on the issue, saying the same thing: Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment renders Trump ineligible to run for president, because he fomented an insurrection against the U.S. government on January 6, 2021, preceding weeks leading up to that event. (E.g., this.)

As I’ve noted before, the desire to keep Trump from returning to office has become an end that justifies any and all means if you’re a power elite or cultural leftist. Thus far he’s been slammed with unprecedented indictments, a growing schedule of court appearances that will tie up his time next year when he needs to be campaigning, and use legal fees to drain his finances.

Some pundits, though, are acting like the 14^th Amendment is the real slam-dunk. Is it?

What does Section 3 say?

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive of judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

The intent here was to bar former officer holders of the Confederacy from ever running for office again. It’s barely been looked at since.

This should be enough to indicate what I’ve argued previously about the importance of official narratives to be taken as gospel, surrounded by phrases used mantralike, as conversation-stoppers. That January 6 was an insurrection against democracy is one of those phrases. Another frequently-used phrase is deadly riot (or deadly Capitol riot), although as we’ll see in a minute, an insurrection and a riot are not the same thing.

Does what happened that day constitute an insurrection or a riot? That’s one salient question. If the answer is NO, then a second salient question loses its raison d’être: did Trump’s words, delivered from the Ellipse earlier in the day, give rise to it?

It might be worth noting that none of the allegations against Trump related to January 6 actually use the word insurrection. Read an account of them here (and note how often they use the word conspiracy; it’s okay for approved media outlets to use this word, and for them it’s not a theory). Surely, though, it is fair to say the allegations presuppose insurrection narrative, at a level that would override obvious claims that Trump’s criticisms of the November 2020 election are protected speech under the First Amendment (parallel to its not authorizing you to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater unless there really is one).

What, exactly, is an insurrection?

Merriam-Webster says: an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government.

Cambridge Dictionary says: an organized attempt by a group of people to defeat their government and take control of their country, usually by violence.

According to Black’s Law Dictionary, it is a “rebellion, or rising of citizens or subjects in resistance to their government.”

Before continuing, a caveat. Calling up definitions might be helpful, but not decisive. Supporters of different ideologies have their minds made up and will see what they want to see both in events and in words on paper. This means all we can do here is key in on certain of those words and ask if they really reflect what happened.

The terminology distinguishes a revolt from a riot, and associated insurrections with the former, not the latter. Riots have happened periodically in U.S. history, but it is the rare event that constitutes a revolt, which strikes at the core of what a government is. Shay’s Rebellion was a revolt: a full-scale uprising. What happened in Watts in the 1960s, violent as they were, were riots.

The George Floyd riots weren’t a revolt — although what happened in Seattle might be a borderline case. Antifa-type leftists were able to take over several city blocks, disrupt normal flows of traffic and commerce, and make themselves the sole authority there. I’ve yet to hear the word insurrection applied to that event. Possibly because Seattle’s pushover hard-left city government let them get away with it for several days. Hence actual violence was minimal.

What really happened on January 6, 2021?

Conservative people assembled by the tens of thousands in Washington, D.C. Not a single building was burned, or car torched, or street taken over by thugs, because conservatives don’t tend to do those things!

Then, that afternoon, groups of people, many wearing MAGA hats, one dressed in a wild costume (the so-called QAnon Shaman), entered the Capitol building unauthorized. I’ve never said this was a good idea! It wasn’t! A few got violent, breaking a few windows and assaulting Capitol police, but most walked in through open doors unimpeded. It’s on video. A few invaded Congressional offices such as Nancy Pelosi’s and did silly things like put their feet on her desk. This was an even worse idea! But most just walked around, filming and taking selfies. Some were only inside the building a few minutes.

Corporate media reminded us — one of its mantras — that “five people died” in a manner as to insinuate that Trump supporters were responsible. They weren’t. Two were killed by police, one of them (Ashley Babbitt) shot in cold blood from behind by a Capitol cop who wasn’t identified for months, and was cleared of allegations of wrongdoing.

The others died of health problems. Capitol cop Brian Sickwick’s death was falsely blamed on protestors who were said to have attacked him. No one attacked him. He had a stroke, doubtless associated with the event but hardly the doing of any protestor. This is proof that corporate media simply makes crap up and then keeps repeating it. How many other such fabrications now have over a thousand people incarcerated?

Incidentally, the George Floyd riots were more widespread and far deadlier. Eighteen people were killed, over a billion dollars’ worth of damage was done in over a dozen cities, people whose cars struck violent protestors as they tried to flee in terror were brought up on charges, all in addition to the local “declaration of independence” in leftist Seattle.

Contrast this with the five deaths at the Capitol and $1.5 million in damage to the building.

Point being, even if radicalized groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers were involved, there was no direct and concerted attempt to take control over the country on January 6. There was an attempt to stop the certification of an election tens of millions of people believed (still do) was stolen.

Jan6ers believed there had been an attempt, at the highest levels of power, to prevent Trump from winning a second term, and that it had worked! Statements by the elites themselves in one of the country’s most elite publications confirm at least some of this, that there was a behind-the-scenes effort, coordinated by Big Tech allied with the cultural left. The narrative of that material is that they were trying to prevent Trump from stealing the election.

Defenders of the official Election 2020 narrative will bleat that x number of courts found no evidence of election fraud.

I recall affidavits circulating, signed under penalty of perjury, claiming to have witnessed wrongdoing (e.g., ballot-stuffing) at numerous polling places. I saw a couple of these affidavits. I won’t say from where, or who sent them to me. The persons had suffered public smear campaigns and went into hiding, alleging death threats.

The affidavits — supposedly there were over a hundred of them — have all been memory-holed.

Another salient question is, How does a guy who barely campaigned, has the charisma of a sack of potatoes, and couldn’t fill college auditoriums, get 7 million more votes than a guy able to fill arenas? Ultimately the claim that there was nothing amiss with Election 2020 makes zero sense.

The men and women who invaded the Capitol hoped they could stop Mike Pence and Congress from undertaking an action that would pass the reins to an administration they firmly believed would be illegitimate, and send the matter back to the disputed states.

That’s it! It wasn’t a an “insurrection,” therefore! The protesters believed in democracy, and they believed they were taking it back, not attacking it!

Nearly everyone knew why they were there long before Trump spoke that day.

What did Trump say about going to the Capitol? Word for word, in context (emphasis mine):

… I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.

Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.

I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.

Today we will see whether Republicans stand strong for integrity of our elections…

Corporate media reportage typically omits the phrase peacefully and patriotically. Yet another commentary on corporate media honesty (or lack of). Note that Trump never said to enter the Capitol. That was guys like Ray Epps, who then wondered why he was accused of being an agent provocateur working for the feds. I doubt he was the only such person, just the one who got caught. Were there people there to cause trouble, not support Trump? No one can prove it, but nor can anyone rule it out — especially given that infiltration is something both leftists and feds (especially the FBI!) are very good at!

Returning to Trump’s speech, from near the end, the passage corporate media has most often seized upon:

And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.

Was Trump urging, or even suggesting, violence?

I checked all the usages of the word fight in the speech. All are metaphorical. Not one of them implies violence.

For example, this one, a reference to Rudy Giuliani: And Rudy, you did a great job. He’s got guts. You know what? He’s got guts, unlike a lot of people in the Republican Party. He’s got guts. He fights, he fights.

Surely Trump is not saying that Giuliani gets violent!

The same with this reference to Congressional Republicans: There’s so many weak Republicans. And we have great ones. Jim Jordan and some of these guys, they’re out there fighting. The House guys are fighting.

And you have to get your people to fight. And if they don’t fight, we have to primary the hell out of the ones that don’t fight. You primary them. We’re going to. We’re going to let you know who they are. I can already tell you, frankly.

Surely no implication that the Republicans Trump approves of are physically fighting with anyone.

A third example, for the especially dense, might nail this point down:

Republicans are, Republicans are constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back. It’s like a boxer. And we want to be so nice. We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. And we’re going to have to fight much harder.

That’s how Trump used the word fight in his speech: figuratively, not literally.

It’s the most common usage of the word in political contexts, taken out of context by those promoting the insurrection narrative.

Bottom line: what happened on January 6 was not an insurrection; nor was Trump trying to foment one — and this remains true even for those who reject the allegation that Election 2020 was stolen.

Consequence: the 14^th Amendment doesn’t apply!

Even if it did, there’s another problem with the idea that the courts can keep Trump off the ballot, either in specific states or nationally.

Purveyors/corporate media supporters of the 14^th Amendment gambit may have read Section 3 but not Section 5!

Section 5 says clearly:

The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

I concede: I’m not a heavyweight Constitutional scholar in a major law school, just a guy with a doctorate in philosophy who left academia.

I can still read plain English, and if you’ve read this far, I hope that means you can, too.

How heavyweight of a scholar do you have to be to realize that the 14^th Amendment argument for disqualifying Trump from running next year doesn’t work?!

This is not a job for the courts, including the Supreme Court. If this issue comes before them and the Supremes elect to follow the Constitution, they will have to decline to take the case by stating that the Constitution does not give the Judicial Branch jurisdiction, or they will have to reverse a lower court decision by pointing this out, that only Congress can keep Trump off the GOP ballot with appropriate legislation.

One can only pray that the Supremes get this!

What Congress would have to do isn’t at all clear. The Amendment isn’t specific about something that’s never been tried before. I don’t believe for a minute they’d do it. They have to know that the blowback could be worse than anything that happened on January 6!

There’s a potentially far more serious consequence to any state foolishly pursuing the 14^th Amendment gambit. It would destroy whatever is left of the credibility of the political system in the United States!

Given that Trump is likely to remain Republican voters’ choice of nominee, if either the courts or Congress maneuvers to keep his name off state ballots, and the maneuver somehow succeeds, it will torpedo out of the water the claim that the U.S. is really a democracy!

This fracas erupted because of allegations of a rigged election. These people want to rig Election 2024 in plain sight!

Even Brad Raffensperger, on the receiving end of Trump’s calls to Georgia back in 2020, seems to get this. He recently penned a guest op-ed observing, “Anyone who believes in democracy must let the voters decide.”

So much for the idea that getting Trump off ballots is about “protecting democracy”!

Corporate media and its many satellites keep contrasting this mantra by invoking fears of “authoritarian populists” or “autocrats” whose actual mission has been to wrest control of the machinery of dominant institutions in their nations (education, media, etc.) from the hands of liberal-globalist elites and return them to their peoples.

Of course, major pundits will keep trying to square this circle. It’s worth keeping in mind the level of intellectual-cognitive dishonesty and rationalization, or possibly just severe cognitive dissonance, that we’re dealing with here, as well as the locutions we surveyed in some detail last week that are being used to paralyze people’s brains and shut down all our critical thinking skills.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

This article previously appeared on my Substack. Please consider subscribing (subscribe buttons on the site).

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Part I. Part II. Part III.

[Author’s note: while admittedly neither Substack nor NewsWithViews.com are The Atlantic Monthly, nor am I even close to being the most widely read writer on either, my level of readership (judged by reader interaction) has been disappointing at best. Pages like mine cannot survive indefinitely without reader support, including forwarding. If you read this and approve, please forward the link to your lists, especially if they contain the names and email addresses of public office-holders or other decision-makers! And please consider becoming a Patron to support my work. It’s not about money, however. These are the only ways the Internet “knows” that outsiders such as myself even exist. In the absence of evidence that this article has visibility, I will be foregoing future contributions here in order to work on other projects in need of my attention.]

Most Powerful Information-Control Machine in Human History

By Steven Yates

September 15, 2023

Is It Possible to Break the Grip?

“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly — it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.” —Joseph Goebbels

“Media manipulation in the U.S. today is more efficient than it was in Nazi Germany, because here we have the pretense that we are getting all the information we want. That misconception prevents people from even looking for the truth.” —Mark Crispin Miller

“Those of us in the West rely primarily on news reports. Virtually all news that we see in the media was created by one of three agencies – Associated Press, Reuters, and, to a lesser degree, AFP.

“All three companies are owned by the same parent companies, who, in turn, own most of the Western corporatist structure, and, not surprisingly, the reports that they distribute to the media are boilerplate.

“As such, the TV news tends to be uniform, and whenever a new catch-phrase pops up, such as ‘extreme right activists’ or ‘January sixth insurrection,’ it tends to appear in all major media on the very same day and is then used ubiquitously. We, therefore, receive only one ‘truth,’ and we’re left to either accept it or comb the internet for alternate possibilities.” —Jeff Thomas, “The Outcome of War with Russia,” —InternationalMan.com, Aug. 28, 2023.

In various ways, I’ve been a student of language all my life. What is a language? It is a complex system of signs or symbols — words with sufficiently specific meanings and references, spoken or inscribed, combined into grammatical sentences, combined further into logically structured paragraphs, and so on: used to communicate as members of a language community both send and receive information, instructions, ideas, etc., of various sorts.

Professional philosophy introduced me to the philosophy of language, with dusty and arcane questions such as, “What is going on when proper names, descriptive phrases, and general terms ‘hook onto’ specific persons, places and things, or classes of things?” The study of language includes grammar or syntax — the ways sentences hang together to express ideas and provide information — and then semantics — the ways terms and phrases both singular and general relate to objects and classes of objects in the world — and finally pragmatics (not to be confused with pragmatism, the philosophical movement) — the ways language-users and their motivations affect how language works. There is room here for observing how language changes over time from pressures placed on it by social change, technological change, etc.

Over the years — and it’s reflected in a lot of material I’ve written here — my interest in the third of these has grown. What are the various uses to which language can be put by users?

Lemme see. Describing facts or states of affairs we can observe directly, e.g., “The cat is on the mat.” Sometimes these are called declarative statements, or just declaratives. We normally make the charitable assumption that we’re not dreaming or hallucinating.

Or relaying information obtained from books or other second-hand sources and accepted as true. Most of these we also have no reason to question. Example: “Hungary is a country in Europe, situated east of Austria.” What is interesting here is how the enormous range of such truths indicates the narrowness of our personal experience. In fact, none of us experiences more than a tiny slice of reality; this realization and its implications are truly jarring if we think about it, and I don’t think any of us, myself included, have come to grips with it. At the very least, it calls for interdependence with others and on sources we have to verify are reliable. Becoming a world traveler, or at least living in a foreign country for a while, may mitigate this some but not as much as any of us would like.

Then there are formal truths like “seven plus five equals twelve” or “the sum of the squares of the sides of a right triangle equals the square of the hypotenuse.” Or Aristotle’s, “All contradictions are necessarily false” (a much-shortened account of the lengthy discussion in his Metaphysics IV). It makes little sense to question these. They’re known a priori, an analytic philosopher would say. Claim to have a counterexample, and you’ll be thought joking or confused.

What others?

Identifying things, e.g., “That’s a specimen of amethyst” when pointing at the purple cluster of crystals on my shelf, or “That’s of a seashore,” pointing to the painting on my wall,” or, “That’s a map of South America” pointing elsewhere in my home office. Also called ostension.

Asking questions or requesting information, e.g., “Is the cat on the mat?” or “Who was president during the Cuban Missile Crisis?” Also called interrogatives.

Telling stories, e.g., what J.R.R. Tolkien did in The Lord of the Rings, or C.S. Lewis in his Space Trilogy, or George Orwell in 1984. Stories often contain indirect messages, sometimes profound, as with Aesop’s Fables. Films also accomplish this, obviously. Think of The Matrix. Narratives, which we’ll discuss below (and which I’ve discussed in numerous places before) are stories intended to convey messages able to direct mass belief and actions desired by the narrative scriptwriter (or his/her superior!).

Giving how-to explanations such as, “To download an app onto your iPhone, click the button on the right side twice.” Providing other sorts of explanations, such as, “You caught a cold because you went outside without properly drying your hair, this weakened your immune system, and you got exposed.” Scientific explanations are more sophisticated because they appeal to unobservables: “According to Newton, gravitation is the physical force that explains both the trajectories of projectiles such as arrows and bullets and the behaviors of the moon in its orbit around the Earth and the planets in their orbits around the Sun.” No one has ever seen gravity. All we see and measure are its effects.

Praying. Talking to the Creator.

Issuing commands (“Shut the door.” “Lock her up!”).

Expressing humor which often involves purposeful equivocations or plays on words (“Did you take a shower?” “Why, is one missing?”). Dry humor is used to mitigate unpleasant realities, as when George Carlin says, “It’s a Big Club! And you ain’t in it! You and I are not in the Big Club!”

Some statements, you’ll note, are true. They fit the reality(-ies) they purport to describe. Others are false. They don’t fit reality. The true/false dichotomy doesn’t always apply. Questions aren’t true or false; they are either answered or ignored. The answers are either true or false (or their truth value is unknown). Commands are either obeyed or disobeyed. Etc. Stories either capture an audience’s attention through containing something the audience can relate to such as a lead character facing a problem, or they fall flat. Jokes are either funny and laughed at, or not if their audience doesn’t “get the joke.”

Some uses of language are darker, shall we say, than others. We can use language to insult someone (“You’re an idiot!”). We can use it to lie, e.g., saying you weren’t with Susan last night when the truth is, you were. We can use language to confuse, mislead, or obfuscate. It happens all the time.

Speaker credentialing matters. Statements about, say, professional writing carry more weight coming from Stephen King than they do from an unknown blogger (not necessarily King’s politics which I don’t care for). Statements about business carry weight if they come from, e.g., Jeff Bezos (whatever your opinion of Amazon); less so from the unemployed town drunk. A statement about physics means something if Richard Feynman made it; less so (I would think) if it came from a flat-earther. There are degrees here. We’re talking about people who spent years studying their craft. This doesn’t make them infallible, and it doesn’t rule out factors able to through them off track (e.g., the human-all-to-human impulse to conform, and the need for funding!). But it makes them worth listening to. To make a long story short, “normal” science is based on consensus: that certain statements about fundamentals have solved a range of perplexing problems reasonably well, and provide a generally reliable guide to how to go about tackling remaining problems (Thomas S. Kuhn’s concept of a paradigm reduced to one sentence if that is possible!).

A use of language I’ve written about previously: media talking heads, or “hit piece” writers whose purpose is denunciatory and not informative, use the same words or phrases over and over again to hypnotize and mislead — and control the thought processes of their audience. When a given usage appears everywhere, almost overnight, in widely disparate places, this is, or should be, a dead giveaway of top-down orchestration from would-be thought controllers (“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” –The Wizard of Oz, a bit of storytelling from long ago that can be appreciated on multiple levels!).

Here’s a list of such usages, with variants, I’ve compiled over the past several weeks. Naturally, the professional philosophers of language have no interest in this kind of analysis:

conspiracy theory (-ist) (or baseless conspiracy theory or false conspiracy theory — occasionally harmful conspiracy theory);
hate group (or extremist hate group) always applied by corporate media to organizations on the right, never on the left;
misinformation or disinformation (don’t mean the same thing but are often used carelessly as if they were synonymous, used to imply ulterior motives by those trading in such);
debunked (used without stating when, where, by whom, how, etc.);
unprovoked attack (applied, obviously, to Russia invading eastern Ukraine in February 2022; not applied to the U.S. attacking Iraq in March 2003);
January 6 insurrection (or riot);
threat to democracy (or some variant such as subverting democracy);
overturned the election (or subverted a free and fair election or election interference or again overturning democracy or some variant on such);
Big Lie (or election lies or election falsehoods);
mostly peaceful protesters (applied to violent leftists);
right-wing extremist (or ultra-right or far-right populist; see again the second above);
autocrat (or proto-fascist) (applied to a political leader resisting globalist policies diluting or destroying the national culture);
pro-choice (an old standby, belying the fact that the choice is to kill a human life);
toxic masculinity (applied to traditional male behavior);
white supremacists (closely related: white nationalists);
systemic racism (sometimes structural racism);
Black (not capitalized before the George Floyd riots; the capitalization of the term suddenly appeared everywhere and continues to this day in mainstream outlets whose writers usually do not capitalize ‘white’);
Karen (applied to an “entitled white woman”);
antisemitic (applied to exposés on George Soros, or the ADL; or just to criticisms of Israel or of Jews generally)
homophobic and transphobic (which are not real, clinically-diagnosed phobias such as agoraphobia or claustrophobia, and this should indicate the mind-controlling intent of whoever introduced them; in this same category can be found xenophobic and Islamophobic but not Christophobic—see how this works?)
false equivalence (to circumvent the free expression of a perspective unwanted by those attempting to dominate the public conversation);
Christian Taliban; (to propagandistically associate U.S.-based Christians and their institutions with brutal regimes in the Middle East);
safe and effective (whether shown to be or not; or possibly We believe in Science (the latter shows a complete misunderstanding of what science is).

This is probably not an exhaustive list. I recorded those I’ve seen in corporate media in recent weeks. Some doubtless raise issues worth discussing. Most, however, are brain-paralyzing conversation-stoppers. They’re designed to circumvent challenge, or the asking of questions, but turning off critical thinking. They’re intended to discredit, a priori, those they’re used to target. That’s their purpose. What they communicate to listeners / readers is: we, the authorities, don’t want you peasants going there! Don’t do your own research. Just listen to us. We’re the experts.

All were imposed from the top downward. We can infer this because when the triggering event occurred, all appeared simultaneously in every corporate media outlet. The CIA first weaponized the term conspiracy theory back in the 1960s. Or see again my remark on the use of Black, now always capitalized to refer to a member of the race.

In fairness, those of us operating out here in the boonies, far from the centers of corporate media influence and blogging away as best we can, have our own phraseology, which we use because we think it offers superior matches to present-moment cultural and political-economic realities than those above:

Deep State (or just deep state without the caps; the octopus entity incorporating the Pentagon war machine, the alphabet-soup intel agencies such as DARPA, their many satellite organizations funded with public monies; and so on);
power elite (or just elite or some variation; used in the context of the obvious realization that in every advanced society on the planet a small minority is dominant: politically, economically, and culturally; while it may be possible to deny the reality of a more-or-less unified Deep State, how one denies the existence of elites baffles me completely);
political prisoners (imprisoned for political crimes; and I do not maintain that this began with the Jan6ers. The U.S. has always had political prisoners. There were political prisoners in the 1960s. Eugene Debs was made a political prisoner for criticizing the U.S. entrance into what became World War I. It is not generally known, but Abraham Lincoln imprisoned dissidents against his war effort on behalf of the Union).
globalism (or global elites or global ruling class, etc., whose goal, some of us has maintained, has been to build up a world government that answered, ultimately, to the uppermost echelons of global corporations);
woke (or wokeness or wokery, which I’ve explained here);
official narratives (stories promoted by dominant media, dominant academia, etc., the ultimate purpose of which is to keep our minds from straying from the approved paths whether the subject is science, history, religion, or political economy);
grooming (I’ve not used this term much that I recall, but is rooted in realizing that gays, lesbians, etc., cannot have kids, suggesting a choice between recruitment or their dying out in one generation, duh);
Trump Derangement Syndrome (an obvious one for the hysterics that came not just from the left but from worthless “movement conservatives” with Trump’s assent in 2015-17 and beyond, applying ever since);
Make America Great Again (MAGA) (implies that America was great once, isn’t great at present; but that America’s greatness can be restored — admittedly increasingly dubious);
“America First” (the view that American policy should place American interests ahead of the entire world’s interests, which is just George Washington’s original recommendation of “peaceful trade with all without interference in their internal affairs”; implied is that every other nation should do the same);
red-pilled (the metaphor introduced in The Matrix which dropped the scales from our eyes about how dominant institutions, especially media but not excluding academia, have created a fabricated, artificial reality; with blue-pilled being those — sadly, the majority — remaining in the cognitive catatonia of official narratives);
left-liberal (present-day Democrats as opposed to classical liberals who followed utilitarian philosophers such as John Stuart Mill or Austrian school economists such as Ludwig von Mises; liberalism as a whole is a deeply flawed political philosophy, but this is not the place to pursue the fact);
pro-life (again not a term I use much but others do; it just gives expression to the realization that the abortion issue is about whether to sustain a defenseless human life or to kill it);
original intent (the school of thought in constitutional law arguing that in deciding cases and situations today we should stick as closely to what the Founders believed as recorded in their writings as we can; again, they were imperfect, but if this is again a matter of degree, there is far more wisdom in, say, James Madison than you’ll find in the average university professor—even of law!—today);
corporatocracy (used by John Perkins in his Confessions of an Economic Hit Man books and referring to corporate domination using loans, etc.)
techno-feudalism (which I used in a now-lost essay back in 2015, and have discovered leftist Greek author and economist Yanis Varoufakis using it in a new book coming out early next year — suggesting that issues central to current political-economic domination transcend easy left/right dichotomization).

This, too, is not an exhaustive list, although I’ve avoided terms pretty much unique to myself (e.g., GloboCorp). Would it matter to include those? My audience is fairly small, and people aren’t exactly banging my door down. So I often have the sense of banging my head against the wall, knowing that providing a list of words and phrases used propagandistically, as would-be mind control, on an obscure Substack page, isn’t going to change a thing.

If anyone at The Washington Post chanced to run across my list, he or she would dismiss it out of hand.

And it’s hardly news that corporate media, collectively, is a propaganda machine in the business of conditioning and controlling the “public mind.” There are countless expositions on this, sometimes by their own purveyors, e.g., Edward Louis Bernays who wrote his slim volume Propaganda back in the 1920s. As Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Bernays was drawn into elite circles with both his uncle’s and Gustave le Bon’s ideas about crowd control in the latter’s tract The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind published back in 1895.

How large tax-exempt foundations supported social controls of various sorts, including media, is ably documented in René Wormser’s Foundations: Their Power and Influence (late 1950s; the same decade C. Wright Mills published his pathbreaking The Power Elite).

More recently, of course is Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media published in the mid-1980s, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death written around the same time, and the Mitroff-Bennis volume The Unreality Industry: The Deliberate Manufacture of Falsehood and What It Is Doing to Our Lives published in 1989. The latter introduced the concept of boundary warping: everything — broadcast news, education, etc. — becomes a de facto branch of the entertainment industry, so that even documentaries must be entertaining to keep audience attention (“infotainment”), considered a necessity in an attention economy in which we’re all supposed to be busy, busy, busy, in a society in which you can graduate from a university unable to find, say, Ukraine, on a world map.

The above are just a few. One of my personal favorites is Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (2002) edited by Kristina Borjesson and sporting a forward by Gore Vidal. The book does just that. And this was before Julian Assange came along with WikiLeaks which exposed the lies of the U.S. war machine.

Assange’s fate shows the price sometimes paid by uncompromising entrepreneurial truth-tellers. Which is probably why there are so few such people.

The point is, nothing here is new. All that is new is the way I’ve organized it, bringing in philosophy of language as part of the background. With an implication that the study of how language has been used to mislead, misdirect, and confuse is important to a people who wants any semblance of freedom.

But that said, I’m just one voice — one of probably tens of thousands out here laboring away in obscurity, the bane of our existences being low visibility (and very low income), because I’m a much better writer than I am a salesman or marketer. I’m quite sure that nothing I write qualifies as “infotainment.” I’ve not set out to entertain. I’m here to offer information and ideas.

What all this boils down to:

We now live within the most powerful information distribution and control machine in human history, if only because communications technology is everywhere — all around us, day and night. Its influence begins in public grade schools, years ago designed to produce controlled children who would grow up into mostly controllable adults. This influence only grows, in an environment they will never think to question. Most people are now plugged into the digital world virtually from childhood, having grown up in front of screens, tied to the smartphone we all carry in our pocket or purse, or which sits on our desks at work and next to our bed on the nightstand at night within easy reach so we can be available 24/7. Social media has billions of users worldwide; with Facebook euphemistically calling your contacts friends even if you’ve never met most of them and wouldn’t know them if you passed on a sidewalk.

This technology has become necessary for living a functional life in the 21^st century.

We’re now in an environment, moreover, in which, as I’ve also noted previously, a single public faux pas — the product of a bad day, for all anybody knows (and we all have them) — can be filmed and uploaded to Facebook or X (formerly Twitter) or TikTok, where being viewed by thousands of strangers will alter the person’s life forever before he/she can say boo.

This is not good, and I suspect we’ll someday see studies of how social media not just drove us apart but ruined a lot of lives.

In this environment, the above terms are used, and I’ve no doubt, will continue to be used. It is unfortunate that any well-organized (and sufficiently well-funded) questioning of these usages is beyond us right now. Terms ranging from homophobic slur to January 6 insurrection have overwhelming cultural power right now — an entirely different animal from political power as it doesn’t rely on law or force, only on the power of propaganda delivered staccato-fashion in mass media with repetition, conditioning specific responses in the “mass mind.”

What makes this especially bad is that the repeated use of January 6 insurrection without any actual analysis could conceivably result in the leading candidate of a major party in what we’ll doubtless continue to be told is a democracy being removed from Election 2024 ballots because of a selective reading of the Constitution by the courts. (I am at work on an article specifically addressing this danger.)

Is it possible to thwart the power of this information-control machine, by exposing what it is and what it is doing to us all?

This is one of the greatest challenges of our strange moment in time. Especially for writers such as myself who are not famous: who are basically nobodies and likely to remain such if we are ruthlessly honest about it. I may have a doctorate in my field, moreover, but so do thousands of others with a much better situation (they might have academic positions, for one thing) who wouldn’t agree with a single line I’ve written on this site and won’t hesitate to use many of the terms or phrases I’ve listed above no matter how often they’ve been exposed as propaganda.

[Author’s note: this article previously appeared on Substack.]

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

Part I. Part II. Part III.

If you enjoyed this article and approve of what I do, please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

Will We See an Assassination Attempt Against Trump Before November 2024?

By Steven Yates

September 8, 2023

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.” —Frank Zappa

[Author’s note: in light of more recent events and discussion in a rapidly changing environment, this is an update of my most recent Substack.]

Scenarios are tricky. The reasonableness of a scenario — which is not a prediction exactly, just a description of a possible outcome — depends on conditions being met. If they aren’t, the scenario isn’t possible and loses its point.

As I’ve noted, two forces in America are on collision course — those being the “liberal pseudo-democratic” ruling class, exemplified by the Democrat Party in its current form — versus the “populist” forces that coalesced around Donald Trump back in 2015-16, routed worthless “movement conservatism” from control over the Republican Party, and continue to see Trump as leading spokesman.

The former have vastly superior resources, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t absolutely terrified of the latter. Trump’s ability to command those media he uses is vastly superior to anything the former possess. The former are therefore pulling out all the stops to shut Trump down, figuring that what he represents will fall apart without him. This assumption is very dubious.

January 6 might turn out to have been a skirmish compared to what’s coming … at least in some presently imaginable scenarios.

The Centrality of the Insurrection Official Narrative of January 6.

I cannot underestimate how central the insurrection official narrative has become. This narrative maintains that what happened on January 6, 2021, was really an insurrection and that Trump fomented it. Numerous efforts are now underway to keep Trump off next year’s ballots on 14^th Amendment grounds. The 14^th Amendment, Section 3 of which contains the infamous “insurrection clause” dating to 1868 and aimed at former Confederates, doesn’t even specify that the one accused of insurrection need be convicted of the offense. It simply says, “shall not have engaged in insurrection,” which leaves the matter muddled, just in case some believe it was an insurrection but others do not.

The people invoking the insurrection clause following the narrative are either Democrats (e.g., Tim Caine, Hillary Clinton’s former running mate 2016) or Establishment Republicans, i.e., GOP ante-2015-16: remaining “movement conservatives.”

If several states are able to keep Trump off their ballots, then what?! is the obvious question.

I don’t know what! We’re in uncharted waters, boys and girls!

Obviously, Trump’s first gambit will be to sue, probably going straight to the Supreme Court. I also don’t know what the Court would do. The Supremes would have to take a decisive stand. This is not something they’ve done consistently. For years they assumed that Roe v Wade was solid precedent. Then, last year, they overturned Roe. For years they held onto affirmative action. Then, more recently, they overturned that.

I happen to favor those recent decisions. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, the Supreme Court has been erratic and ideologically driven for decades, so who knows how they would handle something as fundamental as this?

Never before has the leading candidate of a major political party been targeted by the opposing party as Trump has (and all the judges indicting him are Democrats; most of the media denouncing him are controlled by Democrats).

I have little trouble imagining Trump declaring that any such decision against him is illegitimate, because the entire governmental structure since January 21, 2021 is illegitimate. That follows from the idea that Election 2020 really was stolen, and that January 6 was therefore not an “insurrection” but a last-ditch effort to reverse the theft. It was surely not an attempt to overthrow the government (that’s the definition of insurrection).

This would precipitate an unprecedented Constitutional crisis, and the narrative war could easily turn hot at that point.

The End of the Illusion of Democracy.

Equally dangerous scenarios are possible. Tucker Carlson recently suggested that an assassination attempt against Trump could become a live option. He outlined the deadly progression in a recent interview he gave with Adam Carolla:

“Begin with criticism, then you go to protest, then you go to impeachment, now you go to indictment, and none of them work! I mean what’s next? You know, graph it out man! We’re speeding toward assassination, obviously. No one will say that, but I don’t know how you can’t reach that conclusion!”

This assumes the indictments will fail, of course. There’s 91 of them (so far). None are slam-dunks, corporate media propaganda notwithstanding. Most of them involve reaching, some relying on legal precedents not invoked in eons.

An assassination attempt is almost certainly a last resort. I don’t expect to see it tried unless there’s an actual attempt to keep him off the ballot that meets with resistance, or he gets the GOP nod and has the same (or a better) chance of winning as he had in 2016. The liberal pseudo-democrat (i.e., globalist plutocrat) ruling class is not stupid. They doubtless understand just how dangerous an assassination attempt would be. With everyone and his brother having smartphones, setting up patsies like they did in the 1960s would be far harder to do.

If they actually murdered Trump, moreover, the reaction could well make what happened on January 6 look like a cafeteria food fight by comparison.

Tens of millions of people voted for Trump in 2020. They are ready to do so in 2024.

Not that “our” Establishment couldn’t gain control, since its resources include weaponry and much better organization, but as I concluded last time, there would be a lot of breakage. Including skulls and bones (not the Yale sort!).

I’m reasonably sure the Department of Homeland Security still has those millions of hollow-point bullets, purchased well over a decade ago, as if foreseeing this eventuality, when a large swath of the American public rejected dominant narratives. Those atop that division of the U.S. war machine are fully capable of turning their arsenal against any group that revolts openly. What is Posse Comitatus but “ink on a page”?!

What this would mean, of course, is an end to all pretenses that America is really a democracy. I don’t see how any such pretense could be credibly maintained, no matter how many propagandists at CNN and MSNBC work overtime trying.

Nuclear Armageddon Soon to Be a Live Option?

Tucker Carlson drops another equally dangerous scenario the ruling class is doubtless thinking about: the proxy war with Russia, via Ukraine, turn hotter — via U.S./NATO sending troops onto land claimed by Russia, or into Russia itself. Launching drone strikes on Russian targets would be enough.

Our deep state will be gambling that Putin won’t simply get fed up. It’s not a gamble I’d be willing to make, but then again, I’m not a psychopath whose view of the world is, Either I stay in power, or nuclear Armageddon is a live option!

A More Modest Option: Assassination by Plane Crash!

As we know, an ally of Putin’s who become an arch-nemesis, Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, was killed along with several of his associates in a recent plane crash.

Many had stated that after he turned on the Russian military and began his infamous march toward Moscow back in June, his days were numbered.

Prigozhin embarrassed Putin on the world stage. Bad idea. Very.

Did Putin order Prigozhin’s execution? I have no idea, of course, but it’s not an unreasonable suspicion.

Compare this to the ruling elites in our part of the world. The only reason so many people believe Putin is worse than they are is because “our” narratives say so.

Trump still represents an existential threat to everything they hold dear: global economic and military dominance, in what is the still the world’s largest economy with its most powerful military machine.

This threat held through the covid fiasco, which some of us are convinced was an orchestrated effort intended to shut down global “populism” when mere censorship and public demonizing hadn’t worked, as well as opening doors to a technocratic global state based on total surveillance and population control: the Western ruling elites’ ideal form of government (which I’ve previously called GloboCorp: world government serves global corporate dominance).

The globalist effort is struggling. No informed, sensible person believes the dominant narratives anymore! No one outside the big cities believes “globalization” will make him rich if he just “reinvents himself.”

This is a main reason Trump remains the lead candidate for the GOP nomination next year, despite facing four indictments in four jurisdictions.

Thus we might get to find out if one of Joe Biden’s handlers (unlike Putin, I don’t think Sleepy Joe himself is mentally capable of planning and executing such a thing) will have done to Trump what Putin is accused by many of doing to Prigozhin.

A “lone gunman” would be ridiculously obvious. No one in his right mind would believe it!

Plane crashes have been an effective means by which agents of the ruling class took out nationalistic political opponents. Remember Omar Torrijos of Panama and Jaime Roldós of Ecuador? I was in Panama briefly in 2016. I met Panamanians who assured me: no informed person there thinks Torrijos’s death was an accident. It happened when the plane he was flying in crashed, on July 31, 1981 — just two months after Roldós’s death by the exact same means.

Both leaders had become thorns in the sides of U.S. corporate-governmental elites.

Trump does fly, on a fairly regular basis. I see assassination by plane crash as the last resort of a globalist ruling class doing whatever it has to, to stay in power.

And since the majority of Trump supporters would refuse to believe it was an accident, just as many Panamanians to this day deny that Torrijos’s death was an accident, such a scenario would be taking the chance that the time had finally come to end all pretenses that the U.S. is a democracy and just crack down.

A Stolen Election 2024? Back to the End of the Illusion of Democracy.

But wouldn’t the globalist-leftist alliance just let Trump run and arrange to steal Election 2024? Wouldn’t that be the path of least resistance through this morass?

Yes, it might be. (How election theft probably happens.)

Narrative management on elections has proven somewhat easier, it is true.

But again, the reason Trump is the leading GOP candidate is that no one on the “populist” side of the fence believes the narratives CNN, The Washington Post, etc., are peddling.

And given the response to January 6, the U.S. may never see another election everyone will agree was trustworthy.

I don’t know what will happen. The point of writing scenarios is that there is more than one possibility here, based on what the ruling elites do and also on what Trump does.

The point is, stopping Trump has become the highest priority for the global ruling class, operating through our legal system, electoral system, and corporate media machines trying to program narratives into the “public mind.”

Before this is over, “our” ruling elites may just decide that maintaining the décor of democracy is no longer worth it, that it’s too inconvenient and costs too much for something no one much believes in anyway (except Democrats who will believe anything they’re told on CNN or read in The Washington Post).

They’ll take down the scenery, remove the tables and chairs, pull back the curtains, reveal the brick wall at the back of the theater.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

Part I. Part II. Part III.

If you enjoyed this article and approve of what I do, please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

Dispatches From a Disintegrating Society

By Steven Yates

August 25, 2023

“We were living in the future, now those days are gone.” —Shriekback, “Now Those Days Are Gone” (Without Real String or Fish, 2015)

“One person’s craziness is another person’s reality.” —Tim Burton

If I can believe my newsfeeds, civility in the U.S. is disintegrating. Some of it is political; some isn’t. What it suggests is a society cracking up, one person at a time.

“You can’t be naked in here!”

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a report of a guy who didn’t appear to realize, he couldn’t strip naked in a crowded theater where Barbie was playing. Supposedly this was at the Regal Cinema in downtown Denver.

“Dude, you can’t be naked in here!” he was told by security, accompanied by shouts from onlookers saying things like, “Get that perv outta here, I’m with my kids!” Supposedly he was forcibly dressed and forced to leave, all the while acting confused about what he’d done wrong.

Alas, I couldn’t find the report again, so I can’t confirm it. But it’s no worse than a lot of things easily verified, so it’s not crazy to think it might have happened.

Theater owners agree, after all, that behavior in their establishments has deteriorated. We hear of people talking loudly on their phones while the movie is playing, partying with friends, being intoxicated, taking videos to upload to TikTok, etc.

It’s not just theaters. “Bad behavior” is now epidemic. Seemingly ordinary folks are flipping out over little things, e.g., on airplanes. If it’s a woman, she becomes the “Karen of the week” on social media. A Karen, in cultural Marxist lingo, is an “entitled white woman.” It’s conceivable, she might have been struggling with some invisible personal issue, reached a tipping point, and now has to deal with the instant infamy of being uploaded to a dozen platforms where virality makes money for Big Tech at the expense of people’s wellbeing and sometimes personal safety. That said, I’ve lost count of the number of claims of flight attendants having to deal with out-of-control passengers, flights diverted, etc.

Similar things are happening in restaurants. Servers report having food thrown at them, or worse. Franchise owners complain bitterly of being chronically short-staffed. I wonder why! Talk about a hostile work environment! Not to mention absurdly low pay! Were I a twenty something right now I wouldn’t do it. It’s not worth it.

We see unacceptable behavior at concerts, where musicians are complaining of having objects thrown at them. A pop singer named Bebe Rexha doing a show in Manhattan reported being struck in the face with a cellphone thrown by a 27-year-old male who, when arrested, called what he’d done “funny.” Performers are complaining bitterly about this dangerous trend.

I’ve also lost count (long ago!) of road rage reports, some ending in assaults or fatal shootings. My wife and I witnessed two minor league incidents when we visited Miami-Dade Co. just over a year ago. Picture two strangers, both male, blocking lanes, shouting at each other, traffic moving cautiously around them. The two of us, on the sidewalk, wondering if we should drop to the ground, just in case one or both of these nutcases pulls out a gun and starts shooting wildly.

Unprovoked assaults have become commonplace, especially in and around cities. Whether leftists like to admit it or not, the assailants are usually black and usually in groups. They’ve cornered a lone white male (sometimes it’s a lone white female). Black-on-white violent crime has always been much higher than white-on-black violent crime, rarely reported because it doesn’t fit the official narrative. Statistically, black-on-black violent crime surpasses both put together.

Countless stores, finally, also in big cities, have experienced “flash mobs”: dozens of black teenagers enter, help themselves to merchandise, then flee past helpless clerks and even security personnel. The latter don’t dare use firearms if they have them, both because they know they would be quickly overwhelmed by the mob, and even if they get out in one piece, they will be the ones accused of racism and brought up on “hate crime” charges.

Again, jobs in such places are going unfilled. But why would anyone in his right mind work in such an environment?

End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration.

Although the bulk of its focus is on recent history and geopolitics, Peter Turchin’s just published book (that’s the title) may shed light on some of this. You might not agree with everything he says (I don’t), but Turchin’s ideas merit a place at the table.

He’s another cycles-of-civilization theorist, and cliodynamics, the political-philosophical paradigm he is working within, seems worth knowing about. I wonder if such thinkers seeming to come out of the walls is yet another sign of civilizational decline. The first two I encountered were William Strauss and Neil Howe, whose The Fourth Turning appeared back in 1997 and predicted the crisis era we’ve since entered.

When societies are healthy, do its scholars ponder such things? Do they need to?

What Turchin sees when he looks at America: first, a past order in which we achieved a level of stability — political, economic, and for a time, cultural — followed by a slow unraveling caused more by structural factors as anything done by individual political actors. Economic stability began in the late 1940s and continued until around the mid 1970s. A rising tide indeed lifted all boats, or it was sincerely desired that it do so. Well-intentioned movements urged equal pay for women and nondiscrimination against blacks, so that their prospects would improve through their own efforts which is always the ideal.

Then, intertwining forces began to intrude. First, the number of well-educated, independent-minded, and ambitious people began to grow: elite-aspirants, Turchin calls them (using the term elite in a broader sense than I do, but never mind that here). The number of elite-aspirants soon exceeded the number of jobs able to make use of their skills. These either stayed the same or shrank (as in academia). Competition for those jobs grew increasingly fierce, and some were bound to lose out. Some competitors began to break the rules to get ahead. This always presages unraveling.

Meanwhile, even those trying to adhere to the rules grow resentful and increasingly angry. Their mindset worsens if they get the sense that the winners cheated, working the system instead of working to earn a place in it.

From the latter eventually came early-adopters of emerging counter-elites, Turchin calls them. Trump is a counter-elite in politics. Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson are media counter-elites. To be a counter-elite, no less than an elite, you have to have money — and very good networking skills. Trump was and is a billionaire. Neither Bannon nor Carlson are hurting financially. All three excel at gaining and keeping attention in what has become an attention economy.

Another factor worsening the mindset of the have-nots is what Turchin calls public immiseration. What is this, and how does it come about?

By the end of the 1960s, the federal government was expanding by leaps and bounds. Civil rights, voting rights, environmental causes, etc., were creating new bureaucracies, all of which had to be paid for somehow.

By 1971, Nixon had a choice. He could call the biggest tax increase in U.S. history, which would have gotten him hated more than Watergate did.

Or he could take the radical step of “closing the gold window” and allowing the Federal Reserve / U.S. Treasury Dept. complex to create money out of nothing.

As we know, he chose the second. The national debt has since gone from the $475 billion when he left office to its present $32.6 trillion.

Money printing destroys a currency’s purchasing power. Thus waves of inflation. Some inflation was hidden. A lot of newly created money went to the Wall Street investment class. A system of welfare-statism in reverse, I’ve elsewhere called it, began to develop: redistribution of wealth upwards.

Turchin’s term for this is a money pump.

It explains the meteoric rise of the Dow and Nasdaq, especially in the 1990s.

If the elites cheated, this system was one of their primary instruments.

Its effects are felt as a cost of living that soon rises faster than wages. People are immiserated when their lives become a worsening scramble to pay the bills, and when neither political party seems able to do anything about it. For the system comes to depend on easy credit. Eventually this alone becomes a source of instability. It crashed in 2000, and crashed harder in 2008. Some believe an even bigger crash is coming.

Add to this mix “free trade” agreements such as NAFTA, GATT II, etc., which decimated our manufacturing base while enabling corporations to get richer. As conventional economists were describing this at the time, manufacturing was replaced by services. The former paid reasonably well. The latter did not.

The result: an increasing percentage of this population, many already stymied in their searches for occupations of their choosing, having a progressively harder time keeping a roof over their heads. Complaints are legion of people being forced to choose between paying the electric bill and paying the mortgage.

Credit card debt escalated.

Life, for an ever-increasing percentage of the population, became a scramble of the cash-strapped, with many trapped in jobs (sometimes more than one) they despised.

This is public immiseration, and it is capable of provoking chronic stress. Some people manage stress reasonably well, although eventually doing so damages one’s health.

Others flip out and become the “Karen of the week.” Or the next road rage casualty.

I’ve left out things like skyrocketing tuition for the college degree the “experts” all say you need to get ahead, despite arguably diminished quality: universities went corporate while their faculties went woke. The former looked to beautify their campuses, put in health clubs, and hire legions of “administrators,” i.e., more bureaucrats to oversee it all, including “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucrats (no straight white men need apply!).

Student loan debt has risen to over $1.5 trillion, another drag on people’s lives and source of chronic stress.

Financial elites reap the windfalls of all this debt, of course, and this aggravates what Turchin describes as another obvious destabilizing feature: massive inequality, with the haves openly flaunting their status.

Summing: Turchin sees two factors which destabilize societies: increasing numbers of frustrated elite-aspirants whose faith in the system is slowly eroded, and public immiseration, caused when the cost of living escalates past the ability of large segments of the public to cover it. Both find themselves losing ground — sometimes a lot of ground. Legions of those unable to pay escalating rent ended up homeless!

I have yet to hear university wokesters set aside their obsession with “transgenders” long enough to recognize the homelessness epidemic in every major city in the U.S.

I think there’s a third factor, one a lot of us (myself included, at times) have experienced: atomization.

The 1950s and 1960s were the heyday of the nuclear family. One breadwinner (usually Dad) could feed a family of four. Families were stable. Divorce was frowned upon, and the divorce rate was relatively low.

Blacks may have faced racial discrimination and prejudice, but their families tended to stay together.

Both radical feminism and the rising cost of living gradually tore the nuclear family apart. The first sought to discredit and demonize men (think of terms like mansplaining and toxic masculinity). The second, as we’ve already seen, made it ever harder, and finally impossible, for a single breadwinner with a modest salary to support his family. His wife had to work whether she wanted to or not.

Economics as much as ideology drove women into the career smorgasbord.

No-fault divorce had appeared. The divorce rate increased, sometimes because she realized she didn’t need him. And because the two-parent family was losing ground culturally. Stigmas disappeared.

We began to hear of single-parent homes and latch-key children.

The former grew into increasingly atomized adults. As families deteriorated and the incentive to marry declined (destructive family court policies contributed to this), the population of single never-married and single-and-divorced adults multiplied. It continues to grow to this day.

Oftentimes the atomized male finds himself ridiculed and humiliated as an incel (short for involuntarily celibate — although many, seeing what was available, may have chosen celibacy). I think of that pre-French Revolution line used by elites, let them eat cake.

And we wonder why a tiny percentage of these guys pick up weapons and become mass shooters. Another means of flipping out.

Atomized females are not ridiculed but not meeting with better fates or mindsets. They might not pick up weapons but experience eating disorders, addictions to Big Pharma’s drugs, etc.

Substance abuse and self-destructive behaviors are increasingly common in both sexes. Suicide rates have risen, along with what Turchin among others call “deaths of despair.”

We are not wired psychologically to be totally on our own, alone, friendless. In many respects, we are tribal beings. We need groups, both for companionship with like-minded others, to find suitable mates, and to connect with associates with whom we can divide our labors, able to help us if we need help and allowing us opportunities to help them when they need it.

I think this is why solitary confinement is often so psychologically devastating, probably the worst form of punishment industrial civilization has devised. It is less torturous physically than, say, the rack, but its damage isn’t visible. I’m sympathetic to those who would end solitary confinement as a form of “cruel and unusual punishment” unless there is a very good reason for keeping a prisoner isolated (e.g., personal safety considerations).

Perhaps Turchin’s book helps us see why, collectively, America is descending into crazy, one person at a time. Millions have been frustrated in their career aspirations, just told to “reinvent themselves.” Already under-employed, they are then immiserated as the cost of living skyrockets, their money having lost most of its purchasing power, while their salaries stayed the same or diminished through coerced career changes. And they’ve been atomized: populations of isolated singles having exploded over the past few decades — atomization having been made even worse by the plandemic which left millions of people with a sense of having even less control over their lives.

“What Happens When an Irresistible Force Meets an Immovable Object?”

The immiserated naturally turn to someone whose very presence suggests a way out: a loud and brash counter-elite who tells them, “I can fix this!”

We’ll doubtless see hundreds of analyses of the period in U.S. history that began in 2015 when Donald Trump descended the infamous escalator. Most, sadly, will be written from an elite point of view, make no attempt whatsoever to understand the immiserated perspective which empowers counter-elites, and so consist of worthless academic exercises.

It is clear: the elites (using that term now in my original sense of those with visible political power and/or economic prowess) hate counter-elites like Trump, as well as generally supportive media mouthpieces such as Tucker Carlson.

I think they fear such people as well. Most elites could never survive in the attention economy without huge, well-moneyed support systems around them, and they know it.

The counter-elites despise the elites just as much, and would replace them at the centers of power if they could. Sometimes they can, at least for a little while. They aren’t “supposed to.” Hillary was supposed to be “our” First Woman President, after all.

Neither one considers the other legitimate.

We’re not really talking about irresistible forces here, merely forces that aren’t going to go away simply because corporate media demonizes them as “threats to democracy.”

Nor are we talking about immovable objects. Empires do fall, repeatedly. Governments are transformed beyond recognition.

But you get the idea (I hope).

It’s not just the U.S., moreover. A few days ago I encountered an article about the “fury of a silent majority driving a global ‘right wing’ counter-revolution.” Such articles are bound to provoke extreme anxiety in superelite and elite classes everywhere.

It began with Brexit: the U.K. kicking out the globalist EU. Then came Trump’s upset victory. Moti had risen in India, defending traditionally-minded Hindu populations there. Then came Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Orbán had won reelection in Hungary. More recently: Giorgia Meloni in Italy.

Now, we have the rising Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the wake of Angela Merkel’s disastrous globalism and further harm done by the official (NATO-driven) Ukraine narrative which spans a Europe in increasing trouble. Naturally, Germany’s corporate media Establishment is demonizing the party; considerations of bans are underway, without even a sense of irony when those initiating the bans say they are “protecting democracy.”

In Argentina, a leading candidate for the next presidency is described as an “anarcho-capitalist” ready to kick out the leftist Peronistas that have spent the past decades running that country into the ground.

Eventually, a lot of people figure out that the globalist-leftist alliance is not only not their friend, but that everything it touches, it screws up!

Paraguay just elected a “right-winger”: Santiago Peña.

Chile veered left in its last election, as did Brazil. The Gabriel Boric presidency is struggling, with an approval rating under 30 percent. If the next election were held today and ultraconservative José Antonio Kast were his opponent, Kast would win. Chilean media predictably demonized Kast, associating him with Pinochet, for whom he’d (unwisely, in my view) expressed admiration.

When people are struggling to feed themselves, though, such things don’t matter. Elites don’t get this. My prediction is that Chile, too, will turn “right” and put Kast in the presidency if he runs again in the next election.

Brazil? The “Lula-ista” neo-communists are back in power there, but how long will it be before the same corruption that once got Lula tossed in the slammer comes roaring back, and Brazilians return to their senses?

Those are just the cases I’ve thought of while writing this article. I am confident there are others.

Were I a superelite, ensconced in the WEF or just the Asylum on the Potomac, I’d be very worried right now. Were I in the U.S., I’d be doing everything in my power, supporting the sort of lawfare that throws 91 felonies at the opposing party’s leading candidate, however dubious the reasoning behind many of them, to prevent another four years of counter-elitism in charge, able to seriously monkey-wrench the superelite agenda for the world. I would do everything in my power to tie up his finances and tie up his time. He can’t campaign when he’s defending himself in court.

As I’ve observed repeatedly, all the narratives globalists and leftists relied upon — “globalization will make you rich,” “diversity is our strength,” etc. — have collapsed.

No sensible person believes those things anymore, if they ever did!

They have stayed collapsed, therefore. They aren’t going to be revived.

When the globalist-alliance can’t get what it wants by either persuasion or subterfuge, it is liable to engage in more drastic action.

Hence the real worry, about which I’ve floated several scenarios: what will the superelites do to stay in power? How much damage will they do, some of it to entire populations they regard as the moral equivalent of cattle?

What is clear is that they are doing now is not working. The GOP base, for example, is not abandoning Trump, because it sees the allegations against him as political. Continue with the lawfare, of course, and some of those 91 felonies might stick. The machinations by servile Democrats may keep Trump out of the White House. They succeed with the official narratives and repetitive language I’ve documented, e.g., “we’re saving democracy.”

This will not quell the societal discord and unrest, which is likely to worsen, its manifestations ranging from mere unfocused “bad behavior” caused by the unrelieved stress of living in the world the elites have made, to more organized counter-elite campaigns of opposition. They will not succeed in preventing someone else from standing up and channeling that unrest — possibly someone we haven’t seen yet (I’m losing faith it will be Ron DeSantis).

The Establishment doubtless sees itself as an immovable object. It isn’t. What is coming — other things being equal — is a force that may not be totally irresistible but will be extremely difficult to put down.

Expect breakage, whatever happens next year (or sooner). Expect a lot of breakage.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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Part I. Part II. Part III.

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Language Is Everything When There Are Official Narratives to Defend

By Steven Yates

August 16, 2023

How the leftist-globalist alliance has weaponized language in an attempt to stop Donald Trump.

In a recent article, Caitlin Johnstone commented on the illusory truth effect. It’s also called the reiteration effect. Wikipedia gets this right:

When truth is assessed, people rely on whether the information is in line with their understanding or if it feels familiar. The first condition is logical, as people compare new information with what they already know to be true. Repetition makes statements easier to process relative to new, unrepeated statements, leading people to believe that the repeated conclusion is more truthful.

Put more simply, the more a word or phrase or sentence is repeated, the more it puts your brain to sleep so that you believe it uncritically.

Caitlin’s example is the constant use of unprovoked to describe the Russian attack on Ukraine. Virtually every corporate media outlet uses this word repeatedly, although even superficial research on the events that led up to that attack will realize that it was anything but unprovoked.

What provoked it were numerous actions of the U.S./NATO axis as the latter crept eastward towards Russian territory since the collapse of the Soviet Union, despite pledges not to. The most recent major event was the 2014 coup in Kyiv, orchestrated by neocons such as Victoria Nuland and the CIA, replacing a Russia-friendly government with a Russia-hostile one. The latter began a systematic assault on ethnic Russians living in the Donbas who, in response, sought to leave Ukraine and join the Russian Federation.

Caitlin reviews the use of unprovoked as a propaganda device in one corporate newspaper, The New York Times, relying on Jeffrey Sachs’s earlier research which I also recommend. In fact, we can find hundreds of uses of this term all across corporate media, often as part of longer phrases such as unprovoked war of aggression.

My point is about language. It is no coincidence that Sachs, who used to be a creature of the mainstream (I guess he has a conscience and it began to gnaw at him), opens his essay with one of George Orwell’s best known adages from 1984:

“Who controls the past, controls the future. And who controls the present controls the past.”

Power elites learned over a hundred years ago that the way to control the past and present is to control the language used to describe current events. One of the best ways to accomplish this was to gain control over the press. Thus Owen Callaway, a Senator, had entered into the Congressional Record for 1915 a vivid description of how a powerful corporate entity of his day, JP Morgan, gained control over newspapers:

“In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, ship building and powder interests and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press in the United States.

“These 12 men worked the problems out by selecting 179 newspapers, and then began, by an elimination process, to retain only those necessary for the purpose of controlling the general policy of the daily press throughout the country. They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. The 25 papers were agreed upon; emissaries were sent to purchase the policy, national and international, of these papers; an agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.

“This contract is in existence at the present time, and it accounts for the news columns of the daily press of the country being filled with all sorts of preparedness arguments and misrepresentations as to the present condition of the United States Army and Navy, and the possibility and probability of the United States being attacked by foreign foes.

“This policy also included the suppression of everything in opposition to the wishes of the interests served. The effectiveness of this scheme has been conclusively demonstrated by the character of the stuff carried in the daily press throughout the country since March, 1915. They have resorted to anything necessary to commercialize public sentiment and sandbag the National Congress into making extravagant and wasteful appropriations for the Army and Navy under false pretense that it was necessary. Their stock argument is that it is ‘patriotism.’ They are playing on every prejudice and passion of the American people.

Contrary to national mythology, we’ve not had a free press for over a hundred years!

Hence the weaponized use of unprovoked to describe Putin’s response to violence against ethnic Russians by Kyiv.

Hence the use of conspiracy theory, the phrase weaponized by the CIA back in the 1960s to discredit criticism of the Warren Commission Report, and which has proven effective in demonizing criticisms of official narratives (political assassinations, the 9/11 attacks, so-called free trade agreements, globalism generally, covid-19 and the mRNA shots, and a multitude of lesser events for which an official narrative has been desirable for those in power).

Hence the creation of mantras such as war on poverty, war on drugs, war on terror, etc. None were anything of the sort, of course.

January 6, 2021 was the same: corporate media repeatedly calls this an insurrection, led by a president trying to overturn the results of Election 2020 which he lost.

See how this works?

An equivalent claim is that President Trump attempted a coup (or: attempted a violent coup).

The Constitution is clear: no one convicted of engaging in an insurrection can run for elected office. From the Fourteenth Amendment, Section 3 (passed in the wake of the War Between the States):

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

So, what this comes down to: will the official narrative based on the official language of Jan 6 hold?

The present assigned tasks of both the controlled legal system and controlled corporate media are making sure it does. That means doing whatever they can to convict Trump in the media.

Thus: hundreds of uses of insurrection or deadly riot or some such, even if Trump actually told his supporters to march “peacefully and patriotically,” the memory-holed phrase.

Trump never told anyone to enter the Capitol. That was Ray Epps (possibly among others)!

This matters! Very, very much, does this matter!

Official narratives ruin lives!

Not only have official narratives resulted in the incarceration of over a thousand people now, most of them nonviolent and very few with previous brushes with the law, the outcome of the next election and possibly the future of the country itself turns on what might happen between now and early 2024, not just in the court of law but in the court of corporate media controlled “public opinion” (another mantra-like phrase concocted back in First World War days)!

Trump remains the frontrunner for the GOP nomination. Court dates (e.g., next January) are already being arranged in ways that will interfere with his ability to campaign. One thing I think all parties will agree upon: he can’t be in two places at once. If his days are tied up in court, he can’t make public appearances.

This matters because Trump’s only presently serious competitor, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, is struggling. Other announced candidates are polling in single digits. Chris Christie would not even be a blip on the radar except that he’s building a campaign around attacking Trump. Trump’s own best bet (though it goes against his natural inclinations) would be to ignore Christie altogether.

The Establishment — billionaire-owned corporate media, academia, Big Tech, the integrated complex of intel agencies and war machine Trump and others designated as “the deep state” — is absolutely terrified of a second Trump term. I don’t blame them. A second Trump term would be quite unlike the first one. Trump has doubtless figured out that there is only one way to deal with would-be totalitarians, and that is by strongarming them, using the same measures someone such as Viktor Orbán used in Hungary to great effect. The leftist-globalist axis has been stymied there.

Academic leftists in Hungary were called out. They retaliated by moving their Soros-founded Central European University to Vienna, Austria. Naturally corporate media does not describe it this way. The mantra here is academic freedom, which has meant freedom for leftists to do as they please and cancelation for anyone who disagrees with them.

But Hungary has border controls. Its policies place Hungarians first, and even provide advantages for young married couples who have children. Orbán has no patience with dangerous “gender affirming care” nonsense. Small wonder he is demonized.

Hungary is a small nation, of course. Only 9.8 million people live there. Its effect on the worldwide dominance of the leftist-globalist alliance is therefore small.

Imagine this happening in the U.S., a country of perhaps 330 million people (who knows the actual number, since so many are in the country illegally)!

This understandably scares the leftist-globalist ruling class to death!

Thus the use by their corporate media shills of terms like authoritarian, autocrat, protofascist, fascist, and others as epithets which once had precise meanings.

More weaponized language.

We, say the shills (whoever we are), need to safeguard our endangered democracy.

There are, again, many variants on that theme.

Truth: the U.S. became a plutocracy (or plutocratic oligarchy) during its first Gilded Age; its first generation of plutocrats seized control over the economy when they created the Federal Reserve System in 1913 having engineered the Woodrow Wilson presidency the preceding year.

Plutocracy (or plutocratic oligarchy) means: rule by wealthy interests. JP Morgans, Rockefellers, etc. The elites, the Establishment (institutions enumerated above), call them what you will.

It is common to hear Patriots say that the Founders did not create a democracy, they created a republic: “A republic, if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin famously said.

It’s neither. But we’re supposed to believe the U.S. is a democracy because we the peasants can vote (usually for carefully vetted candidates) every two and four years.

No one I know of voted to send hundreds of billions to Ukraine! No one I know of voted for the U.S. wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq!

Donald Trump remains the biggest existential threat to this machine in our lifetimes! Not just in his person but in the movement surrounding him, which includes tens of millions of Americans who are now awake (not “woke”)!

Hence the fierce attempts to take Trump down, sometimes with legal precedents not used in a U.S court of law in over a hundred years.

The best result, for the ruling elites, would be to prevent him from running on Constitutional grounds.

They can do this only if they can make the insurrection official narrative stick by getting a conviction. The ball will then be in Trump’s court.

If he proceeds to run anyway — expressing not in words but deeds that he considers the conviction as illegitimate as he considers the Bidenista presidency — this will create the biggest crisis of legitimacy in U.S. history!

The Establishment would have trouble jailing him. As a former president he is entitled to Secret Service protection wherever he goes. House arrest is the most they could accomplish. That would not be sufficient to stymie his massive support which is already a ticking time bomb.

Real scholars such as Peter Turchin (in End Times referenced in my last article) are comparing our present era to the late 1850s.

This is potentially larger, because even if had the Confederacy won the war that ensued, the Washington government would have stayed intact.

Trump’s determination to remain a candidate for president despite an insurrection conviction and being supported by those millions of Americans planning to vote for him threatens the very legitimacy of the plutocrat-controlled government behind a conviction on grounds those millions deem a false narrative.

To make this more nuanced, what this would threaten is not the government the Founders tried to give us roughly 235 years ago, which Ben Franklin called “a republic.”

It would threaten the Establishment and war machine that began to develop much later, which was emerging around the time the Federal Reserve was created and the mainstream press was hijacked.

This distinction is bound to be over the heads of most controlled media pseudo-pundits. One major difference between the two, though, is easy to spell out.

The former promoted noninterference with the internal affairs of other nations (e.g., George Washington’s Farewell Speech).

The latter destroys other nations with efficiency and enthusiasm!

The first of the new millennium were the disastrous incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq. Among Trump’s “offenses” regarding the classified documents at Mar-A-Lago include his apparent sequestering of a war machine scenario of a projected attack on Iran, a much bigger country than either Afghanistan or Iraq. Had this taken place, it would have been a proportionally bigger disaster than those were.

The proxy war against Russia is just the latest of these catastrophes.

War machine plans appear to know no bounds. There is never an off-ramp, never a sense of what these wars are intended to accomplish besides making money for defense contractors. There is never a sense of how things are supposed to look afterwards.

But imagine a multipolar world without the extremely power-consolidating (not to mention immensely profitable!) Anglo-American / CIA / NATO war machine, and the Establishment behind it!

I know, I have a hard time imagining it, too. We all grew up with this “complete and total disaster” (Trump’s words, from his 2016 campaign).

During his first term, Trump was the first president not to involve the U.S. in any new wars, or oversee the destruction of countries by some war machine entity (such as Hillary Clinton singlehandedly destroying Libya and Honduras when she was Obama’s Secretary of State).

All of which is why I do not think Trump will be allowed a second term.

The legal branch of the Establishment is throwing felony allegation after felony allegation at him in the hopes that by the law of averages something will stick. Their efforts are spilling over onto lawyers who worked for Trump, a major disincentive for lawyers to work with him down the road. They are trying to drain his resources (one PAC, Save America, has shrunk from over $100 million to just $3.6 million from paying Trump’s legal fees).

Summing up: expect controlled corporate media to keep hammering us with the insurrection narrative.

If the controlled legal system either don’t get a conviction, or if they get one and Trump tries to run anyway, we go to the next stage in the crisis of legitimacy: the Establishment (or particular deep-pocketed players such as Soros) covertly sends angry mobs of leftists to protest his appearances and physically assault his supporters.

We know this is possible because it happened back in 2016: Black Lives Matter blocking major thoroughfares, etc., with extremely high legal penalties for anyone who runs through one of these blockades and injures or kills one of the mostly peaceful protesters (another propaganda phrase; are we getting how these kinds of phrases have proliferated over time?).

We know they will loot and burn, because they did it during the George Floyd melee in 2020, and corporate media protected them both with the above phrase and demonizing truth-tellers as racists.

If those ploys fail, and as Election 2024 nears….

Well, here is where multiple scenarios are possible, as I’ve noted many times previously. Cyberattack? Another plandemic? Climate lockdowns? A hoaxed invasion by space aliens? I have no idea what might be used, but of one thing we can be sure: if it looks like Trump could win the presidency back next year, the panicked leftist-globalist alliance — and its many servile types in corporations, academia, elsewhere — will do something able to solidly lock the country down.

We know they are capable of this, because they did it also in 2020, via a 24/7 corporate media and governmental campaign of nonstop scare tactics that proved massively effective on a global scale.

Should this somehow fail…. Or if the leftist-globalist alliance lacks the collective nerve….

They may simply steal Election 2024. Jay Valentine has documented how it might happen.

Should that fail, because this time it is credibly exposed, however that happens?

Trump wins, officially at least, in the Electoral College.

The leftist-globalist alliance will then use every resource at its disposal to launch riots in every major American city, starting sometime in mid-November of 2024, prior to Trump’s getting into the White House making it impossible for him to do anything legally. The riots will continue until Trump either steps aside or is forced to do so — thus ending, for careful observers, any remaining pretenses that they were living in an actual democracy.

I’ve not factored in every conceivable gambit here, such as the possibility (likelihood?) that the Democrat Party will nudge Joe Biden aside and run Gavin Newsom instead. Newsom has all of Biden’s leftist-globalist bona fides and none of his tendencies to lapse into dementia-caused word salad. Gavin has succeeded in California: assuming the goal was finishing transforming the place into the kind of neo-feudal dystopia envisioned by the leftist-globalist alliance for the entire planet: Silicon Valley billionaires contrasted with homeless encampments in every major city.

Newsom would have a better chance of defeating Trump than Biden. (No one, of course, not even the elite-controlled DNC, thinks Kackling Kamala is qualified to be president, which is probably the only reason Biden’s handlers are allowing him to finish out his term.)

Whatever happens, 2024 may still be over four months away, but it is already shaping up to be a pivotal year — possibly more so than 1860 was. Remember the adage about an irresistible force meeting an immovable object? The Establishment collectively considers itself immovable, but the forces besieging it — armed with the truth, including truths about official narratives and how language is used as a weapon of mind control — are proving, if not irresistible, extremely difficult to put down. Probably because there are a lot of peasants out there in red state hinterlands who do not believe they have anything left to lose.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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This article previously appeared on my Substack (please consider subscribing).

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Part I. Part II. Part III.

If you enjoyed this article and approve of what I do, please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

How to Spot A BS Artist

By Steven Yates

August 5, 2023

Someone Emotionally Wedded to an Official Narrative

A couple of weeks back, a commencement speech at Northwestern University by Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker went viral. Pritzker is a Democrat, of course. No one in his right mind thinks a Republican would be invited to speak at such an event. Well, on second thought, a RINO like Liz Cheney might be. Few others would.

Pritzker soft-pedals wokery without calling it that, of course. His wokesters are kind; anti-wokesters are cruel. He intimates that the former are “the smartest people in the room.” Those who wish to see and hear the entire speech can do so here. Anyone wishing to read my commentary on his handling of kindness and cruelty as concepts can do so here.

This article fries some different fish. I’m also interested in his claim to have an “idiot detection system,” something so-called pundits (example here) have picked up on.

He has his, and I have mine. I’d been thinking: mine is more of a BS detection system. I originally entitled this piece “How to Spot a BS Artist,” but then realized, there’s more to the story than that.

Philosopher Harry Frankfurt (who sadly just passed away at age 94) wrote the slim book On Bullshit (2005). It became a bestseller (I wonder why!). Frankfurt distinguished BS-ing from lying. Lying tries to persuade you to believe something the speaker or author knows to be false, and so is indirectly concerned with truth and falsity. A BS-artist has no regard for truth. Many so-called pundits accuse Trump of being a BS-artist, which has to make us wonder if they’ve been paying attention to any of the country’s political history preceding Trump.

But what of those cases, and there are many, where a speaker or author is convinced, beyond any shadow of doubt, that what he is saying is proven truth, and is completely oblivious to any and all evidence he might be wrong? Such a person is not lying as we defined it, nor is he/she a BS-artist.

This is the case with many defenders of official narratives.

As my thoughts evolved, they turned into something of a system for detecting when someone is tied mentally and emotionally to an official, dominant narrative, is in his/her comfort zone, not about to leave it voluntarily, and so has little or no patience with dissent. Some signs of such will be obvious; others, less so. I’ve singled out three categories that seem to me most telling, in the knowledge endeavors we’ll all grapple with at some point. The first involves those who deflect criticisms of official narratives with accusations that the critic is a conspiracy theorist. The second poses as a voice of scientific reason while irrationally engaging in juvenile namecalling instead of honest engagement. The third, when it comes from the left, accuses critics of wokery of “making it all up,” and when it sometimes comes from the right, accuses those who sees those talking about economic inequality as closet socialists.

Let’s look at these, one by one.

(1) Those trained in the art of reciting official narratives harp incessantly about “conspiracy theories” (sometimes it’s “baseless conspiracy theories”). This will be the case even if the person accused isn’t proposing a theory, just questioning the narrative. Mainstream corporate media loves this phrase. Its so-called pundits have no grasp of what I’ve pointed out so many times I’ve lost count: the CIA weaponized the phrase back in the 1960s. Purpose: circumventing allegations, increasingly widespread back then, that JFK was assassinated by “his” own government, most likely a small group of CIA and FBI insiders — the same group that murdered his brother five years later. RFK Sr. would likely have stopped the war in Vietnam which the Establishment of the day wanted badly — and possibly reopened the investigation into JFK’s death.

There’s a link to the CIA’s own document here.

These days, going through the two newsfeeds I typically look in the morning which pull “the best of the best” (ahem!) from mainstream sources, if an author uses any variant on conspiracy theory, I often stop reading at that point.

Life is too short.

Enough said about this category, therefore. There is plenty in my archive about “conspirators” who aren’t really that at all, because as I’ve also often said many times, a real conspiracy would be hidden from you. Those trying to build “global governance” aren’t hiding. They’re just counting a public that is (a) inattentive, and (b) possibly too busy struggling to pay the rent or mortgage, keep the lights on, etc., to ponder what the Great Resetters might be planning for them.

(2) Then there are those who speak for The Science, whether in health and medicine, biology, history, origins, what-have-you. They will tell you they are speaking for “rationality,” of course, but invariably begin ad hominem attacks, often in their first sentence.

This blog is a literal gold mine of examples, starting with its title. Invariably, official narratives (usually those of leftists and global corporations, especially Big Pharma) epitomize “rationality.” Dissidents are “loons.”

I’ve no idea who “G.D.” is, of course. What’s clear is that he (I’m assuming it’s a he) has every official line down pat and recites them like a playbook. He draws liberally from this site, which has these same features. Originality is not his strength.

What his site communicates is that he doesn’t understand what reason and intellectual responsibility call for, including openness to the possibility that one might be wrong — including about one’s fundamentals.

Thus he conflates actual science, to the extent it still exists, with The Science; rejects religious belief in all forms, and embraces woke fashionability.

Decades ago, long before the Internet, it had begun to dawn on me that virtually all the theories we have about how the universe originated, how life originated, where we came from, how civilization originated — and how old they are — are seriously flawed. How do we know this? Because of scientific anomalies: well-authenticated findings of things that wouldn’t exist if the dominant consensus on all the above (“big bang” cosmology, abiogenesis, human evolution from an “apelike ancestor,” no civilizations before Sumeria, etc.) were true.

Examples: fossilized footprints, sometimes sandalprints, in layers of rock geologists insist is not mere millions but sometimes hundreds of millions of years old.

More examples: out-of-place artifacts (ooparts, the colorful designation) suggesting that someone, or some group, long before the civilizations we know, had technologies “stone age men” weren’t supposed to have had!

Final big example: astronomer Halton Arp’s documented problems with the “red shift,” without which present-day dominant ideas about the age and size of the universe fail to work. (If this is new to you, start here.)

If we had a mere handful of these things, we could probably discount them as mistakes and hoaxes. But there are hundreds, possibly thousands, dogging every scientific and social-scientific discipline. A renegade physicist named William R. Corliss began collecting them back in the 1970s. He compiled a series of Sourcebooks, he called them. Sadly, he passed away in 2011. His collections have gone out of print. Used copies are floating around on, e.g., eBay, although they’re rather pricey!

What we can say: we’re talking about phenomena uncovered, apparently by accident, by very different people in different parts of the world, almost none of whom with anything to gain by perpetuating a hoax — more to lose, actually — sometimes in circumstances where doing so would have been physically impossible, as when an object clearly of intelligent origin is found partly encased in rock or even petrified wood.

What Corliss reproduced, limiting his own commentary, were academic-quality accounts when he could obtain them.

What tactic does The Science employ?

Putting such things in the backrooms of museum basements and forgetting about them.

Or destroying the careers of those who won’t shut up about them.

Halton Arp found his access to the equipment necessary to continue his work as an astronomer increasingly unavailable to him when he kept insisting that a “red shifted” spectrum did not indicate that an object was moving away from us.

Christians have a ready explanation for anomalous fossils, footprints, and artifacts: the Great Flood, before which there existed a possibly relatively advanced worldwide civilization, probably as depraved as ours if not worse.

Ancient-astronaut types of a more secular bent have had field days with such things, writing books aimed at convincing readers that our ancestors were visited by extraterrestrials who became the “gods” of old. Such authors make bushels of assumptions for which there is no evidence (some discussed last week): that extraterrestrials exist, and could get here if they did.

I’ve maintained complete agnosticism on both. For other reasons too lengthy to go into here, I think the Erich von Dänikens of the world sell our ancestors short. Their theories strike me as weaker than the official ones.

I’m not sure why it’s so difficult for people to realize: there are things in this world we simply don’t know, and might never know. They are mysteries, because actual empirical evidence is insufficient to allow us to reach any decisive judgments about them.

The point I’m making: a sign you are dealing with someone emotionally bonded to an official narrative of The Science, whether about human origins or the origin of civilization or about alternative medicine or about astronomy, is that they dismiss all this out of hand. If they’ve examined it at all, their examination is so cursory as to be useless. Their judgment: scientific anomalies are fake (because they conflict with the official consensus) and the study of them is a “pseudoscientific” waste of time.

(3) The third category is more complex and takes more than one form. It can occur among writers and supposed pundits on the right as well as on the left. Given our present situation, I’m most concerned about this category. So I’m going to say more about it than I did the others. It definitely affects more people, usually against their will.

There are writers and commentators who dichotomize “cultural” issues (abortion, gay marriage, gender-fluidity, critical race theory, immigration, free speech, parental oversight of K-12 education, etc.) from issues such as economic inequality, what I’ve described as the redistribution of wealth upwards (welfare-statism in reverse, if you will), wage stagnation, inflation, the growing homelessness crisis, and so on.

Some on the left — Robert Reich is an example — contend that the former are distractions from the latter, and that the latter are the fault of Republicans, or of conservatives generally. Conservatives, Reich charges, harp about, e.g., wokery, so they don’t have to talk about the people struggling to keep a roof over their heads.

Reich actually accuses Ron DeSantis of “making up” wokery in corporations like Disney!

Some on the right, however, so-called free-marketers, indeed largely ignore economic matters such as the growing concentration of wealth at the top. They seem to believe that if you’re homeless, it’s because you’re on drugs, not because your part-time job was no longer sufficient to pay your escalating rent. Such so-called pundits appear to think the 21^st century U.S. economy really is a meritocracy, that the billionaire class actually worked for all that money and didn’t just work the financial system.

I sometimes feel like shouting it from my rooftop: IT’S NOT EITHER-OR, PEOPLE! IT’S BOTH-AND!

That wokery doesn’t really exist (or is harmless if it does) is an official narrative of many on the left. That economic inequality doesn’t matter, or that one’s status as a “99.99 percenter” is exclusively a matter of one’s own bad choices, is the official narrative of some on the right.

Both are real, and both are existential threats to Western civilization as we know it.

Left-wing billionaires fund cultural confrontations. Their neoliberal equivalents help undermine the middle class with class warfare.

Class warfare? Isn’t that a Marxist-type notion?

Warren Buffett once observed, “There’s class warfare alright, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

He probably knows what he’s talking about!

Fortunately, some conservatives are paying attention to the worsening predicament of working people. Leftists kicked them to the curb as too white, too straight, and above all, too Christian.

The right that began to rise after the financial meltdown of 2008 is thus less prone to ignore economic and “structural” issues.

This has led to an internecine struggle between two groups with very different philosophies, both of whom claim to be conservative. (Here.)

One group, remnant “movement conservatives” of old for whom Ronald Reagan was the idol, gave us the Bushes, Romney, McCain, Kemp, etc.; in media, George Will among others. This group insists on all those things that have aggravated the redistribution of wealth upwards — what biologist turned macrohistorian Peter Turchin, in his fascinating book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (2023) calls a wealth pump.

These include so-called free trade, immigration (which drives down everybody’s wages by oversupplying labor), and in general whatever enables global corporations to make money: “globalization” generally. Neoliberalism is their economic theory, and if it results in once-thriving communities going into tailspins when employers move jobs overseas, leaving only Walmart which had already forced all the mom-and-pop stores to close (and then the Walmart closes!), so be it.

Reinvent yourselves, peasants! (That’s the 21^st century equivalent of “Let them eat cake!”)

I’ve described the narratives that led to such results as having collapsed, lost their credibility with voters of various stripes. That is how Donald Trump was able to win the presidency, never having held public office. It had brought about Occupy Wall Street and fueled the Bernie Sanders movement among younger leftists. The DNC, being far more Machiavellian than the RNC, was able to stop left-populism. Hence the Bidenista catastrophe.

The second group consists of those who supported Trump whether they liked him personally or not: the “nationalist conservatives” who voted for him twice and who listen to Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. These folks, counter-elites in Turchin’s jargon, are deeply suspicious of so-called free trade, open borders, and too-big-to-fail corporate leviathans.

The “nationalists” understand that a problem exists when corporations’ loyalty to the almighty dollar trumps their loyalty to the country, and are even more destructive when they go woke.

This second group thus favors what academically-trained economists (most of whom are globalists in a loose sense) disdain as “protectionism”: government builds, or rebuilds, and supports a country’s manufacturing base against outsiders — especially China!

These two areas, the cultural and the economic, are both important, in other words.

It would be nice if the two groups could talk to each other, but I fear that without realizing it, they harbor different worldviews. The purveyors of globalized “free trade,” etc., are de facto materialists, for whom money and power get the last word even if they don’t put it so bluntly. The cultural conservatives tend to be Christians, for whom not everything is subject to “the market” because God gets the final say and His Word is not for sale!

Thus my concern is to prompt more discussion of worldviews (see links below), which orient our thought about what kind of world this is, how we fit into it and how we came to be, and help us lay out for ourselves and our progeny what is of value in life and how to go about pursuing it: in the end, how to build, strengthen, and sustain healthy families, and communities that allow genuine human interaction on its own terms.

If, as some conservatives say, economics is downstream from culture, then culture and community are downstream from worldview.

Summing up: doubtless some so-called pundits have what they call idiot-detection systems, or BS-exposing devices. These do not do the right things. The above three categories, to my mind, help us single out those whose interest is in furthering agendas and perpetuating positions whatever the consequences, not in seeking truth.

What matters, of course, is what helps us live fulfilled lives surrounded by loved ones, adding genuine value to our communities — lives of some self-chosen combination of learning, loving, productive work, and exploration — lives not dictated by tyrants or buffeted about by forces only power elites can control. Many of us would put Christ at the center, agreeing with real pundits who have said that if men do not bow before Him they will find themselves forced to bow before tyrants and dictators.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

Part I. Part II. Part III.

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Could Globalists Fake an Alien Invasion?

By Steven Yates

July 28, 2023

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” —H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature (1945)

“I am fearful when I see people substituting fear for reason.” – Klaatu, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

“It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.” —Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind (1955)

“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” —Henry Kissinger, quoted in The New York Times, October 28, 1973

“Imagine North Korea in 2030, when every citizen has to wear a biometric bracelet 24 hours a day. If you listen to a speech by the Great Leader and the bracelet picks up the tell-tale signs of anger, you are done for.” —Klaus Schwab, COVID-19: The Great Reset (2020)

“Time’s up.” —David Levinson, Independence Day (1996)

At first glance, the idea sounds totally left field: bonkers, nuts, loony, completely out to lunch. But could the globalists fake an invasion by aliens — not the illegal kind but the extraterrestrial kind?

The idea is being bandied about on alternative media platforms.

First: since last year, UFOs have had a higher profile in mainstream publications than ever before — although the preferred acronym seems now to be UAPs — Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. The U.S. military suddenly reversed 80 years of course and claimed there’s something up there its best and brightest can’t explain.

Articles on the subject have moved from the National Enquirer to Popular Mechanics and The Atlantic Monthly. The latter is as Establishment as it gets.

Is someone directing a priming of the pump, trying to acclimate the public to the idea of something unknown in our skies, perchance watching and waiting?

Second: the covid debacle failed to quiet the restless natives. Trump is on track for winning the GOP nomination despite the intensifying lawfare. Biden’s presidency, moreover, is in free fall despite belligerent denials. Under Bidenista watch the country is in a shambles. Infrastructure is falling apart while hundreds of millions go to Ukraine. Inflation may have receded a little but remains unacceptably high.

And without his teleprompter Biden doesn’t seem to recall if Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine or Iraq. Here, appearing before a union group last Thursday, is Sleepy Joe’s latest lapse into word salad:

“I often say, and I mean this sincerely, Wall Street — good folks down there — but they didn’t build the middle class. They didn’t build America. The middle class was built by the middle class.”

Huh?

Does anyone in his right mind believe this man ought to be reelected? Or should have been (s)elected in the first place?

Yet, third: if we learned anything from 2020-22, it is that the natives can be locked indoors, compelled to obtain permission from “their” government to go out for food, wear masks, and be forced to go along with such tyrannical measures via 24/7 scare tactics.

Corporate media could be counted on to comply, and terrified control freaks amidst the general public would do the bulk of the policing.

As I’ve noted countless times, fear works!

Nevertheless, the restlessness continues. The “plandemic” has receded, and people are asking questions. MAGA Republicans, meanwhile, are unimpressed by the allegations against Trump, which they consider the work of a politicized Justice Department driven by abject terror of a second Trump presidency. (Fear works both ways!)

Americans aren’t alone. Europe is also restless. The government of the Netherlands recently resigned. And although it hasn’t been much publicized on our side of the Atlantic, France has fallen into near-chaos. A cop in a Paris suburb shot an immigrant. His fellow immigrants took to the streets and pulled a BLM/Antifa number on that country, looting, burning, and smashing things in multiple French cities. Macron has had his hands full. His globalist, open borders presidency is also in a shambles.

NATO, finally, continues poking the Russian bear, announcing that when “conditions” are met, Ukraine’s joining the alliance will be green-lighted.

This puts Putin in the worst possible bind. If he allows Ukraine to join NATO, he shows himself to be the ultimate weakling. But what does he do? Continue smashing Ukraine as the U.S./NATO Empire continues to funnel arms there? Threaten to use tactical nukes? Then what?

So: many of us are wondering when the next shoe is going to drop, and what that shoe will look like.

A friend of mine whose wife works for a Big Pharma corporation tells me she received an emailed notification of a new vax for a new and deadlier variant of coronavirus that hasn’t been rel— I, uh, mean, identified yet. It could turn up at any time! The official narrative will be that existing “boosters” will be useless against it.

Did you get that? A dead giveaway that Pharma knows about these things in advance?

Or could the next shoe to drop be the cyberattack I’ve suggested could shut down large parts of the grid for months?

Or could it be … an invasion by extraterrestrials!

Or so we peasants will be told by “our” government and its compliant media!

The other day, dissident psychotherapist Dr. Joseph Sansone published this on his Substack.

I recommend giving it a close read.

Some of us are old enough to recall seeing that classic black-and-white science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) when we were kids. It starred the underrated Michael Rennie as Klaatu, visitor from another world, whose spaceship had touched down in Washington and whose artificially intelligent (before that phrase had been coined) robot Gort used high-intensity death rays against violent humans who had tried to breach the ship.

In the climactic scene, Klaatu delivered a pointed warning to the peoples of Planet Earth. Scrap your nuclear arsenals, Earthlings. Don’t even think about bringing your violent tendencies into space. If you do, we’ll obliterate you where you stand.

It was a powerful message, and if I recall correctly from a more recent viewing, one of the ending scenes showed rows of flags of nations uniting into a single body.

I, as a somewhat precocious second-grader, watching back then with my parents, could have become a globalist. Gasp!

My dad talked me out of it the following morning at the breakfast table (families shared meals together back in those days). I’d asked something like, “Couldn’t we stop war if we just got everybody together and united as one world?”

“Nope!” he responded. “Won’t happen. People in different places are just too different from one another.”

That wasn’t the exact conversation, of course, but that was the gist of it, and it was enough.

The idea has persisted, though. Warnings of doom from the sky if we don’t change our ways have continued as an undercurrent in science fiction.

The year 2008 saw a remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, this time with Keanu Reeves in the lead role. The issue now was climate change.

Stop destroying your own climate, dumb Earthlings, or we’ll destroy you.

Now, the U.S. federal government has all but pronounced UFOs to be real.

Add a fourth factor to those above, therefore.

Probably most people (even many educated Christians) believe odds are good that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations exist out there somewhere. The apparent discovery of over 4,000 exoplanets now lends this idea credence and psychological support … even if very, very few of those worlds seem at all Earthlike.

If just a few alien civilizations are advanced enough to have developed technology able to cross light years of space between their worlds and ours—

Well, do the math.

The idea sounds plausible, even if there’s no scientific proof that such civilizations exist or could get here if they did. And while much alien-invasion sci-fi depicts aliens as monstrosities, more thoughtful novels and films, like The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Contact, portray them as benign if nearly inscrutable (because they are so far ahead of us both technologically and sociologically).

Dr. Sansone thus invites us on a harrowing thought experiment:

Imagine holograms projected into the sky with ships the size of cities. Followed by reports of communications and directives for humans to follow to avoid destruction. Do you hold it past heads of state to participate in such a scam? Would people fall for it?

Expanding on this: we awaken one morning and learn to our horror that gigantic craft of unknown origin appeared out of nowhere above every major city in the world.

Think of another flawed but intriguing film: Independence Day (1996).

Initially, as in that movie, there is no communication, and our attempts to communicate meet with no response. The ships hover silently. A couple of days go by.

Military-scrambled jet fighters then cautiously approach. They are blown out of the sky by unknown weaponry.

Then comes the first communiqué from “the aliens” simultaneously to every city, using our own hijacked technology, in each recipient’s native language.

The message just happens to be: unite the planet under a single global body, or perish!

The message continues: this alone will end the two biggest existential threats to your civilization: nuclear war and climate change.

The solution to the second just happens to be exactly what globalists insist on: ending burning fossil fuels for energy. In practice this will mean: curtailing energy usage since no form of alternative energy generation so far yields fossil fuels’ results. It will mean less mobility than we enjoy now (15-minute cities, anyone?), and a lower standard of living. Perhaps even eating bugs.

It would be fake, of course.

But The Science would speak! Benign beings from the sky have at last arrived, to save us from ourselves!

Think it’s fake? You’re peddling baseless conspiracy theories!

For most terrified populations, that would take care of it!

How would anyone accomplish such a feat?

What H.P. Lovecraft said: fear of the unknown. Unknown to the peasants, at any rate. (Doubtless reports would be circulating of nutcases claiming to have met the aliens.)

Drones could project images of the craft, which would look like solid structures. AI* could coordinate their near-simultaneous appearance everywhere, produce accurate translations of their directives in multiple languages, and deliver them to the peoples of the world through hacked smartphones and social media. With everything now wired into everything else, this would not be that hard.

Advanced AI-controlled weaponry** could be deployed aboard a drone to destroy anyone who approaches.

“Our” governments would already have locked us indoors “for our safety.”

Compliance with directives of “the aliens” would be ordered.

A few would resist. They’d organize and open fire. An AI-controlled drone would appear above them — perhaps 500 feet overhead — and fry them with microwaves as they ran screaming.

Nearly all resistance would stop with the abruptness of a faucet being turned off.

Since an invasion by extraterrestrials could be portrayed as far scarier than any virus, most would already have complied without question.

Hierarchical groups would likely form spontaneously, from regional governments down to neighborhood groups. Proven compliance with directives on energy use, etc., would be a condition for being allowed out and readmitted into the post-“invasion” economy (so much for privacy).

Even if this means wearing bracelets or even allowing implants inserted into our bodies able to monitor emotional responses and detect resentment or anger. In which case: as Klaus Schwab put it, you’re done for.

Crazy?

Suppose I’d asked you, back in the happy and carefree 2010s, whether the world’s masses would comply with government-mandated lockdowns, ostensibly to protect from a virus that had evolved in a bat and jumped to humans in a Chinese wet market.

That they’d “voluntarily” stay indoors and “wait for a vaccine.”

Suppose you’d replied, this would destroy businesses and disrupt supply lines the world over. The answer: “So? It’s our health that counts, right? It’s all for the greater good!”

Based on such reasoning, Melbourne, Australia, and Shanghai, China remained locked down for months, with no end in sight!

If I’d told you this back in, say, 2015, would you have believed me?

Are we getting this?

Dr. Sansone wasn’t making a prediction, and neither am I. I’m not in the prediction business, I’m in the scenario business.

I’ve no idea whether those with real power would have the guts to try a stunt like this.

But nothing I’ve read recently on the subject rules it out.

Dr. Sansone’s scenario places “the invasion” in 2024. I think it reasonable to say that whichever shoe drops, will drop before Election Day next November.

To be sure, if the Democrat Party and others in the Establishment are sure they’ve stopped Trump, or acting behind the scenes has secured a replacement for the frail and failing Joe Biden (probably Gavin Newsom), nothing may happen.

But such securings are never guarantees.

Trump was not supposed to win in 2016.

Hence scenarios like this one.

The globalists have the technology. They could maintain such an illusion indefinitely. And they’d have their world government.

* I think the real danger of AI is not that it will “turn sentient,” like Skynet in the Terminator movies, or the machines in The Matrix, but that it will enable globalists to take a quantum leap in advancing their goals for the world.

** There have long been rumors of advanced death-ray technology that has never been publicly revealed. What, after all, was genius inventor Nikola Tesla working on when JP Morgan killed his funding all those decades ago, and when the U.S. government raided his laboratory, confiscated and classified whatever it was they found? Tesla’s lab notes remain classified to this day. What was going on at the HAARP facility in Alaska all those years, moreover? What is really happening at Area 51? I’ve never bought the line that it has anything to do with extraterrestrial spaceships or aliens.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

Part I. Part II. Part III.

If you enjoyed this article and approve of what I do, please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

Supreme Court Ends Affirmative Action – Where We Go From Here

By Steven Yates

July 5, 2023

When I learned last Thursday that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled 6–3 against affirmative action programs in higher education based on two suits, one at Harvard and the other at the University of North Carolina, I honestly didn’t know what to think.

After all, I joined this fight at the start of the 1990s. While I wasn’t a party to any legal action, I penned a widely-circulated major article here, which looks to have been “boosted” following the decision. The article brought down on me the wrath of both black students and a couple of black faculty members, giving me insight into their feelings-based worldview.

I also wrote a book, published in 1994, reasonably well-received everywhere except academia where it was “indexed” in a few major universities. Even then, academia was inclining toward censorship. A few years later, this.* Part of my argument was that political correctness and what soon became known as cultural Marxism had definite ties to the perceived need to delegitimize criticisms of affirmative action that were then appearing. My career, though, was dead in the water. I found myself essentially blacklisted. After 1995, I never taught full-time again.

My case against affirmative action joined with others, the best and most extensive of which came from economist and prolific author Thomas Sowell, that affirmative action only aggravated the problems its overly idealistic architects back in the 1960s said they wanted to solve, many of them the problems of discrimination itself. It had replaced discrimination against blacks and women with discrimination against white men, mostly those seeking employment. We were portrayed as motivated by residual racism and sexism. Cultural Marxist groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center piled on, further indexing some of us (somehow I dodged that bullet), contending that the country was seeing an upsurge of “right-wing” resentment.

But, as Sowell had documented, whenever there is widespread realization that one or more groups are receiving government-sponsored favors at the expense of other groups, tensions between the favored and the disfavored rise. They worsen until they threaten to explode into violence. Sowell documented many cases on a worldwide scale, also showing that discrimination per se need not be a barrier to a group’s advancement (it has never held back Jews, for example).

Meanwhile, affirmative action failed to benefit the majority of those in favored groups. It is common knowledge that most of its actual beneficiaries were white women. The black community gradually went into a tailspin: into a “left-liberal welfare plantation,” if you will.

The rates of crime and horrid public schools in black-dominated cities testify abundantly to the utter failure of over fifty years of affirmative action in America.

If anything, I’m annoyed, therefore, because the Supremes should have had the gumption to make this kind of decision long ago. Today, of course, we have six conservatives in Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Conant Bryant, with John Roberts who wrote the majority opinion, holding that race-conscious admissions violate the equal protection clause in the 14^th Amendment. This should be obvious. Had no previous Court noticed?

Arch-leftists Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissented, of course. Leftist Ketanji Brown Jackson — the Bidenista appointee who couldn’t define woman for the Senate Judiciary Committee — recused herself from the Harvard case as she has ties to Harvard, but penned a dissent regarding the North Carolina case.

Given the current environment, no one in his right mind thinks one Supreme Court decision is going to put this to bed. The cultural left is simply too strong for that. Among my warnings was that political correctness would spread from academia and law schools to every major institution in the country. It has done just this. The woke mindset which evolved from political correctness now dominates corporations from Big Tech to Hollywood, has infiltrated mainstream religious denominations, and been felt in the military (e.g., Gen. Mark Milley’s wanting to understand “white rage”).

California governor Gavin Newsom (whom many of us are watching as a possible replacement for the increasingly enfeebled Joe Biden between now and November 2024**) has already warned that ending affirmative action will result in falling black enrollment rates at major universities.

He’s probably right, not seeing the results in his own state as still more testimony that affirmative action has failed miserably, and that the worldview behind it fails.

Thus we’ll see more lawsuits, and possible legislation able to reverse such decisions, once the Democrat Party again controls Congress (not unimaginable in 2025).

The failures of blacks in particular to make significant advances in American society outside athletics and mass entertainment will continue to be blamed on “systemic racism,” that academic creation of critical race theory (which also originated in the 1990s), not on failed left-liberal policies such as affirmative action, and on the broader and much older disaster known as public education. “White privilege” cannot explain how Asians have succeeded in America despite facing the same barriers other ethnic minorities have faced. They, too, began to chafe at policies that increasingly excluded them—because cultural Marxism doesn’t target whites as such, it targets the successful. Many Hispanics have also succeeded despite hostility from some whites including the previous president of the U.S.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) has accomplished little more than rationalizing black (and left-liberal) failure. Diversity certainly doesn’t mean intellectual diversity; what we have seen for over thirty years now is a march leftward — easy once conservative intellectuals are kicked out and rendered almost extinct! Equity, moreover, is not equality, either economically or as equal treatment under the law; embedded in the term is the Marxian call for a total restructuring to eliminate “systemic racism.” Inclusion, finally, does not include whites — or Asians or successful Hispanics or Jews who aren’t billionaires.

DEI, in short, is a pseudo-intellectual cult, and a commentary on the freefall that American academic has experienced at least since the 1990s (probably much longer), leading to present circumstances where you can be any “gender” you like, and people with PhDs cannot define what it means, biologically, to be male or female.

DEI will also prove extremely difficult to dislodge from American culture in its present state.

There is something my book and essays got wrong at least by implication, therefore, and I’ve had less trouble facing this over time. The Libertarian in me, back in the day, blithely assumed that when presented with rational, evidence-based argumentation based on literally overwhelming evidence, the public if not academic authorities would respond. They would demand an end to what was manifestly causing far more problems than it was solving. Blacks in particular would wake up out of their left-liberal collective slumber and realize that neither the federal government nor the sprawling entertainment industry are their friends.

But if people responded rationally to evidence — or absence of it — then no one would have countenanced replacing discrimination against blacks and women with discrimination against white men, Asians, and other success stories.

We’d never have been in this mess.

If people responded to evidence — or its absence — then gender ideology would never have caught on with supposedly intelligent people, much less become a dominant force in psychiatry and academic pseudo-subjects like “gender studies.”

Gender ideology posits a “social construct,” gender, differing from biological sex and supervening over it so that it conditions how different “genders” see the world. It also opens doors to what we now see: “transitioning” and “gender affirming care” as part and parcel of transgenderism, arguably now a bigger danger to impressionable (and naturally curious!) children than sex-ed ever thought of being!

I am continually amused when journalistic shills in dominant corporate media (e.g., The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, Yahoo News, etc.) pen something along the lines of “Putin [or Trump or whoever they want to demonize that day] asserted without evidence that …” as if they truly cared about real evidence and were doing more than delegitimizing the person and whatever he/she was claiming.

You can point to reams of evidence of the corruption of Big Pharma — how multibillion dollar pharmaceutical corporations place money ahead of health and even lives, and how they are protected by American courts by indemnity from lawsuits for the harm done by their products. Read the latest outrage here.

These are the outfits we peasants were supposed to trust regarding mRNA “vaccines” for covid-19(84). Tens of thousands of people have keeled over after receiving these shots, some of them visible athletes. Millions, moreover, have gotten the shots and got covid anyway. None of this has mattered. The official narrative, that the shots are “safe and effective,” has held.

I was wrong in assuming that people decide political-economic beliefs on evidence. Not even Republicans respond to real evidence. If they did, then Dr. Ron Paul would have been the leading candidate for the presidency back in 2008; or surely in 2012. (Listen to his farewell speech on the occasion of his retirement in 2013 and tell me that Dr. Paul wasn’t the leading voice of reason in the American political system.)

What I’ve learned over the course of almost thirty years of investigation, nearly all of it on my own, is that you can present reams of evidence for the existence of a globalist superelite — a small minority of would-be philosopher kings in the World Economic Forum and elsewhere who believe themselves fit to dominate the world economically and technologically. You can teach yourself to follow money trails such as the hundreds of millions funneled to the Wuhan lab — and still be dismissed as a “conspiracy theorist.”

You can point out that the CIA weaponized the phrase conspiracy theory back in the 1960s to circumvent doubts about the official story of the JFK assassination, and it falls on deaf ears.

Very basic beliefs are accepted emotionally, not rationally. We Christians believe in a God who ordered the universe and created us because we are more “at home” psychologically in such a universe. I am not so delusional as to think I can prove God’s existence with logic or supposed evidence from design. This has been the folly of theistic philosophers (except for a few figures like Kierkegaard) for centuries.

Materialists, for whatever reason, feel more “at home” in a universe without such a Being — probably because it frees them from the sense of responsibility to moral rules set by such a Being and allows them to be as hedonistic as they please. They want a world in which they answer only to themselves or each other. I can point out the consequences of materialism in the secular world, and this, too, fall on deaf ears.

Marxism is a worldview, a species of materialism. It posits that the fundamental forces in reality and history are dialectical, not mechanistic; that history is the outworking of violent clashes between “masters” and “bondservants” (or “slaves”) which Marx thought would end only when the process (led by his “enlightened” minions) established perfect Communism.

I should perhaps note that the above-mentioned would-be philosopher kings — superelites, Globocorp, whatever label you use for them — don’t care about any of this. Power has no ideology as such. Superelites have no interest in the fate of American blacks … nor that of homosexuals nor supposed transgenders.

The last thing they want are educated populations capable of critical, fact-based thinking. Much of the history of public “education” is a history of efforts to quash intellectual independence and curiosity, in favor of docility, conformity, acceptance of one’s status as a peasant, and bowing before the judgments of one’s superiors, the “experts.”

Returning to the matter at hand: I am therefore gloomy about anyone giving up DEI, affirmative action, or the cultural Marxist worldview more generally, even if this Supreme Court decision is a step in the right direction. Leftists are turning attention to what they think of as the “affirmative action” of legacy admissions, i.e., mediocre students getting into Harvard because daddy went and gave millions of jack to the school. I’m not sure attention on legacy admissions is such a bad thing. It might open doors to criticisms of the plutocratic oligarchy that really runs the country on behalf of the global would-be philosopher kings.

My recommendation remains, therefore: separate, rather than urge reforms (as I once did). There is little point in continuing to argue with these people. Instead, build parallel institutions: private universities even if unaccredited; private academies for children and teenagers which whets rather than stifles their natural curiosity; autonomous communities where their elders of whatever ethnicity can deal with one another and solve common problems peacefully. Continue with alternative media and independent publishing platforms, for those of us conscious of what gets results and builds successful families, communities, and lives; versus those things presently taking us down the path to global-level destruction.

*This is not the original, which appeared on LewRockwell.com and is long gone, a casualty of my falling out with Libertarian circles during the 2000 decade over Libertarian tendencies to condemn institutions of government while maintaining dead silence as global corporations ran increasingly wild.

**Joe Biden recently asserted, “Vladimir Putin is increasingly losing the war in Iraq.” The man literally cannot speak a coherent sentence without a teleprompter, and sometimes ends quotes from others actually saying “end of quote.”

This article originally appeared on the author’s Substack.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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Join Jack Carney and Steven Yates for Philosophy of Responsible Freedom, Saturdays at 5 pm EDT. Next weekend (it’s Session 33 of a projected 50) we will be discussing brainwashing as a tool of power. More information about Philosophy of Responsible Freedom here. To get on our email list contact me at freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.

Steven Yates’s latest book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) is available here and here. His earlier Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) is available here.

While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published on October 31, 2023. To learn more, shoot me an email.

In Terrible Times, An Urgent Call for Calm!

By Steven Yates

June 13, 2023

Now we go nuclear. IC war going to new levels. Just got an EM fm senior IC friend, it began: “He will die in jail.” —John Schindler, Former NSA

We’re in terrible times, and they’re likely to get worse before they get better.

It’s true: lawfare against Donald Trump has gone to the federal level. Last Friday the 37-count felony indictment in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents situation was unsealed. He will appear in a Miami federal courtroom at 3 pm on Tuesday. He stands accused of mishandling classified documents and then obstructing efforts by federal officials to obtain them. The best spin on the situation is that Trump got extremely careless with materials powerful people care about (one of them involving plans for an attack on Iran!).

He forgot one of the most basic rules of political realism, that outsiders have to live by a different set of rules than insiders. Unlike insiders, outsiders will pay for every mistake they make, or ever made. That’s not “fair,” but that’s probably how all governmental systems work. Outsiders must keep their noses clean at all times. Trump has not done that. This, by the way, explains the double-standard: both Hillary Clinton and even Joe Biden, when he was Senator, mishandled classified documents without consequence. This was not even Trump’s greatest error: underestimating what he was up against when he ran for the presidency in 2015-16 and told us during his inauguration: “Americanism, not globalism!”

Now I’m reading of calls for violence coming from Trump supporters on social media and online forums. Many use screennames so they can say things that would likely be actionable if they used their real names in public. Commenters on a site called The Donald (no, I’m not linking to it) have called for mass executions. A poster calling him(her?) self Belac186 said, “The only way this country ever becomes anything like the Constitution says this country should be is if thousands of traitorous rats are publicly executed.” Another commenter, “DogFaceKilla,” concurred: “I got some rope somewhere in the garage…” “Heavy_Metal_Patriot” added: “Hans says we can borrow the flammenwerfer.” This refers to a special flamethrower used on the battlefield by German soldiers in the Second World War.

Visible figures seem to be encouraging revolt. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) stated, “Eye for an eye!” Kimberly Guilfoyle, Eric Trump’s fiancée, warned, “Retribution is coming!” in all caps.

Kari Lake elaborated:

“I have a message tonight for Merrick Garland and Jack Smith and Joe Biden — and the guys back there in the fake news media, you should listen up as well, this one is for you. If you want to get to President Trump, you are going to have go through me, and you are going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA…. That’s not a threat, that’s a public service announcement.”

For that speech she received a standing ovation.

I sincerely deplore this, must repudiate it, and urge readers not to participate in this sort of thing!

Yes, we’re in terrible times. For the first time in U.S. history, a former president is being prosecuted at the federal level. He has already been tried and convicted in controlled corporate media. The U.S. is becoming more of a banana republic with each passing day.

Protesting is one thing. Protests can be conducted peacefully. The vast majority of Trump supporters have done this up until now. Of the thousands of people who went to Washington on January 6, 2021, only a small handful unwisely breached the Capitol, and only a handful of those became violent. [Dan Bongino: They Are Putting Trump’s Life in Danger]

So how else can I say it? Allowing ourselves, especially those on the scene, to give in to the temptation to become violent, is the absolute last thing we should do!

Yes, yes, I know…. Leftist groups became violent and destructive during the George Floyd riots the year before. They did hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of damage in over a dozen American cities. Most got a pass, while a teenage kid who used deadly force to defend himself from leftist thugs — Kyle Rittenhouse — found himself facing murder charges. Reportage happens as it does because the globalist-leftist alliance controlled corporate media and much of government even when Trump was in the White House. Now, with the Bidenistas in charge, they control that much more.

We need to find ways of fighting them without becoming them!

Some in corporate media will claim that Trump has said nothing to discourage the present mood.

That is absolutely false!

On June 11, Trump stated, “We need strength at this point, and everyone’s afraid to do anything, they’re afraid to talk, and they have to go out and they have to protest peacefully.”

My prediction is that not a single corporate media outlet will repeat that. I found it on an “independent” site.

Trump elaborated: “Look, our country has to protest. We have plenty to protest, we’ve lost everything. We’ve lost our borders, we’ve lost our election integrity, we’ve lost respect all over the world.”

He could not have been clearer.

Is the Establishment hoping for violence? Are leftists in corporate media quietly waiting for some hothead to fire off a weapon so they can further demonize the entire population of Trump supporters as violent “right-wing extremists”?

I don’t know. I’m not inside their heads. But it wouldn’t surprise me any. So let me just say it:

There’s a fair chance that Trump supporters becoming violent is exactly what the Establishment wants!

If just a handful lose it and are filmed (leftists do have smartphones), corporate media will descend on them like a pack of wolves, and a massive Bidenista crackdown in the name of “protecting the rule of law” may well ensue.

This will be ongoing. It is not limited to Trump’s arraignment. This will continue, since a trial will come and especially if Trump is convicted.

The 75 million Kari Lake warned about aren’t going to become violent, of course. Not even a small fraction of them are probably violence-prone. But just one tenth of one percent of that figure amounts to 75,000 people.

That’s a small army! It’s not a nothing!

But unless they are really well organized and really well trained, then unless they want to fight in guerrilla fashion, they would not be able to stand up against the U.S. Army, which would definitely be called up to fight what would be branded another “insurrection against democracy,” Posse Comitatus be damned.

To think those in power wouldn’t do this is naïve, and so to revolt openly at this point is just plain crazy!

Those who have not figured this out, need to do so and issue calls for calm of their own, on the scene. Because otherwise their leaders’ most likely fate is being convicted of seditious conspiracy and handed lengthy prison sentences, like Stewart Rhodes, founder of Oath Keepers.

Right now, the “illiberal” right is being portrayed as primed for the next dictatorship, the next Adolf Hitler, when given our present circumstances and actual money-and-power arrangements, tyranny is far more likely to come from the hard left.

So what should we do instead, in the face of those who now incarcerates political prisoners, go after the opposing party’s leading candidate in an upcoming election, and are increasingly intolerant of criticism?

Isn’t that the question?

The first thing is just breathe. Get outside and get some sun, if you can. Go for a walk. Get away from current events long enough to clear out your head.

We’re all having to do it. (I turned off the news this entire past weekend.)

Then come back and assess the situation with a cooler demeanor, without angry posts on social media, and in its full context, historically.

The first thing to note is that Trump’s favorability rating has actually gone up, not down, since last Thursday.

That is because millions of people have figured out what is really going on.

That is driving the Establishment nuts. Their biggest fear, after all, is another Trump presidency. Has been since 2020.

As much as they are into thought control, they cannot control our thoughts unless we let them.

So what I would do next is take my cue from the ancient Stoic philosophers, who also lived in and suffered tumultuous times — and it might be worth noting that the Romans were far more brutal with their opponents than the Bidenistas are likely to be.

What did the Stoic philosopher Epictetus counsel?

Paraphrasing him: focus on what you can control; set aside what you cannot control. He also said, “No man is free who is not a master of himself.”

None of us has any control over this indictment, what corporate media says or does not say about it, and what ensues on the inside. But we can control our thoughts, we can control our emotions, and we can refuse to fall into traps.

Seneca, another Stoic philosopher who had one of the worst jobs I can imagine — advisor-counselor to the psychopathic Nero — once stated:

“Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.”

He also counseled at length:

“I wish to instruct you in how passions get started, develop, and reach the point of exasperation. The first movement is involuntary, and it is like a preparation, or a threat, by the passion; the second movement is voluntary and controllable, and it consists in thinking that vengeance is necessary, because I have been offended, or that someone has to be punished, because he has offended; the third movement is arrogant, it does not want vengeance because it is necessary, but because it wants it, it has already annihilated reason. We cannot avoid the first impulse by reason, in the same way as we cannot avoid … physical reactions … [like] yawning when others yawn, or closing our eyes when someone suddenly points a finger at them: these things cannot be overcome by reason; perhaps they may be attenuated by habit, or a constant attention. But the second movement, the one that springs from deliberation, is also countered by deliberation.”

I recommend reading that at least three times this morning. Seneca could be speaking to us today, right now.

Finally, there’s Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic Emperor who well understood his enormous responsibility and became one of the few rulers in all of history not to be completely drunk on the power rulership over an Empire affords. He observed:

“You have power over your mind — not over outside events.”

As eloquent as it gets. (And I bet you thought philosophy was difficult at best and unintelligible at worse. No, only its academic permutation, which is mostly anti-philosophy but that’s another article.)

Marcus asked further:

“Does what’s happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness, and all other qualities that allow a person’s nature to fulfill itself?”

No? In that case:

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

Applying to our present moment:

We who supported Trump over Hillary in 2016 and again over the Bidenistas in 2020 both can and must continue to exercise the control we normally maintain, even if some among us have become keyboard commandos and visible figures have gotten unnervingly hotheaded.

What is the worst that can happen?

The worst thing I can think of is what Paul Craig Roberts quoted in the article I linked to near the outset: coming from John Schindler of the NSA who stated openly that the deep state had declared “nuclear war” against Trump, that he would be imprisoned, that he would “die in jail.” (See lead quote).

Now for the broader perspective.

The system that will have put him there has also doomed itself.

History testifies abundantly that Empires rise, and Empires fall.

The most common comparison between what is happening to the U.S. is, of course, to Rome. Rome fell for a combination of reasons: it overextended itself, it debauched its currency, it allowed the sexuality genie out of the bottle, and it sunk into internal corruption, driving its best minds either elsewhere, outside its reach, or into the quietude or seclusion of what amounted to an internal exile of nonparticipation.

But Rome is hardly the only Empire this fate has befallen. If we study history and learn something from it, we see that some variant on this theme has happened to all of them.

It is unfortunate that the serious study of history, like philosophy, has been largely destroyed by academic pretenders. But there’s nothing to be done about that now except rebuild from the outside (some are doing this!). A lesson to be learned, and is usually learned the hard way:

Centralization does not work! That one sentence should be tattooed inside the eyelids of every aspirant to political authority everywhere!

Work here means: brings benefits to the people. For obviously centralization brings great power and wealth to those who rise to the top and become its elites, and in our time have contributed to the seamless integration of corporate (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Big Pharma, etc.) and governmental (CIA, FBI, DOJ, the military-security-surveillance complex) power that constitutes the deep state.

Those of us who want benefits for the people are arguing for radical decentralization: a radical devolution of power from the center, and for what Catholic social philosophers call subsidiarity: social problems should be tackled at the most local level possible, and only addressed by powers higher up if they’ve been shown to be intractable at the local level.

The U.S. is an Empire in decline. Recognition of the U.S.’s status as an Empire that became such after the Second World War, via agreements such as Bretton Woods, the Petrodollar to come, around 750 military bases in dozens of foreign countries, etc., is increasingly gaining traction among real scholars.

Decline, however, has become palpable among everyone who is paying attention. We have a man with progressive dementia in the White House, whose cannot speak extemporaneously without lapsing into word salad.

Each Congress is more dysfunctional than its predecessor.

The military’s top brass sponsors drag shows and its top commander bemoans not understanding “white rage.”

Professors are arguing over how many “genders” there are, and you can be fired from your job for stating that there are two and only two biological sexes. Those who protest the participation of biological men in women’s sports risk being physically assaulted in public.

All these, and more, are signs of decline.

The military’s capacity to respond to, e.g., secession efforts by individual states or regions might well be living on borrowed time. My point has been: at present, it could do so, in spades!

The survival of the government emanating from the Asylum on the Potomac is not the end-all, be-all of the future. What might matter is how we prepare for whatever is to come, which may include opportunities at responsible self-governance we’ve yet to see.

This is the reason I have advocated various forms of separation: psychological and spiritual, economic, and political to the greatest extent possible. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.)

Separate quietly, in other words. Don’t do it on social media.

If Trump either cannot run, or runs and does not win (is not (s)elected) — or what would be worse, mounts a third-party run that throws the election to the Democrats hands down, this would not be the end of the known universe.

It would not even be the end of Trumpism, understand that as larger than one man.

Trump has been a hero to many, but he has not been and will not be our savior. There is in fact no salvation in politics, or in political economy. There is but one Savior of this world. His Kingdom is not of this world. His name is Jesus Christ.

Christ spoke from the wooden cross to which He had been cruelly nailed, both hands and feet, after having been beaten and scourged to within an inch of His life by the Romans (after being betrayed by some of His own):

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!”

The powers we are up against today know not what they do either, however well they seem to be doing it. Let us do more to think and act under these realizations, and realize the calm they will bring about, the more we meditate on them.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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Materialism Is Choking the Life Out Of Us All

By Steven Yates

May 25, 2023

According to published accounts, on May 1, a homeless and mentally ill black man named Jordan Neely, 30, was being more than simply annoying to other passengers on a Manhattan subway — something not uncommon, if my sources on what frequently happens on Manhattan subways are to be believed (I’ve never traveled one myself). He was menacing them and throwing trash at them.

Finally, an ex-marine named Daniel Penny, 24, stepped in, placed Neely in a chokehold and kept it on him for several minutes while waiting for authorities to arrive. No one tried to stop Penny. A couple of onlookers even assisted him. There is no reason to think Penny intended to end Neely’s life, but that’s what happened.

According to Wikipedia:

Witnesses said Neely was acting in a “hostile and erratic” manner, telling riders that he would hurt anyone on the train. [Freelance journalist Juan Alberto] Vázquez [who was filming the incident] said that Neely was shouting that he was hungry and thirsty, that he did not mind “going to jail or getting life in prison,” and was “ready to die.” Vázquez said that Neely did not physically attack anyone, while police sources said that other witnesses reported him throwing trash at passengers. Penny approached Neely from behind and put him in a chokehold. The chokehold lasted for several minutes and at least three minutes were recorded on video. According to Vázquez, the chokehold lasted for 15 minutes. An onlooker warned Penny, saying, “You’re gonna kill him now.” After the chokehold, the onlooker said, “He’s all right. He ain’t gonna die.” Vázquez said that Neely was moving and defending himself during the chokehold, and Vázquez did not believe that he would die. Neely was taken to Lenox Hill Hospital, where he was pronounced dead; according to some sources, he died on the subway car’s floor.

Neely’s death at the hands of a white male on a New York subway quickly became the latest flashpoint in the ongoing culture wars, especially when Penny was questioned by police at the scene and then immediately released. Protests erupted and continued over the next several days, some turning violent. The “Rev” Al Sharpton got involved. Penny finally turned himself in.

Neely’s background was not enviable. His mother was murdered by an abusive boyfriend when he was 14. According to a relative, after testifying at the boyfriend’s trial he developed PTSD and other psychological problems. He ended up in foster care, and then, as an adult, experienced periods of homelessness. He apparently picked up a few shillings impersonating Michael Jackson as a dancer but found no structured way to use whatever talents he had as a performer. He was on an official list of those most in need of shelter and treatment.

Clearly Neely had aggressive tendencies. He had been arrested 42 times by NYPD, three times for unprovoked assaults on women in the subway. Once he dragged a 7-year-old girl down a street. Recently he punched an elderly woman in the face, breaking her nose and an orbital bone. At the time of his death, he was supposed to have been living in a treatment facility, part of an alternative-to-incarceration program. He appears to have left the facility after just a few days. He’d missed a court appearance, leading to a warrant for his arrest.

The long and short of it: we’re looking at a severely damaged person here.

What of Daniel Penny? He’s an ex-marine sergeant from Long Island. He had no previous criminal record. Now he stands charged with second-degree manslaughter. If convicted, he could face up to 15 years in prison. During the incident he appears to have had the support of those around him. A couple even assisted him in restraining Neely. One onlooker — a black woman, incidentally — has promised to testify on his behalf if necessary.

Most corporate media and political class responses were as predictable as winter following fall. (Some, I should note, predate Penny’s being in custody.)

From Metropolitan Transportation Authority chair Janno Lieber: Neely’s death was “really troubling and upsetting … [riders should] find a way to deescalate” if “challenges” emerge on a subway.

From New York State Senator Julia Salazar: “A man named Jordan Neely was choked to death in public on the subway this week while people watched and even cheered. This is horrific. The constant demonization of poor people and people in mental health crisis in our city allows for this barbarism. It is making our city sick.” She went on to call Neely’s death a “lynching.”

From Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “Jordan Neely was murdered. But [because] Jordan was houseless and crying for food in a time when the city is raising rents and stripping services to militarize itself while many in power demonize the poor, the murderer gets protected [with] passive headlines [and] no charges. It’s disgusting.”

From New York City Comptroller Brad Lander: “We must not become a city where a mentally ill human being can be choked to death by a vigilante without consequence.”

From Mayor Eric Adams: Neely’s death was “tragic”; he also stated that “there’s a lot we don’t know about what happened here.” Asked about vigilantism, he said that “we cannot blanketly tell passengers what they should or should not do.” During a press conference he called for the passage of the proposed Supportive Interventions Act which would lower the legal threshold for a person’s being involuntarily committed in New York.

From City Council member Tiffany Cabán: the killing was “the inevitable outcome of the dangerous rhetoric of stigmatizing mental health issues, stigmatizing poverty and the continued bloated investment in the carceral system at the expense of funding access to housing, food and health.”

New York Governor Kathy Hochul called Neely’s death “deeply disturbing.”

Daniel Penny and his supporters have been able to raise roughly $2 million for his legal defense, from more than 45,000 online contributors.

Both Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Matt Gaetz (R-Fl.) have called him a hero.

But, yes, thinking of one comment, there’s more going on here than meets the eye. Different moral impulses are at work. Most people will claim that if they are subject to an unprovoked attack in public, they have a right to defend themselves, and with deadly force if necessary to save their own lives. And if they don’t have the means, they will leap to the defense of someone who does. All some have to do is imagine themselves in the same situation, confronted by someone who could pose a deadly threat and ask themselves what they would do. I think this is the source of Penny’s support.

Across the aisle are the instincts of those who contend, sincerely, that killing someone is always tragic, and wrong except in absolute cases of self-defense in a life-threatening situation, and that Penny should have let up on his chokehold when it was clear that Neely had been overpowered and was under control.

But at what point could he have been sure of this? (Video of final 3:45 here.)

These two perspectives share a common premise: human life matters. It should not be snuffed out without a very good reason.

But do our systems and many of our most popular ideologies reflect this?

The answer is No, and there are reasons for that.

First, though, a disclaimer. Regarding the players in this unfortunate drama, I’ve relied on what corporate and some alternative media have released: no more and no less. I’ve corresponded with no one.

Be that as it may, it seems reasonable to ask what this man was doing on the street, or in a shelter, for that matter, as he seems to have had family. Perhaps his family was dysfunctional. The loss of the black family unit over the past several decades has been a tragedy in itself.

My role, over these decades, has been to study the dynamics of materialistic societies and outline the outcomes they yield which don’t serve anyone.

Just as Penny choked Neely to death, however unintentionally, materialism is choking the life out all of us, out of our society.

Again unintentionally. Obviously the intellectuals who have defended materialism all these years don’t want this kind of result. But their attempts at a secular basis for a moral view of the universe and society have failed, in some cases miserably.

What do I mean by materialism in this context? I’m referring not to an obsession with material goods necessarily but to a philosophical view of our place in the world. I’ve written elsewhere at length on this subject. See 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. (For additional objections to materialism as a theory of how nature works, watch this.)

According to this philosophical view, we’re just big-brained animals whose lives have no transcendent significance. There is nothing, no meaning to be assigned, to the idea of a world outside of space and time as we perceive it, and nothing beyond our lives in this world: no God or afterlife, in other words. When you’re dead, you’re dead. You’re worm food. So we work at tasks having no significance beyond whatever ephemeral significance we can give them. The world as it presents itself to us is has no intrinsic meaning or moral significance. In philosophy, this is called nihilism.

We are now at the end of a long process, which could be called the “real” replacement. Intellectuals, beginning during the Enlightenment, dropped God from their world picture. They replaced Him with either the Almighty State, The Science, or Money.

The first of these became, in the twentieth century, the biggest death merchant in history (Communism, Nazism, etc.; leading inevitably to the U.S. war machine). Enough said. But the State still has plenty of idolators.

The second? Science and technology may have transformed large portions of the world and our lives for the better with ever greater creature comforts, but think also of the Tuskegee Experiment. It was a triumph of the prevailing secular ethos, which is that some may be sacrificed for the supposed good of others.

And given what evidence we have of what some of the apostles of The Science feel free to do, such as enhance the ability of coronaviruses to infect humans, the jury may not be out much longer that this surrogate for God, too, has feet of clay.

Materialist civilization has atomized us. For most Americans, public schools begin the process, throwing us into competitive situations and conveying not critical thinking skills or even that much practical knowledge, but obedience to authority and to dogmas, including about being free. Thus its graduates will unknowingly help government impose more authority and enable corporations to get richer.

The latter have organized their priorities around profitability, not human needs (look at Big Pharma and Big Tech). Beginning at least 30 years ago, stable communities found themselves undermined by de-industrialization as jobs went first to Mexico and then to China for ever cheaper labor. Corporations got wealthier; the middle class started its way toward the cliff as wages failed to keep up with the cost of living. Increasing automation meant technological unemployment at home.

More and more things became about money. Employed and want more? Develop a “side hustle.” Have a retirement plan? (Saving only makes sense if currency maintains its value. Thanks to government / Federal Reserve printing presses, it has not.)

Now, with AI advancing by leaps and bounds, we could be looking at the biggest wave of technological unemployment in human history as corporations continue to enrich themselves. This is the legitimate fear surrounding AI, not that it will become self-aware, turn into Skynet, and take over the world. (The idea that properly programmed machines will develop consciousness and become agents able to think is part of the logic and ethos of materialism as a worldview.)

Regarding money and its distribution, big cities provide macrocosms of a world with a small minority of have-a-lots, the ruling class, with a few haves who serve them and have a similar mindset; and a lot of have-nots who ran honest businesses and increasingly came up empty-handed believing they were playing by the rules. Financialization, as I’ve noted in countless places, functions as a kind of welfare-statism in reverse. It redistributes wealth upwards and into the hands of those for whom money and power are their only core values.

The indifference of the have-a-lots is thus palpable. These are the global superelites, be they individuals or corporate entities: think of George Soros, or the World Economic Forum, or a corporation such as Blackrock. When I speak of indifference, I speak of indifference from the standpoint of a moral posture that regards human lives as having intrinsic value, not extrinsic value derived from what’s in their pocket or bank account or investments, the number of followers they have on Twitter, or endorsements from “influencers.”

In this ethos, the powerful and influential pursue agendas. Some of what they do, they don’t bother to hide. Klaus Schwab, for example, writes and publishes a book entitled COVID-19: The Great Reset (2020). Corporate media then gaslights us by calling the Great Reset a “baseless conspiracy theory.”

Whether these people are conscious materialists, I have no idea. What they are doing is living out the most important consequence of the materialist view of the universe: that ultimately there are no moral restrictions on rulership, so that those who believe themselves most fit to rule and have the means to rule are free to do so. They can reinvent themselves as Platonist “philosopher-kings” (see Plato’s The Republic), redesigning as much of the world as possible into the Platonist image of what they believe to be Utopia.

Their Utopia, of course, will be Dystopia for the have-nots and, for that matter, any haves who somehow cross up the elites at some point.

We go through a period of anarcho-tyranny in the meantime. Anarcho-tyranny is a societal state in which random criminal violence is allowed to create chaos. Policies like defunding the police further this, as well as rationalizing black criminality by blaming it on “systemic racism” and calling it a form of reparations. But as petty crimes such as shoplifting cease to be prosecuted, as in Alvin Bragg’s Manhattan, businesses, plagued by losses, and by the occasional flash mob, cannot function. They close.

And if anyone responds to criminality with deadly force when the authorities do not, he or she is demonized as a “vigilante” in corporate media or by legal eagles, then viciously prosecuted in the face of violent protests by a politicized legal system. Protests are easy to orchestrate on social media if race is a factor, as it was in Jordan Neely’s death.

Materialism, again, has the consequence that human life has no intrinsic value. Its only value is extrinsic: what can be monetized by an employer (or oneself), what the crowd says (and the marketplace is just a variant on crowd dynamics), or what is stipulated by loved ones — quite real but no less transitory.

All values are ephemeral. After all, again, we’re all just big-brained mammals who have been atomized, demoralized, and in some cases dehumanized. Some will act the part by shooting their fellow big-brained mammals at random — and then often ending their own lives if not shot to death by police.

I see the horror of Neely’s defenders as valid but superficial. Most of it reflects no awareness of the philosophical issues behind the atomizing of human beings and their being discarded, like trash. This vague sense, that one’s life is purposeless, may well turn out to be a major cause of mental illness. There are probably tens of thousands of Jordan Neelys running around in every major city. This is because black lives are mattering only if they can be used to score political points for the hard left.

Not that the right has a firm handle on what is going on. I don’t hear Donald Trump, currently the de facto leader of the Republican Party, talking about materialism. I don’t think he is capable of the level of abstract thought that would require. But neither is Ron DeSantis talking about it. Mike Pence? He may have a weak version of the idea, but he’s compromised for other reasons.

The political class has no answer to this. Collectively, it doesn’t understand the question.

Practically no “influencers” are talking about materialism. It is past time for that to change. This is one reason I’ve written a book about where philosophy should go. So far, its readership has been limited to my immediate circle of associates (if even that).

There are a few Daniel Pennys out there, though: action-takers rather than thinkers. But as they continue to be prosecuted for trying to protect the public, their numbers will dwindle — just as stable families and church attendance are dropping all across the West, for all ethnicities.

What to do? I’m doing it here, shouting from my own rooftop as it were, that this is about far more than a man unintentionally killing another man on a New York subway and inflammatory responses from corporate media and political class “influencers.”

This article first appeared on the author’s Substack. Subscribe here.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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Taking Down Trump, Taking Out Fox News, With Lawfare

By Steven Yates

May 20, 2023

The jury in the civil case filed by writer E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump handed down its verdict a little over a week ago. Trump, they said, was guilty of “sexually abusing” her, but not “raping” her. He then “defamed” her, the jury agreed, by saying she made the whole thing up to get attention and sell a book. They then demanded Trump pony up $5 million for her.

What rational sense does this verdict make? How did Trump “sexually abuse” her but not “rape” her, given her lurid account of what she claims went on between the two of them in that dressing room? Why is the first credible but not the second? What makes anything she said credible? Some women are very good storytellers (I’ve met a few!).

The judge advised jury members to stay anonymous. Perhaps he was trying to save them from public embarrassment and humiliation.

Carroll now threatens further action because of Trump’s comments on the CNN town meeting the other evening. Trump called her a “whack job” and described her case as “a rigged deal.”

She has the backing of the very influential Roberta Kaplan (the same attorney who prosecuted Unite the Right in the Sines v Kessler case), who as a married lesbian is also both an ardent Alphabet Soup Mafia activist and — obviously — a Democrat.

The witnesses against Trump: all Democrats.

I probably don’t need to list the pending dogpile of suits against Trump: the one out of Georgia, the Mar-a-Lago case, the case involving January 6, and a couple of lesser civil suits, one brought by a family member.

This is how lawfare operates. Its purpose is not justice but taking the opponent out, to shut him or her up, by whatever means necessary.

Lawfare is what we’ve been seeing against Fox News, which settled with Dominion for $787.5 million, but faces a similar suit from Smartmatic for $2.7 billion.

Although Tucker Carlson is gone, Fox is also facing a suit from one Abby Grossberg, who claims she faced a “hostile work environment” and endured “antisemitic remarks” during her time on Carlson’s show. She also charges that she was coerced into giving a misleading deposition in the Dominion case.

I’ve no idea, of course. I wasn’t there, any more than any of us were in that dressing room back in … whatever year it was (Carroll doesn’t remember!).

Now Nina Jankowicz is also suing Fox for defamation. If anyone remembers, she is the woman DHS put in charge of the Bidenista disinformation governance board. Numerous observers of varying degrees of visibility saw this as an open attempt to create a real world Ministry of Truth. The avalanche of criticism quickly left the board paralyzed. Jankowicz resigned as DHS “paused” the effort. Soon after, it was shut down.

Jankowicz, 34, author of two books (I’ve not read them) and billed as a cybersecurity expert, says she’s faced a torrent of both public and online harassment including threats, and that her career has been “irrevocably damaged.”

She told Politico, “I didn’t intend for my entire career to be lit on fire before my eyes by taking this job.”

She blames Fox News for spearheading the campaign against her.

Yes, some conservatives may have gotten carried away. It happens. We’re not perfect. Especially in online environments that allow anonymous strangers using screennames to go into attack mode without consequence.

But we’re subsisting under conditions which makes me wonder if left-liberals who speak of a “hostile work environment” would know one if they saw it.

I left the U.S. just short of 11 years ago. I’m not sure I’d be able to write what I write and still live there, especially given how the cost of living in the U.S. has skyrocketed. Given my criticisms of the “diversity, equity and inclusion” religion that now controls higher education and a great deal of corporate America, and given my rejection of the increasingly militant transgenderism movement, I’d never be able to teach at a university! Probably I’d not be safe on an urban campus. I was once doxed by a leftist troll after taking to a forum to defend a conservative Christian ally from scurrilous, lawfare-type attacks before they were called that (a court case was in progress; the troll was actively and possibly illegally interfering with it). That was in 2006-07. In 2008 my apartment was broken into. Money and a few valuables were stolen. I didn’t pursue it beyond a standard police report, because obviously I had no proof that the troll had anything to do with it. But as other apartments around mine weren’t touched, it was clear, I’d been the intended target.

Not saying I’ve been singled out. This is the situation truth-tellers are in. I don’t know a single such writer who doesn’t receive hate email and occasional online attacks verging on threats.

But how did we get into this predicament? Truth-tellers have all been ostracized — or have left their places of employ on their own because they couldn’t stand them any longer. Some, such as Paul Craig Roberts, Glenn Greenwald, and Matt Taibbi, have retained substantial audiences from those who long ago tuned out CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and all the rest.

The plain truth is, trust has collapsed. And as yet another independent author, Charles Hugh Smith, recently observed: once trust collapses, it’s gone. There’s no going back.

This is not simply conservatives versus left-liberals. Are all of the people in the above list conservatives?

It isn’t simply about “left” versus “right,” nor Democrats versus Republicans.

The struggle of our lifetimes is between those who have gained and seek to maintain power, typically through accumulating immense wealth and are distributing it through their vast networks and control grids, versus the rest of us: the peasantry. The primary way those in power have sought to keep it and extend it, is to present in front of us a consistent parade of lies and then, when we question the lies, gaslight us by calling us “conspiracy theorists,” “right-wing nut jobs,” “fascists,” and “antisemites.”

This includes the upside-down presentation by the fully-owned corporate media of the handful of leaders struggling against globalist power as “authoritarians,” while portraying themselves as “defenders of democracy.”

The problem, as I’ve noted previously: the latter do not like anyone standing up to them. They believe that we the peasants ought to sit down, shut up, listen to their designated “experts” and do as we’re told.

If their “experts” tell us to take a certain vaccine, then we should get the shot and not ask for proof of its safety and effectiveness, nor wonder why over a thousand athletes under the age of 50 have dropped dead from heart attacks since the start of 2021.

Nothing to see here! Move on, move on….

Only we don’t. Because we don’t trust their “experts,” nor those behind them.

This collapse of trust isn’t the result of anything Trump said or Fox News did. They’re symptoms, not causes.

In my humble opinion, the Establishment — a term covering the prevailing political economy including all the alphabet soup federal agencies, the military and its appendages, corporate media, Big Tech and Big Pharma — did this to itself.

These institutions, or their spokespersons, have been lying, sometimes by omission and sometimes by commission, longer than most of us have been alive.

Let’s review:

Back in the 1950s, branding a populist leader who stood up to corporate power as a “communist” was sufficient to destroy him. It happened with Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala. From that unhappy episode came the term banana republic. Similar events brought down Muhammed Mosadegh’s democratically-elected presidency in Iran during that same period, instilling the Shah, Reza Pahlavi. (To note: democracy is only legitimate when it serves the interests of the globalist ruling class.)

In the 1960s, the Establishment lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident and about that decade’s political assassinations. There are still over a thousand documents related to the JFK assassination that remain classified, the magic phrase “national security” still invoked. No, we can’t prove that they contain information pointing directly to the CIA, or to CIA/FBI collusion, but if there is nothing damning in that material, then why won’t the federal government declassify it and make it public?

I have copies of documents sent to me by a younger relative of someone who was in the LAPD and on the scene at the time of the RFK assassination, where forensics basically showed that Sirhan Sirhan’s gun did not fire the bullets that killed Bobby Kennedy. Kennedy was shot from behind; Sirhan was in front of him the entire time.

The real killer got away.

To this day, the federal government and controlled corporate media maintain the lies that Oswald and Sirhan were “lone gunman” killers who acted alone.

Yes, sometimes Republicans are as guilty of lying as Democrats. Nixon lied about Watergate. But Johnson preceded him. Victor Lasky’s It Didn’t Start with Watergate (1977) proves this. Nixon got caught.

Jimmy Carter campaigned for president as an outsider. This was a lie. He was backed by, and staffed his administration with, members of the recently formed Trilateral Commission (the brain abortion of David Rockefeller Sr., Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Henry Kissinger).

The Reagan Administration tried to hide Iran-Contra. Reagan likely also hid his campaigns behind-the-scenes dealings with the Iranian students who had taken over the U.S. Embassy in Teheran. He wanted to ensure that they kept the hostages until after the election and up to the start of his presidency, so that Carter would lose and see his legacy permanently damaged.

Then Reagan staffed his cabinet with Trilateralists.

The first George Bush gave a pass to that ludicrous story of Iraqi soldiers, having invaded Kuwait and triggering the Gulf War, removing babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and leaving them on the floor to die.

Never happened.

The Clinton Team Presidency then lied about nearly everything. Clinton wanted credit for the “economic boom” of the era which was actually the work of Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan’s easy money policies which inflated the tech bubble (burst in 2000). These had far greater consequences than Clinton’s dalliances with an intern, although naturally corporate media fixated on the latter.

The second George Bush sent troops into Iraq launching one of the most disastrous wars in U.S. history on the basis of “weapons of mass destruction” that did not exist. The result was to create enemies like ISIS and destabilize the entire region.

Barack Obama told us that “if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor,” and that Obamacare would bring down health care costs. Did it?

The Establishments of both political parties and most “economists” kept up a parade of lies about globalization (so called), that it would make us all rich and prosperous — as opposed to laying waste to countless communities as the country was de-industrialized, low paying “service sector” jobs replaced productive work, and the middle class started to pinwheel over the economic cliff.

Financialization, which began when Nixon “closed the gold window” in 1971 but really got underway during the Reagan-Bush years assisted by the Federal Reserve money printing press, has funneled billions upward into the hands of the now-dominant billionaire class. Greed and speculation have replaced honest work, which has become a fool’s errand.

Equality — not to be confused with the Woke pseudo-concept “equity” — is desirable at least as a regulative ideal, because obvious, massive, and growing inequalities, eventually destabilize countries.

It is mathematically impossible to earn a billion dollars in a year doing real, honest work that serves others. This isn’t especially hard to show. But today, according to Oxfam, 26 people now own as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of the entire world’s population!

Today’s brand of left-liberal seems okay with this. He/she is too busy defending gender fluidity to care.

The utter absurdity of all this signifies narrative collapse.

Clearly we saw extensive narrative collapse after the near-collapse of the financial system 2008-09, and with the ensuing years witnessing the re-inflation of what became known as the Everything Bubble. Coastal elites prospered somewhat (nowhere near what billionaires were gaining, obviously, but enough to live with a modicum of comfort when they went along in order to get along). The rural working and former middle class suffered, especially those who are white. They were told their sufferings were “their own fault.” (Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the term for this was “victim blaming.”)

With this legacy of misleading information, open lies, general deceit, and an utter lack of empathy — all from government and legacy media — is it any wonder that an outsider like Donald Trump was able to win the Republican nomination in 2016 and then the presidency despite never having held public office before?

And given how Trump was (and remains) uncontrollable, is it any wonder he spent the next two years battling bogus allegations that his campaign colluded with the Russian government?

The same people that spent all that time and billions of taxpayer dollars trying to delegitimize Election 2016 now expect us to trust them about Election 2020, which they belligerently insist Biden won “democratically”; no doubts or “election denialism” allowed!

These same kinds of “experts” (e.g., Fauci) want our trust about the mRNA “vaccines”; no “vaccine hesitancy” allowed!

They want us to trust their good intentions in sending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to Ukraine, supporting what is probably the most corrupt regime in Europe, with a legacy of persecuting and sometimes murdering the ethnic Russians living in the breakaway regions. None of it reported in Western corporate media.

Today, mass resistance to globalist-driven EU policies in France, the Netherlands, and elsewhere in Europe, is completely blacked out on our side of the Atlantic.

There is no basis for trust in any of this!

Doubtless there are more official lies I didn’t think to list. So are there still any questions about why many of us, not all of us conservatives, were loudly suspicious of a “disinformation board” formed by one of the most powerful federal entities, one formed in the aftermath of a dramatic event (9/11) that raised a lot of questions that have never been given satisfactory answers?

This is the political-economic and cultural ambiance entered by those who believe they can grapple with never-defined “disinformation” and do it on the federal payroll.

I’m rather sorry Nina Jankowitz has had to go to GoFundMe to raise money for legal expenses. Maybe this is part of the prevailing theater; maybe it isn’t. I’ve never met her nor had an online exchange with her. I know no more of her situation beyond what she’s stated publicly than I do what went on in that dressing room (if anything) back in whatever year it was. But given this ambiance, is it not clear why so many of us thought the DHS might want a real life Ministry of Truth, from which it backed down only in the face of outrage and public ridicule?

This article originally appeared on the author’s Substack.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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ANNOUNCING: an online course/tutorial entitled The Philosophy of Responsible Freedom, directed by Jack C. Carney with myself as chief partner: a Zoom-based intellectual encounter between an atheist (Carney) and a Christian (Yates) exploring the history of ideas using Academy of Ideas videos and supplementing them with the thoughts of others. Carney is an autodidact in areas ranging across psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology who emphasizes the importance of human relationships in a world where loss is omnipresent (he also teaches English online). I am an author and trained philosopher with a doctorate in the subject who taught philosophy courses in years past, walked away from academia, still writes philosophy emphasizing the need to identify, clarify, and evaluate the success (or failure) of worldviews in civilization, on stages of civilization, on the quest to build free communities in the face of encroaching globalism and technocracy, and how worldviews either enhance or hobble responsible freedom. Course/tutorial outline here. For more information or to get on our email list: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.

Steven Yates’s latest book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) is available here and here. His earlier Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) is available here.

While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published later this year.

Tucker Carlson’s War on Official Narratives – Fired from Fox News

By Steven Yates

May 2, 2023

If I wanted, I could make this the shortest article I’ve written for NewsWithViews.com. After all, Frosty Wooldridge scooped me with this excellent piece you should read right now if you haven’t already, and which deserves the widest possible dissemination.

As of this writing, Tucker Carlson himself has not said why he and Fox News “parted ways.” He surfaced on Twitter on Wednesday, April 26. Here (we’ll look at what he said below).

I’ve no original theories of my own on this, and it wouldn’t matter if I did. It’s pretty obvious, is it not?

Carlson is a truth-teller. Powerful people today don’t like truth-tellers. Many who identify with authority, for one reason or another, also don’t like truth-tellers.

For example, Carlson routinely criticized the U.S. involvement in Ukraine, and exposed the special forces on the ground going directly up against Russian forces in violation of the law. He interviewed others such as Glenn Greenwald who are among the few voices that have criticized the assumptions on which the U.S. federal government throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at Ukraine are based.

Let’s pause and just ask ourselves: isn’t it weird — Charles Fort level weird — that with what is arguably the most dangerous war in human history, a war in which there have been more than mere hints of the use of nuclear weapons coming from both sides, that there is no substantial antiwar movement anywhere to be seen???

No visible protests in the streets! Nothing on college and university campuses, not on any media network or platform with visibility!

Just the opposite, in fact. If you question Ukraine’s being the totally innocent victim of the vile, violent, and corrupt Russians, if you challenge the claim that Russia’s Feb. 24, 2022 invasion was “unprovoked” and question the wisdom of “our” government sending hundreds of billions of dollars to the Zelenskyy regime in Kyiv, that makes you “pro-Putin”!

This smear is now sufficient to demonize anyone who criticizes America’s deepening involvement in what is clearly a proxy war for which, like “our” government’s disastrous incursion into Iraq in 2003, there is no end in sight. The same sorts of things were said against those of us who criticized that war, that we were “Saddam lovers”!

Careers have been derailed over this, which may be why the only visible antiwar voices are now-independent journalists/writers like Greenwald and Caitlin Johnstone (there are very few people further outside the boxes supplied by official narratives than she is).

Now Tucker Carlson joins them — one hopes!

I’ve no doubt, he’ll land on his feet. How much of his audience of around 3.5 million strong he’ll take with him from Fox News remains to be seen. He’ll have hurdles to clear. He replaced Bill O’Reilly, whose audience diminished significantly after he left Fox. Were I Carlson, though, I’d not give that a second thought. The people who count will stick around. I would therefore already be putting together my own news-and-commentary platform. When you’ve been getting paid tens of millions a year for several years and have an audience of that size, who needs an employer?

Carlson’s firing appears to have come from the top: Rupert Murdoch himself. Assuming the man is not senile — not impossible as he’s 92 years old — from a financial standpoint what he did was grade-A stupid. Fox’s market shares plummeted last Monday after Fox announced Carlson’s sudden departure.

In one day, the corporation lost more money than it will probably pay to Dominion Voting Systems ($787.5 million according to the settlement).

One takeaway: Fox’s reputation is as a conservative news network, but its uppermost enclaves are still billionaire class. They are therefore wedded to official narratives. Billionaires like Murdoch don’t have to care about the bottom line if narrative control is at stake. They’ll lose money before they give up control.

Could it be that he figured all this out???

The real bottom line was that Tucker Carlson could not be controlled!

He did not help the power elites “manufacture consent” (Chomsky).

Thus he criticized the official narratives on Ukraine, Hunter Biden’s laptop, January 6, covid, the mRNA shots, and much more. He exposed Big Pharma and gave Robert F. Kennedy Jr. airtime, allowing Kennedy to speak for himself so that an audience of potentially 3.5 million could hear about the merger of governmental and corporate power which is RFK Jr.’s central message (not “antivax conspiracy theories” as Establishment corporate media would have you believe).

Big Pharma has tentacles everywhere, of course. One estimate I have is that the multibillion dollar pharmaceuticals industry funds 70 percent of corporate media. This is one reason every third television commercial you see is for a drug. And why you’ll never hear anything critical of the industry or its products on CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, or even from other Fox News hosts.

Tucker Carlson, though, on a recent show:*

Is any news organization you know of so corrupt that it’s willing to hurt you on behalf of its biggest advertisers? Anyone who would do that is obviously Pablo Escobar level corrupt!…

Suppose the Trump administration had made it mandatory to buy My Pillow [Mike Lindell’s company].

Imagine if the administration had said that if you don’t rush out and buy at least one My Pillow, and then get another “booster” Pillow, you’d not be allowed to eat out, couldn’t reenter your own country, you couldn’t have a paying job.

My Pillow, they told you with a straight face, was the linchpin of our country’s public health system.

Now imagine, as they told you that, Fox as a news organization endorsed it, amplified the government’s message. Imagine if Fox News attacked anyone who refused to buy My Pillow as an ally of Russia, an enemy of science.

And then imagine that Fox kept up those libelous attacks even as evidence mounted that My Pillow caused heart attacks, fertility problems, and death. If Fox News did this, would you trust us? Of course you wouldn’t, you would know that we were liars.

Thank heaven Fox News never did anything like that. But the other channels did. The other channels took hundreds of millions of dollars from Big Pharma companies, and then they shilled for their sketchy products on the air, and as they did that, they maligned anyone who was skeptical of those products.

Pow!

Carlson routinely delivered monologues very much like that one on Russia-Ukraine — including the unintentional irony of corporate media embracing RussiaGate back in 2016-18 which implied that with the help of Russian collusion (which never happened) the Trumpists basically stole that election, while branding doubts about the legitimacy of Election 2020 as “baseless conspiracy theories” and “election denial.”

Carlson openly called out the DOJ’s utter lack of interest in what was on Hunter Biden’s laptop (a topic Big Tech suppressed). Also labeled “Russian disinformation.”**

His material on January 6 should have been enough to raise doubts about that event being an “insurrection,” however many times the Establishment calls it that.

The only thing he did not do, at least not openly that I ever heard, was talk about the globalists, and the encroaching techno-feudalist political economy globalists are gradually laying into place. Probably well over 90 percent of the technological infrastructure necessary for a world government now exists.

Maybe it’s a good thing that, again to the best of my knowledge, he left such topics alone. He might have been let go by Fox long ago. (Glenn Beck was gotten rid of, let us remember, following his exposing globalist-leftist George Soros who, through his Open Society Institute and the organizations it bankrolls, also has tentacles everywhere.)

Tucker Carlson surfaced a day ago as this is written, with this video. It’s long, but I think it’s worth a look:

Good evening, Tucker Carlson here….

[W]hen you take a little time off, you realize how unbelievably stupid the debates you see on television are. They’re completely irrelevant. They mean nothing. In five years, we won’t even remember that we had them. Trust me as someone who participated….

And yet at the same time … the undeniably big topics, the ones that will define our future, get virtually no discussion at all. War. Civil liberties. Emerging science. Demographic change. Corporate power. Natural resources.

When was the last time you heard a legitimate debate about any of those issues? It’s been a long time. Debates like that are not permitted in American media. Both political parties, and their donors, have reached consensus on what benefits them, and they actively collude to shut down any conversation about it.

Suddenly the United States looks very much like a one-party state. That’s a depressing realization, but it’s not permanent. Our current orthodoxies won’t last. They’re brain dead. Nobody actually believes them. Hardly anyone’s life is improved by them. This moment is too inherently ridiculous to continue, and so it won’t.

The people in charge know this; that’s why they’re hysterical and aggressive. They’re afraid. They’ve given up persuasion; they’re resorting to force. But it won’t work. When honest people say what’s true, calmly and without embarrassment, they become powerful.

At the same time, the liars who’ve been trying to silence them shrink. They become weaker. That’s the iron law of the universe. True things prevail. Where can you find still find Americans saying true things? There aren’t many places left, but there are some. And that’s enough. As long as you can hear the words, there’s hope.

See you soon.

In other words, Tucker Carlson will be back. What “current orthodoxies” is he talking about? We enumerated them above, and as owner of his own platform (hopefully!), he’ll be able to talk about them more openly.

Contrary to what the Establishment will push, the above message offers hope. For as I’ve previously noted, empires built on lies and brute force never survive. Eventually they go down in flames, often at the hands of their own. People who can get out from under their reach do so. Those who cannot, are increasingly likely to start burning things down in numbers eventually too large to stop when they get the chance.

There is a vast difference within the human race. The difference is psychological as well as philosophical. On the one hand there are the few, sociopaths who literally worship power and believe themselves most fit to rule, like the Philosopher-Kings of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato’s Republic. Think World Economic Forum, the most visible organization that fits that bill. Think of some of those at the helms of global corporations, entities like the EU, and of course the U.S. Deep State. Think finally of the American cultural left, which talks a lot about “freedom” and “democracy” but exhibits no actual faith in either. Collectively these few fancy themselves as having dethroned God. They have what Thomas Sowell called “unconstrained vision”: given sufficient time and resources and a capacity to enslave whole populations, they’ll build Utopia!

And then there is the rest of us, the many, who would like to think we live in the real world. At least we try. We do not worship power. We honor prescriptions like “Thou shalt not murder” and “Thou shalt not steal.” We wish only to be left alone. Some of our best philosophers, long ago, formulated such notions as the “natural rights of man,” of freedom of speech, of due process, of the rule of law. We have what Sowell described as “constrained vision.” What constrains society is human nature, which is sinful, fallible, not perfectible; but with great potential to solve problems and build limited greatness.

Fail to recognize limitations, and you end up with Dystopia!

It might be worth noting, though, that there is a heck of a lot more of us than there are of them.

Maybe this is why they are fundamentally afraid of us, afraid of people making their own choices, especially when those choices are circumscribed by a morality that does not position them and their institutions at the center, and refuses to regard human lives as expendable and disposable.

Tucker Carlson will continue to be praised by some and condemned by others. When you’ve taken stands that threaten powerful people and moneyed interests, that is inevitable. Just note who is giving him praise, and which voices are condemning him, or simply calling him names (e.g., “fascist”).

He hasn’t really gone anywhere. I, for one, look forward to his next venture. Something tells me it’s going to be good. Maybe he’ll do a massive information dump at some point and post all the January 6 footage he still presumably has in his possession. What an exercise in transparency that will be!

*I can’t see the point of linking to this, or other YouTube videos where Tucker Carlson appears, because I expect them to be scrubbed any day now, either by Fox itself or YouTube. Which means any links I put in will cease to work, obviously.

**Some with free minds might wonder in their idle moments, why are we being encouraged to hate Russia so much? Well….

Russia is a Christian nation (Orthodoxy) and was, for centuries. Its populations are mostly lily-white. It has traditional family and social structures. The perversions being celebrated in the West are therefore not accepted there. Putin, moreover, is a nationalist if he’s anything, and will do what he can to protect ethnic Russians. One reason for his invading Ukraine was to put a stop to the brutalizing of Russians by the Kyiv regime in the Donbas. The Russian political philosopher and geopolitical strategist who most likely has Putin’s ear, Aleksandr Dugin, defends a multi-polar (not globalist-controlled) world, and wrote a book entitled, in English translation, The Great Awakening Vs the Great Reset (2021).

In other words, Russia’s Establishment is everything ours is not, and vice versa. What better explanation could there be of the visceral, irrational hatred being spewed at everything Russian by our Establishment via its countless shills in government, media, academia, Hollywood, and elsewhere?

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published later this year.

The Real Fantasyland

By Steven Yates

April 19, 2023

“The power of privilege is the right to dictate what is truth and what is misinformation. Always has been.” ~Marc Andreessen (Netscape cofounder)

A few years ago, I ran across references to a book entitled Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire by one Kurt Andersen, which had just come out (this was 2018). I think I perused an excerpt from it in some Establishment publication (possibly The Atlantic Monthly).

I haven’t read the book otherwise. This is not a review, therefore. It is more a review of the idea that seemed to motivate it, that of the dogmatic hyper-rationalism associated with the kind of epistemic authoritarianism now known as The Science.

I gather, going by some of the Amazon reviews the book garnered, the author was quite upset that far too many people reject or at least question official narratives, scientific as well as political-economic, or supposed public health measures. To elitist defenders of The Science, we peasants aren’t supposed to ask questions, as opposed to sitting down, shutting up, and doing as we are told.

We may be talking about the Federal Reserve System, or money power generally.

Or political assassinations like those of the Kennedys, or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Or stealth campaigns such as Agenda 21 / Sustainable Development.

Or “conspiracy theories” about 9/11.

Or those surrounding covid and the so-called vaccines.

Or January 6, 2021, that it was an “insurrection against democracy.”

Or countless other cases about which suspicion can be cast upon an official story that has been repeated over and over again, like a mantra, in corporate media.

This includes, for arch hyper-rationalists (Andersen appears to be one), just the idea that a God exists, as His existence is rejected by materialists and so-called “scientific humanists” and New Atheists. It annoys hyper-rationalists that there are subcultures at home, and cultures abroad, that reject the materialism baked into The Science.

Fantasyland was published before the coronavirus / Covid-19 debacle. With what we now know is provable (think: Twitter Files), that federal agencies worked very closely with Big Tech to impose censorship on anyone who questioned either the lockdowns or, when they arrived, the safety and efficacy of the mRNA shots that were forced on populations, often via employers, amidst relentless campaigns against “vaccine hesitancy,” “misinformation,” “baseless conspiracy theories,” etc., I wonder if Andersen wishes he’d waited to publish!

Andersen seems to believe — and again, I am going off some of the reviews — that inherent in the very idea of American liberty is a slippery slope: if people are able to believe and worship as they see fit, or pursue whatever ends they see fit based on their own beliefs about reality, they will end up with the relativistic idea that your beliefs are just as “true” as mine, or that what’s “true for me” need not be “true for you.”

While I’m no relativist, the title still seemed to me an apt description of the collective mental/cognitive landscape into which we’ve actually been taken at an accelerated rate over the past several years — not by QAnon types and MAGA hat wearers but by the Establishment, as it has scraped and clawed to stay in power epistemically as well as politically, amidst the upsurge of “populism” represented by the Donald Trumps of the world and those who spoke awkwardly of “alternative facts” (they mean: alternatives to the official narratives about what is fact).

This clash of narratives didn’t begin yesterday. There’s a sense in which industrial civilization itself is based on control systems, passed off under euphemistic terms like “socialization.” The best control systems work by compelling “the masses” to control themselves and each other, via public education and mass media messaging (remember: “If you see something, say something”?). Control systems, beginning in public schools, encourage obedience and conformity, not critical thinking and independence.

Hence exposés on education like John Taylor Gatto’s Dumbing Us Down (1992) and The Underground History of America (2001), among others; Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt’s the deliberate dumbing down of America (2000); and Beverly Eakman’s Educating for the New World Order (1991), among others.

Include here equivalent exposés on mass media, the development of the technologies it uses to get its messages into our heads, resulting in social control via narrative management: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (by Neil Postman, 1985), The Unreality Industry: The Deliberate Manufacture of Falsehood and What It Is Doing To Our Lives (by Ian I. Mitroff and Warren Bennis, 1989), Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (ed. by Kristina Borjesson, 2002), and of course Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, 1988, 2002).

This is a representative sample. Note that these tomes span the ideological spectrum. I doubt anyone would classify Chomsky as a “right winger.”

There are other such exposés, many devoted to specific topics such as health and medicine, or food, or science itself. All tend to show how moneyed and therefore powerful interests have studied, and made use of, techniques ranging from clever marketing to psychological manipulation to lead audiences by their noses in desired directions — often using the latter’s own preferences for entertainment over substance against them.

What these authors all expose, in one way or another, is the fabrication of “reality” by elite (and superelite) interests and those working for them, often unknowingly, often in ways intended to entertain us in the process. If we’re finding someone’s content entertaining, we’re less likely to be on our guard.

The result is Real Fantasyland. The purpose of Real Fantasyland: more money and power for the elites and superelites; less money, power, and independence for We The People. Examples of Real Fantasyland are easy to enumerate.

Real Fantasyland is the belief that men can turn themselves into women and women can become men through “transitioning”; and that such options should be made available to children.

Reality: your sex is determined by your chromosomes. Males have XY chromosomes; females have XX chromosomes. These are fixed early in prenatal development. There may be a very tiny fraction of humans whose chromosomes are somehow different or incomplete or ambiguous, but this fraction is far too small to explain the upsurge of “transgenders” that now seem to be everywhere. The obvious explanation for this last is cultural left politics, not some sudden biological mutation. Cultural left politics may well embrace The Science but rejects the real science of biology.

Real Fantasyland is believing that the “white supremacism” of straight white Christian males is responsible for every calamity that has befallen the black community (and, for that matter, every other group), for the “systemic racism” baked into the American cake as it were since 1619.

Reality: there are probably no more than a few hundred bona fide white supremacists in America. On the other hand, straight white Christian males have been under systemic cultural and legal attack for the past 50 years. This attack has intensified over the past 30 years or so, the political correctness era. Boys and men have been under attack, the natural expression of their identity derided as “toxic masculinity.” The percentages of males enrolled in colleges and universities has been dropping for over two decades now. No one will address the real cause: an academic environment that is toxic for men who aren’t emasculated left-liberals.

Real Fantasyland is believing you can continue bullying a people, having already outsourced their jobs to foreign lands for cheap labor, deindustrializing their communities and turning once thriving downtowns into wastelands, and then continue gaslighting them about nonexistent “white privilege,” without inviting pushback.

Reality: the Donald Trumps of the world stepped into the roles they did for specific, identifiable reasons, and as long as those reasons remain valid, “populism” will remain a force to be reckoned with unless it is violently suppressed (something not outside the realm of possibility as events continue to play out this year and next).

Real Fantasyland, however, is believing you are ever going to get the truth about important current events, especially wars and their causes, from any major corporate media outlet anywhere in the Western world.

Realities: the Russian invasion of Ukraine was not “unprovoked,” as anyone who studies the history of the region — just the era since the end of the Soviet Union will do. Ukraine is not “winning” despite receiving hundreds of billions in foreign aid from the U.S. The person accused of leaking classified Department of Defense documents, Jack Teixiera, 21, an Air National Guardsman of Massachusetts, is (predictably) being demonized as a racist and an antisemite as well as a “gun enthusiast.” He is probably on his way to a deep, dark hole. That’s what happens when you expose the lies of powerful people in the U.S. war machine, and you don’t flee as Edward Snowden did.

Real Fantasyland is believing you are ever going to get the truth about any of the history-shaping events of our lifetimes from the U.S. federal government.

Realities: the U.S. federal government still has thousands of documents related to the JFK assassination that are labeled classified. The truth about the assassination of JFK’s brother five years later has never been unraveled. What some of us have learned (in my case, from a relative of someone who was there) is that the official narrative of that event has more holes than Swiss cheese. Sirhan Sirhan is almost certainly an innocent man whose life was destroyed.

We do not have the full truth about how the 9/11 attacks were accomplished; what we have are accounts by qualified scientists and engineers who argue that the official narrative of three (not two) skyscrapers descending into their own footprint is physically impossible. The official story of the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan is extremely dubious. Buried at sea? No one ever saw a body. We’re supposed to just trust “authorities” who have lied to us repeatedly?

Finally we get to the “mysterious” origin of the coronavirus that causes covid, and what was known in the back rooms of Big Pharma about the mRNA shots before their being forced on a “vaccine hesitant” public. The Science would have you believe that the former evolved in a bat, and that the latter are “safe and effective” despite the fact that huge numbers of people got the vaxxes and got covid anyway, while others got the vaxxes and died or have sustained life-altering injuries. All memory-holed.

Real Fantasyland is seeing an “autocrat” or an “authoritarian” in every leader — Trump, Florida’s Ron DeSantis, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, others, who puts / has put the interests of his own nation ahead of those of the “liberal international order,” i.e., he refuses to play the globalist game.

Reality: the policies of such figures put the brakes on left-liberals and globalists (and corrupt mass media outlets) saying and doing anything they see fit, and since most national elites and global superelites are unused to having anyone influential, or with political power of their own, stand up to them, naturally they cry foul.

Real Fantasyland for many American conservatives, however — at least they identify as such — is believing the death culture at home can be voted out of power.

Reality: it is not that sort of thing. It seems likely, for example, that the overturning of Roe v. Wade genuinely hurt Republicans in the midterms (2022). I’ve been reading about the just-published book by one of the few living conservative political philosophers, Claes G. Ryn, entitled The Failure of American Conservatism and the Road Not Taken (2023). Ryn argues that for years now, too many who self-identify as conservative have focused only on politics. They’ve neglected culture, mass media, academia, and academic subjects and endeavors that aren’t profitable to business such as philosophy, history, theology, the arts, and so on. Hence conservatives lost every one of them. It is probably Fantasyland to believe we have any chance of winning these arenas back in our lifetimes. The reality: we are going to have to reconstruct them — in some cases, from scratch.

Real Fantasyland is thinking that if you get rid of legally-owned firearms, society will be safer.

Reality: if the U.S. ever follows the path Australia took, two classes of people will be armed: government employees (e.g., police) and criminals. Guess which one will have all the advantages at the street-level. And when the next excuse to lock down the population shows up, perhaps for months with no end in sight, those who foolishly gave up their arms will have no means of defending themselves. Ask the residents of Melbourne.

Real Fantasyland is believing that our present money system, which redistributes wealth upwards, can survive its central bank, the Federal Reserve, continuing to print money, print money, print money.

Reality: Modern Monetary Theory, which sanctions this, is a pseudoscientific fraud. In combination with the reckless incompetence of the Bidenistas, other nations are now moving away from the dollar. They are allowing China to broker agreements between them, as Saudi Arabia and Iran recently did. As the dollar gradually loses its status as the world’s reserve currency, reasons for holding dollars will evaporate. They will return to U.S. soil, causing still more price inflation and dislocation. If programmable CBDCs replace dollars, the U.S. outside elite enclaves will become a dystopia not far removed from the nihilistic world depicted in science fiction author Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk novel Snow Crash (1992).

Real Fantasyland is believing that civil society can be maintained indefinitely on an edifice of lies, deceit, censorship, and memory-holing inconvenient truths; or on political prosecutions of the opposition (think: that of Trump in Manhattan for non-crimes), and the utter incompetence that results when identity-politics trumps qualifications in appointments at the federal level.

Real Fantasyland is believing Joe Biden will still be in the White House in 2028 even should he miraculously hang on through the episodes of word salad and physical stumbling and win in 2024 (God help us all if he does!).

Reality: Mark Milley wants to understand “white rage”; this is the woke loon presently leading the U.S. armed forces. Bidenista weakness, especially where foreign policy is concerned, has yielded the most dangerous situation since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1961 — a potential confrontation between nuclear superpowers both of which have weapons 500 times more powerful than what was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki!

Getting to the bigger picture:

Real Fantasyland is believing that the wealthy and powerful have never conspired against the public good, and against the world’s populations generally.

Reality: as I’ve noted previously, many of the superelite’s representatives have set down in their own words, in numerous books and articles, what they are doing and what they hope to achieve.

Real Fantasyland is believing either than the U.S. (or any other Western power) is actual democracy, or that left-liberal Democrats have any sincere interest in “protecting democracy,” whether from Jan-6er political prisoners or from anyone else. You cannot “protect” what does not exist.

Reality: the U.S. and other Western powers are plutocratic oligarchies, or plutocracies. Arguably the U.S. became such when the superelite of the time created the Federal Reserve System.

Real Fantasyland is believing that the technocratic, techno-feudalist dystopia in the making can possibly endure.

Reality: highly centralized empires based on lies and fraud, and when these fail, brute force, have never succeeded.

This one, however, when it fails, will still be powerful enough to do damage on a planetary scale!

Real Fantasyland, finally, is believing you can discount God’s watchful eye and capacity to take action because His existence cannot be proved by human logic or laboratory science (or The Science).

Since by definition Real Fantasyland is not real: when governments, corporations and whole populations are immersed in it for a long enough period of time, it exacts a price. In our case, the price is proving to be the long term collapse of everything that went into building the West, and of the West itself.

Our foundations were Christendom (our second president, John Adams: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”), the value of truth more broadly, and the values of life and liberty. No, our original republic wasn’t perfect, but whether anyone likes it or not, it was better than anything else accomplished either before or since, and it would be a shame to lose it all because of the present-day immersion in the Real Fantasyland, be this about “gender” fluidity, the destruction of our currency at the hands of those once entrusted to safeguard it, foreign wars we should not be involved in, or anything else.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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ANNOUNCING: an online course/tutorial entitled The Philosophy of Responsible Freedom, directed by Jack C. Carney with myself as chief partner: a Zoom-based intellectual encounter between an atheist (Carney) and a Christian (Yates) exploring the history of ideas using Academy of Ideas videos and supplementing them with the thoughts of others. Carney is an autodidact in areas ranging across psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology who emphasizes the importance of human relationships in a world where loss is omnipresent (he also teaches English online). I am an author and trained philosopher with a doctorate in the subject who taught philosophy courses in years past, walked away from academia, still writes philosophy emphasizing the need to identify, clarify, and evaluate the success (or failure) of worldviews in civilization, stages of civilization, the quest to build free societies, and how worldviews either enhance or hobble responsible freedom. Course/tutorial outline here. For more information or to get on our email list: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.

“Woke” Will Be the West’s Downfall

By Steven Yates

April 8, 2023

Conservative writers, when challenged, have trouble defining what it means to be Woke.

Bethany Mandel, co-author (with Karol Markowitz) of the recently published Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation, struggled with the term in an interview on The Hill, hosted by Robby Soave and Briahna Joy Gray. When pressed for a definition of Woke by the latter, what she said was:

“Woke” is, sort of, the idea that— “Woke” is something that’s very hard to define … it is sort of the understand that we need to totally reimagine and redo society in order to create hierarchies of oppression … [struggles] … it’s hard to explain in a fifteen-second soundbite.”

Soave tried to help her out.

“It’s one of those things that … you definitely know it when you see it…. It’s the tendency to punish people, formally or often informally, for expressing ideas using language specifically that is new, that no one would have objected to five seconds ago, so it is easy to come with examples like punishing people for using the wrong pronouns, or identifying structures of that kind….”

These are more the effects of Woke, and not a definition of it.

In a recent article I quoted Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s general counsel Ryan Newman’s attempt to define the term:

The belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them…. To me, it means someone who believes that there are systemic injustices in the criminal-justice system, and on that basis, they can decline to fully enforce and uphold the law.

This should help us see a bit more clearly what is going on here, and why conservatives have trouble pinning it down. But before elaborating, it might be helpful to see what those who are sympathetic to the idea mean by it. For example, Damariyé L. Smith, PhD, Assistant Professor of Contemporary Black/African American Rhetoric and Media Studies at San Diego State University had this to say:

So there’s a lot of things in language that have the same meaning, but just have a different terminology. I would argue that woke really starts around the early 1960s and ’70s with the Black Power movement and civil rights issues of the time. It wasn’t just called woke, it was called consciousness. And so consciousness or this idea of staying woke was about Black people, in particular, thinking about and questioning what are the ways in which our government is not necessarily protecting us as citizens, not just in the South, but everywhere…. Somewhere around 2012 and 2014 we started seeing stuff about “staying woke” because again, at this time, you have cell phone videos of people capturing police brutality. I would say around 2013 is when you kind of really start seeing that term being used more especially under the umbrella of Black Lives Matter. When social media becomes bigger and bigger and bigger, people start to pay more attention to it.

In other words, it’s not a new term or concept, but what’s new is its public currency. Social media is indeed responsible for a lot of that currency.

The term or concept has obviously (as did affirmative action) spread beyond race/ethnicity. It is now used by radical feminists and members of the Alphabet Soup Mafia (LGBTQIABCXYZ+++).

Emory University professor of political science Andra Gillespie stated, referring to those using the term negatively:

“If you ask people what woke is, I think what they mean is they want to stand against people who are engaging in some type of advocacy for marginalized people…. It’s kind of this lumping together of anybody whose views could be construed as being progressive on issues related to identity and civil rights.”

One wonders who is more marginalized now that the white working class is struggling with substance abuse and falling off the economic cliff, but never mind that just now. There are doubtless several dozen other comments floating around. The most compelling one I’ve seen is this one, from one Freddie DeBoer (credentials not given) which I have from a philosophy blog I look at every few days. Warning: it’s not light reading. But don’t be intimidated. We’re going to dissect it. All italics are the author’s:

“Woke” or “wokeness” refers to a school of social and cultural liberalism that has become the dominant discourse in left-of-center spaces in American intellectual life. It reflects trends and fashions that emerged over time from left activist and academic spaces and became mainstream, indeed hegemonic, among American progressives in the 2010s. “Wokeness” centers “the personal is political” at the heart of all politics and treats political action as inherently a matter of personal moral hygiene – woke isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. Correspondingly all of politics can be decomposed down to the right thoughts and right utterances of enlightened people. Persuasion and compromise are contrary to this vision of moral hygiene and thus are deprecated. Correct thoughts are enforced through a system of mutual surveillance, one which takes advantage of the affordances of internet technology to surveil and then punish. Since politics is not a matter of arriving at the least-bad alternative through an adversarial process but rather a matter of understanding and inhabiting an elevated moral station, there are no crises of conscience or necessary evils….

… Central to woke discourse is the substitution of older and less complicated versions of socially liberal perspectives with more willfully complex academic versions. So civil rights are out, “anti-racism” is in. Community is out, intersectionality is in. Equality is out, equity is in. Homelessness is out, unhousedness is in. Sexism is out, misogyny is in. Advantage is out, privilege is in. Whenever there’s an opportunity to introduce an alternative concept that’s been wrung through academia’s weird machinery, that opportunity is taken. This has the advantage of making political engagement available only to a priestly caste that has enjoyed the benefits of elite university education; like all political movements, the woke political movement is captured by the urge to occupy elevated status within it.

I think that if you give that a close reading, you’ll see two things.

First, as I’ve insisted from the get-go, this did not begin yesterday. I’ve been warning about it for over 30 years now, since it was called simply political correctness, the pejorative that began to be used back in 1991.

Statements that “the personal is the political” started to be used around that time by radical feminists who, in professions like mine anyway, were reaping the lion’s share of affirmative action benefits.

Second, and more importantly, you’ll see what amounts to an admission that Woke, however it started, is a fundamentally totalitarian impulse.

Note that near the end of the first paragraph, persuasion and compromise are rejected.

To persuade is to try and convince another person that something you believe is true, using arguments and evidence. Although the term persuasion doesn’t necessarily exclude psychology (a lot of marketers are very good at this), it does suggest that the use of force is verboten.

Compromise has been part of the warp and woof of civil discourse in America for as long as there’s been an America. Compromise means that each side in a disagreement puts self to one side, rises to the occasion, and agrees to give up a little of what it wants in order to gain something that would be better for everyone. This does not mean abandoning principles. The country’s Founders all wanted a Constitutional republic with limited government based on “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but they did not agree on every detail how to obtain it. Volumes of their debates over various passages in the Constitution show this clearly. They compromised among themselves to make the document work as best as any product of human minds and hands could, and get as many states as possible to ratify it. The consequences of not doing so: everyone would soon fall back under rule by the British.

For ensuing decades, compromise between competing political parties and less structured groups continued to be the mainstay. Fortunately, each group wanted the country to work. The only exceptions here were the secessionists of the South who believed they were being more truthful to the principles of American founding documents, and that defenders of the Union had betrayed those principles.

Now we’re back to that, in spades. It’s doubtful that both sides in any of our current disputes really want the U.S. to continue to work.

Compromise, like persuasion, implies that intimidation, bullying, and if these fail, brute force, are off the table.

But according to the above author, under the regime of woke, “Correct thoughts are enforced through a system of mutual surveillance….” Departures from an “elevated moral station” are to be “punished” and “there are no crises of conscience or necessary evils….”

What follows is a contrast between the humane liberalism many of us grew up with, replaced with the extreme-leftism that began to infest academia in the 1980s — not the 2010s which saw a ratcheting up of something that had been there all along, waiting for a triggering event. The first such event was the Michael Brown shooting in 2014, after which campuses exploded. Then came George Floyd’s death in 2020, after which the country itself nearly exploded.

Most important in the piece above is the ending: only a “priestly caste” really understands any of this. The concepts have been “wrung through academia’s weird machinery” to which very few (white male) conservatives are privy. Well, obviously not, as conservatives are nearly an extinct species in academia: we’ve all either taken early retirement or left in disgust.

What makes Woke an easy word to use but difficult for conservatives to define is its embeddedness in the hard-left conceptual machinery that now controls academia, the legal profession, much so-called journalism, and a lot of corporate leviathans from Disney to Google.

One result is that a lot of job descriptions now include requests for applicants to state how they can contribute to the university’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion program (what we might call the Unholy Trinity of Wokeness).

Consider the relevant portion of this one:

….The College of Arts and Sciences is committed to building and supporting a diverse, inclusive, and equitable community of students and scholars. [Redacted] University is an equal employment and affirmative action employer and a provider of ADA services. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment based on individual qualifications. [Redacted] University prohibits discrimination based on age, ethnicity, color, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, national origin, disability status or protected veteran status. Applications from women and minority group members are especially encouraged.

A full dossier will include a cover letter, CV, dissertation abstract, writing sample, at least three letters of recommendation, a research statement, a teaching statement, a statement on fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion in and out of the classroom, and evidence of teaching effectiveness, such as teaching evaluations.

The italicized statements completely contradict and render null and void the statements that “all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment based on individual qualifications.” This, and “fostering [the unholy trinity of] diversity, equity, and inclusion….” are not compatible goals!

But in contemporary academia, war is peace! Freedom is slavery! Ignorance is strength! Etc. Orwellian linguistic gymnastics consumed higher education long ago. The above is not an aberration. It is now standard. I still receive solicitations for applications for teaching positions, a list from which I never unsubscribed. I’ve seen dozens of calls for Woke-supporting statements.

There’s a sense in which Woke is no more — and no less — than an affirmation of the Unholy Trinity of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, applying not just to race but “gender” and the Alphabet Soup Mafia, now including the idea that children should be encouraged to “question” their “gender identity” which seems to me to border on child abuse. (Even sex education in schools was once governed by standards of age-appropriateness.)

Here, though, is the conception of Woke I also came across recently that is my personal favorite. It is from a letter to the editor (fancy that, that a letter writer should articulate this with greater clarity than an academic with a PhD). I’ve removed the person’s name since I’ve no reason to think that he planned on becoming a public figure:

… here are a few examples of wokeness and its absurd consequences: A Supreme Court nominee who cannot define a woman. A biologically male athlete proudly displaying the medal he won competing in women’s sports; the women he defeated being advised to shut up. Lower college admission standards. The near disappearance of humor from late night TV. The demotion of Elon Musk from media darling to pariah. Overuse of the term “conspiracy theory” by people who imagine oppression everywhere. The suppression of rational discussion of the COVID pandemic and vaccines. Hyperventilating about perceived fascism while advocating for censorship of those who disagree.

The danger of being woke is that it permits only a single viewpoint and diverts attention from real problems. Practical solutions require trade-offs. In the end, we must work together. That requires dialogue and respect for the views of others, not wokeness.

Compare this with the lengthy statement from Freddie DeBoer, and you are looking at the totalitarian implications of Woke. Its expanded version, from race/ethnicity to every other group that can wear the mantle of victimhood in our Age of Entitlement, will be a major contributing factor to the West’s downfall if it is able to continue unabated. The only American in a position of authority whom I know of that is challenging Wokeness forcefully in his own state is Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and he may be overreaching — because he underestimates the cultural power of what he is up against. Disney recently outmaneuvered him, after all.

We need to return to promoting equality under the rule of law, as it was promoted back in the 1960s. We need to affirm that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with either diversity or inclusion, so long as they are voluntary and not coerced. “Equity,” on the other hand, cannot be accomplished without massive social engineering including thought control via censorship. I don’t know to what extent any of this is still possible in the 2020s New Normal. But once we understand what Wokeness really is, we should see it as a central part of the path to the West’s downfall, into ever-increasing degrees of totalitarianism.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

_________________

Issue #3 of Truth, Freedom, Validation is now available, with its offer of a method and a system for achieving your Biggest Goal over the next six to eight months. To gain access, go here. (You can read it, and future issues, for just $1/month!)

ANNOUNCING: an online course/tutorial entitled The Philosophy of Responsible Freedom, directed by Jack C. Carney with myself as chief partner: a Zoom-based intellectual encounter between an atheist (Carney) and a Christian (Yates) exploring the history of ideas using Academy of Ideas videos and supplementing them with the thoughts of others. Carney is an autodidact in areas ranging across psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology who emphasizes the importance of human relationships in a world where loss is omnipresent (he also teaches English online). I am an author and trained philosopher with a doctorate in the subject who taught philosophy courses in years past, walked away from academia, still writes philosophy emphasizing the need to identify, clarify, and evaluate the success (or failure) of worldviews in civilization, stages of civilization, the quest to build free societies, and how worldviews either enhance or hobble responsible freedom. Course/tutorial outline here. For more information or to get on our email list: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.

While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published later this year.

Trilateral Commission Declares 2023 ‘Year One’ of the New World Order

By Steven Yates

March 28, 2023

“Countless people … will hate the new world order, be rendered unhappy by frustration of their passions and ambitious through its advent and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to estimate its promise we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people.” -H.G. Wells, The New World Order (1940), p. 129.

“The nation-state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation state…. A global human conscience is for the first time beginning to manifest itself…. [W]e are … witnessing the emergence of transnational elites … composed of international businessmen, scholars, professional men, and public officials. The ties of these new elites cut across national boundaries, their perspectives are not confined by national traditions, and their interests are more functional than national. These global communities are gaining in strength and … it is likely that before long the social elites of most of the more advanced countries will be highly internationalist or globalist in spirit and outlook.” -Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (1970), pp 56-59.

“For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents … to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as “internationalists” and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure—one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.” -David Rockefeller, A Memoir (2002), p. 405.

“Today, a new dividing line exists in politics and society. It is the division between globalism and nationalism, between cooperation and protectionism, between embracing the new and preserving the old.” -Klaus Schwab, World Economic Forum Annual Report, 2022.

Well, it’s happened. At a confab in New Delhi, India, its Annual Plenary Meeting (March 10-12), the Trilateral Commission declared 2023 ‘Year One’ of the New World Order.

One speech comes to our attention courtesy of James Baker, who served in the (Trilateral Commission controlled) Carter administration and is described as having served on the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. Baker did not identify the speaker. Apparently doing so would have violated Commission rules. In any event, this is what the speaker said:

“The Biden administration is trying to convince the world that there is this titanic struggle between autocracies and democracies. I am skeptical about that… Three decades of globalization — defined as integrated, free-market based and deflationary — has been replaced by what will be a multidecade period of globalization defined as fragmented, not-free-market-based but industrial-policy based and structurally inflationary. This year, 2023, is Year One of this new global order.”

In other words, the free enterprise capitalism you may have learned about in college is dead. It is being replaced by “industrial policy,” i.e., global corporatism the primary method of which is technocracy: key decisions are made by so-called experts and imposed on populations in top-down fashion. As I’ve stated many times before, Western powers are not democracies. In genuine democracies, informed voters would put a stop to such shenanigans at the ballot box.

The Trilateral Commission was founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller Sr., Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Henry Kissinger to further the development of what was then called a New International Economic Order integrating the economies of North America, Europe, and Asia (back then, Japan; now, China).

Brzezinski had just published the book quoted above. Rockefeller read it and arranged a meeting. Given Rockefeller’s huge rolodex (reputed to have contained ten thousand names and phone numbers), one thing led to another and one of the most powerful semi-secret globalist organizations was born.

Brzezinski’s book outlined three essential stages of modern times. The first was nationalism, being transcended by global economic actors even as he wrote. The second was Marxism, which had also broken down nationalist sentiment but was done in by its ideological rigidity. The stage that awaited, Brzezinski argues, was globalism.

Yes, he used that word openly, as essentially synonymous with internationalism.

So much for the idea that globalist elites is a “baseless conspiracy theory.” If you don’t believe me, get Between Two Ages and read it for yourself.

The fall of the Soviet Union at the start of the 1990s conforms to the pattern Brzezinski lays out, in which (the neoliberal variant on) global capitalism triumphs over the rigid and defunct Soviet brand of communism. The former’s actors no longer thought in terms of advancing the interests of their nations, as is clear from how jobs were outsourced to cheap labor countries in the U.S. As Paul Craig Roberts would observe in a classic article published a little over a decade later, because of changed technology absolute advantage had replaced comparative advantage as the guiding principle of “free” trade.

“Free traders” had become de facto globalists, because they enhanced globalism whether they knew it or liked it or not.

Almost 20 more years have passed, and seen the coming of a contra-globalist rebellion, otherwise known as “populism,” in several nations which globalist corporate media describes as “autocracies” (the globalist-leftist alliance in these places is prevented from doing as they please). But in confabs, its spokespersons can tell us all we need to know about how they see the progress they’ve made.

Welcome to Year One!

Obviously, when the idea of a world government was first conceived — as clearly it had been when H.G. Wells was writing — the necessary technological infrastructure did not exist.

It does, now.

What is alarming is how few have noticed this Trilateral Commission comment! A search turned up just one article written by an American: Patrick Wood, who has been sounding warnings about the Trilateral Commission since its early days in the 1970s. Wood learned to do historical research from the late, great Antony C. Sutton who unearthed the financial deep connections between Wall Street and the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, and other bad actors of the past century.

In other words, this has never been about advancing an ideology, such as Marxism. Many on the right had this wrong from the start; some still do. This has been about building the infrastructure for and then imposing global power which knows no ideology, unless you consider techno-feudalism to be an ideology and not the three-tiered state of affairs in the offing: the global ruling class; its immediate administrators, underlings, and apprentices; and populations of permanently cash-strapped, controlled serfs to be kept pacified with various forms of Huxleyan soma (most are already addicted to smartphones and many, to video games).

Klaus Schwab speaks of “stakeholder capitalism” which is not capitalism at all, of course. It has nothing to do with free enterprise. It will choke free enterprise, as the covid lockdowns did. We will be looking at the universalizing of the kind of system in which political power is awarded to hand-picked charlatans (if you need an example look at “Joe Biden” although Establishment Republicans are no better), in which the cash-strapped serfs will answer to faceless technocrats via screens, and in which economics will reign supreme: the logical culmination, I must add, of materialism as a worldview. This is where the complete replacement of Christendom with materialism has brought us.

So what now?

We can do pretty much as we have been doing, which is next to nothing, while guys like Patrick Wood, myself, and possibly a few others, continue spinning our wheels shouting into the wind.

We can organize — although it seems a bit late for that! As I’ve noted, the wealth and power now consolidated is likely to make effective open resistance next to impossible. The “populism” I’ve mentioned comes the closest, and it remains divided by specific nations, and under sustained assault by powerful corporate media as well as the legal octopus.

Just look at the efforts to destroy Trump with lawfare: e.g., the political prosecution likely about to begin in Manhattan, directed by a (globalist) George Soros funded D.A., even as I write.

Psychos like Alvin Bragg would like to arrest every Trump supporter out there, and I am sure he and his minions would like to yank the Internet access of guys like me.

The globalist ruling class cannot have a “populist” at the helm of the world’s largest political economy! They cannot have populations of informed “populists” who vote, or writers who support them.

I’m sure they are working on ways to shut down those of us Schwab recently called “the frivolous fringe.”

We can separate ourselves in the manner I’ve also described, although I’m increasingly dubious that such a solution can work in the long run, at least not without a great deal of preparation which few are undertaking.

And if we’ve learned nothing from the repressive measures taken beginning in March 2020, which were global, it is that there is no place to go! Calls to have a “Plan B” are obsolete, as I can testify personally, having been in a Chile that was more severely locked down from March 2020 through September 2022 than Florida.

All I can do is what I am doing now: write for readers, presenting what evidence I’ve amassed in roughly a quarter century of awareness and studying the problem of a coterie of psychopaths obsessed with global domination, and who have the money and technology to do it.

It’s some consolation that the New World Order will not last. No empire based on fraud, lust for power, and when these fail, brute force, has ever endured. This one will be no different in that respect.

It will, however, be the first empire to be not just worldwide but built up on the pseudo-prosperity of printed fiat money gone digital. Think of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) which are being worked on now utilizing blockchain technology. The first was just introduced in Nigeria — it’s called the eNaira, and being test-driven in Africa’s largest economy. The Federal Reserve’s has been tentatively called FedCoin.

This has never been done before, so we’re moving into uncharted waters.

But no one can change the basic laws of nature, which include the nature of money (the real thing, backed by precious metals such as gold and silver). Were governmental-central banking complexes able to print (or digitize) their way into ever greater prosperity, Zimbabwe would have become the richest nation in the world.

The New World Order’s own money system will be its downfall. Even if none of us live to see the implosion.

I know of no better way to end this than by citing my own prophetic remarks given what we’re already seeing: massive inflation, rising homelessness, skyrocketing violent crime. And epidemics of substance abuse, mental health disorders, and a rising suicide rate especially among the young:

“Where do we go from here? One way of responding is just to say: we the people take back this country from the superelite, or the United States will not survive as a major power. If we do not take our country back, present trends will continue unabated, their consequences will gradually worsen, and our standard of living will drop precipitously over the next decade or so as our society becomes techno-feudalist. It may do so anyway, because the time has come to pay the piper for over four decades of mounting false prosperity.” Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011), p. 265

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

___________________________

I wish to thank Thomas Abshier for becoming a $20/mo. Patron!

Issue #2 of Truth, Freedom, Validation has been posted. It contains previously unpublished thoughts of mine on money, markets, and freedom. To read them, go here. (You can sign up for as little as $1/month!)

ANNOUNCING: an online course/tutorial entitled The Philosophy of Responsible Freedom, directed by Jack C. Carney with myself as chief partner: a Zoom-based intellectual encounter between an atheist (Carney) and a Christian (Yates) exploring the history of ideas using Academy of Ideas videos and supplementing them with the thoughts of others. Carney is an autodidact in areas ranging across psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology who emphasizes the importance of human relationships in a world where loss is omnipresent (he also teaches English online). I am an author and trained philosopher with a doctorate in the subject who taught philosophy courses in years past, walked away from academia, still writes philosophy. My philosophical writings emphasize the need to identify, clarify, and evaluate the success (or failure) of worldviews in civilization, stages of civilization, the quest to build free societies, and how worldviews either enhance or hobble responsible freedom. Course/tutorial outline here. For more information or to get on our email list: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.

While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published later this year.

Tucker Carlson and the January 6 Narrative War

By Steven Yates

March 21, 2023

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” —George Orwell, 1984

One could see it coming.

Back in February, new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson exclusive access to around 44,000 hours of previously unreleased footage of January 6, 2021. McCarthy spoke of “transparency.”

Starting on March 6, a Monday, Carlson began showing relevant portions of this footage on his show, and commenting on them. This has led to the latest explosion in hysterics from the narrative control freaks in both Congress and corporate media.

Carlson presented reasons for doubting the verisimilitude of the official narrative of January 6: that it was a “riot,” a “violent insurrection against democracy” that “killed six people.” Moreover, there may be reasons for believing some of this footage is exculpatory, and that some of the more visible Jan6ers (Jacob Chansley being the most obvious) are owed new trials in the interests of justice.

What we see from viewing the footage:

There were hooligans present who broke windows, but the majority of Jan-6ers were nonviolent. They entered the Capitol through open doors, and were just walking around, taking selfies, etc. Carlson called them “sightseers.”
Chansley, the so-called “QAnon Shaman,” looks outrageous with his face paint, fur hat and horns, but does not assault anyone. Nearly every moment he spent in the Capitol is on video somewhere; Carlson’s footage shows him with police seeming to escort him around. Neither is acting as if the other is a threat. Chansley, arrested three days later, plea-bargained his way to a 41-month prison sentence, even though he was unarmed and there are no indications he committed a real crime. Entering the Capitol may have been ill-advised under the circumstances — no one denies this — but it’s a public building and merely entering a public building is not a crime. Admittedly he looks like a nut. But neither is this a crime. Nor is believing in the QAnon “conspiracy theory” a criminal offense (yet!). The man has officially diagnosed mental health issues. As I write, he is locked up, clearly a political prisoner, where his problems are likely to worsen from isolation and neglect.
Officer Brian Sicknick is clearly visible in a different segment, walking around after Trump supporters are supposed to have beaten him over the head with a fire extinguisher. In fairness, corporate media outlets like The New York Times who originally ran with this story retracted it some time ago. We still encounter versions of it, however, as part of the general claim that “six people died that day.” But the fact remains: not a single death on the Capitol grounds can be attributed to violent actions by Trump supporters. But two deaths that did occur can be attributed to acts of deadly violence by Capitol Police.
Carlson interviews former Officer Tarik Johnson, who alleges that he was left on his own, receiving no guidance whatsoever from superiors who were clearly caught completely unprepared for the sheer numbers. There seems to have been no security plan in place. Johnson describes how he donned one of the infamous MAGA hats to negotiate his way through the crowd more easily. That one act cost him his job.

The Jan-6ers — with tens of thousands of people in the Capitol’s general vicinity — were there because they believed the election had been stolen. They believed they were protecting democracy, not trying to overturn democracy.

The official narrative accuses them of trying to stage a “coup against democracy” led by a sitting president who had lost a “free and fair election.” Many have stated that they were encouraged to march to the Capitol after listening to Trump’s infamous speech at the Ellipse, near the White House. Corporate media outlets reported Trump’s call to his supporters to march to the Capitol, dishonestly editing out one of the most important phrases he used, that they should “peacefully and patriotically make their voices heard.” Trump was impeached based on the coup-against-democracy narrative.

Must I repeat: nowhere does Trump say enter the Capitol. Ray Epps was filmed doing that. Epps vehemently denies having been an FBI informant. The FBI also denies it. The fact remains: Epps (who also in fairness did not enter the Capitol himself) was not charged with anything. He was considered one of the “good guys.” Just what is his story? Why was he encouraging others to go in when Trump hadn’t? These questions have gone begging.

Trump’s supporters believed the real coup against democracy had taken place on November 3-4, 2020, reflected in those mysterious early morning vote spikes, all representing votes for Biden, recorded on graphs that were scrubbed from the Internet days later, also in dozens of claims of eye-witnessed malfeasance, reported on affidavits signed under a penalty of perjury.

All memory-holed, in Orwellian fashion, so that judges and even Trump’s attorney general William Barr could say “there’s no evidence of fraud” and corporate media outlets could brand stolen-election claims as “lies” (not mere falsehoods but lies — a purposefully stronger claim).

The reactions to the Carlson broadcasts are similarly telling. From Chuck Schumer: “To say January 6 was not violent, is a lie, a lie, pure and simple.” Did he watch Carlson’s broadcast? Carlson had not said there was no violence, only that the reports of it were greatly exaggerated for political reasons. Schumer went on to state that Carlson’s letting the public see any of that footage was a “threat to democracy.”

From Mitt Romney, who can always be guaranteed to parrot the Establishment line: “It’s really sad to see Tucker Carlson go off the rails that bad…. The American people saw what happened on Jan. 6. They’ve seen the people that got injured. They saw the damage to the building. You can’t hide the truth by selectively picking a few minutes out of tapes and saying this is what went on. It’s so absurd. It’s nonsense.”

The answer is that of course Carlson selected from the footage. He had 44,000 hours of it, most of which was doubtless useless images of empty hallways and closed doors. He used what was relevant. As to what the American people saw of what happened that day, those who were not there — or not watching online from multiple perspectives (as I was, with three devices set up in my home office) — “saw,” after the fact, what corporate media wanted them to see.

From the Bidenista White House: following up those others, a mere, “Tucker Carlson is not credible.”

From corporate media: CNN’s Anderson Cooper proves himself to be a fundamentally disgusting human being, saying: “The idea of Tucker Carlson being in that mob that day and not wetting his pants is hard to imagine.”

Stephen Colbert, who “make[s] a good living” thinking he is funny and not merely obnoxious, is worse. “Some people,” his rant concludes, “are just addicted to being d*cks.” Since he brings it up, it was apparently okay for Dominion Voting Systems to cherrypick a handful of quotes out of tens of thousands of internal emails and messages, not supplying context, to portray Carlson and others at Fox of gaslighting their audience, saying on the air they believed the election was stolen when they really didn’t believe this. But it is definitely not okay for Carlson to rely on an hour or so out of 44,000 hours to portray the majority of Jan-6ers as nonviolent.

Jimmy Kimmel, finally, did what he does best: wax sarcastic. At the Academy Awards this past Sunday he stated, “Editors do amazing things…. Editors can turn 44,000 hours of violent insurrection footage into a respectful sight-seeing tour of the Capitol.”

These are representative, and support the idea that an Establishment, which ranges across the Asylum on the Potomac, corporate media, and the highly controlled entertainment industry, is fighting for a narrative.

Watch Carlson’s footage here, noting the contrast between the narrative corporate media has been feeding us for over two years now, and what had not been released before last week. Which the January 6 Committee had, but did not show publicly.

Carlson follows up here and responds to his critics here.

Upshot: to say that Americans have a situation on their hands doesn’t even begin to cover it. Tens of millions of Republicans (and at least some Independents) continue to believe something about Election 2020 wasn’t above board, and that there had been a concerted, behind-the-scenes effort to get Trump out of office by whatever means necessary. Time Magazine as much as admitted that such an effort existed, establishing the narrative that Trump would try to steal the election unless preventions were in place. They evidently were: who would have thought that tech billionaires would have joined forces with hard-leftists???

Recall that tens of thousands came to Washington, D.C. on January 6. Not a single building was set ablaze, or car overturned. This followed the George Floyd riots of mid-2020, which no one can honestly deny were extremely violent and destructive, doing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of damage in multiple cities across the country.

But since these were cultural leftists, depicted by a left-friendly corporate media as “social justice protesters,” they not only got a pass, but were respected, honored even. Those who found themselves in situations where they believed they were in possible ndanger and reacted accordingly were the ones prosecuted/persecuted, their lives derailed. Ask the McCloskeys!

Such cases should tell us all we need to know about whose narratives have cultural power in America. Cultural power is not political power, but it does give groups the capacity to get violent with some assurance that they won’t be held accountable, and that even if they are arrested and charged, their cases will be favorably portrayed because their actions fit the “social justice” narrative.

In other words, the real Big Lie is that a bunch of unarmed protesters who entered a public building were either capable of, or had any plans to, “overturn democracy.”

Carlson: In free countries governments do not lie about protests as a pretext to gain more power for themselves. They don’t selectively edit videos for propaganda services, and then lie about them to hold fake hearings and show trials. That’s exactly what happened, and every member of Congress should ask why that happened.

The U.S. is not a free country, of course. It is getting less free all the time. The U.S. is not a “democracy.” Nor is it a “republic” except on paper. Like all other Western industrial powers, the U.S. is a plutocratic oligarchy. It is run by a handful of immensely wealthy families in banks and other corporations who have the political class and “legacy” (corporate) media bought and paid for so that their interests are served. Would-be elected officials who refuse to serve this oligarchy end up moneyless and find themselves deemed “unelectable” when they are covered by media at all. The only way Trump got through was because he had billions of dollars of his own money to spend on his 2015-16 campaign.

Those who began on the inside of corporate media but eventually started dragging their feet at the cultural-leftward (or pro-war) drift were eventually elbowed out and now subsist on Substack.

Whether anyone likes it or not, Donald J. Trump remains the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in 2024. Ron DeSantis’s presumed “challenge” to him is yet another corporate media concoction, as he has yet to state his intentions.

The mere possibility that Trump could regain the White House terrifies the Establishment.

My guess, as of right now, is that he won’t be allowed back in office — anymore than he was allowed to win reelection. How will this be accomplished? Will we see another Election 2020? Or will we see Soros-bankrolled riots aimed at preventing Trump supporters from gathering peacefully? We saw this back in 2016, if anyone remembers, so it’s almost a given, that if a new Trump campaign begins to get legs, it will face violent opposition.

This is just one of the narrative wars in, or involving, American right now. I’ve not mentioned those things globalists indirectly benefit from because they distract, such as the fight over so-called transgenders and their “pronouns.” All I can say is that I went all the way through school, well over a decade total, getting a bachelors and eventually three advanced degrees, without ever once hearing the word, or one similar to it (transsexual).

All of a sudden these people seem to be everywhere, and their numbers seem to include children!

Who puts the idea in a child’s head that he/she can, or should, have a sex change operation? Or that he/she is “nonbinary” (another category that did not exist when I was a student).

To his credit, DeSantis has vigorously opposed all this nonsense, and should he announce his intent to run for the GOP nomination next year, in today’s environment his actions in Florida will be used vigorously by cultural leftists to denounce him.

Not to mention his just having called the Russia-Ukraine war a “territorial dispute” and “not a vital national interest” of the U.S. Ukraine, despite its being one of the most corrupt countries in the world, continues to be a protected state by said Establishment whose shills speak of the “rules-based international order” (i.e., rule by corporate globalists).

All these narrative wars are coming to a head little by little, and I’ve a sense that as bad as 2023 might turn out to be, in 2024 things could really get ugly! That’s if the Establishment doesn’t get us into the most destructive war in human history first!

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

_________________

I wish to thank Thomas Abshier for becoming a $20/mo. Patron!

The first issue of the newsletter is out! The title has been changed to Truth, Freedom, Validation. It will offer content ranging across philosophy-for-living (as opposed to the idle academic discipline), survival strategies given the challenges to come, life and relationship advice, and more, with links to further content worth exploring and notes on recent important books in all these areas. There are (believe it or not!) good things happening! You can access Truth, Freedom, Validation Issue #1 here. Subsequent issues will be available to Patrons. To get the next issue, go here and sign up. (You can obtain it for just $1/month!)

ANNOUNCING: an online course/tutorial entitled The Philosophy of Responsible Freedom, directed by Jack C. Carney with myself as chief partner: a Zoom-based intellectual encounter between an atheist (Carney) and a Christian (Yates) exploring the history of ideas using Academy of Ideas videos and supplementing them with the thoughts of others. Carney is an autodidact in areas ranging across psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology who emphasizes the importance of human relationships in a world where loss is omnipresent (he also teaches English online). I am an author and trained philosopher with a doctorate in the subject who taught philosophy courses in years past, walked away from academia, still writes philosophy emphasizing the need to identify, clarify, and evaluate the success (or failure) of worldviews in civilization, stages of civilization, the quest to build free societies, and how worldviews either enhance or hobble responsible freedom. Course/tutorial outline here. For more information or to get on our email list: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.

While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published later this year.

Official Narratives Are Falling Like Dominoes; Corporate Media in a State of Panic

By Steven Yates

February 4, 2023

Not being a TV watcher, I only saw it in a newsfeed the next day: actor Woody Harrelson’s opening monologue on Saturday Night Live, during which he dropped the verbal equivalent of a bomb.

It was buried inside usual late night stand-up comic fare. He suddenly pivoted, began talking about an imaginary movie script dating (interestingly!) from 2019:

Okay, so the movie goes like this. The biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in their homes. And people can only come out if they take the cartel’s drugs and keep taking them over and over.

I threw the script away. I mean, who is going to believe that crazy idea being forced to do drugs? I do that voluntarily all day long.

He hadn’t mentioned covid or covid policies directly, or the mRNA shots, but you’d have to have been in a cave the past three years not to get it.

Corporate media went into collective hysteria. Just their headlines have all the linguistic-propagandistic features I’ve noted, without even an attempt at an objective examination.

From The Washington Post: On SNL, Woody Harrelson Pushes Popular Covid-19 Conspiracy.

From the reliably hard-left HuffPo: Woody Harrelson Rambles About Weed, Anti-Vax Conspiracy, in SNL Monologue.

From the equally left wing Daily Beast: Woody Harrelson Spews Anti-Vax Conspiracies in Rambling SNL Monologue.

From Salon: Woody Harrelson’s anti-vax joke raises questions about what we excuse in likeable people: The goofball star’s inebriated SNL stunt makes us wonder what we’ll tolerate from conspiracy theorist friends.

From Rolling Stone — once, long ago, a publication of the counterculture but now only a guarantor of official narratives: Woody Harrelson Spreads Anti-Vax Conspiracies During SNL Monologue.

From Variety: Woody Harrelson’s Saturday Night Live Monologue Makes COVID Conspiracy Jokes.

From Entertainment Tonight: Woody Harrelson Draws Backlash Over Covid-19 Conspiracy Theory in ‘SNL’ Monologue.

I’ll stop there. I think I’ve made my point.

Politifact delivered this curious remark: Woody Harrelson’s ‘SNL’ pandemic monologue not selectively edited by NBC.

In other words, Bad NBC for not censoring!

Note also some of the other language used in these headlines, which I may not have noted before. Harrelson “rambles” about weed, conspiracies. He “spreads,” or “spews,” anti-vax conspiracies.

Dumb people ramble. Sick people spread disease. Disgusting people spew things from their mouths.

And of course, not one of these derogatory headlines avoids the Establishment’s favorite demonizing word: conspiracy.

Honestly, I don’t know that much about Harrelson. I’d heard his name before and that’s all. I’d assumed that like most actors on that show, he’s another mediocrity who owes his paycheck to his insufferably left-wing politics.

Maybe my assumptions about at least some of these folks are wrong….

Maybe even liberals are picking up on the fact that something terrible was unleashed on the world late in 2019, serving as justification for shutting it down in March, 2020, in what was clearly a globally-coordinated effort.

Most listeners of such shows, of course, are just ordinary folks, whatever their political leanings. Many saw their lives go out of control, their livelihoods destroyed by lockdowns, placing their health (mental as well as physical) at risk for reasons having nothing to do with any virus.

Many are not recovering during this “new normal” when many of us are wondering when the next shoe is going to drop.

But in the meantime, the dominoes are falling. One “conspiracy theory” from 2020 is increasingly obvious to anyone with a functioning brain.

The FBI is now openly endorsing the idea that we have compelling reasons for believing the coronavirus came from a “lab incident” in Wuhan. What FBI director Christopher Wray recently said:

“… you’re talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab that killed millions of Americans, and that’s precisely what that capability was designed for…. I should add that, that our work related to this continues. And there are not a whole lot of details I can share that aren’t classified…. I will just make the observation that the Chinese government seems to me has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here, the work that we’re doing, the work that our U.S. government and close foreign partners are doing. And that’s unfortunate for everybody….”

Pretty circumspect. The idea, stated openly, that the release of the virus was deliberate, I assume is still “conspiracy theory” territory. Definitely so, if accompanied by the allegation that our very own Deep State was involved! This is Ron Unz’s theory, which has received the silent treatment.

I would refer people back to the World Economic Forum / Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored Event 201, held at Johns Hopkins University on October 19, 2019.

The source of Harrelson’s movie script?

No, this does not prove, absolutely, that the coronavirus was released on purpose. It merely suggests compellingly that the official consensus on the matter may be wrong. For even “accident theorists” have to admit: when a few of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world host a semisecret meeting featuring a “tabletop” exercise in which a pandemic breaks out and they strategize a global-level response to it, a response including vaccines and dealing with resistance to top-down mandates, I’d think even the most ardent Establishmentarian has to wonder.

Especially since we have extensive documentation of the gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, bankrolled by one Anthony Fauci, about which he lied through his teeth!

I understand some of the reluctance of decision-makers in government and corporate media to face what has happened and come clean.

Around 6.8 million people worldwide have died from covid.

If this thing was the product of gain-of-function research and then released on purpose, those who did so are responsible for the deaths of more innocent people than Adolf Hitler is accused of killing during the Holocaust!

Moreover, we still don’t know the long term effects of the mRNA shots, boosters for which are still being pushed on an increasingly reluctant public (because whatever limited effectiveness the shots may have seems to wear off in a few months).

What we have are numerous cases of Sudden Adult Death Syndrome (I’ve actually seen it called that on a number of sites, with the acronym SADS).

The number of athletes in their 20s, 30s, or 40s, who have mysteriously dropped dead from myocarditis or closely related ailments since the mRNA shots were introduced (Dec./Jan. 2020-21) is off the scale; nothing like this has ever been recorded before!

Here is the most recent, just the other day. Such cases are always described as “under investigation.” We know that nearly all professional athletes have had the mRNA shots, because their teams or other professional organizations mandated it.

We can be reasonably sure that no “official investigation” is going to tie the deaths to the shots. Big Pharma is simply too powerful. (One thinks of how a lot of scientists and even doctors dragged their feet declaring cigarettes a direct cause of lung cancer and heart disease — back when Big Tobacco was a money power.)

Comment sections under such aggregated articles tend to be verbal slugfests between mRNA shot believers and skeptics, usually beginning with the commonsense question, “Was she vaxxed?” answered by dimwits reciting, like robots, statements straight out of the official narrative playbook.

The Hill has an interesting if visibly uncomfortable discussion of the Harrelson blow-up; I’m a bit surprised YouTube hasn’t censored it. But note that YouTube thought police couldn’t let this go without posting all the official narratives prominently beneath the video; the elites absolutely must try to maintain control. They follow The Science; all else is “misinformation.”

Again, read the comments. I am guardedly encouraged, because ordinary people are posting what they’ve had three years to figure out.

It is true that billions of people have received these shots and not had any adverse effects.

Yet.

I don’t know how many people grasp that this says nothing about what might happen down the road.

Conceivably some effects will accumulate and not show up for years. They may shorten life spans in ways barely traceable to the shots. Or younger women who got them in their teens will be unable to carry a pregnancy to term. Or, when “vaccinated” men’s sperm counts drops.

Or, perhaps they can have children — who turn out to be sterile!

I’m only floating possibilities, of course; obviously these are not facts I can claim to have hard evidence for. I’m not worried about this. Leftists never support their main claims with evidence.

My first point is, we don’t know. No one does. The shots were experimental. Not even Big Pharma execs denied this. No one can know the full range of possible effects of an experimental treatment foisted on populations at a global level.

What we do know: more people have been injured or have dropped dead following these shots than from all previous vaccines put together. And that other proposed treatments, such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, were demonized.

My second point: given what information we do have — the fact that almost 7 million people have died from covid, that over a thousand professional athletes have died mysteriously over the past two years, with millions more people alleging harm they trace to the shots manufactured by corporations legally indemnified from lawsuits — we could be looking at the biggest crime against humanity in human history!

This looks to have been a bioweapon in two parts. Part One was the coronavirus itself. Part Two was the “vaccine,” with career-ending consequences for many who refused it.

All so Deep State superelites serving GloboCorp could get Trump out of office, enrich the billionaires in their midst, and lay their global control grid in place.

Knowing that these people are sociopaths keeps me from asking how they sleep at night, or look at themselves in the mirror by day: people such as the Schwabster who have been quite open about seeing covid as their best opportunity ever to institute their Great Reset.

What I wonder is what they plan to do if the entire package of narratives in which they are heavily invested unravels, simply because increasing numbers of people no longer buy it and will take up arms, if necessary, to fight against it.

This issue, of official narratives collapsing like rows of dominoes under the slightest rational scrutiny, extends well beyond the plan-demic.

The present White House is clearly more interested in Ukraine’s borders than those of its own country, and just sent $10 billion more taxpayer dollars to that corrupt sinkhole.

This, as I said last week, is money not going to E. Palestine, Ohio, to help clean up that mess.

The most left-wing administration in U.S. history doesn’t mind canceling a community of mostly Trump supporters — most of them white.

In that Bidenista administration, we have a Vice President, a Transportation Secretary, and an Assistant Health Secretary all of whom owe their jobs to Identity Politics: to the fact that they are members of politically sacrosanct groups (respectively: black, gay, trans). All are laughingstocks. The second, we know now, is utterly incompetent.

This is the perfect storm for an empire in long-term (engineered) decline.

How many people are figuring all this out, that yet another reason for not trusting modern medicine is that even medical schools’ top preoccupation these days is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Would you want to be operated on by a surgeon who believed he (she?) could be any gender he (she?) liked, whose ideology had overwhelmed common horse sense biology?

Returning again to Ukraine: are people also figuring out that the official narrative on why Putin invaded depends on much of the history of the region, especially of the U.S./NATO backed coup of 2014, being memory-holed? Come to think of it, I’m not even sure what the official narrative is supposed to be. I guess it’s that Putin woke up one morning and looked in the mirror and told himself, “Being the psycho-dictator that I am, I think I’ll attack Ukraine and annex four of its provinces!”

It’s now clear as crystal that the Bidenistas destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines and blamed Russia. (“Joe Biden” even said he’d do it!)

One would like to think a reckoning is coming…. We have to be careful, however. As I’ve noted many times, GloboCorp is still holding the bulk of the cards. Its minions control all “legacy” media, all the NGOs and outfits like the WHO, most of the governments of the world all via money flows, and nearly all of popular culture in the West via its grip on Hollywood and the entertainment industry generally — the reason the occasional Woody Harrelson causes gaskets to blow.

Censorship is still the “new normal”: even if we now know that serious medical professionals were censored when they criticized the covid lockdowns and the official mRNA narrative (think: Twitter files).

After the biggest power grab in history (as well as redistribution of wealth upwards), people are waking up in increasing numbers.

I keep coming back to: What’s Next?

Nowhere, ever, do those in power relinquish it willingly. And we’ve never seen a wealth-and-power structure like that of present-day globalism.

These psychopaths could “accidentally” release something deadlier than covid was. We peasants would have no defenses against it, or against the next wave of lockdowns which would be enforced at gunpoint.

Or they could stage the cyberattack I’ve speculated on (small-scale cyberattacks are already occurring on a regular basis). Such an event wouldn’t kill us, but it would effectively shut down our ability to communicate and share information.

Or, if GloboCorp fears losing control of the global situation, it could maneuver the world into nuclear Armageddon. As I wrote last week: a single nuclear-tipped missile strikes somewhere in Ukraine. Russia is blamed. Western corporate media goes into hysterics. “Joe Biden” blusters incoherently, then blunders his way to a U.S./NATO response. Matters escalate from there.

GloboCorp top dogs ride it out in their underground bunkers.

You’ll find people telling you that these are the best and most exciting times to be alive. They’ll typically cite all the great technology, or perhaps purely economic statistics, e.g., there have never been more millionaires than there are today. They never consider the reality that we’re all sustaining ourselves on an addiction to printed money — much less that education long ago degenerated into pure indoctrination; that violence, homelessness, mental illness, and substance abuse are all on the rise; and that much of popular culture is now a cesspool of filth.

No, these are now dangerous times to be alive, if only because of all the unknowns. We should act accordingly. Look around and be grateful for what you have. Be kind to your loved ones — and neighbors and any strangers who permit it. Spend time outdoors; watch a sunrise or sunset (or both). Get right with God. Because the next shoe could drop at almost any time.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

_________________

ANNOUNCING: an online course/tutorial entitled The Philosophy of Responsible Freedom, directed by Jack C. Carney with myself as chief partner: a Zoom-based intellectual encounter between an atheist (Carney) and a Christian (Yates) exploring the history of ideas using Academy of Ideas videos and supplementing them with the thoughts of others. Carney is an autodidact in areas ranging across psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology who emphasizes the importance of human relationships in a world where loss is omnipresent (he also teaches English online). I am an author and trained philosopher with a doctorate in the subject who taught philosophy courses in years past, walked away from academia, still writes philosophy emphasizing the need to identify, clarify, and evaluate the success (or failure) of worldviews in civilization, stages of civilization, the quest to build free societies, and how worldviews either enhance or hobble responsible freedom. Course/tutorial outline here. For more information or to get on our email list: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.

While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published soon.

Our newsletter tentatively entitled The Zeno Letter is on the drawing board. It will offer content ranging across philosophy-for-living (as opposed to the idle academic discipline), survival strategies given the challenges to come, life and relationship advice, and more, with links to further content worth exploring and notes on recent important books in all these areas. The name will be explained in the launch issue, hopefully no later than the end of March, which will also launch a larger project on the drawing board. There are (believe it or not!) good things happening! The PDF of this and subsequent issues will be FREE to Patrons! To get on the email list, go here and sign up.

Will Biden’s Blundering Get Us Into World War III?

By Steven Yates

February 25, 2023

“The first casualty, when war comes, is truth.” —Hiram W. Johnson (1866-1945; R-Cal., 1917-1945).

I’ve no meaningful memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was five years old. What I learned years later: the use of nuclear weapons was on the table as a live option. We avoided Armageddon because President John F. Kennedy, not perfect by any means but overall a man of lucidity and sanity, was able to negotiate with Nikita Khrushchev. The Soviet leader, also not perfect by a long shot but also lucid and sane, agreed to remove Soviet missiles from our backyard: Cuba.

Those watching also saw the difference between lucidity/sanity and psychopathy. Reportedly, Fidel Castro was livid. He told Khrushchev he would have preferred Armageddon to being excluded from the negotiations. Maybe there was a reason both Kennedy and Khrushchev excluded him? Do you think?

Only a psychopath would choose nuclear Armageddon over negotiation and pragmatic de-escalation, even if the latter leads to disempowerment and multipolarity.

According to numerous observers, we’re now closer to a nuclear World War III than at any time since 1962. The octogenarian in the White House, moreover, is no John F. Kennedy, despite scripted stunts such as his appearing in Kyiv, Ukraine the other day to the sound of air raid sirens although there were no air raids going on.

Reviewing the relevant history: following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western powers made agreements with Russia that NATO, a cold war product, would not expand eastward toward Russian territory. These were quickly violated, as Eastern European nations joined, one by one. Russia tolerated this. Until Vladimir Putin came along, the Russians had little choice. Their country was dysfunctional.

Now it isn’t, and its restoration to superpower status drives Russo-phobes nuts. This is the main reason “our” government has military bases in Russia’s backyard.

In Ukraine, in February 2014, the U.S. and NATO backed an engineered coup that ousted the democratically elected but pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovich. After three months of violent instability, a new election was held. Petro Poroshenko won. A businessman, Poroshenko was clearly a U.S./NATO puppet.

By this time, Crimea had held a referendum in which voters on the Black Sea peninsula overwhelmingly elected to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. There was substantial support for a similar move in Ukraine’s eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk by majority populations of ethnic Russians. The Poroshenko regime forcibly quashed the effort. Fighting continued off and on for the rest of the decade. The Kyiv government instituted humiliating discriminatory measures against ethnic Russians. These included an injunction against speaking their native language in public.

Russia left Ukraine alone, but President Putin drew lines in the sand. He warned that if Ukraine tried to join NATO, obtain nukes, or retake Crimea, the result would be war.

More recent puppet-president Volodymyr Zelenskyy refused to listen. In 2021, he talked openly about the prospects of Ukraine applying for NATO membership. Then, in mid-February 2022, he attended the Munich Security Conference and publicly announced a plan to go nuclear.

That was the last straw. Less than two weeks later — on February 24, one year ago — Putin invaded, intending to liberate the “breakaway” provinces and send a clear warning that a nuclear Ukraine would not be tolerated. According to the official Western corporate media narrative, this was an “unprovoked attack.” The narrative demonized Putin and made the fact-free claim that he planned to reclaim all the countries the Soviet Union had relinquished in his drive to build a new Russian Empire.

More official narrative: Russia is losing in Ukraine, and losing badly. Simultaneously, however: the Russian army is murderous, wantonly killing civilians, bombing hospitals, and committing other atrocities.

The Bidenistas have already sent hundreds of millions to Ukraine, because a Russian victory is “unthinkable.” Supporting Ukraine is clearly politically correct, as the multitudes of Ukrainian flags by virtue-signalers all across the West testify.

What the money going to Ukraine won’t do is help the growing populations of homeless people in the U.S. as housing, rental costs, and prices for basic food staples skyrocket. It is not going towards repairing our collapsing infrastructure, or cleaning up the messes this has caused. Ask the people of E. Palestine, Ohio, if they could use some of that money right about now.

They can’t look to Bidenista Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who owes his job not to his qualifications — he has none — but to the fact that he’s gay. He is serving in an administration that places Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion above public health and safety concerns. The population of E. Palestine is mostly conservative white people who voted overwhelmingly for Trump. As a result, they’ve been effectively canceled.

Returning to Ukraine, who’s really winning? I’ll briefly hand my digital mike to Jeff Thomas, writing for Doug Casey’s International Man Communiqué:

Kiev has been continually desperate for more from NATO in order to survive, and the U.S. and other countries never seem to be offering enough material, advisors, and funding for Ukraine to win. Eventually, rumors began to leak out of Ukraine. Their casualties are eight to Russia’s one. The seasoned Ukrainian troops have been decimated. Kiev is barely surviving with green conscripts, outside contractors and depleting resources. Meanwhile, Russia has built up a force of over 500,000 fresh troops that are well-trained and well-armed with substantial supply lines. A winter campaign is under way that’s expected to make short work of the collapsing Ukrainian defense.

This comes from on-the-ground sources, not CNN or MSNBC or The New York Times or The Washington Post.

I wonder how long it will be before a critical mass of Americans realizes that this war is just the latest thing they’ve been lied to about, and with stakes much higher! With diplomatic relations between Russia and the U.S. deteriorating rapidly over the past year, and Putin just having suspended Russia’s participation in the START Treaty signed back in 2010 which caps the number of strategic nuclear warheads the countries can legally deploy, this is now the most dangerous faceoff since 1962.

Behind-the-scenes Bidenista / Deep State conversation seems to suggest that “limited nuclear war” is a live option.

Lunatic arch-neocon globalist Victoria Nuland, Bidenista Undersecretary of State (and a primary architect of the 2014 coup) has stated that Russian facilities in Crimea are “legitimate targets” — one of the very things Putin warned against! Small wonder he has accused the U.S. of trying to escalate the war!

People like that are loons, because they seem oblivious to the fact that Russia is ahead of the U.S. in nuclear technology. This should not surprise us. Russian high schools teach four years of math and science. Russian universities graduate engineers, not gender studies majors. I bet that among Russian faculty you’ll not find a single leftist goofball who says math is racist.

Nor is the Russian army headed by a Wokester who wants to understand “white rage.”

What are the Russians dead set against? The very thing we were against back in 1962! The establishing of bases capable of firing missiles able to reach Russian cities in a matter of minutes! Who can blame them for that, and for not trusting an international alliance (NATO) that breaks every agreement it makes?

But would Putin allow the present situation to escalate, especially if Ukraine and countries like Finland (which also borders Russia) are admitted into the alliance?

Putin is a pragmatist. He surely sees the consequences of pushing that first button. He’s holding a lot of the cards, moreover. The Russian economy is expanding. U.S.-led sanctions backfired, making Russia stronger and more independent. Russia and China are being pushed into an alliance which will control not just far more territory but will have a far larger population than exists in the West. It would constitute the largest economy in the world. Jeff Thomas again:

The U.S. sanctions have caused two-thirds of the world to seek new treaties with Russia and China. The new agreement between China and Saudi Arabia will effectively end the petro dollar. And the U.S. is not only broke but in debt beyond the ability to even pay the interest.

You know who warned that this could happen? Donald Trump, years ago. He may not have been a diplomat, but his geopolitical instincts tended to be sound.

With the Bidenistas in charge and the GOP in disarray — and the EU disintegrating — Putin can bide his time and let the West grow increasingly dysfunctional.

The real danger, though, is Western power elites deciding they have nothing to lose.

Here is an indication of how the results might play out (and remember, as you watch, that members of America’s billionaire class have their private bunkers set up in places such as remote corners of New Zealand).

Given the evidence that the U.S., not Russia, destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines (why, after all, would the Russians destroy their own gas-delivery system? Some official narratives are just stupid!), and given the usual denial, it is possible that the U.S./NATO axis will launch a tactical nuke somewhere inside Ukraine and blame Russia. An hysterical corporate media chorus will then call on all of Europe to stand against the insane Russians!

The problem, however: both the U.S. and Russia have pre-programmed missile systems. Watch the video I linked to above. These computerized systems would take over, and in a matter of a few hours, devastate three regions: Europe, major U.S. cities, and Western Russia. Estimates are that 91.5 million would die immediately in the missile strikes, with added deaths from severe burns and radiation sickness, other injuries sustained in collapsed buildings, and eventual starvation following the loss of critical food supply lines. The death toll would quickly rise to well over 100 million.

It would be the worst catastrophe in human history!

I do not see how Western civilization could recover, especially if you factor in the psychological toll that would be taken on survivors many of whom would soon find themselves in brutal fights with other survivors over fast-dwindling supplies of food and clean water. Mad Max would look like Mother Goose by comparison!

Not to mention the environmental impact. Particulate matter thrown high into the atmosphere could block out sunlight over much of the northern hemisphere for days, with continued disturbances causing a cold wave that could last several years.

Read Cormac McCarthy’s horrific, post-apocalyptic The Road (2006), and you’ll get the idea.

I do not know what would happen with China, but if the Chinese either backed Russia or invaded Taiwan they would doubtless be pulled into World War III. The death rate would be even higher!

Incidentally, I doubt anywhere in South America would be targeted. The southern hemisphere generally, with its separate atmospheric systems, would suffer far fewer environmental effects. But since southern hemispheric nations such as Chile, Brazil, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, others, are tied into global commercial networks, and since these would be decimated, all would face sudden economic disruption and probably spiral into a massive depression. No more cheap goods from China. Their peoples would learn to manufacture previously imported goods or do without.

“But none of this can happen!” some will frantically respond. “Surely no one will be so stupid as to fire off that first nuke!”

Go back and read my opening lines. At the start of the 1960s, we had a president of lucidity and common sense. Major institutions were not drowned in Woke lunacy. Crazy existed, but it was under control.

Does any informed person think this is true today?

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

________________________________

ANNOUNCING: an online course/tutorial entitled The Philosophy of Responsible Freedom, directed by Jack C. Carney with myself as chief partner: a Zoom-based intellectual encounter between an atheist (Carney) and a Christian (Yates) exploring the history of ideas using Academy of Ideas videos and supplementing them with the thoughts of others. Carney is an autodidact in areas ranging across psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology who emphasizes the importance of human relationships in a world where loss is omnipresent (he also teaches English online). I am an author and trained philosopher with a doctorate in the subject who taught philosophy courses in years past, walked away from academia, still writes philosophy emphasizing the need to identify, clarify, and evaluate the success (or failure) of worldviews in civilization, stages of civilization, the quest to build free societies, and how worldviews either enhance or hobble responsible freedom. Course/tutorial outline here. For more information or to get on our email list: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.

While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published soon.

The GOP at the SOTU: A Class Act, or Just a Frustrated One?

By Steven Yates

February 17, 2023

I did not watch Biden’s State of the Union (SOTU) speech. For starters, it was too late at night in my time zone (11 pm, two hours ahead of EST this time of the year). Surely it would start with some inane bromide like, “The state of our union is strong!” Everything to follow would gaslight its audience with denials that this is the most disastrous administration in a hundred years. I wanted to sleep afterwards instead of lie in bed, my blood boiling.

So I passed.

I also figured it would dominate news cycles for the next couple of days, and that accessing video clips of pivotal moments would be easy. Yep, Sleepy Joe slurred his way through efforts to claim that the worst inflation since the Carter years was “under control,” despite prices of staples like eggs and meat now off the scales. How much was simply dodged, I don’t know: homelessness rising because houses and rentals are becoming unaffordable, the crisis on the Southern border he opened to every foreigner who wants in, rising drug use — especially fentanyl coming in from across the border, escalating violent crime in (left-controlled) big cities, Wokery continuing to dominate education and the culture, the highest credit card debt in history, and more.

From what I could gather, the SOTU stressed domestic issues. Bidenista foreign policy is an even bigger catastrophe, after all. It is dominated by a proxy war against Russia that real experts tell us could go nuclear if the Bidenista/NATO axis pushes the Kremlin far enough, e.g., if Zelenskyy stupidly fires U.S.-obtained missiles (at U.S. taxpayer expense) at targets clearly inside Russian Federation territory, or if he tries to reclaim Crimea which voted democratically to rejoin the Russian Federation in 2014.

And then there’s the Chinese spy balloon that entered U.S. airspace unannounced, unnoticed until it was well inside Montana, allowed to continue on course for days: as if this White House and its Woke military were telling Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party: “Our installations are open books! So go ahead! Spy on us!”

Biden calls for “unity” after repeatedly denouncing “MAGA Republicans” and accusing the GOP of trying to gut Social Security and Medicare.

Sometimes you laugh to keep from crying.

Around a third of Democrats do not want this octogenarian to run for reelection in 2024. That should be telling. If he ran and (miraculously!) lasted four more years, he’d be 86 when he left office! Everyone seems to be praying that Biden stays sufficiently healthy to keep up the front and can continue minimizing the word salad.

After all, if something happened to him, Cackling Kamala, Biden’s Woke VP chosen exclusively because of her race, sex, and leftist ideology, would become president!

No sane person wants that! That would be catastrophe to the nth power!

Corporate media stressed none of this, of course. Mainstream outlets fed us the visceral GOP reaction to Biden’s lies of commission and omission. All as predictable as rain in Seattle.

A guy who often emails his disagreements with me from a center-left point of view sent me Charles Sykes’ latest piece, probably representative of the Establishment Republican response to what happened the other night.

Sykes wrote a number of good books from 1988 to 2000. They had names like ProfScam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education (1988), A Nation of Victims: The Decay of American Character (1993), and Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why America’s Children Feel Good About Themselves but Can’t Read, Write, or Add (1995).

Unfortunately, as happened with many “respectable conservatives,” 9/11 seems to have thrown him for a loop. He backed the Iraq War on the evidence-free claims that Saddam Hussein was a very bad guy who had WMDs he could use against us at any time! Some of us considered that war a very bad idea (to say the least!), and thought we were staying a genuinely conservative course when we said so. Bush II, after all, was not a conservative. Like his old man, he was an arch-globalist.

Sykes’s most recent book that I’ve seen is entitled How the Right Lost Its Mind (2018), a denunciation of Trumpism, “conspiracy theories,” etc., suggesting that he never got the narrative collapse that gave us Trump in 2016 — especially the collapse of the idea that “globalization will make us all rich if we just give it time.”

The article the gentleman whose initials are “R.B.” sent me was entitled “The GOP Keeps It Classy: SOTU 2023: Biden vs. the Trolls.”

The first thing is that if this is representative of Sykes’ recent work, then he’s slipped badly. The article is less his material and more an anthology of quotes and tweets from others. I know, I know, I’ve put in lengthy quotes a few times when another author said something not easily summarized — but Sykes’ selection of quotes and snarky comments about the GOP response to the SOTU (“A Theater of Performative Jerkitude,” he calls it) are as banally mainstream as he seems to have become.

A liberal could have compiled “The GOP Keeps It Classy.”

Such material only reinforces my conviction that Establishment Republicanism collapsed, intellectually at least, along with its favorite narratives, between 2008 and 2016. Symptomatic of that collapse was Romney losing an election in 2012 he might have won had he not written off an entire population of voters.

So Marjorie Taylor Greene shouted “Bull****!” at one of Biden’s more egregious lies, a kind of climax to the boos, chuckles, snorts, sarcastic asides, and other signs of the general lack of respect for the pitiful figure on stage.

It’s simple, Mr. Sykes (and R.B. and other liberals).

To be respected, you have to be respectable. Biden simply isn’t.

His approval ratings tick up from time to time but remain low overall. His notorious verbal faux pas are the target of jokes. He clearly does not have the respect of foreign leaders. As I’ve said previously, I do not think Putin would have sent troops into Ukraine had he perceived strength in this White House. Nor would the CCP be menacing Taiwan and sending spy balloons around the world.

Call this GOP a “Class Act” all you want. I think of what I saw of their reaction to this SOTU as A Theater of Performative Frustration: the frustration of those who have tried to get truth to voters and been thwarted every step of the way while being called every name in the Woke-globalist playbook.

Go back to 2020. I know we’re all tired of hearing about the jankiest election since the superelite of the 1900s engineered the Woodrow Wilson presidency to get their Federal Reserve.

But there it is, unresolved, like a long and very sharp thorn still digging into our sides, dissent silenced by epithets like election denier.

Tens of millions of Americans including several members of the present Congress do not consider this administration legitimate, and that’s all there is to it.

Even if you disregard the early morning hour vote spikes many of us saw with our own eyes on web pages that were scrubbed from the Internet just days later, the Twitter Files indicate the illicit effort Big Tech made on behalf of Biden and against Trump, an effort involving rampant censorship and deplatforming. They used these same techniques against qualified doctors with medical degrees from Harvard and Stanford who criticized the covid lockdowns as dangerous. (We now have a generation of kids even further behind where they should be, education-wise, but that’s another article.)

All this said, the GOP does have major challenges ahead, and we have to talk about them. They are independent of anything the Bidenistas do.

Start with the fact, for fact it is, that the factors that helped get Trump elected are still around. Globalism’s proposed Great Reset and Wokery’s white-bashing are as prevalent as ever, if not stronger than they were in 2016. Whites remain the only population that is actually losing ground in America and across the West. CBDCs, moreover, are on the horizon and might start being rolled out this year! They will effect every group without regard to race/ethnicity, “gender pronoun choice,” etc.

Second: the Establishment will do whatever it has to, to block a second Trump term, even if Trump is the nominee in 2024. Should Trump be the nominee? According to a recent poll, he has 31 percent support, which means that 69 percent of Republicans prefer someone else at this point.

But does Trump want the nomination badly enough? Frankly, his performance since last November has not exactly set the world on fire. He remains fixated on 2020. Part of me doesn’t blame him, but he’s not putting forth any vision for the future, starting with what he wants his second term to accomplish. Instead, he’s attacking Ron DeSantis who according to polls is his main, so-far-unannounced competitor, also attacking anyone he perceives as disloyal (e.g., Evangelicals who seem to be getting cold feet).

Small wonder the upper echelons of the GOP’s donor class have launched their own narrative, which is that Trump is the only Republican who can’t defeat Biden in 2024. Their fear: a large field of self-interested hopefuls — Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, John Sununu, possibly Liz Cheney, others — could divide the anti-Trumpers and hand him the nomination.

Recall that roughly the same percentage of Democrats prefer someone else in Biden’s place. They have potentially much stronger candidates. Should Gavin Newsom (e.g.) run and get the Party of Jacobinism nomination, this will make the GOP’s job tougher.

We have time for Trump to get it together, even if at the moment it’s not lookin’ too good (as my late maternal grandmother would have put it).

My present thinking: if Republicans blow it in 2024 — or if 2024 is also stolen and not reversed in time — they blow it for America. If they win in 2024, e.g., with someone such as DeSantis who will carry the anti-Woke and hopefully the anti-globalist torches, that person will have the same fight on his hands that Trump has had to contend with. There are no guarantees he will be able to do anything except slow the inevitable to a crawl while the rest of us strategize our alternatives.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

_________________

ANNOUNCING: an online course/tutorial entitled The Philosophy of Responsible Freedom, directed by Jack C. Carney with myself as chief partner: a Zoom-based intellectual encounter between an atheist (Carney) and a Christian (Yates) exploring the history of ideas using Academy of Ideas videos and supplementing them with the thoughts of others. Carney is an autodidact in areas ranging across psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology who emphasizes the importance of human relationships in a world where loss is omnipresent (he also teaches English online). I am an author and trained philosopher with a doctorate in the subject who taught philosophy courses in years past, walked away from academia, still writes philosophy emphasizing the need to identify, clarify, and evaluate the success (or failure) of worldviews in civilization, stages of civilization, the quest to build free societies, and how worldviews either enhance or hobble responsible freedom. Course/tutorial outline here. For more information or to get on our email list: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.

While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published soon.

What Does It Mean to Be “Woke”?

By Steven Yates

February 7, 2023

One Ex-Academic’s Investigation

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is carrying on his personal war against “wokery” in his state, with nationally publicized efforts against “woke” corporations such as Disney and race-conscious courses in Florida colleges and universities. Thus far DeSantis has weathered the heat, standing up to something that clearly has a great deal of cultural power these days.

But what does it mean to be “woke”? The governor’s office was recently asked. It’s a fair question.

His general counsel, Ryan Newman, responded. “Woke” is:

Awkwardly expressed, but essentially the right idea. Differential treatment under the law can be justified so that (for example) the book can be thrown at white Jan-6rs while the blacks who rioted following George Floyd’s death can be handled with kid gloves even though the latter were far more violent and did far more actual damage. Black Lives Matter was joined by more than a few white Antifa members.

If you’re “woke,” you give leftists a pass, regardless of skin color.

DeSantis stated, during his election night speech:

We reject woke ideology. We will never, ever surrender to the woke agenda. People have come [to Florida] because of our policies.

He has described Florida as a place where woke goes to die.

In a speech back in December, 2021, he’d said:

What you see now with the rise of this woke ideology is an attempt to really delegitimize our history and to delegitimize our institutions, and I view wokeness as a form of cultural Marxism… They really want to tear at the fabric of our society.

What you’ll hear if you are able to buttonhole a modestly articulate “woke” activist about what he or she believes, you’ll get something like the first statement above, invoking a difference between systemic as opposed to systematic racism and discrimination. This distinction long predates Michael Brown (shot to death by a police officer back in 2014) or George Floyd (allegedly murdered in 2020).

Systematic implies action, e.g., individual acts of discrimination, a refusal, say, by white men to hire or serve blacks, or hire women, out of racism and sexism respectively. Actions against which laws were passed back in the 1960s.

Systemic implies structural: large-scale ways society and its institutions have been arranged, perhaps from the beginning, so that the results are unjust differential treatment regardless of any living white person’s actions or intentions.

“Woke” appeals to the latter. Were it true, laws would be all but useless against it.

According to Merriam-Webster, African-Americans began using the term woke among themselves back in the mid-1900s. It referred to awareness of prejudice and potential violence they faced.

The term slowly crept into public discourse via social media. It became current after the uprisings following the Brown shooting in Ferguson, Mo., and even more so after the death of George Floyd.

Conservatives have hijacked the term, at least in part, weaponizing it against the liberal-left on a variety of issues including the vaxxes and the climate. They spoke of the “woke mob” on Twitter (e.g.): ugly, apt to “dogpile,” calling for censorship and cancellation.

In a sense, woke is just the latest word for identity politics, which replaced the earlier (and very sullied) political correctness, the commonly used term back in the 1990s.

The idea of structural discrimination was hinted at in LBJ’s Shackled Runner argument, delivered back in the mid-1960s when the ink on the Civil Rights Act was barely dry. Blacks faced challenges whites did not face because of the past; their situation was equivalent to trying to run a race with one leg shackled.

Most people back then saw discrimination as an action. Fair-minded people thought it morally wrong. Economists argued sensibly that when restaurants refuse to serve blacks, they reduce their customer base. And if, say, an enthusiastic and well-qualified woman with a good track record applied for a top-level job, and was refused an interview out of misogyny, the employer hurt his own company.

None of this gets at the systemic, though, which is what “woke” is about.

My own research into this (much of it done years ago) points at a single Supreme Court decision, a gamechanger that deserves to be as well-known as Roe v. Wade for its long-term effects on the body politic.

This is the landmark Griggs v. Duke Power Co. decision (1971).

The case came up because North Carolina based Duke Power used high school diplomas and intelligence test scores as criteria for employment. Black applicants for jobs with Duke Power were far less likely to have diplomas or be able to score well on the tests used, and thus had been limited to the company’s Labor division. So they sued under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The suit held that such criteria and tests did not measure anyone’s ability to do the job, and were nothing more than efforts to circumvent anti-discrimination law. The plaintiffs argued that would-be workers suffered because black public education in North Carolina was substantially inferior to that of whites. They were thus negatively impacted by such requirements.

The Supreme Court agreed, with then Chief Justice Warren Burger writing:

The Court of Appeals’ opinion, and the partial dissent, agreed that, on the record in the present case, ‘whites register far better on the Company’s alternative requirements’ than Negroes… This consequence would appear to be directly traceable to race…. Because they are Negroes, petitioners have long received inferior education in segregated schools…. What is required by Congress is the removal of artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary barriers to employment when the barriers operate invidiously to discriminate on the basis of racial or other impermissible classification.

Congress has now provided that tests or criteria for employment or promotion may not provide equality of opportunity merely in the sense of the fabled offer of milk to the stork and the fox. On the contrary, Congress has now required that the posture and condition of the job-seeker be taken into account. It has — to resort again to the fable — provided that the vessel in which the milk is proffered be one all seekers can use. The Act proscribes not only overt discrimination but also practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation. The touchstone is business necessity. If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited.

The concept of disparate impact thus entered our legal and political lexicon: practices could be “fair in form” (i.e., they don’t discriminate systematically) but “discriminatory in operation” (i.e., they discriminate systemically).

Another way of saying this: the Court shifted the meaning of discrimination from actions to outcomes. If a workforce did not have a politically acceptable ratio of blacks to whites, or percentage of black workers, based on their percentage of the population, structural discrimination was presumed even if no specific actions could be identified.

Still another explanation: an elusive equality of opportunity could only be measured by equality of outcomes.

Bureaucratic bean counters have had a field day ever since, as employers were compelled to keep careful records of the race/ethnicity and sex of every employee and every job applicant. To claim that there was no reverse discrimination would simply be a lie. Diversity as a hiring criterion was born. Law schools began the practice of racenorming to ensure that they had enough black students (black applicants competed only against other black applicants to get the required 10 percent ratio).

These new policies proved to be extremely hard to implement, as I documented in my Civil Wrongs (1994) which looked at occupations from academia to the construction industry. Pushback was inevitable, moreover, and the later Supreme Court of the late 1980s either upheld lower court decisions or handed down new ones that began to roll back the disparate impact doctrine (Croson, Ward’s Cove).

The narrative war of the time was between those who saw stubborn and lingering racism in this rollback, versus those who believed white males were now targets of discriminatory retaliation for states of affairs that preceded their birth, which was hardly just.

Political correctness grew out of this — a sustained effort by the left to control the narrative by claiming moral high ground and silencing the opposition, especially the educated and well-informed opposition that was rising in academia and included black and female scholars.

Thomas Sowell, for instance, argued at length in numerous places, we don’t see a multi-ethnic society anywhere in the world where each ethnicity is represented in positions of power or influence in exact proportion to its percentage of the population.

In other words, measuring equality of opportunity by equality of outcomes is irrational in theory and impossible in practice.

Absent massive social engineering, it just can’t happen. The only way to further it is to reduce freedom for everybody, including minority ethnicities.

Not that leftists didn’t try. Those positioned under the affirmative action umbrella already included minority leftist activists and radical feminists; soon it would include gay, lesbian, and transgender activists, all claiming oppression by a dominant “hetero white masculinist” culture and writing dissertations about “intersectionality”: oppression crossing boundaries of race, ethnicity, and gender identity.

Yet for reasons Sowell had calmly pointed out, the ratios (e.g., of blacks to whites in academia) refused to budge. There just had to be massive systemic discrimination, however difficult it was to point to besides resorting to arguing from a supposed legacy of slavery and the Three-Fifths Compromise.

Hence critical race theory, which also had its roots in the 1990s, and whose purveyors contended that blacks were far more likely to be spied on in malls, followed through stores, accosted by police, stopped when driving erratically, etc.

To conservatives (who by this time almost never said it openly for obvious reasons), the reasons for this were obvious: blacks commit more crimes than whites, ranging from petty shoplifting to crimes of violence.

To leftists, this is racist (I can almost hear their hissing voices, writing this!). All I can say by reply is: check the data!

I do not say this with any glee or sense of satisfaction whatsoever. It actually makes me quite sad that we’ve had this situation for as long as we’ve had, and not only failed to make any progress but are clearly going in the wrong direction.

Dr. King spoke of a world in which we would all be judged not by the color of our skin but the content of our character. Race blindness was the ideal of those of us who grew up in the 1960s.

Identity-politics — unlike the liberalism of the pre-Griggs world — reinforces race consciousness. It isolates each race/ethnicity within its own universe of presumed oppression, which came to include obviously unintentional “slights” such as not looking a black man in the eye when he walks past. Anything critical of anyone in any “protected group” soon became verboten, in academia and media. Whites who refused to lower their heads and fall in line, moreover, are motivated not by “mere” racism — the term white supremacy was weaponized by the left to associate any pushback with the KKK — but by “hate,” “rage,” and whatever other pejoratives could be invoked.

Woke is just the manifestation of this mindset.

My argument back in the early 1990s: either conservatives seize the moral high ground and forcefully oppose political correctness, or it will soon overwhelm every institution in the country.

Look around you. Has any institution of significance not been affected? We see woke in leviathan tech corporations like Google. The entertainment industry is permeated with it, as is corporate media generally. We see it in the military, where Gen. Mark Milley pondered how he wanted to understand “white rage.”

Finally there’s academia. Universities and academic disciplines where this started are now in ruins: especially humanities and social sciences. The woke crowd controls these departments on campuses, it controls administrations where their efforts go under such acronyms as DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion); it thus controls hiring committees (no conservatives need apply!). The woke mindset controls national organizations of academics. It controls university publications, academic and other major presses, and prestige refereed journals. Perhaps worst of all, it controls funding sources for academic research.

Freedom of inquiry thus no longer exists inside (or outside) the walls and halls of ivy. Critical thinking in the affected disciplines no longer exists. From the students’ point of view — and remember that students today are going massively into debt to the tune of five or even six figures to attend even public universities and/or obtain professional credentials sought by employers — there are no reasons for attending a university other than to study a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) subject.

Even STEM is no longer safe! Mathematics has come under the purview of “woke scholars” contending that the subject is white-male-heterosexually biased (this is just the most recent case I’ve seen).

I don’t think dislodging these people is possible at this point. There are too many people involved, most of them are safely tenured, they are too well interlocked, and they have too much cultural power. The occasional Ron DeSantis who surfaces may be our best hope of exposing what is going on to the light of day. Should he decide to run for president, though, it should be clear: these people will send their media attack dogs after him as strongly as they did against Donald Trump — possibly more so since DeSantis is far more focused and lacks Trump’s tendency to shoot from the hip. (If DeSantis runs, moreover, he’ll also have to fend off attacks from Trump himself and Trump loyalists.)

It’s simple. We need our own educational institutions. A few exist already, but we need more. Parents whose teens are approaching college age, ex-academics who fled (as I did), horrified university alumni, employers with direct experience of the mass illiteracy now being churned out, all need alternatives to turn to.

The new institutions need to emphasize, first, liberal arts learning as a way of living in a civilized society, securing a solid foundation that will precede scientific / technical and vocational training. Their purpose will be to turn out educated citizens, not mindless followers. Educated here includes realizing that language is dangerous when captured, manipulated, and weaponized, that cancellation and censorship are never justifiable, and that concentrations of power are always dangerous. Wealth, based on sound values and properly used, is a good thing. But in the wrong hands, it just enhances power. Witness Bill Gates.

The new institutions need to start up elementary schools (or the equivalent), as well as offer university-level courses. By the time a cohort reaches college age these days, it’s too late. For as Frederick Douglass once said, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”

If there is no way to make this happen, I think it likely that the U.S. will cease to exist within the next couple of decades. I’ve not factored into this discussion other converging challenges: another orchestrated plan-demic with more tyrannical lockdowns and the potential collapse of viable health care systems, vaccine passports, possible travel restrictions related to the supposed climate emergency (which in all likelihood does not exist), CBDCs and purposeful impoverishment of America’s “masses,” the continued invasion on America’s southern border to further dilute the “majority-white” culture, or other devices globalists might have at their disposal we don’t know about, all leaving us with less control over our lives and destinies, whatever our race or ethnicity, gender identification, what-have-you.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

________________________

ANNOUNCING: an online course/tutorial entitled The Philosophy of Responsible Freedom, directed by Jack C. Carney with myself as chief partner: a Zoom-based intellectual encounter between an atheist (Carney) and a Christian (Yates) exploring the history of ideas using Academy of Ideas videos and supplementing them with the thoughts of others. Carney is an autodidact in areas ranging across psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology who emphasizes the importance of human relationships in a world where loss is omnipresent (he also teaches English online). I am an author and trained philosopher with a doctorate in the subject who taught philosophy courses in years past, walked away from academia, still writes philosophy emphasizing the need to identify, clarify, and evaluate the success (or failure) of worldviews in civilization, stages of civilization, the quest to build free societies, and how worldviews either enhance or hobble responsible freedom. Course/tutorial outline here. For more information or to get on our email list: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.

While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published soon.

The Patreon.com campaign I have been running improved a little last month, with one new Patron since my last article. The reality remains: people are exiting such sites, often for reasons beyond their (or my) control. I might still have to return to pursuing copywriting, copyediting and ghostwriting clients as a source of income in this era of roaring inflation.

Thank you, “Joe Biden”!

This would mean reduced visibility on NewsWithViews.com. It might even mean a “farewell” piece soon, even if only temporarily. Those are the breaks. I am not independently wealthy. To reverse this while there is still time (i.e., before a new client accepts my offer), please consider pledging today by going here and signing up.

A Look Behind the GOP’s “Dark Path” – It’s Just Anti-Globalism, Absent Good Messaging

By Steven Yates

January 28, 2023

“Whoever tells the best story shapes the culture.” ― Erwin McManus

“It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions.” ― Richard Rorty

Someone named Jill Lawrence at USA Today recently opined:

… the Republican Party is on a dark path and should not hold power anywhere until it comes back into the light. That’s especially true on Capitol Hill. Congressional math is unforgiving. If there is just one more Republican than Democrat in the House or Senate, a power-obsessed party in thrall to election deniers and conspiracists will control committees, agendas, investigations, and leadership positions.

This is from an article entitled “If you care about your country and your rights, don’t vote for any Republicans in 2022.” Since the article was dated Tuesday, January 24, 2023, I presume she means “don’t vote for any Republicans in 2024.” Proofreading does not appear to be USA Today’s strong suit (or Yahoo’s, which aggregated the article).

That aside … “dark path”?

It’s an interesting image Lawrence has foisted on us, one presumably be shared by a lot of Northeast-based pundits and fake-pundits.

The rest of the paragraph expands: “a power-obsessed party in thrall to election deniers and conspiracists….”

Weaponized code words, as I’ve noted repeatedly. But however indirectly, they point to what terrifies the mainstream in this New Normal.

It’s the opposition to globalism, a movement that has advanced by any means necessary.

It’s the opponents’ desire to live as they see fit, and not be subject to forces they cannot control or defend against.

But let’s think about the images conjured up by phrases like dark path versus back into the light. And why the weaponized phrases continue to paralyze people’s brains?

Because we anti-globalists have a messaging problem, and until we understand how the propagandists of the other side are programmed to operate, we’ll continue to have a messaging problem.

To lay the groundwork, let’s first ask ourselves, are human beings truly “rational animals” as the ancient philosopher Aristotle said? Are we primarily reasoning beings, that is, whose emotions are add-ons, like decorations, to keep life interesting, sexy, and colorful?

Or instead, are we fundamentally emotional beings who happen to be able to reason — usually using it to justify, after the fact, beliefs we’ve already formed or decisions we’ve already made.

If it’s the latter, it makes sense that most humans respond better to stories and images than to didactic arguments and long chains of reasoning.

The eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume believed that only emotions — or passions, he called them — could motivate action. If Hume were alive today, he’d invoke his analysis to explain the sweeping cultural changes of the past 30 – 40 years as well as the intractability of the culture wars.

For it bears asking, how did homosexuality go from being abnormal and repugnant back in the early 1980s to something novel and fascinating in the 2000s?

The answer: storytelling. I’m surprised so few conservatives have noticed.

This is what happened: by the early 1990s Hollywood writers and producers were inserting gay and lesbian characters into the scripts of popular sitcoms and middle-of-the-road TV programs aimed primarily at younger audiences. These scripts portrayed such characters sympathetically, even heroically, facing problems all of us can relate to: at work, in relationships, etc.

They simultaneously depicted Christians as arrogant, unfeeling, and potentially violent.

An actor or actress, or star athlete, or some other celebrity “influencer” — someone millions of people identify with emotionally — would then “come out of the closet.”

By the mid-2000s the country was ready for Brokeback Mountain. In the early 2010s Lady Gaga (who is highly intelligent and knew exactly what she was doing) released “Born This Way,” an anthemic dance tune which did more than became a club hit and top-10 single, it defined the mindset of a generation.

The avalanche of sympathy for LGBTQ+ was unstoppable. Obergefell v Hodges was inevitable.

That’s how you change a culture. You change its dominant narratives and ethos, which are just storylines and images delivered and promoted by the influential.

Why was The Matrix so popular with a different subculture?

Knowing that film much better than I do 1990s television, I can be more specific.

That film’s premise was that we are all plugged into a computer-generated virtual reality designed to keep us under total control, and that the only way we would ever be free was to unplug from the machine and destroy it. That meant fighting the gatekeepers — including some of our own.

The Matrix embedded this message, with compelling images (e.g., “red pill” versus “blue pill”), into a riveting action story involving clear protagonists (Morpheus, Neo, Trinity) and antagonists (Agent Smith and his lookalikes). It placed the protagonists in situations which many of us can relate to (e.g., the sense of being an outsider), within a plot leading through tense confrontations and crises building to an edge-of-your-seat climax and thought-provoking finish (Neo, to the power the Matrix represents: “I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you…”).

Replace the idea of a computer generated virtual reality world with the fictions created by corporate mass media and most formal education, in which (1) we live in democracies, (2) our military-industrial complex is the world’s “protagonist,” Russia is evil, evil, evil; (3) the coronavirus “evolved in a bat,” and the mRNA shots are “safe and effective”; (4) Election 2020 was the “more secure in history”; (5) Trump is a proto-fascist whose supporters tried to overturn a democratic election on January 6, 2021; (6) Putin’s attack on Ukraine was “unprovoked”; etc., ad nauseam.

Not one of these is true.

The idea of being “red pilled” had crept into the Patriot community in the early 2000 decade and has remained ever since.

That film is almost 24 years old, though. We need new messaging in new packaging, for our present New Normal. A world in which we are gaslighted routinely about all the above. A world whose death culture defends a woman’s “right to control her body” so long as it kills her unborn baby but cannot be invoked to refuse a shot.

A world in which central banks scheme to impose systems that will monitor and potentially control every aspect of our financial lives (central bank digital currencies).

I’m surprised Dystopian fiction and films are not more popular than they are. But then again, the 2020s have seemed to make Dystopia redundant!

We should take Dystopian messaging and turn it against globalism. Globalism, after all, is the “dark path” if it leads to a world based on total control.

And if our thesis above about our being primarily emotional beings is true, people will respond better to stories and images depicting such than to didacticism. Especially if the stories and images are repeated over and over until they are burned into brains and prompt action. This is how social engineering worked before, through positive messaging and “nudges” people responded to, believing the choice was theirs.

I’ll admit, I’ve been as bad as anyone, hanging onto the idea that arguments changed minds, far longer than I should have. It’s the way I was trained — or perhaps programmed. I’m having to deprogram myself in certain ways, too.

But look at any good picture of Klaus Schwab. Does he not look like a Dystopian sci-fi movie villain? Or a caricature of such?

The memes are there: we’ve probably all seen the one of Bill Gates with an evil grin on his face holding up a needle.

We need storylines with compelling characters in which to embed such images and give them a fuller context.

These storylines will portray Patriots not as “insurrectionists” but people you would want as neighbors: truthful, trustworthy, helpful, principled, and protective if need be.

Those who openly promote global domination are antagonists in this script, depicted as the opposite: deceitful (often lying by omission), immoral, hypocritical to the core and apt to break every promise they keep, ruthless enough to mass murder anyone who gets in their way.

Propaganda? Or hard reality? Even Greta Thunberg has called out the hypocrisy of the World Economic Forum globalists, including CEOs of major energy corporations, flying in from all over the world on private jets, to run their mouths about man-made climate change.

A good satirist should be able to portray these people as objects of ridicule.

Compelling storylines of whatever sort, if they can be gotten in front of an audience hungry for entertainment can portray globalist minions as Darth Vaders, their political pawns no different than Coriolanus Snow (of The Hunger Games).

Over the top? No less than the left’s ludicrous depiction of “MAGA Republicans.”

It’s true: many if not most Dystopias, and discussions of them, present leftist messages (The Handmaid’s Tale is the most obvious example).

But others, interpretations aside, just depict their fictional tyrants as all too many real tyrants have been: ruthless and psychotic (think of Adam Sutler in V for Vendetta).

Dystopian protagonists offer hope. In The Matrix, Neo promised freedom from the control grid. The character V, in V for Vendetta, fomented a mass uprising against the tyranny, with the Guy Fawkes mask as his symbol.

Is it an accident that Guy Fawkes masks have been seen everywhere in the world at protests against elite power ever since.

It’s in the messaging.

We need messaging that portrays globalism as the real “dark path” the world has been on, and for quite some time, given its ongoing campaign to use laboratory-created diseases and induced impoverishment to create an inescapable control grid.

Defenders of freedom, then, are struggling against enormous odds against descending techno-tyranny trying to bring as many people as possible “back into the light.”

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

________________________

ANNOUNCING: an online course/tutorial entitled The Philosophy of Responsible Freedom, directed by Jack C. Carney with myself as chief partner: a Zoom-based intellectual encounter between an atheist (Carney) and a Christian (Yates) exploring the history of ideas using Academy of Ideas videos and supplementing them with the thoughts of others. Carney is an autodidact in areas ranging across psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology who emphasizes the importance of human relationships in a world where loss is omnipresent (he also teaches English online). I am an author and trained philosopher with a doctorate in the subject who taught philosophy courses in years past, walked away from academia, still writes philosophy emphasizing the need to identify, clarify, and evaluate the success (or failure) of worldviews in civilization, stages of civilization, the quest to build free societies, and how worldviews either enhance or hobble responsible freedom. Course/tutorial outline here. For more information or to get on our email list: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.

While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published soon.

Thank you, “Joe Biden”!

What I’m Doing Here: Another Boomer’s Journey

By Steven Yates

January 21, 2023

“Fifty years is ample time in which to change a world and its people almost beyond recognition. All that is required for the task are a sound knowledge of social engineering, a clear sight of the intended goal — and power.” —Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End

“I’m trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.” —Morpheus, The Matrix

A year ago I adopted the practice of penning a piece on what I’m trying to accomplish with my writing, whether here or generally. This is in the interest of transparency, given that people are supporting my work with small donations. They deserve to know what they are getting.

Also last year — in a trilogy on my blog (here, here, and here) — I developed three core values guiding my work: telling the truth as best I can, defending freedom, and mastery of self. As for the first, I’m not convinced that truth — real, honest-to-God truth — will necessarily make us happy. As Ecclesiastes says (1:18): “For in much wisdom is much grief, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.” I’ve learned things that on sleepless nights I wish I hadn’t learned.

Believe it or not, as a Boomer growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, I was probably a liberal by the standards of the times. My mother liked the Kennedy’s (except for Ted whom she couldn’t stomach). She told me late in life she thought the country would have gone in a entirely different and much better direction had Bobby not been assassinated. I’ve no idea if this is true or not. The civil rights movement might have taken a different course had Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lived. I was one of many who came to regard Dr. King as a heroic figure. Yes, he had flaws and blind spots. All such people do. This means they are human. Liberalism got things wrong. But the liberalism of the ‘60s wasn’t destructive like the left is today.

As a philosophy student in the ‘80s, what I wanted most was a permanent teaching position at a liberal arts college with a good reputation, a home base from which to contribute meaningfully to my discipline. I wasn’t expecting anyone to give me a job. I assumed I had to earn it. I did the work, publishing four articles in refereed journals while still a graduate student, and gaining teaching experience at my alma mater before getting my doctorate.

When seeking teaching positions, I noticed: white women were leapfrogging over me. Usually they had less (sometimes no) teaching experience; no publications. Some didn’t even have doctorates in hand. Yet they were being given teaching positions I’d not even being interviewed for. I nosed around. I wasn’t alone. Other “ordinary” white guys were telling me the same thing. Someone at a university where I’d applied leveled with me. His voice lowered, he told me: his department was under intense administrative pressure to hire women.

Was this right? What was going on?

I immersed myself in the literature on affirmative action. My specialties expanded to include political and economic philosophy as I studied the greats (Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Bastiat, Mill, etc.), weighing and considering competing philosophies of society in light of this problem which was wreaking havoc on many professions.

One result was my first book, Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong with Affirmative Action (1994). It was one of a flurry of exposés on the subject that appeared during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I’d like to think that what set mine apart was connecting the perceived need to defend these programs from legal pushback and mounting criticism, not all of it coming from white men (think of Thomas Sowell), with rising political correctness — the primary tactic of which was to “deconstruct” critics as motivated by racism/sexism, and silence them by whatever means necessary.

As a guy who’d been teaching courses in logic and critical thinking, the fallacy seemed self-evident! I could not believe that some of my fellow professional philosophers supposedly with more training in the subject than I had were committing it!

One of the criticisms of affirmative action is that it gets jobs for the unqualified: and in my profession, the majority of beneficiaries were white women. There just weren’t many black applicants. In 1960 the percentage of blacks in academic philosophy was around 1.5 percent. What was the percentage in 2000? Around 1.5 percent. The irrational push to hire women, however, would satisfy diversity bureaucrats, and so had increased their numbers by leaps and bounds.

It also increased the overall amount of crazy in academia (I discuss examples here, here, and here). These were not idle academic exercises. They were doing real world harm. Claims had appeared (e.g.) on how one in four college women were raped. Sometimes the figure was one in six. Either claim misuses statistics. But if a guy was accused, he was presumed guilty until proven innocent. An accusation was potentially ruinous. Lives were permanently altered by the notorious “gang rape” hoax at the University of Virginia, in a scurrilous Rolling Stone article in 2014, retracted in the face of multiple lawsuits as its claims fell apart under scrutiny.

Be all that as it may, you challenge academic leftists at your own risk. More than one faculty member was driven to seek other employment to end nuisance harassment and bullying by resident feminist militants.

What had struck me back in the early ‘90s when it might have been possible to oppose this juggernaut was how no one wanted to talk about it. I once read a paper outlining and evaluating various defenses and criticisms of affirmative action at a humanities conference (this was the Southeast, mind you). Women listeners took potshots at me, some of them personal. They insinuated that I was the one who wasn’t qualified, that with minorities and women rising in influence, we “privileged” white guys weren’t getting the jobs we thought we were entitled to. Now we were crying foul.

I wanted to shout, But what about the issues?! Affirmative action in academia was barely benefiting African-Americans at all; its beneficiaries tended to be radical feminist women who engaged in just these kinds of fallacious ploys! No one could really, seriously believe these women had been discriminated against! We had entered a period in which white males really were at a disadvantage in job searches!

Eventually I all but dropped the subject and moved on. Rational discussion had proven impossible. Far more dismaying was how conservatives handled the matter — or, rather, didn’t handle it. Organizations like the Heritage Foundation gave me the silent treatment. I’d worked on a project for the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, but as I attempted to press the case for a more organized strategy of opposition to political correctness, they dragged their feet and the relationship I’d tried to build with them collapsed.

I was learning the difference between conservatives and neocon — or, more bluntly, between the former and RINOs.

If the politically correct were motivated by power, those I’d tried to trust and ally with came to strike me as cowards. The average Republican was (is) terrified of being called a racist. This gave the PC crowd power.

All this made me realize: the basic problem of political-economic organization is not, What is the Ideal Society?, but How do we constrain that sociopathic minority that is fascinated with power, while accommodating the self-interest and insouciance of the majority?

One morning, though, I awakened with a more disturbing question: was affirmative action the only topic on which an official narrative was being imposed by weeding out dissenting voices?

What if what I’d encountered with affirmative action and political correctness was not the exception but the rule?

Academia, it turns out, is full of orthodoxies. Ultimately it is a very controlled enterprise. The implications matter.

Why do public schools, and public universities, exist at all? Writers like John Taylor Gatto — an award-winning teacher in tough New York City schools who walked away when he couldn’t take the BS any longer — tells us. As have others from various points on the ideological spectrum, left as well as right. I strongly recommend his treatise The Underground History of American Education (2001).

The education industry — from grade schools to graduate schools — exist not to communicate knowledge or a defensible moral philosophy but to instill narratives. Grade schools instill them in children, while acclimating them to control systems. Children are forced to sit in the same place all day, for the same hours every day, be quiet during those hours against all their natural inclinations, study the same subjects as all other children, and in the same way. At least that is how the system was designed. Like most such systems, today it has basically collapsed. What I hear from teachers is that most public schools are now anarchic.

I recently encountered a study showing differences in children’s curiosity and willingness to ask questions. This tendency is very large when they are small; small children are naturally curious about everything around them. This diminishes gradually in school. By the time they finish high school, their natural curiosity is all but gone. “Educated” out of them, with obedience “educated” in.

The situation may be worse. I was once given an assignment intended as punishment for some minor-league infraction: “I want to know about Socrates,” the teacher said. “Write me two pages on Socrates.”

I’m not joking!

Research and writing assignments were handed out as punishment by this teacher (and by many others in my elementary school).

If it wasn’t turned in the next day, the length doubled!

What message did that send children? Did it incentivize or disincentivize independent thinking and learning?

(For whatever it’s worth, I skipped a day and turned in four pages on Socrates, and this probably became my introduction to philosophy! I was already marching to a different drum, but guys like me were few in number.)

That was the 1960s. Do I even want to know what kinds of disincentives to independent thought are being handed out by today’s products of education colleges?

Even before The Matrix (1999) came out, I was toying with the idea that the primary purpose of nearly all formal education and nearly all mainstream media was political-economic and cultural programming. Small wonder that film resonated with those of us who began to think of ourselves as “red-pilled.”

Conspiracies?

Conspiracy is a standard category in any legal and criminal justice dictionary. It has been used against some of the January 6 political prisoners.

Once you’ve done a little homework, read or listened to the right people, you realize, the idea that wealthy and powerful people have never conspired against the public interest to gain power is absurd!

Who I’d read? Gatto is a good place to begin. He puts his finger on the Rockefeller cabal, who have had their hands in everything from education to pharmaceuticals. I’d then consult Antony C. Sutton, Carroll Quigley, Patrick Wood, G. Edward Griffin. I’d go online and search out James Corbett, Catherine Austin Fitts, Whitney Webb, a few others.

An entirely different history of the past two centuries emerges!

The CIA weaponized conspiracy theory in the 1960s to protect the Warren Commission Report from those poking holes in its narrative, that JFK was shot by one man acting alone. Prior to 1967, you never heard the phrase, not even when Sen. Eugene McCarthy was alleging Communist infiltration of American institutions. Richard Hofstader criticizes conspiratorial thinking in his classic essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1964). He never uses that exact phrase, not even when describing the granddaddy of such notions: the Bavarian Illuminati of the late 1700s.

Conspiracy theory is an intended discussion-stopper. Just as are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and other words now routinely used to protect respective narratives.

It’s sleight-of-hand, but it works! It is very effective against a cowed population whose critical faculties have been dulled by a dozen or more years of public schooling!

Ludwig Wittgenstein, easily the greatest philosopher of the last century, counseled: “In philosophy the question, ‘What do we actually use this word or this proposition for?’ repeatedly leads to valuable insights.” Not just in philosophy, but in life. Wittgenstein spoke of a “battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”

Words and phrases are weaponized and used to gaslight us. They are instruments of thought control, drawing listeners/readers either into certain narratives or away from unwanted ones.

Thus the upside-down nature of the New Normal. Truth-telling is demonized as “conspiracy theory,” “election denial,” or “misinformation.” Political leaders both in the U.S. and around the world who are trying to free their populations from the insidious influence of globalism are called “fascists,” “autocrats,” and “threats to democracy.” Democracy has to be the most powerful and pervasive propaganda word out there! But when was either the Federal Reserve system or the income tax placed before the public, which was informed about them and allowed to vote on them. Was affirmative action ever voted on? How about any of the recent wars, such as the disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq? How about Obamacare?

Neither the U.S. nor any other Western powers are really democracies: governments by, and which answer to, We The People. A real democracy would be a major threat to those with real power. Western powers are plutocratic oligarchies: rule by fabulously wealthy power elites, many atop global corporations well represented at confabs like the one the World Economic Forum is holding in Davos as I write this. Regional branches of GloboCorp control major political parties through the power of the purse. This is why there will never be a successful “third party” in America. Financial resources are not the end-all, be-all, though. Narratives able to capture thought, incentivize, and control human mass behavior are what enable the few to dominate the many.

And sometimes narratives collapse: lose credibility. Large swaths of the American public no longer believe the major narratives of the left (“all white males are privileged,” “America is inherently white supremacist”), nor that of “movement conservatism” (i.e., neocons, “we need a ‘muscular’ foreign policy with ‘theater wars’), nor the idea that “globalization” will make us all prosperous.

Narrative collapse in the U.S. got Donald Trump elected president over the far-better positioned Hillary Clinton, who answers to GloboCorp and its war machine. Alternatives to leftist-globalist narratives still aid leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

The powerful struck back in 2020, as I’ve recounted in numerous articles. GloboCorp won some big battles, but not the narrative war. Not yet. We may see another narrative collapse with the covid mRNA shots, now that somewhere between a thousand and two thousand previously healthy athletes and celebrities most in their 30s and 40s (a few even younger) have dropped dead from cardiac arrest. The elephant in the front room: we can be sure that all were “vaccinated” because their team, contract, what-have-you, required it.

If the narrative that the “Covid-19 vaccines” are “safe and effective” collapses, it might bring down the entire house of cards built by Fauci, Gates, the WHO, the CDC, and their Big Pharma and Bidenista cronies. Combine this with the mounting evidence that Big Pharma and biotech corporations were hard at work on something before anyone knew about a “novel coronavirus,” and given the damage this episode has done, heads might roll. Literally.

There are words and phrases that will free your mind: especially after almost three years of plan-demic (see what I just did?). There are mindsets and behaviors I now advocate, derived from the ancient Stoics who distinguished what we can control from what we can’t control (example here). None of us can control what GloboCorp does. But we can exercise clear thought about it and learn how to minimize our contact with the institutions it controls. We can take charge of our own health, e.g., by eating nutritious food (and cutting the sugar!), by taking vitamins and supplements, by exercising, and doing all of this consistently.

Notice that none of this is taught in public schools, or in most private ones.

The idea of being an educator in a broad sense, to help fill this gaping hole, still seems meaningful to me.

My being able to work for an American university again, however, seems about as likely as the coffee in my cup spilling upwards and striking the ceiling, should I accidentally knock it over.

One can only go forward. This is what I’ve been doing, learning what I need along the way. As a conservative thinker, I’ve consulted with other conservatives, with the voluntarist who designed and directs the Philosophy of Responsible Freedom tutorial series in which I am a leading consultant and participant, and begun work on another book (rough draft should be completed by early spring).

“Movement conservatism” is dead, however. Real conservatives — who have some grasp of what they want to conserve — may need to separate in the manner I’ve described, should the Great Reset prove unstoppable. Schwab, Gates, and their henchmen have enormous resources and momentum. The fact that the mostly insouciant American public sees nothing amiss is working in their favor. My readers are not part of this insouciant public, however.

The Great Resetters could stumble on their ambitions, committing mistakes narcissistic control freaks usually make, trying to control what they can’t control via centralization, surveillance, and “nudges.” (Yes, Virginia, the Stoic rule I mentioned applies to the power elites as much as to us.) GloboCorp cannot control our desire for freedom, such as the freedom to refuse the vaxes and solve our problems creatively and productively.

Thus despite the past three years of fearmongering and power grabs, there is a lot of dissent out here. Big Tech censorship has not been able to quash it. Will another and still heavier shoe drop, to silence us? I don’t know.

The Austin, Tex. based Brownstone Institute has just published an admirable piece, however, arguing that GloboCorp’s planned techno-feudalist, technocratic dystopia is impossible.

It will run up against political-economic reality.

What author Robert Blumen, an engineer and “avocational” economist (which means he has sense), contends is that the Great Reset will cause a collapse of productive capacity and large scale cooperation necessary for an advanced civilization to function, and that this will make the globalists’ own immense wealth and power system impossible to sustain. They probably imagine that continued investments (“money making money”) will sustain them forever — if they really believe in pseudoscientific “modern monetary theory”: credit expansion via money printing creates real wealth.

Blumen argues compellingly that this is wrong, and in greater detail than I can recount here. The bottom line, however: even should GloboCorp gets its Great Reset by 2030, its days will be numbered. What will number them is a collapse of all those things AI and robots can’t do — what encounters I’ve had with AI have left me unimpressed — and what centralization cannot accommodate. The lockdowns have given us a preview of this by causing borderline-destabilizing supply line disruptions, now augmented by the war in Ukraine. (Wars, it should be noted, are almost invariably instigated and directed by powerful elites wielding propaganda and financial resources, not by the peoples of the world most of whom have no reason to fight one another.)

Centralized political-economic planning, moreover, has never been effective on a national scale without promoting dislocation and dysfunction. How can anyone not completely blinded by their fascination with power believe that a central control grid can be made to work on a planetary scale?

Thomas Sowell distinguished between constrained and unconstrained visions (in his magnificent A Conflict of Visions, 1984; for a brief discussion go here). Constrained visions, of which American conservatism as originally conceived is the best example, recognize limits imposed by reality, including human nature. Unconstrained visions, such as Marxism-Leninism and the globalist-planned Great Reset, do not. The Great Resetters imagine Utopia no less than Marx did, cloaking it in pleasant sounding phrases like “sustainability” and “stakeholder capitalism” (review Wittgenstein and myself above on language bewitching our intelligence). With dangerous accumulations of fake wealth at their disposal, the Davos culture schemes to build the latest Utopia even as I write. Their efforts, argues Blumen (and many others before him), will crash and burn.

But since no one in the Davos culture appears amenable to reason even were they accessible by us peasants, avoidance may be impossible, and the damage they will do when reality exacts its consequences and their Utopia destabilizes will be incalculable.

As the 2020s’ New Normal continues, therefore, getting the word out about what these sociopaths are up to, and working out real solutions, has never been more urgent. That, more than anything else, is what I am doing here and what keeps me going.

ANNOUNCING: an online course/tutorial entitled The Philosophy of Responsible Freedom, directed by Jack C. Carney with myself as chief partner: a Zoom-based intellectual encounter between an atheist (Carney) and a Christian (Yates) exploring the history of ideas using Academy of Ideas videos and supplementing them with the thoughts of others. Carney is an autodidact in areas ranging across psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology who emphasizes the importance of human relationships in a world where loss is omnipresent (he also teaches English online). I am an author and trained philosopher with a doctorate in the subject who taught philosophy courses in years past, walked away from academia, still writes philosophy emphasizing the need to identify, clarify, and evaluate the success (or failure) of worldviews in civilization, stages of civilization, the quest to build free societies, and how worldviews either enhance or hobble responsible freedom. Course/tutorial outline here. For more information or to get on our email list: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.

While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published soon.

Thank you, “Joe Biden”!

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

The Year 2022: Looking Back, Looking Ahead

By Steven Yates

December 27, 2022

I recently encountered a nice, hefty list of the converging crises of the 2020s:

The aftermath of the plan-demic
The war in Ukraine
Supply-chain problems caused by both of the above
Energy scarcity caused by the second of the above
Scarcity of farming necessities such as fertilizer caused by the second of the above
Roaring inflation (caused by relentless money printing, but aggravated by both of the above)
Labor shortages (people who can do so are opting out)
A mental health crisis
Polarized politics (made worse by both social and legacy media)
Doubts about the legitimacy of the Bidenistas
An epidemic of mass shootings; worsening violent crime generally
A looming recession (which Federal Reserve policy will doubtless cause and aggravate)
Multiple hot spots of civil unrest
The rapid growth of technologies of surveillance and control, moves toward vaccine passports and central bank digital currency, among other trappings of globalist technocracy, or techno-feudalism.

The plan-demic 2020-22 was the biggest global-scale power grab I’ve ever seen! It still looms like a colossus over a more fearful world.

The Russian incursion into Ukraine last February was the inevitable long-term result of the CIA-backed coup that took place there back in 2014. A democratically elected but Moscow-sympathetic government was overthrown and replaced by an autocracy sympathetic to NATO and hostile to Moscow, and to Russians more broadly.

The two governments, Kyiv and Moscow, were on collision course from that time forward, especially after Ukrainian forces started brutalizing ethnic Russians in the two breakaway regions. Putin doubtless waited to annex those regions into the Russian Federation until he saw the weakness of the regime in the Asylum on the Potomac.

The war in Ukraine and the “opening up” of the world are doubtless the top two stories of 2022. Inflation probably runs a close third. The Federal Reserve just raised interest rates. This will dampen spending and guarantee a recession in 2023. Does anyone really believe these things aren’t planned? At the very least, I have trouble believing people with a minimal ability to think really believe in modern monetary theory. If creating money out of thin air brought wealth, Zimbabwe would be the richest nation in the world!

We see unrest everywhere except perhaps Antarctica. Most readers probably know about the anti-lockdown protests in China, the product of Xi Jinping’s zero-covid policy. Having been unable to leave their residences for months at a time, people have literally starved to death. The protests were triggered by a fire which burned a dozen or so people alive when they couldn’t get out and rescuers couldn’t reach them in time.

The technocrats in Beijing thus saw the worst protests since Tiananmen Square, and interestingly, they’ve started reopening. Predictably, we’ve seen a wave of illnesses. I say predictably, because we know — from reputable scientists whose views were suppressed — that lockdowns do harm! Immune systems get compromised. People get sick who otherwise wouldn’t have.

South America has its share of unrest, with a fresh upheaval in Peru which has seen several years of political instability. Pedro Castillo, elected president 17 months ago, tried to dissolve the Congress, which retaliated by having him arrested. He has plenty of support, and some of that support took to the streets of Lima. Over a dozen people have been killed in clashes with police. Castillo, who says he’s a Marxist, has support from leftist governments in Bolivia, Argentina, Colombia, and (a bit surprisingly) Mexico. Interestingly, Chile has stayed out of it, with leftist Chilean president Gabriel Boric stating that Castillo violated his country’s constitution when he tried to dissolve its Congress.

Castillo’s opponent last year was Keiko Fujimori of the Fuerza Popular — whom global corporate media denounced as a proto-fascist (where have we heard that before? these people really need some new material!). They never failed to note that her father Alberto Fujimori was imprisoned — as was she, briefly.

Meanwhile, over in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro voiced suspicion of fraud against the recent election that by the narrowest of margins put corrupt leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (whom everyone calls Lula) back in power. While this may seem like November 2020 – January 2021 in the U.S. all over again, unlike Trump Bolsonaro has strong backing within the Brazilian military. A coup in South America’s largest country in the foreseeable future is not impossible.

These are just the situations I’ve been watching. There are others, too many for one person with no staff to keep track of. One thing seems certain: if corporate media denounces a candidate as an incipient (or proto) fascist, or an autocrat, or a threat to democracy, that person is probably worth supporting. He or she may have a track record of standing up to globalists, whom corporate media serves.

Globalism is the enemy, folks. The visible enemy, anyway.

Bringing us to the corruption and unreason at home. The Bidenistas are riding high following Election 2022 and the “red wave that didn’t happen.” Corporate media keeps spinning this as voter rejection of “election denialism” and “MAGA extremism.”

But what really happened? I doubt we’ll ever know for sure. I have two friends, Arizona residents (one in Maricopa Co., the other elsewhere), who are convinced that Kari Lake was robbed in broad daylight.

Other outcomes make no sense, such as the victory by a man who can barely articulate a sentence against a popular doctor (Pennsylvania).

One of those friends told me in an email, “I don’t trust any of it!”

I’ve no idea how widespread this sentiment is — but millions of Americans no longer consider American elections to be honest.

Lake has file suit. Dr. Oz has struggled to get his older career back on track and has found himself blacklisted, which can happen when you’ve gone up against approved narratives, or been endorsed by someone the Establishment hates (e.g., Trump).

I’ve never been a fan of Twitter — which has been enabling gnat-length attention spans for over a decade now. I figured that when Elon Musk bought the platform I had no dog in the fight because I don’t trust the man. He’s a technocrat and definitely on board with transhumanist types even if he seems to enjoy triggering lefties, who blew a few gaskets apiece the other day because of the lefty European journalists Musk unloaded.

Be that as it may, the Twitter Files have definitely brought some revelations! It is now crystal clear that the platform suppressed information on Hunter Biden’s laptop back in 2020 that could have revealed the Biden family’s connections both in Ukraine and to the Chinese. I recall that Facebook was suppressing claims, then backed up with evidence in the form of the now-memory-holed 3 am vote spikes, that Election 2020 was stolen.

We also know that Twitter suppressed reputable scientists such as Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya when he criticized covid lockdowns as ineffective and likely to do more harm than good.

The plain truth is, platform owners, hired moderators, “fact checkers,” and algorithm programmers have all they need to control the online visibility of scientists, investigative journalists, writers such as myself, if we express an opinion or present information that goes against approved narratives. Countless people were deplatformed off YouTube, kicked off Twitter, or “shadow banned” on Facebook, because they wrote something disapproved of by a “fact checker.”

This is especially troublesome for those for whom writing is their primary source of income. Downgrading income is one of the ways technocracy punishes dissent. Medium writer (at least that is where I see her articles) Tessa Schlessinger thus writes:

It doesn’t matter who you are, if you express an opinion contrary to the status quo, the owners, or even a moderator, you will have the reach of your work limited.

The outcome of that is that it’s fairly difficult to trust any site for any length of time….

In order to protect income, it has become necessary to widen one’s reach. This means that one has to work on several sites, use multiple skills, ensure that you are on multiple payment platforms, plus be serious about becoming an expert at SEO — search engine optimization.

Schlessinger recommends writing for sites like SmashWords, Post.News, and Vocal Media, all of which are recent and small but growing rapidly as writers struggle for the right combination of visibility and free speech (and income).

My view, for whatever it’s worth, is that we need our own platforms!

The press is free only if you own one.

The downside: there are probably too many platforms now. The Internet is clogged with conflicting voices, incommensurable truth claims, and information overload. In our attention economy, those who can keep you on their sites — and then use it to hock stuff — will be the victors. Sadly, that long ago ceased to be those with truthful content (if it ever was). The masses naturally gravitate to what is titillating, exciting, and above all, easily consumed, so they can get on to the next bit of entertainment. I don’t expect this to change anytime soon.

Those of us trying to present broad perspectives on how we got into our present mess, as a prelude toward finding strategies that might get us out of it, are at a structural disadvantage.

My most recent contributions to Medium include this, this, and this: a three-part series, the point of departure for which hearkens back to a series done for this site — here, here, and here — integrating insights from this.

It’s doubtless demanding, and readership (especially of the hefty third segment) has been negligible. The truth about Medium: those who can write fluffy inspirational self-help pieces or colorful “listicles” tend to reap its windfalls.

We do what we can….

Looking ahead to 2023 (and beyond), which will be here in less than two weeks even if we don’t especially care to look:

Expect the recession I mentioned.

Expect more irrational Deep State provocations against Russia, which as everybody knows has both tactical and long-range nukes. Given that we are probably closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, I have to wonder, What are these lunatics thinking? I don’t know, but the American Deep State is probably just following orders. There is no telling how long the war in Ukraine will drag on, and no way to predict how it will end.

Realizing that the globalists have their underground bunkers will doubtless help us all sleep better at night!

Expect more fearmongering over Variants. Because if your aim is to control behavior on a mass scale, fearmongering works. Those who think the plan-demic is “over” are probably kidding themselves; the same is true of those harboring doubts that the elites will find some other excuse to lock down populations in the future. (Think: climate, carbon footprints, etc.)

Earlier this year I wondered if we might see a major cyberattack that would turn out the lights for several weeks over a substantial geographical region. This hasn’t happened, but the possibility remains … if the globalists believe they are losing control, whatever the circumstances.

We can be sure they will do whatever they can to prevent a second Trump term.

Expect vaccine passports and central bank digital currency to continue to inch forward quietly. Those considering international moves probably better make them no later than this year, especially if you are unvaxxed (or if you are but aren’t “boosted”).

Expect political polarization to continue, with sporadic outbreaks of violence when one side can gaslight and use lawfare to suppress the other without consequence.

Mass shootings and other violent crime, most of it apolitical, will continue as more and more people “snap.” White male shooters will be denounced as such. If there is no mention of race in corporate media reporting, you will know that the shooter is black, Muslim, or some other protected ethnicity.

Expect the culture war to continue, since although the cultural left / abortion death culture axis controls academia, corporate media, and most of government except the Supreme Court, it has been unable to suppress conservative voices completely. There are simply too many of us, and it remains to be seen what happens when Republicans assume control of the House in January (given their performance in the past, though, I wouldn’t get my hopes up).

But where is the person many of us have put our writing careers on the line defending for almost seven years?

Trump may have announced, but his effort seems to be floundering amidst reckless ventures such as the dinner with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, or other gestures that are simply embarrassing, the most recent as of this writing being these NFTs or “digital trading cards” depicting The Donald as a cartoon superhero (not especially good quality from what I hear, but sold for an absurd $99 a pop).

This followed a promised “major announcement” (Thurs, December 15).

A few Jan-6ers have been quoted as saying things like, “I went to prison for this?”

Even Steve Bannon, about to accept four months of political prisoner status for having gone to bat for Trump, is now saying, “I can’t do this anymore….”

Trump has not held any rallies, and has none planned that I know of.

He’s done other dumb things recently. I just happened to be a student at the University of Georgia when Herschel Walker was the resident football hero there. Details aside, I can certify — no doubts whatsoever on this point! — the man is dumb as a brick! He proved this in a statement before the Georgia election when he said he didn’t know what a pronoun was.

What was Trump thinking when he endorsed this clown?

Not that Walker’s opponent in the Party of the Death Culture was a viable alternative. Voters in Georgia simply didn’t have any options this year. Were I still a resident there, I would have gone fishing.

It is as if Trump is giving the globalists what they want: someone not electable. To be sure, he has plenty of time between now and the next round of primaries to get it together. But we need more from him than we’ve seen so far: much more.

And he’d better stop wasting time. Some of his supporters are casting about for another standard-bearer: Trumpism without Trump. I have said from the get-go that the idea of Trumpism is larger than the man. It’s not hard to see why Trump supporters might be looking elsewhere. The country needs real leadership and a vision for the future, a clear and viable alternative to what World Economic Forum globalists are prepared to shove down our throats. It needs to be able to get people on board in large enough numbers to make a difference.

Trump did this back in 2015-16. He does not appear to be doing it now.

I have no idea whether Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will challenge him for the GOP nomination. Corporate media is pushing him, hard — countless articles read almost as if he had already announced.

Obviously, should DeSantis run and claim the nomination from Trump, these same legacy outfits will turn on him like wolves. Much of his thinking, after all, is too close to Trump’s for comfort, and he’s considerably more focused. He has the woke cult’s number. He has Big Pharma’s number as well. His new state-level grand jury might help determine how much long-term damage the mRNA shots can be expected to do.

DeSantis could easily become the standard-bearer for conservative populism and economic nationalism, and potentially, therefore, a bigger threat to the globalists than Trump was.

But as I’ve also said, I don’t know that he wants the job. He’s not stupid, and he has to know what it could cost him and his family, personally as well as politically.

Lastly: Sleepy Joe has been kept in the Oval Office longer than I anticipated, possibly because he’s been a really good boy (so to speak), doing the bidding of his real owners, and possibly because VP Giggles would be an even bigger disaster than he has been. Everyone knows that. Should Biden be replaced in 2024, though, whatever the stated reason, it will likely be by someone even further to the left than he is. Think: California Governor Gavin Newsome.

Imagine the entire country looking like San Francisco by 2028!

Newsome can cobble sentences together, though, and make them sound intelligent. I doubt he dozes off in meetings. He doesn’t look and sound like an idiot. These all put him ahead of Sleepy Joe and VP Giggles.

In the end, though, if nothing is done to ensure that no more elections can be stolen, period, it probably won’t matter which party runs which candidate, because the globalist-approved candidate will be the one to “win.”

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

________________________

ANNOUNCING: an online course/tutorial entitled The Philosophy of Responsible Freedom, directed by Jack C. Carney with myself as chief partner: a Zoom-based intellectual encounter between an atheist (Carney) and a Christian (Yates) exploring the history of ideas using Academy of Ideas videos and supplementing them with the thoughts of others. Carney is an autodidact in areas ranging across psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology who emphasizes the importance of human relationships in a world where loss is omnipresent (he also teaches English online). I am an author and trained philosopher with a doctorate in the subject who taught philosophy courses in years past, walked away from academia, still writes philosophy emphasizing the need to identify, clarify, and evaluate the success (or failure) of worldviews in civilization, stages of civilization, the quest to build free societies, and how worldviews either enhance or hobble responsible freedom. Course/tutorial outline here. For more information or to get on our email list: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.

While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published early next year.

Thank you, “Joe Biden”!

This would mean reduced visibility on NewsWithViews.com. It might even mean a “farewell” piece in December, even if only temporarily. Those are the breaks. I am not independently wealthy. To reverse this while there is still time (i.e., before a new client accepts my offer), please consider pledging today by going here and signing up.

The Controlled Demolition of Trumpism

By Steven Yates

December 23, 2022

They’ve done it!

On Monday, December 19, the January 6 (Un)Select Committee recommended that not two, not three, but four criminal referrals against former president Donald Trump be sent to the Department of Justice (DOJ).

The charges referred to the DOJ are immersed — totally — in official narratives about Election 2020 and its aftermath, leading up to what happened on January 6, 2021. No early-morning vote spikes (a statistically impossible all-at-once deluge of hundreds of votes for Biden being recorded all at once) scrubbed from the Internet within days, no electronically altered votes, no illegal ballot harvesting, no dead people voting (well, in Georgia, two), nothing. All memory-holed.

Aggregating that early evidence would have been crucial! This needed to be done in a couple of days if not hours! Without it, there is indeed no hard evidence of fraud! I have no idea if it was attempted or not. (How I wish I’d thought to take screenshots!) Patrick Byrne’s book is very suggestive of what happened, and his apparent invisibility to the Committee might well be significant. He had Trump’s ear. But Trump listened to Rudy Giuliani, not Byrne, and the effort to rescue his presidency went down in flames.

Not that this matters now. Powerful people wanted Trump gone. They got what they wanted. There is no reversing this. Ever. Period.

The Committee’s Executive Summary begins:

In the Committee’s hearings, we presented evidence of what ultimately became a multi-part plan to overturn the 2020 Presidential election. That evidence has led to an overriding and straight-forward conclusion: the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, who many others followed. None of the events of January 6th would have happened without him.

What follows is an account of how Trump was urged by those around him to concede the election. He refused. By the time the Electoral College had met, however (December 14), the evidence was gone. Possibly a computer engineer could have retrieved the images I saw; I don’t know. Since they only came from one location in one state, they would not have been sufficient. The point is, it was too late.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, moreover, but as far as I can tell, an eleventh-hour refusal by Mike Pence to count electoral votes from certain states on January 6 would indeed have been illegal. A vice president simply doesn’t have the Constitutionally-grounded authority to make that kind of unilateral call. I’d concluded that long before reading the Committee’s report. Would any of us have wanted Al Gore to have it back in 2001? Or Kamala Harris to have it in 2025?!

The confrontation, however, came to a head anyway.

Here is a summation of the Committee’s accusations:

Obstruction of an official proceeding of the U.S. Congress: because Trump urged Pence (on the advice of one John Eastman) to refuse to certify the election; and is accused of then sending his supporters to the Capitol to disrupt the electoral vote count.
Conspiracy to defraud the United States: because he and others told and retold what Democrats and corporate media have labeled “the Big Lie” and tried to have state officials, e.g., in Georgia, “find” him votes; this includes that idea that Pence could act unilaterally in the way described above. The accusation goes beyond just this. The Committee contends that this was premeditated: that Trump thought through the idea of stealing an election in advance of the election itself.
Conspiracy to make a false statement: because among other things Trump called for separate slates of electors in states Biden “won” to replace the official ones.
“Inciting” or “assisting,” or giving “aid and comfort” to an insurrection — because, so the charge goes, Trump watched events that afternoon unfold on television and did nothing to try and stop the violence. This allegation would enable the DOJ to invoke the Fourteenth Amendment to prevent Trump from ever holding office again, his announcement of his candidacy for the GOP nomination for 2024 last month notwithstanding.

Trump had tweeted this:

I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, we are the party of Law & Order — respect the Law and our great men and women in blue! Thank you!

Not quite memory-holed, or I wouldn’t have been able to retrieve it.

Ignored by the Committee.

Others are getting criminal referrals as well, such as Eastman, the attorney who believed Pence could act unilaterally; and of course Rudy Giuliani (who, if we can believe Byrne’s book, was plastered most of the time).

What we have just seen is, of course, unprecedented. Not once in U.S. history has a former president been accused of federal crimes committed while in office. This sort of thing happens in second world banana republics. Although in backhanded fairness, the U.S. is looking more and more like a second world banana republic with each passing day.

We should note that the Committee’s recommendations don’t have the force of law. The DOJ can do as it pleases. One can be sure, given the present environment and the DOJ’s being politicized under the Bidenistas, they will consider this carefully. They have their own separate investigation going on, headed by special counsel Jack Smith. The DOJ will be under pressure, even after the Committee disbands at the end of the year. As member Jamie Raskin (D-Md) noted, realizing that over 900 people have been incarcerated for their actions that day: “Ours is not a system of justice where foot soldiers go to jail and the masterminds and ringleaders get a free pass.”

I won’t predict Trump will actually be arrested. But doubtless Bidenista Attorney General Merrick Garland is on board with those determined to prevent a second Trump term. This long ago became an end which justifies any means.

We are probably looking at the end of Trumpism, folks.

Had this gone down six months ago, I would have said that the accusations listed above would have enflamed the GOP base. Now, in the aftermath of the “red wave that didn’t happen” (except in Florida where greater voting security ensured that it did), and evidence that some who supported Trump now want to move on, I am unsure that an actual Trump arrest will provoke anything. Maybe a few demonstrations easily and safely dismissed as the work of “baseless conspiracy theorists.”

Republicans need to think about elections, whether the U.S. is really a democracy (or should be), and what it means to be a conservative.

Otherwise, they may never “win” another major election in our lifetimes. Unless, of course, they return to nominating Bush and Romney types.

Trump (as I noted the other day) appears to be self-destructing on his own, with reckless behavior and even more reckless statements including the hyperbolic suggestion that what happened in Election 2020 could justify setting aside parts of the Constitution.

In my last article I noted that Ron DeSantis seems to have become the preferred alternative to Trump. His thinking is close enough to Trump’s to qualify as “Trumpism without Trump.” He is anti-woke, moreover, putting his money where his mouth is.

He’s not said if he’s running in 2024, though, and might not say anything definite for months — according to my calendar he has well over a year to think about it.

He’ll doubtless figure out, if he hasn’t already, what he’ll be getting himself and his family into.

DeSantis might move away from Trumpism as a matter of political survival in the corporate media environment as it is, an environment in which the left-liberals who led the crusade against Trump from the get-go, parading “Trump-Russia collusion” that never happened, will on him like packs of wolves, having hypocritically promoted him over Trump all these months. Will he have the charisma Trump had, and the stamina to weather the storm the way Trump did for all those years.

The more he looks like another Bush, the better coverage he will get!

The Bushes are all globalists, of course.

Initially, Jeb Bush was the moneyed interests’ choice back in 2016, if anyone remembers. The problem was: those narratives had all collapsed. The base was not interested. They wanted someone who at least sounded like he understood their problems. Trump was that someone.

Fast forward to the present, and what we’ve learned, or should have.

Corporate media doesn’t even pretend to be objective, or honest. They’ve weaponized the language shamelessly. I see countless references to the “deadly Capitol riot” during which “five people died.” These references don’t include the fact that the only two violent deaths happened at the hands of Capitol Police. The other three were medical emergencies.

Corporate media fabricated a wild story of Officer Brian Sickwick’s death at the hands of “rioters” clubbing him over the head.

He’d had a stroke.

Neither the January 6 Committee nor any corporate media has said nothing about one Ray Epps, almost surely an agent provocateur from the FBI, on the street urging people to force their way into the Capitol, something Trump had not said to do. Trump said to march to the Capitol; he never told anyone to go inside.

Memory-holed, all of this.

The artificial “real Matrix” fake reality is falling into place, and getting harder and harder to challenge. In this “real Matrix,” Trump planned to win Election 2020 at all costs, and when the democratic vote count went against him, he set about to overturn it, ending on January 6, 2021 when he ordered his supporters to invade the Capitol never eschewing violence. In this “real Matrix,” a man who barely campaigned, falls asleep during meetings, and can barely articulate three sentences without committing a gaffe defeated by over 7 million votes a man who was able to fill arenas.

I would not be surprised if criticisms of globalism/globalists are soon demonized as a form of antisemitism, since so many prominent globalists have been Jews.

The controlled demolition of Trumpism might mean the controlled demolition of the last concerted, national-level opposition to the dystopia being developed by the globalists. This effort is still in its planning stages but moving apace. I’ve written about it elsewhere (see especially here). If Trump can be criticized, it is for having greatly underestimated what he was up against and overestimating his ability to deal with it unilaterally. The power grab of the 2020s continues. The globalists remain considerably better organized than we are, with far greater resources (some researchers place the wealth they clandestinely command as not mere billions or trillions but in hundreds of trillions). They have plenty of insouciant people at all levels of American society doing their bidding, knowingly or not, from Congress and Silicon Valley down to syndicated columnists and common Internet trolls.

________________________

ANNOUNCING: an online course/tutorial entitled The Philosophy of Responsible Freedom, directed by Jack C. Carney with myself as chief partner: a Zoom-based intellectual encounter between an atheist (Carney) and a Christian (Yates) exploring the history of ideas using Academy of Ideas videos and supplementing them with the thoughts of others. Carney is an autodidact in areas ranging across psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology who emphasizes the importance of human relationships in a world where loss is omnipresent (he also teaches English online). I am an author and trained philosopher with a doctorate in the subject who taught philosophy courses in years past, walked away from academia, still writes philosophy emphasizing the need to identify, clarify, and evaluate the success (or failure) of worldviews in civilization, stages of civilization, the quest to build free societies, and how worldviews either enhance or hobble responsible freedom. Course/tutorial outline here. For more information or to get on our email list: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.

While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published early next year.

Thank you, “Joe Biden”!

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

Responsible Freedom Vs Globalist Techno-Feudalism: The Race Is On!, Part 2

by Steven Yates

December 10, 2022

Part 1.

Over the next few years — it might not take that long — We The People have a choice to make. Our future rides on this choice. Are we going to defend our liberties: responsible freedom? Or are we going to go completely down the rathole of mass-accepting official narratives that lead one way, towards the economic serfdom of globalist techno-feudalism.

The first option might seem hard. It probably will be. But we were never promised lives of ease, and this is a fight worth fighting. The second is doubtless easier for many: a path to economic security and comfort, via fewer threats to one’s employability, etc. It will look like a “return to normalcy.” The path through deception to slavery is always easier than one through truth to freedom. “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor.

Responsible Freedom and Conservatism.

Responsible freedom — as I use the phrase — is freedom within the bounds of morality and the rule of law. As a societal state of affairs, it applies the same to all: rich as well as poor; black, white, Jewish, Hispanic, Asian, etc.; men and women; Christian and non-Christian. No special favors for corporations, or a bought-and-paid-for political class. Interactions are voluntary and not coerced. Do no harm is an overriding principle when evaluating actions and policies. Free speech is recognized as necessary. No one is demonized and canceled because of his/her ideas. Education will acknowledge God and encourage self-mastery in a moral world: focus on what you can control and make better with your actions; learn what works, what doesn’t, and why; think before you speak and act; recognizing that we are all the same in being fallible.

Is this conservative? Shall we find out? The question to ask conservatives is, What are you trying to conserve?

In my experience, most who call themselves conservatives have no idea. This is a big reason the leftist-globalist axis of evil has kept advancing for the past century, with conservatives unable to do more than occasionally apply the brakes — and they’ve not exactly been effective at doing that.

What is worth conserving? Not merely institutions and/or traditions of the past (e.g., “traditional marriage,” though that will do for a start), but permanence. That which is eternal. The sense of a transcendent reality the principles of which are imminent in this reality, God being in charge. The Creator gave us rules (not suggestions) to live by, because if followed, they make life better.

We cannot have stability without rules and boundaries. Without acknowledging our Creator, we have nothing to go by except human efforts, all of which have failed. Try as we might, we’ve not been very good at writing our own humanist rules attempting to rescue a moral view of the world during this era when materialism has been the West’s dominant worldview.

The carnage, after all, has been unprecedented! Millions were killed in the name of secular Utopias: Marxism-Leninism, Nazism, Maoism. Even with those ideologies discredited (the only true-believers in Marxism are career academics and a few professional agitators), we stand on the brink of nuclear disaster! Nuclear war would quickly negate all the material creature comforts and technological advances some will tout as if these were sufficient to make us better humans.

Globalist Techno-Feudalism.

This brings us to the most important present-day secular Utopia: globalism, which long ago replaced Marxism among the globe’s power elites. Its goal: world government (“global governance,” “rules-based order”). It would marry the worst of Communism with the worst of Capitalism. Its methods involve technocratic population controls. Its culmination: what writers of different stripes are calling techno-feudalism. It’s also called the Great Reset: after which we peasants own nothing, have no privacy, but are happy — probably because Hollywood and Big Tech would still be entertaining us and Big Pharma would be selling us drugs.

The most visible architects of this system today are Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum (WEF), with satellite entities such as Young Global Leaders who include such folks as Canada’s Justin Trudeau and New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern.

Charles Walton, the man who developed the “Mark of the Beast, the RFID chip, warns us.

Globalism was losing ground a decade ago. The visible manifestations of its narratives, such as open borders, had lost credibility. Publications they controlled were losing readership. In Election 2016, their preferred candidate lost — arguably through her own missteps. An outsider, Donald Trump, became president never having held elected office before. Other outsiders had gained or would gain elected office elsewhere. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán is an example. So is Brazil’s Jair Bolsanaro.

The plan-demic of 2020-22 and the stolen election of 2020 brought globalism back to power. We learned how scare tactics can be weaponized, since the scared will allow local themselves to be locked down and local economies destroyed if they can be made to fear getting sick, infecting family members, everyone dying!

And if on-the-ground preventives and treatments are suppressed by controlled corporate media and a bought-and-paid-for health establishment representing The Science, this only consolidates official narratives.

Today the plan-demic is fading everywhere except China (where protests against lockdowns, courtesy of Xi Jinping’s zero-covid policy, are being suppressed). But globalism is marching on. Doug Casey’s most recent interview speaks eloquently of two of its most important devices in the works: vaccine passports and central bank digital currency (CBDC).

The reason we know corporate media is controlled is that one finds no mention of either, anywhere, in any “legacy media” outlet. The only places you will find them discussed are here, GlobalResearch.ca, and a few other “conspiracy” sites.

What will globalist techno-feudalism look like? At its top will be the GloboCorp superelite: three to four hundred extended families who deem themselves most fit to rule the world. There will be several thousand administrators and functionaries doing the bidding of the ruling elites, and visible political classes who have proved themselves controllable. Finally, all of us peasants, or serfs, tied not to land as in historical feudalism but to the global, technology-based digital money system.

Do not expect a financially independent middle class. Ours has been undergoing systemic destruction for over a generation now. There will be orders of licensed and carefully monitored professionals (doctors, lawyers, writers). But independent middle classes are dangerous to power, as the period 1950-1970 showed. The population will probably not be 8 billion when the dust settles. Let’s just remember, we have little idea of the long-term effects of the covid vaxes, but from what we know so far, things do not look especially good!

Under techno-feudalism you will access your CBDC account with a digital ID. Physical cash having been abolished, you will need this for every purchase, offline or online, with everything recorded. Spend too much on, e.g., vitamins and minerals to take care of your own health, and you might find your account limited, or such purchases digitally blocked (maybe you’ll get warned first). Specific food purchases might be blocked as well, if an algorithm “decides” (based on The Science) that you are consuming too much meat.

Dissent from official narratives, and you wake up and find your account frozen, so that you can’t (legally) buy food unless you’ve paid whatever penance is necessary to have it unlocked. Your penance will doubtless include shutting up and Following The Science.

Techno-feudalism will thus force you to get whatever shots are mandated. Refuse the latest “booster” and you’ll be deemed a “health risk” and not only will your ID be blocked, you might find yourself locked inside your own house or apartment!

With everything monitored, you will likely be assigned a social credit score not unlike what has already been implemented across China. A lowering of your score will have the same effects here that it has there: public shaming, refusal of travel and major purchases such as houses, no license for your proposed business, your children will be refused university admission. The intent will be to compel compliance by humiliating and impoverishing the noncompliant, making their lives almost unlivable. Worst of all: this will most likely be accomplished digitally, via algorithms! There will be no one to complain to, no one to talk to!

Globalists care nothing for individual persons. To them, we are cattle. Globalism is primarily about power, and only secondarily about money. Money for globalists is a means to power. Which is why they financialized Western economies and cultivated tools for aggregating billions without actually doing anything useful. It’s called “passive income,” “earned” from “money making money.” So what does the global billionaire class plan to do with all that money? Ask Bill Gates. Ask others who are spending money building huge underground bunkers that will enable them to ride out the economic (or other) devastation they plan for the rest of humanity.

Materialism: The Importance of Rejecting It.

All because the Western world, roughly a century and a half ago, began to embrace a worldview the real world consequences of which (outside academic-type theory), are that right and wrong, justice and injustice, even truth and falsity, are whatever those in power and who control the narratives say they are.

I recall reading somewhere just recently — wish I’d bookmarked it — that the reason we have hundreds of thousands of regulations compelling compliance is that we could not manage to adhere to just ten. You know the ones. They’re in Exodus 20. While they’ve been supplemented with Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount and Paul’s letters (specific guidelines for family members, e.g.), they remain the best rules for civilized living in the world as it is, given human nature as it is.

Freedom was never intended to be a closed, out-of-context absolute: the freedom to do anything one pleases, without rules or restraint. That’s not freedom. That’s chaos. We are not designed psychologically to live amidst chaos. Out of societal chaos will emerge one thing: strong public desire for someone able to restore order. What then happens?

Those who are strongest or cleverest rise to the top, take charge, and enforce their rules.

Anarchism Does Not Work.

Anarchism, given human nature as it is (in our midst being a few political-economic wolves fascinated with power), will bring tyranny. I have anarchist friends who cannot grasp this. Their argument proceeds, “if we all just….” I turn away, because it seems manifestly obvious to me that “all of us” won’t…. Globalists tend to be sociopaths without interest in the constraining rules of a universal morality. They live by their own rules. They are not open to rational argumentation.

I pray daily that I can somehow convince anarchist/voluntarist friends, because in the upcoming fight to survive against our real enemies, the satanic globalists, we need their energy! We need their optimism! We need them on our side!

Godly Versus Satanic Forces.

Did I just use the word satanic? You saw it.

Ultimately, the battle between responsible freedom and globalist techno-feudalism is a battle between godly forces and satanic forces. For some, that sounds like drama. But how can anyone not read Revelation, then watch behind-the-scenes moves toward implementing vaccine passports and CBDC as conditions for travel and economic participation, and not see an impending “mark of the beast” without which you cannot buy or sell (Rev. 13:16-17)???*

Here’s something I want to stress: the real ruling powers atop GloboCorp are not materialists!

They understand that supernatural beings are real, and act accordingly! Sometimes they push satanic rituals right into our faces, knowing that in a mostly secularized world, the majority will not see it! They seem to believe they can defy God and emerge victorious!

Or maybe they don’t think this. Not being one of them, I wouldn’t know. Maybe they see the inevitable, know they are damned, and plan to do as much damage as possible on their way down to Final Judgment and Hell.

Transhumanism.

The last stage of the globalist techno-feudal Dystopia will be transhumanism, which proposes to merge humanity with technology, e.g., put AI devices inside your body, including your brain, trying to “change” human nature. To my mind, this would be the ultimate violation of personal autonomy, as your emotional states, attitudes, and will, could be monitored digitally and controlled with pharmaceuticals.

Transhumanists have already argued in slippery-slope fashion that no one has any “moral” objections to artificial limbs or knees or hip replacements. Why not devices able to be implanted in human brains that could make repairs or connect brains to computers?

Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari is as complete an archglobalist and transhumanist as you are likely to encounter, with his bestsellers Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014) and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016) (the title alone tells you all you need to know). He is tightly intertwined with the WEF as their court intellectual. He promotes transhumanism openly and has counseled, “We just don’t need the vast majority of the population in today’s world,” a statement that ought to be kept in mind when assessing what is said of the long-term effects of the covid shots, or whatever else comes down the pike between now and 2030.

Billionaire Elon Musk claims to have a device almost ready for such implantation. He calls it the Neuralink device. Reading about it, I have to think the hullabaloo over his takeover of Twitter is little more than another distraction. I, for one, would not turn my back on Musk!

Schwab calls the merging of technology into the human body the “fourth industrial revolution.” Harari calls it “the ability to hack human beings.” What Musk has said: “We are now confident that the Neuralink device is ready for humans, so timing is a function of working through the FDA approval process.”

Summing up.

To say this is a battle conservatives do not want to lose is the understatement of the decade! So how do we win?

One question before us: does Trump understand any of this? Does DeSantis?

If not, is there someone out there who does, and can lay it out in a way ordinary voters can understand and find compelling? (I am not an “influencer” with any special reach.)

If nothing is done about the problems with elections I discussed in Part 1, will it matter?

Are we not looking at reasons for separating and forming our own political-economic communities and institutional arrangements?

Again, this is not a “conspiracy theory.” There is overwhelming evidence for everything in this article, much of it in the globalists’ own books (e.g., those of Schwab or Harari or others) and articles, or on their websites, or on Elon Musk’s Twitter feed.

Many observers see the Federal Reserve as instrumental in bringing about the next financial debacle, which will make 2008 look like a picnic by comparison because the printed-money asset bubbles are magnitudes larger now than they were then.

The most credible plan, many have concluded, is (1) destroy the dollar by eliminating its status as the world’s reserve currency; (2) this will destroy the livelihoods of millions of Americans practically overnight, so that (3); they will beg for salvation from instant impoverishment. (4) GloboCorp will ride in for the rescue. The price will be accepting CBDC, vaccine passports, a China-style social credit system, and the rest of the Great Reset of globalist techno-feudalism and transhumanism.

Ladies and gentlemen, the race is on!

We either envision and implement responsible freedom, for ourselves if need be, or globalist techno-feudalism is our future.

Merry Christmas!

*I discourage Christians from believing that Jesus Christ will “rapture” them off the Earth prior to a seven-year “Great Tribulation,” the unsaved “left behind.” This is a misreading of Scripture, a product of the Darby-Scofield axis that corrupted many Evangelicals last century and still has many in its thrall. Admittedly it is comforting to believe that one will escape the evils likely to befall this world. Comfort never made an idea true, though. Rapture-cultism is a sign of immaturity in one’s belief. I went through such a phase myself — in high school! Since God did not give us any specific timetable regarding His planned return, Christians’ best bet is to set aside eschatology (the study of, or maybe unhealthy obsession with, end times) and focus on the work that needs to be done now, especially winning souls for Christ.

For an in-depth, scholarly study of the origins of Scofieldism and its effects on Christendom, see The Incredible Scofield and His Book (1988, 2004) by Joseph M. Canfield. Also useful is Gary DeMar, Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths: How Misreading Their Bibles Neutralizes Christians (2004; 2^nd Ed. 2010).

Part 1.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

________________________

ANNOUNCING: an online course/tutorial entitled The Philosophy of Responsible Freedom, directed by Jack C. Carney with myself as chief partner: a Zoom-based intellectual encounter between an atheist (Carney) and a Christian (Yates) exploring the history of ideas using Academy of Ideas videos and supplementing them with the thoughts of others. Carney is an autodidact in areas ranging across psychology, psychiatry and anthropology who emphasizes the importance of human relationships in a world where loss is omnipresent (he also teaches English online). I am an author and trained philosopher with a doctorate in the subject who taught philosophy courses in years past, walked away from academia, still writes philosophy emphasizing the need to identify, clarify, and evaluate the success (or failure) of worldviews in civilization, stages of civilization, the quest to build free societies, and how worldviews either enhance or hobble responsible freedom. Course/tutorial outline here. For more information or to get on our email list: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.

While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published early next year.

Thank you, “Joe Biden”!

Responsible Freedom Vs Globalist Techno-Feudalism, Part 1

By Steven Yates

November 26, 2022

The Race Is On!

Trump has announced, as everyone reading this probably knows. The response has been predictable. Trump’s speech was low key, with less bombast than in the past. To a corporate media waiting to pounce, this became “low energy” and “boring.” The speech covered a lot of territory. Thus it “meandered.”

In many respects it was a dark speech, though, recounting the disasters that have befallen America since January 21, 2021. These are easily summarized: the worst price inflation in half a century, chaos at the border, rising violent crime; rising interest rates, falling home values; worsening hostility to everything white, gender-bending being forced on elementary school children who have no psychological defenses against it; a foreign proxy war against Russia involving threats of nukes; aggressive gestures by China against Taiwan, and North Korea against everyone in reach of their rockets (South Korea, Japan, Guam). Little Rocket Man threatens to destabilize the entire region.

None of this would be happening were Trump still in office! Trump noted that we have two more years of the present disastrous regime!

He didn’t seem to play up the theft of his presidency in 2020 — or comment on the relative absence of the predicted red wave in 2022.

Biden’s approval rating was just 36 percent going into November 8, with many in his own party expressing doubt that he should run again in 2024.

So I ask this: does the near-absence of a resounding red wave make any sense whatsoever?

I myself wrote about the grip of the abortion death culture on the country, especially on left-leaning career women and brainwashed Gen-Zers who also support every “diversity” measure out there. These are important counter-considerations. But are American voters, whatever their sex or generation, especially if they buy gas and food and worry about their safety or that of their children, really so completely out to lunch that they would vote to keep the party responsible for the debacle of the past two years in power?

So could there have been fraud on a massive scale in this election?

Final consideration: a red wave did happen in Florida. Paul Craig Roberts explains:

How do we reconcile Florida’s red wave with the absence of one elsewhere? The answer is that Florida doesn’t permit all the voting ways that make it easy to steal. I voted in Florida on a paper ballot that was counted immediately prior to my departing the site, and I was given a confirmation of my counted vote. Gov. DeSantis and Senator Rubio won by overwhelming margins. DeSantis defeated Democrat Crist by 59% to 40%. Even heavily Democrat Miami-Dade County voted 55% for Republican DeSantis. Rubio defeated his Democrat challenger by a double-digit margin. Of Florida’s contingent of 28 members of the House, 20 are Republican. Why only in Florida were Democrats rejected as was expected to happen in many states?

Indeed, why?

My first point: except apparently for Florida, our voting system is broken. We either fix it, or we America First conservatives can forget ever being allowed to win again on a scale large enough to make any difference. Trump can forget about winning in 2024. The lawfare currently being waged against him will only accelerate as it is.

What to do?

Get rid of electronic voting machines and end mail-in voting.

Completely.

Utterly.

Forever.

Return to one-day, in-person voting, locally in one’s precinct (not in large voting centers as was done in Maricopa Co., Arizona, and precipitated the chaos there).

This was the system we Boomers grew up with. It worked. We took it for granted.

Use paper ballots that are verified with voter ID (drivers license, proof of legal residency), recorded, and counted on the spot.

All in one day!

This is why we call it Election Day (not Week, or Month)!

The system we grew up with delivered same-day results. We knew by late evening who won any given race.

The word digital wasn’t in our vocabularies.

Now we have all this much-vaunted digital technology on top of mail-in voting, and it takes days and even weeks to process and count ballots, often due to equipment “malfunctions” that appeared out of nowhere!

This is ridiculous!

My fear, though, is that such proposals as these have no chance of gaining traction, because of the grip official narratives now have on the body politic — among Establishment Republicans as well as Establishment Democrats.

Controlled corporate media (which no longer bothers to hide its preference for the Party of Chaos and Decadence) hammers them incessantly.

The first prevailing grand narrative: “election denialism” and “conspiracy theories,” not widespread fraud, cost Republicans their projected red wave!

Almost no one with visibility is challenging this publicly at a national level!

Kari Lake is challenging what happened in Maricopa Co., but in the face of the ridicule she’s receiving from local corporate media (especially the Phoenix-based Arizona Republic), I see no reason to think her challenge will go anywhere.

Oh, and there’s Mike Lindell, the “pillow guy,” who claims that his team caught cheating in real time.

But he’s a “conspiracy theorist”!

So I doubt we will see any investigation of whether fraud occurred in Election 2022, where, when, and how accomplished.

The approved messaging: repudiate Trump and Trumpism, red-staters, and you’ll win elections again!

Trump and Trumpism are “threats to democracy.” This is the second prevailing grand narrative presently circulating.

In plain English: we are being told to drop America First conservatism and go back to the globalist-serving fake “movement conservatism” of the Bushes, the Romneys, and other neocons.

If this occurs, the Party of Chaos and Decadence might as well stay in charge!

My second point, therefore, follows naturally:

We anti-globalist America First conservatives need to figure out where we want the GOP to go, or where we want to go with or without the GOP.

I am open to the possibility that Trump may not be our best standard-bearer.

That may shock some readers, but let’s remember: our movement predates Trump. Approved narratives about the presumed benefits of “globalization” to Americans had collapsed, as well as those of the “social justice” movement (once called political correctness, now it’s called Wokery) as whites became the only ethnic group in America to enter a visibly downward economic spiral in the new millennium.

These collapses happened well before 2015. Trump did not cause them. He benefited from them. He was able to channel their effects on the GOP base and ride them straight into the White House. The fact that a man with no previous experience in politics was able to do this ought to be of great interest!

But now?

In my last article I expressed bafflement over Trump’s treatment of DeSantis. What I’ve read and what correspondence I’ve had since doesn’t go beyond what even mainstream corporate media has figured out: DeSantis won reelection in Florida without seeking Trump’s endorsement. This bruised Trump’s ego, and he’s launched a preemptive strike against a potential rival for 2024 nomination.

I worry that Trump’s Mt. Everest sized ego, combined with a lack of focus and an inability to control his temper, are going to be his downfall. As he remains for all practical purposes the dominant influence on the Republican Party base, he could take Republicans down with him.

Even if DeSantis runs (he has not announced, and has plenty of time). Then there will be question marks. Would a hypothetical Candidate DeSantis state the real reasons for his 2022 victory in Florida and pledge to fix our broken election system? Or would he keep silent, having caved in the face of the approved narratives?

Either way, absent such fixes, we get four more years of rule by the Party of Chaos and Decadence!

Which would be catastrophic!

Especially with World Economic Forum Great Resetters breathing down our necks!

We America First conservatives have to define what we stand for besides the slogans: what kind of society we want, and what we are willing to do to build it. This includes the possibility of withdrawing, separating, building our own autonomous, self-sustaining institutions — independent of the official ones. And be prepared to defend ourselves, if need be (emphasis on defense!!). For however long it takes to ride this out.

We need to do this now — well before 2024 gets here! Actually we needed to do it yesterday — last week, last month, last year! Long before now!

It’s easy to say, we have over a full year. That’s a good recipe for sitting on our rear ends while our enemies are doing nothing of the sort!

I developed some suggestions here, here, here, here, here, and here! I know of groups who have already mostly separated themselves and are educating others how to do it.

GloboCorp — the Great Resetters, globalists, the superelite, call them what you will — know what kind of world they want!

They have said so, many times, in multiple venues, and in books that are readily available on sites like Amazon and elsewhere.

They did not change Agenda 21 to Agenda 2030 because the latter phrase looks prettier.

Twenty-thirty is their target year, in which they plan for us peasants to “own nothing, have no privacy, and be happy.”

Given the situation with voting and the unlikelihood that it will be fixed, I am not optimistic that the present system can be saved! But it can be exited!

Hence my interest in systems capable of political-economic autonomy and independence — rooted in an ethical and political philosophy I’ve begun calling responsible freedom.

The race is on: globalist techno-feudalism — the culmination of all the mainstream-approved narratives, plus the destruction of the dollar and Anglo-American (white, Christian) heritage and culture, ending with the Great Reset — or responsible freedom in which persons have intrinsic value and we act accordingly in a decentralizing world.

I will develop these final points in more detail in Part 2. For now, it should be sufficient to say: this race will be won, or lost, by 2030! We have, at most, eight years to get this done! After that it will be too late!

To Be Continued in Part 2.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

________________________

ANNOUNCING: an online course/tutorial entitled The Philosophy of Responsible Freedom, directed by Jack C. Carney with myself as chief partner: a Zoom-based intellectual encounter between an atheist (Carney) and a Christian (Yates) exploring the history of ideas using Academy of Ideas videos and supplementing them with the thoughts of others. Carney is an autodidact in areas ranging across psychology, psychiatry and anthropology who emphasizes the importance of human relationships in a world where loss is omnipresent (he also teaches English online). I am an author and trained philosopher with a doctorate in the subject who taught philosophy courses in years past, walked away from academia, still writes philosophy emphasizing the need to identify, clarify, and evaluate the success (or failure) of worldviews in civilization, stages of civilization, the quest to build free societies, and how worldviews either enhance or hobble responsible freedom. Course/tutorial outline here. For more information or to get on our email list: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.

While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published early next year.

Thank you, “Joe Biden”!

No Red Wave? What’s Next?

By Steven Yates

November 15, 2022

The Party of Chaos and Debauchery is celebrating. There was no anticipated “red wave,” they are saying. Nothing happened beyond fulfilling predictions that Republicans would take the House with the slimmest of margins while the Party of Chaos and Debauchery kept the Senate. Many Trump-endorsed Republican candidates lost their races. As I write this, key races in Arizona and Georgia remain undecided. The former is a lawsuit waiting to happen, as it seems clear: the “malfunction” of Maricopa Co. voting equipment (that worked fine during primaries) occurred primarily in Republican-dominated areas. Hundreds of thousands of votes remain unprocessed, again as of this writing. Enough of those should go to Kari Lake to put her over the top.

If they do not — and especially if Katie Hobbs is declared the winner in mainstream media — Kari Lake has positioned herself to cry foul.

There can be no doubt there was fraud in 2020, and that it changed the outcome. I recall seeing the massive (and mathematically impossible) 3 am spikes in votes, all for Biden, in places like Antrim Co., Michigan — on webpages that were scrubbed from the Internet in a matter of days. I know of hundreds of other people who saw the same thing I did. I recall the affidavits, signed under penalty of perjury. All memory-holed, so the Establishment could collectively bleat, “there’s no evidence!” Two election workers who wrote to me in response to an article I penned told me they had witnessed malfeasance. At least one had spoken up publicly, but shut up following a death threat.

I didn’t see anything like that this time. But Paul Craig Roberts is open to the possibility of another stolen election, based on the results of exit polling which were not reflected in the actual outcome. He recently wrote (worth quoting at length; note that he cites an Establishment source, not Infowars; all emphases are his):

Today November 9, 2022, updated at 10:49 AM EST, CNN reporters Zachary B. Wolf and Curt Merrill remarked that the widely expected red wave did not materialize and then went on to present data that is inconsistent with the closeness of the voting.

The reporters compare the exit polls from the 2018 elections with those of the 2022 elections. The comparisons show that the Democrats lost support in Tuesday’s elections among women, moderates, youth, people of color, urban voters, college graduates, and independents.

Exit polls 2022 midterm 2018 shift

The Democrats’ support among women declined from 19 points favorable to Democrats to only 8 points. Republican support among men rose from 4 points over Democrats to 14 points.

By age, the preference for Democrats over Republicans for 18-29 years of age declined from 35 points to 28 and for 30-44 years of age from 19 points to 4. Republican support over Democrats rose from 1 to 10 points for those 45-64 years of age and from 2 to 12 points for those 65 and older.

White men’s preference for Republicans increased from 21 to 28 points. White women moved from a 50-50 split to an 8 point preference for Republicans. Black women’s preference for Democrats declined from 85 points to 78. Black men’s preference for Democrats declined from 76 points to 65. Latina women’s preference for democrats fell from 47 points to 33; and Latino men’s preference for Democrats fell from 29 points to 8.

Urban voters preference for Democrats declined from 33 points over Republicans to 17 points. Suburban and Rural voters preferences for Republicans rose by 6 points and 15 points.

Democrats also lost support among white and black college graduates. Among white votes without college degrees the preference for Republicans rose by 10 points.

Among moderates, the preference for Democrats eroded from 26 points to 15. Among conservatives the Republican advantage rose from 67 points t 83. Among liberals there was essentially no change.

The CNN exit polls show substantial erosion of the Democrat voting base since the 2018 election. How can such substantial erosion be consistent with the lack of any significant Republican gain on Tuesday?

The outcome of Tuesday’s election is made even more difficult to comprehend by CNN’s reporters when they report:

“Back in 2018, 37% of voters said they were Democrats, compared with 33% who said they were Republicans and 30% who said they were independents. In 2022, it was Republicans who have the edge. When they won control of the House in 2018, Democrats had an advantage among independent voters. That is nearly gone in 2022.

“Both Democrats and Republicans improved their performance among the party faithful. But Republicans built a lead among voters who don’t have a a favorable view of either party. Democrats lost their edge among voters who have a favorable view of both parties.”

There are many other indications that indicate that much is amiss in the vote count. Polls show that Biden suffers an approval rate of only 36% and that a large majority of Americans do not want Biden to run for reelection in two years. How is this preference consistent with the vote count of Tuesday’s election?

Consider also that the party in power loses representation in midterm elections, but despite the substantial turn away from Democrats revealed by CNN, this normal result did not occur on Tuesday.

Moreover, consider that in Florida, there was a red wave. Ron DeSantis won reelection handily, as did Marco Rubio. How so? What made Florida different? Turning to Roberts again:

The answer is that Florida doesn’t permit all the voting ways that make it easy to steal. I voted in Florida on a paper ballot that was counted immediately prior to my departing the site, and I was given a confirmation of my counted vote. Gov. DeSantis and Senator Rubio won by overwhelming margins. DeSantis defeated Democrat Crist by 59% to 40%. Even heavily Democrat Miami-Dade County voted 55% for Republican DeSantis. Rubio defeated his Democrat challenger by a double-digit margin. Of Florida’s contingent of 28 members of the House, 20 are Republican. Why only in Florida were Democrats rejected as was expected to happen in many states?

I don’t know. As I said, I saw no vote spikes. Maybe the thieves have learned to cover their tracks better.

Or maybe — just maybe — this cigar is just a cigar, and the abortion death culture is a lot stronger than even I thought. I sensed a lot of anger among feminists and their many sympathizers over the Supreme Court reversing Roe v Wade. All voted for the Party of Chaos and Debauchery.

Plus the fact that the leading edge of Gen Z is now old enough to vote in numbers large enough to affect the outcome. Gen Z voted overwhelmingly for the Party of Chaos and Debauchery. This is not good, as Gen Z is the largest cohort in history!

Bottom line: the Party of Chaos and Debauchery still controls the culture (via corporate media and the enormous entertainment industry). As long as materialism remains the prevailing worldview in the West, this is not going to change. Morality will continue to be subjectively defined and subordinated to identity politics and personal whim.

We should have learned from 2020’s introduction of a genetically engineered virus into the world, moreover, that scare tactics work! The scare tactic this time was to demonize “MAGA” Republicans as “threats to democracy.” Since most people now consider the right to vote as a sign they live in a real, bona fide democracy, the tactic worked.

These all may have balanced out our side’s focus on roaring inflation, for example, or rising violent crime, or the disaster on the Southern border. Remember, though, that partisans of the Party of Chaos and Debauchery see all attention on the latter as nothing more than “nativism” and “xenophobia.”

Such domestic issues may also have nullified the perceived weakness of the Bidenistas in the face of foreign leaders either taking or contemplating actions (Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine, the Chinese Communist Party menacing Taiwan, and Kim Jong Un returning to firing off rockets capable of reaching Japan and Guam). We are closer to a nuclear confrontation with Russia than we have been since the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962). Somehow, this didn’t seem important!

Returning to the election, what I think we need to do — among other things to secure elections if we hope to have any semblance of free and fair elections in the future — is get rid of electronic voting machines and digital processing of votes, completely, once and for all, forever. It has been known since the early 2000s that these machines are vulnerable to hacking and fraud. Can they or can they not be connected to the Internet? The official answer to this is, No, but I think we are all clear: the official answer, like many official answers, is a lie!

Digitizing everything is going to be our downfall.

In the meantime, we’ve got what we’ve got: a media celebrating the losses of the “MAGA (Trump-endorsed) Republicans,” with many Republicans themselves now declaring Trump to be “toxic.”

Yes, it’s all too convenient.

This is exactly what the globalists want: their opponents uncertain and divided amongst themselves, and Trump out of the picture as a viable candidate in 2024 in favor of someone they can control, or believe they can bring under control. Will that someone be Ron DeSantis? It’s too soon to tell, and I’m not making any predictions as I’ve seen nothing where he states directly that he wants the job.

Trump, in the meantime, is not helping himself any, with his verbal assaults on DeSantis, especially as the two seem to agree on most essentials. For a while I thought this was being orchestrated by corporate media, but now I am not so sure. Trump comes across as a bully with labels like “Ron DeSanctimonious,” which serve no one’s interests including his.

Citing this time James Howard Kunstler who opined recently:

Speaking of Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump, the ex-President has been verbally laying into the Florida governor so viciously lately that he might have made a fatal error in his quest for electoral redemption. The opponents of Progressive-Woke-Jacobinism don’t need a circus ringmaster. They need a credible leader, especially one that can manage his or her emotions at least as well as Vladimir Putin does.

Kunstler is right. Trump’s ego and his temper may yet be his undoing. And since no one else is ready to assume the mantle of leading Trumpism in a broader sense (economic nationalism, opposition to globalism and creeping technocracy), if Trump goes down and DeSantis doesn’t rise up — or Kari Lake or someone we’ve not seen yet — the country goes down with him.

But aren’t there other Republicans (some might bleat)?

Who?

Ted Cruz types? Lindsey Graham? Please! Someone else out of a “movement conservatism” that has conserved nothing for the past 70 years???

If that crowd is all the Republican Party has to offer — and if it cannot find some way to sell itself to Gen Z — then the country will fall the rest of the way to the Party of Chaos and Debauchery in 2024 and to the techno-feudalist Great Reset by 2028.

Recall that 2030 is the globalist target date for a world in which “you will own nothing, have no privacy, but life has never been better!” We are already well over four-fifths of the way there!

________________________

ANNOUNCING: an online course/tutorial entitled The Philosophy of Responsible Freedom, directed by Jack C. Carney with myself as chief partner: a Zoom-based intellectual encounter between an atheist (Carney) and a Christian (Yates) exploring the history of ideas using Academy of Ideas videos and supplementing them with the thoughts of others. Carney is an autodidact in areas ranging across psychology, psychiatry and anthropology who emphasizes the importance of human relationships in a world where loss is omnipresent (he also does online classes in English). I am an author and trained philosopher who taught many philosophy courses in years past, walked away from academia, still writes philosophy emphasizing the need to identify, clarify, and evaluate the success (or failure) of worldviews in civilization, stages of civilization, the quest to build free societies, and how worldviews either enhance or hobble responsible freedom. Course/tutorial outline here. For more information or to get on our email list: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.

While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published soon.

Thank you, “Joe Biden”!

This would mean reduced visibility on NewsWithViews.com. It might even mean a “farewell” piece in December, even if only temporarily. Those are the breaks. I am not independently wealthy. To reverse this while there is still time (i.e., before a new client accepts my offer), please consider pledging today by going here and signing up.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

We Need to Repudiate Political Violence

By Steven Yates

November 4, 2022

What occasions this article was reading, on the very day my last article appeared, of the physical attack on Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, in California.

The story in a nutshell: David DePape, 42, allegedly broke into the Pelosi home and confronted Paul Pelosi, 82, demanding to know, “Where is Nancy? Where is Nancy?” She wasn’t there, of course. She was in Washington. He was somehow able to get a 911 call out, then leave the line open. An attentive dispatcher named Heather Grives inferred from what she heard at the other end that something was seriously wrong and sent police to the Pelosi residence stat. They found DePape and Pelosi struggling over a hammer which DePape had brought with him and used to break windows to force his way in. On orders from the police to drop the hammer, Pelosi relinquished it, and DePape then used it to savagely attack him. Pelosi sustained arm, hand, and head injuries including a skull fracture, requiring emergency surgery and hospitalization.

As of this writing, Paul Pelosi is expected to make a full recovery.

DePape is facing charges that include first-degree burglary, attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and elder abuse.

This is all based on official reportage. One thing bothers me. The Pelosis are rich, obviously. I found myself wondering if their house is in a gated community, like many of the rich in that area. Did they, or the community, not have private security? If so, how was DePape able to get that far without being confronted?

Are there grounds for doubting the veracity of this story? I don’t know….

A lot of people would have to be “in on it,” including the San Francisco police, the dispatcher mentioned above, others.

One thing is for sure: corporate media is having a field day! You see, DePape is said to have espoused many of the same things advocated on sites like this one, and by people such as myself. He is said to have blogged denouncing global elites, accusing them of being behind the plandemic (no indication that he used that word), denouncing anti-white racism, promoting the idea that Election 2020 was stolen, linking to sites maintaining that the covid-19 jabs are deadly.

All very convenient….

He also allegedly wrote about Jews (speaking of the “Holohoax”), about the globalists being “Satan-worshipping pedophiles” (the idea QAnon peddles), about space aliens.

It is unclear how solid his attachment to the political right was. No one has supplied an immediate motive for his attack. Estranged from his family for years, according to the San Francisco Chronicle (article difficult to access because of a paywall) his Internet history showed him to have once been a member of the Green Party. He had been a pro-nudist activist who made jewelry working with quartz crystals.

In short, the guy looks to have been a nut.

Or another patsy. We’ll just have to stay tuned on that one.

Two weeks prior to a major election, corporate media is playing up a connection between an alleged violent attack on the spouse of a sitting member of Congress and “election denial” and other “conspiracy theories.”

Even should this be a false flag somehow, what I have to say applies anyway.

I know of no one here, or on other sites I frequent, who has advocated violence against anyone, especially public figures.

We are nevertheless blamed by the Bidenistas and their media mouthpieces for the toxic and increasingly tense political climate, which has resulted in threats against election workers as well as public officials (and their families).

I believe the organized left is far more to blame for this climate. Why? Because leftists control far more corporate media than do conservatives. Their resources are vastly superior to ours! They control Big Tech and other corporate endeavors (not Twitter anymore, and listen to them howl!). They control Hollywood and entertainment media, academia and public schools, and since January 21, 2021, Congress and the White House.

The left has weaponized language, promoted censorship (dating back at least to Trump’s upset victory in November 2016), staged proven hoaxes (e.g., Russiagate), persecuted and prosecuted political foes, and broadcasted its own messages of hate and derangement surrounded with hypocritical virtue-signaling about “protecting democracy.”

Are we really supposed to trust left-leaning media to report an incident like this truthfully without watching very closely?

But never mind all that.

I think we should repudiate initiating violence against those we disagree with, and we need to do it now!

We need to affirm that violence is justified only in retaliation against its initiation by others, especially leftists. If there is violence, let them start it. Let it be obvious who is starting it.

And never mind what Trump was alleged to have said back in the day — in arenas where leftists were protesting outside, blocking highways, and menacing attendees when they attempted to come and go in peace.

We need to affirm — or perhaps reaffirm — that what we do is rooted in a moral view of the universe, that unlike leftists we have a moral compass.

There are definite rights versus wrongs in this world!

Otherwise, what business do we have condemning what we maintain the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates, George Soros, other globalists, have been up to?

If the frustration becomes too much, we should withdraw instead of engaging “the other side.” I have advocated doing this anyway — as Brandon Smith has recently compellingly argued, “red state” communities are going to have to form alternative economies to protect themselves from the Great Reset.

Alternative economies include: growing vegetables for food, raising chickens and livestock; being able to supply clean water, construct housing, keep the lights on; etc. Those involved should indeed be prepared to defend themselves, and that means preserving gun ownership for defensive use. There will be enough work involved in all this that those doing it will probably not have time to pursue “conspiracy theories.”

Think self-control and love, instead of unfocused rage and vituperation.

Take advice from both the ancient Stoics and Christianity.

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus (50 – 138 A.D.) counseled self-control in the following fashion, writing in his Enchiridion (Manual):

There are the things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power. Within our power are opinion, aim, desire, aversion, and, in one word, whatever affairs are our own. Beyond our power are body, property, reputation, office, and, in one word, whatever are not properly our own affairs.

Or in modern parlance, we can control our personal speech and behaviors, our focus and personal goals — all our immediate thoughts, words, actions.

We cannot control the motives or opinions of others, the reactions of others to what we say, or actions taken by others.

Any more than we can control traffic, or the weather.

How much grief do people cause themselves, to the point of damaging their health, trying to control what they cannot control, or griping about what is beyond their control?

We can, of courses, control what we read, allow into our minds, and learn about. We can learn new skills.

(I have written more about the benefits of a Stoic outlook here and here.)

In what spirit do we advance what we can control?

How about love, instead of hate or indifference?

Christianity enters the picture at this point.

For we should love one another, as Jesus Christ loved us (John 13:34; John 15:12). This includes political foes and even enemies (Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:27f.). Loving our enemies does not mean allowing them to hurt us. It means appealing to God’s grace for help in adopting the right attitude as we respond to them, and defend ourselves if necessary. Physical violence should always be a last resort.

Paul told the Corinthians:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I have become sounding brass and clanging cymbal…. Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely; does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things…. And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor. 13:1, 4-7, 13).

For my part, I have criticized the Bidenistas and other Democrats plenty. I have described the present administration’s policies as disastrous, or catastrophic. But I cannot find it in me to wish them physical harm, or to wish harm on their family members. That seems deeply and profoundly evil to me.

My counsel, therefore: respond to the Democrats’ disastrous or catastrophic policies by going to the polls on November 8 and voting Republican.

Go in a spirit of desiring what is best for the nation, not simply defeating the other side. What would be best for the nation: energy independence, border security, sound money, sound health/medical science, restored agricultural and manufacturing bases, homeschooling, decentralizing power generally. Those will do for a start.

Add to that election security. Because: yeah, I know, there’s a danger of elections being digitally or otherwise stolen on November 8 (especially in places like Arizona where an articulate “conservative populist” presents an existential threat to the status quo). That is what poll watchers are for, and the most we can do is encourage their vigilance. Vigilance does not mean intimidation, or bullying. It means watchfulness. It means controlling what one can control.

If we do not do these things, in the spirit of control over our emotions, countering lies with truth, and engaging others with the love Christ showed for us — and who suffered far worse than any of us ever will — regardless of what they do, then we risk becoming no better than those we oppose.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

__________________________

While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published soon.

The Patreon.com campaign I have been running improved a little this past month, with one new Patron since my last article. The reality remains: people are exiting such sites, often for reasons beyond their (or my) control. I might still have to return to pursuing copywriting, copyediting and ghostwriting clients as a source of income in this era of roaring inflation.

Thank you, “Joe Biden”!

Hope … and Danger!

By Steven Yates

October 28, 2022

Though I’ve written in support of a few foreign leaders who have emerged against globalism (here and here), activity on the home front these days gives me guarded hope!

The more I see and hear from Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, for example, the more impressed I am. She understands fully the damage the Bidenistas have done over the past 21 months. A quick rundown:

roaring inflation that did not exist on January 21, 2021, including record high gas and other energy prices, and soaring food prices;
a worse (and worsening) crime rate in all the big cities;
chaos on the southern border, with illegal aliens bringing deadly drugs such as fentanyl into the country;
overtures by cult-of-woke-infatuated “educators” to sexualize elementary-school children, encouraging them to question their “gender”;
critical race theory, also in “education” at every level;
the increasingly dangerous foreign proxy war by puppet governments such as Kyiv against Russia (which did not start on Feb. 24!), as the U.S. pours tax dollars into Ukraine. Articles are now appearing in mainstream publications about the growing danger of the conflict escalating to where a nuclear exchange cannot be ruled out. (I would not put it past NATO to set off a “dirty bomb” somewhere inside one of the disputed regions and blame Putin);
the Chinese Communist Party rattling its sabers against Taiwan as Xi, who is no dummy, grabs a third term;
North Korea’s resident psychopath Kim Jong-Un again testing missiles capable of reaching Japan and Guam.

Under Trump — until March 2020, anyway — some of these problems existed but were under control. There was minimal inflation by official measures. The border was mostly stable. Trump, unlike his predecessors, did not start any new foreign wars or singlehandedly destroy any foreign nations (as did Hillary Clinton when she was Barack Obama’s Secretary of State).

African-American and Hispanic employment were at all-time highs!

Anyway, back to Kari Lake. The woman is poised, chooses her words carefully, and clearly exhibits the confidence one expects in a prospective leader. She is the perfect choice to become Arizona’s next governor.

Her opponent in the Party of Jacobinism and Chaos, Katie Hobbs, a former social worker, present Secretary of State in Arizona, and an open-borders globalist who believes in abortion-on-demand up to the point of birth (and even after!) refuses to debate her in public!

Kari Lake has all the right critics, one might say. They are chanting all the expected mantras trying to demonize her: “conspiracy theorist,” “election denier,” “MAGA extremist,” “a threat to our [sic.] democracy,” “the most dangerous politician in America,” etc.

Consider how she recently handled the “election denier” allegation from a reporter in front of other reporters (scroll to 7:28):

If you’re going to start throwing around terms like election denier, let’s remember who the other election deniers were: Hillary Clinton and all the Democrats. Let’s talk about election deniers. Here’s [pointing to a list of names on a sheet of paper] a list of 150 Democrats denying election results. So it’s okay for Democrats to question elections, but it’s not okay for Republicans? It’s a crock of BS, every one of you knows it, we have our freedom of speech, and we’re not going to relinquish it to a bunch of fake news propagandists. Since 2000, people have questioned the legitimacy of our elections, and all we’re asking, is that in the future we don’t have to have that happen anymore.

Pow!

That’s just one example!

One reason Kari Lake is skilled at dealing with corporate media and more than able to put its little robots in their places, is that she worked successfully in corporate media for close to three decades. She knows corporate media inside and out. She knows how it works. She knows, from first-hand experience, that mainstream media sites like CNN are little more than propaganda mills for approved narratives. Among these approved narratives is that “Joe Biden” is both legitimate and effective.

Given this, one of the reasons millions of people question the legitimacy of Election 2020 is that even given what we see on public message boards such as those of Yahoo, and given the Twitter mobs … are there really that many American voters who are stupid enough to have put the present administration in power???

“Joe Biden” (plus teleprompter plus earpiece) is clearly the worst president of our lifetimes. He is the most Orwellian, appearing recently against a red-tinted background like something out of a dystopian sci-fi movie, warning about “MAGA Republicans.” The Bidenistas make Jimmy Carter look effective by comparison. I would think Sleepy Joe’s handlers would be sufficiently embarrassed to consider replacing him, possibly before 2024 (probably the fact that this would make Kamala “Giggles” Harris president is the only thing holding them back!). In how many meetings will the man have to doze off; how many public appearances will he make where he lapses into word salad at least once?

There is hope, and it is growing as we come nearer to November 8. Much of that hope lies with Lake and other newcomers to the political scene — most of them outsiders, as was Trump. Some are facing off with other newcomers, and some are challenging entrenched and well-connected incumbents in the Party of Jacobinism and Chaos whose disastrous policies are catching up with them.

The rundown: J.D. Vance versus Tim Ryan in Ohio, Blake Masters versus Mark Kelly also in Arizona, Joe Kent versus Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in the State of Washington, Dr. Mehmet Oz versus John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, Lee Zeldin in New York State versus the disastrous Kathy Hochul — who was never elected but appointed to replace the Party of Jacobinism and Chaos led state’s earlier disaster, Andrew Cuomo.

A new, Republican-controlled Congress might well put the kibosh to the January 6 Political Persecution Committee and the “insurrection” official narrative. It might work to restore the border controls that had developed 2017-20.

These are not “movement conservatives,” much to the chagrin of those who are. It may be said, correctly, that “movement conservatism” never conserved anything. It did nothing to stop political correctness back in the 1990s; I was there. It had done nothing to stop the abortion-mill death culture before that (although this will remain a problem for as long as materialism remains the dominant worldview in Western intellectual and media culture). “Movement conservatism” did nothing to prevent the rising “gay rights” movement, also beginning in the 1990s, that eventually morphed into ”gay marriage,” “transgender,” and the any-gender-you-like movements of 2020s wokery.

Do you want Replacement Theory? My prayer is that we are seeing the permanent replacement of “movement conservatives” with “conservative populists” who can articulate firm opposition to the globalists and their corporate media mouthpieces by speaking to what people care about, which is putting food on their tables and gas in their vehicles without breaking the bank.

Kari Lake has used the term globalism a few times. I do not know how much she, or the others I named, know about it; or how fully they grasp the magnitude of the predicament we are in, as powerful World Economic Forum types funded by billionaires continue to advance covid-19 vaccine passports and other instruments of their technocratic surveillance-and-control systems.

At least they are not furthering it, knowingly or unknowingly, unlike their opponents in the Party of Jacobinism and Chaos.

That brings me to the danger referred to in the title above.

Globalists have made it more than clear that their Great Reset (for example) is not a “conspiracy theory.” I have copies of the Schwabster’s books Covid-19: The Great Reset (2020) and The Great Narrative: For a Better Future (2021) sitting on the shelf to my right as I type this. I don’t think I am simply imagining them. The latter should be entitled, The Great Reset, Part 2.

As we near Election 2022, evidence having accumulated of the disastrous effects not just of the administration the globalists instilled in the White House on January 21, 2021 but of the educational and other disasters caused by the (unnecessary) covid lockdowns as well as the big unknown facing the world over the long-term effects of the poorly-tested mRNA “vaccines” that were shoved down our throats also beginning in 2021, the globalists have largely fallen silent (except, occasionally, to parry some of the allegations against them, as Bill Gates has occasionally done).

The only thing that sounds more dangerous to me than globalists running their yammers, one might say, is globalists who have all but fallen silent.

Who knows what these psychopaths are planning?

I’ve periodically offered speculations about what they might do, especially when they realize that the biggest power grab they’ve ever attempted (the plandemic) has not only failed but backfired spectacularly — in the sense that the “populism” globalists sought to quash has not just survived but is stronger than ever! There has been no cyber-attack. There has been no release of a contagion that would be truly lethal (e.g., smallpox). I don’t know….

It is important to realize that these people (globalists) have nothing!

Most would not know what it means to do an honest day’s work! Their wealth comes from “passive income” (i.e., investments, “money making money”).

They have no moral view of the universe. They have no vision for the world or its populations other than as cattle to be incentivized, prodded, penned in, and controlled. As their vax-based control systems are dismantled around the world, they haven’t proven to be very effective even at that!

They have no realistic policy prescriptions. They have no realistic solutions to problems they claim pose existential threats to civilization, such as climate change.

Everything they touch, or that their agents in the Party of Jacobinism and Chaos touch, goes to ruin.

They only instrument they have with any reach is corporate media, filled with little robots of the sort Kari Lake faced off with whose only skill is in using language to try and demonize (“conspiracy theorist” “election denier” “MAGA extremist” “insurrectionist,” “threat to democracy” “Putin-lover” in a few cases, etc., etc.).

As for their other instruments — globalist organizations ranging from the World Economic Forum down to the Council on Foreign Relations — virtually everyone with a functioning brain now knows what these organizations are and what they represent.

The only thing the globalists and their minions have on their side is money, and connections. They have plenty of those. And these are not nothings, not by a long shot!

In other words, underestimating them would be a potentially fatal mistake!

Globalism does not have truth or morality or God on its side. It is important to remember that, in thinking about the dangers of the conflict in Ukraine escalating, with Putin now monitoring nuclear drills.

Perhaps this is a good time to be thinking about the things that matter most: not the upcoming election, even if it turns out well, but our relationship with the Highest Power in the cosmos, and whether what we are doing is pleasing to Him.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published soon.

Thank you, “Joe Biden”!

How Stupid Are Some Americans, Anyway?

By Steven Yates

October 13, 2022

Not too long ago, Yahoo!’s news aggregator restored allowing comments on the site. Comment options were ended not long after the start of the plandemic. Their reason illustrates the old saw that for every corporate decision there’s the official reason and the real reason. The official reason was the need to upgrade. The real reason was the absence of narrative control, which meant too many anonymous posts dissenting from government / corporate approved doctrine, be they on coronavirus origins, the effects of immigration, black-on-white crime, Trump, or anything else.

Now it’s restored — with full narrative control (I posted a few times but quit when every comment of substance met with the common Big Tech bromide, “This might offend readers and violate our Community Standards …”).

Doubtless algorithms on the site are keyed to detecting certain words or phrases or patterns of usage. I doubt that a human ever sees them. So what gets past the algorithmic censors? The other day I perused the comments following a few articles Yahoo! had aggregated on recent events of interest. If the bulk of what I saw really reflects a large enough portion of the American public, then it is small wonder that those in the world’s uppermost echelons, or those approved by the uppermost echelons, can get away with murder (sometimes literally!).

Not to mention testifying to a theme I’ve been hammering for about as long as I can remember: the collapse of education in America.

Consider this sampling of unedited comments on Alex Jones’s second defamation trial (I discussed the first here). Background: Jones elected not to take the stand in his own defense, as the judge had threatened him with contempt of court if he defended himself, or said anything in open court about (gasp!) free speech, or any other staples of the America that was.

From “1angry”: Him [sic.] and his Qanons [sic.] are lower than pond scum

From “Maluco8541”: Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones should be sent to prison for the lies and deceits he’s spread throughout the years!

From “Phillip”: He HAS no defense!! He said what he said!! It’s all on tape!! He is going to pay MILLIONS to those families!! A stroke can’t come soon enough!!

From “mark”: Special place in hell for him… Should have lots of company with the rest of his conspiracy nutjobs.

From “Paul”: Republicans are absolute trsh [sic.].

From “Larry”: How sad is our society to have believers in alex’s [sic.] spewing lies!

From “Michael”: Jones should buy a nice long length of rope and make himself a necktie.

From “patrickt”: hope they take everything he has – except for the rock he crawled out from under. let him crawl back.

(There came a reply: No, take the rock.)

From “Ray”: Does any punishment involve him being banned from doing his shows?

Those weren’t selected at random. Nor did I choose the worst and most illiterate comments I could find. Those were typical. I chose (roughly) every third one, having selected newest from the pulldown menu.

Note the utter disregard for anything resembling due process.

“Ray” wants him censored. “Maluco” wants him imprisoned. “patrickt” wants him financially destroyed. “Michael” and “Phillip” wish him dead. “mark” wants him in Hell!

This, from “Gregory,” somehow got past the algorithms:

Did any of you watch the trial? It appeared there was no defense he could make that the court didn’t shut down. Folks don’t realize that there’s been a number of what is termed false flag events. The Oklahoma City Murrah Building bombing is a good example. Innocent people were killed, and the public was handed an “official story” that everyone believed, but an independent explosives expert and Retired Army Brigadier General claimed otherwise. BTW, that Retired Brigadier General, Benton Partin, was asked by the then Senate House Majority leader, Trent Lott to examine the wreckage, because Senator Lott had doubts based on how he saw it being handled. The OKC event, 911, and other events have set in motion anti-terrorism legislation, that will lead to legal precedents being changed. Most likely against our civil rights. Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “Nothing in politics happens by accident”. I’ve been a labor rights activist for over thirty years. It started for me at the age of 31. Our country is not changing for the worse, it’s being changed for the worse. By moneyed interests that have always wanted to bring America down. Don’t take my word for it. Stop being lazy in your thinking, and research it yourself.

This sensible (and surprisingly literate) comment garnered this response from “Phillip,” probably the same dude who wants Jones to have a stroke:

I have a bunch of tin foil if your hat needs another layer! If OKC was a “false flag”, why did EVERY participant admit (and even take pride in) their personal involvement??? You farking [sic.] conspiracy nut jobs [sic.] are what is making America worse, not some imagined boogieman!!!

And you wonder why some of us have concluded that many Americans are indeed basically sheep who haven’t had an original critical thought in their lives.

The worrisome thing: these people vote!

Now consider the Nord Stream Pipeline. An abundance of evidence points to involvement by the U.S., including Joe Biden’s own past threats. Tucker Carlson drew attention to this evidence (so did Paul Craig Roberts, James Howard Kunstler, Caitlin Johnstone, Glenn Greenwald, and others).

To corporate media and the sheep, this is “Russian propaganda.”

Carlson offered this riposte to critics using that line.

The title of leftist online rag Huffpo’s account of his riposte:

“Tucker Carlson’s ‘Complete Meltdown’ Night Captured in Bonkers Supercut.”

For starters, no one reproduced the whole thing, just segments taken out of context. This is a typical leftist ploy.

Just to note in passing, I often see complete meltdown (or some variant) used by leftists when anyone answers one of their hit pieces. This, coupled with the out-of-context segment, is supposed to convince you to think that their target is indeed nuts, and that no level-headed person could disagree.

Yet another reminder of how language gets weaponized, whether in the hands of those who know exactly what they are doing, or the simply clueless.

Comments on the Yahoo! — aggregated reproduction:

“SoTexSailer” says: CUckerTarlson [sic.] gets paid 6 milllion [sic.] a year to make you dumber

“Jack” says: He’s taking [sic.] to cretins, they respond to noises like that.

“gman” says: Looks like it’s about time for that straight jacket measurement. It’s bound to happen sooner or later.

Some confuse facts with official narratives in a superficially more civil fashion. “russell w” elaborates: More than 1/2 of my family including my elderly parents watch Fox “news”. I force myself to watch it just so I can understand the other side. The problem is, most Fox watchers actually believe all of the stuff they are being fed. They “think” it is real news, when really it is just a continuation of Kellyanne’s “alternative facts”. There is only one set of facts folks, and Fox news is not interested in those facts, so they make up their own “theories” like Tucker’s craziness in this clip. This is dangerous rhetoric that is at least partly to blame for the division within the USA. Fox viewers need be aware they are being used as pawns, and Fox is their Queen.

Geez, what would this guy come up with if he read my stuff??? (I’m not even a regular Fox viewer. I only access what others bring to my attention.)

By the way, this (full video) is what was taken out of context and posted by a member of the Twitterverse mob, taken seriously on HuffPo. Continuing:

“Stephen” says: Tucker is on Putin’s payroll along with trump [sic.].

“Mike” says: he represents everything wrong in this country. A whiny, self-entitled privileged white guy who lies through his teeth just for the almighty dollar

Ah, some wokester had to get Tucker Carlson’s “whiteness” or “white privilege” in there. Anything to distract from the issue at hand: reasons for thinking the U.S. (or the U.S. in cooperation with NATO) sabotaged the pipeline knowing Russia would be blamed.

“Beach Girl” [sic.] says: After seeing the clip (I don’t watch the show or the network the show is on), I just cannot fathom how millions of people can be so ignorant to think that show is news for years upon years. At some point, even the network referred to it as news, in certain “unofficial” responses to criticism.

I have a hard time “fathoming” what she is even saying. Did these people graduate from high school? College? Educational collapse illustrated again, producing garble.

Again, the fact that these people might vote next month is scary.

It doesn’t matter what the hot-button issue is. The response is invariably the same.

Take Trump’s recent lawsuit against CNN for defamation. He stated, “Prove the big lie. The big lie is not a big lie at all. The big lie is the opposite…. All the stats — we have everything. Unfortunately we haven’t had judges that want to look at it.”

Previous commenters were kind compared to those below!

Again, these are unedited:

“James”: Only fools believe Twice Impeached’s big lie. And each time he repeats it, fewer fools believe than the time before. Twice Impeached is lying his way into prison.

“eric”: Just another scheme to grift the dumb and gullible.

“Bittweaker”: Trump makes Hitler look good…

“Hugo”: ITs called Trump lost in over 60 federal court room [sic.] about 2020 election and his lawyer lost his law license

“Captain Cupcake”: The delusional rantings of a raving lunatic.

“franklin”: I can’t wait until the last door clicks and he is locked in a cage forever. No contact with his 3 adult children, as they too, will be felons in their own perfect cages.

“Ray”: So orange man wants CNN to prove the big lie since he certainly could not in his multitude of lawsuits. His Minions better keep on donating to his lawyers or he might actually have to pay them himself.

“Joe H”: This guy needs”more time” to defend his inexcusable document theft, but has plenty of time for frivolous lawsuits? What a giant piece of human excrement

“Tom”: I think we are seeing every day how corrupt, and stupid trump is. How he ever became president is a mystery too [sic.] me.

“Just Facts” (!): How ignorant trump [sic.] is. It will be real easy to prove trumps [sic.] big lie. Attorney general barr [sic.] found not enough fraud to support trumps [sic.] lie. 60 court cases found trump [sic.] lied. Trumps [sic.] a cancer and the people who support trump know it.

“He Who Hates With Fire” (!!!): here’s proof, trump is at home and Biden is in the white house, I mean what other proof is there

Wow! I’m convinced!

This is beyond mere educational collapse. Many of these comments combine blind faith in official narratives with a level of hostility that leaves me no longer wondering why there are mass killings, road rage, or cases of Democrats simply killing Republicans in cold blood.

It’s not like I hover over comment sections. I have better things to do. I perused the first set out of curiosity after the one I mentioned was censored. After what I saw there, it dawned on me to check out a few others. It dawned on me that in at least some circles (big cities come to mind), hostility to the point of sadism directed toward that minority of Americans who can still think is not the exception.

On mainstream news sites, it is now the rule.

The narrative police have their man (and woman) in the White House.

What I’d like to know is: what do we do when dissent from approved narratives regarding “conspiracies,” the covid shots, Election 2020, January 6, Hunter B.’s laptop, Russia-Ukraine, you name it, is either criminalized as sedition or opens you to lawfare from those who take offense or claim their feelings were hurt — or simply have it in for you if you are a conservative?

The danger of the Alex Jones defamation suits is that they are precedent-setting. What can be done to Jones today, can be done to lesser-known voices tomorrow on lesser pretexts.

I am not denying that some of Jones’s listeners crossed lines that should never be crossed. But I’ve neither seen nor heard anything to indicate that Jones directed them to harass anyone.

Never have I said that stupidity is limited to left-liberals. It isn’t. There are people caught up in the “conspiracy” cosmos who cannot distinguish the credible from the silly. Several emails in response to my article illustrated that.

Where Jones failed was in not realizing that American society has filled up with lunatics and sociopaths all across the ideological spectrum. Before sending him to the gallows (figuratively speaking), one might consider having his recent book The Great Reset: The War for the World (2022) a look. You can read the first two chapters for free on Amazon (I’d do it before Amazon removes the book).

From that alone, you’ll see why the Establishment wants him gone.

Not that the judge, the court, or the attorneys in the Jones defamation lawfare suits are “in on it.” That’s just stupid.

They are what Lenin called useful idiots.

As are the unknowing thought police who show up in comment sections, probably because, like the average Internet troll, they do not have lives. This doubtless frustrates them, and so they lash out at politically-approved targets when they can do so anonymously, i.e., safely, without consequences.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

____________________

While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published soon.

The Patreon.com campaign I have been running appears to have been a bust, with just one new Patron in the entire second and third quarters of this year. Meanwhile several Patrons have exited, one informing me that due to the increased cost of living in Bidenista-era America, he no longer has the luxury of supporting an independent, truth-telling writer.

Odds are good I will cancel my account on the site at the end of the year and return to pursuing copywriting, copyediting and ghostwriting clients as a source of income in this era of roaring inflation.

Thank you, ‘Joe Biden’!

This will mean reduced visibility on NewsWithViews.com. It might even mean a “farewell” piece in December, even if only temporarily. Those are the breaks. I am not independently wealthy. To reverse this while there is still time (i.e., before a new client accepts my offer), please consider pledging today by going here and signing up.

Domestic Democrat Failures, Overseas Nationalist Successes, Media Hysterics

By Steven Yates

October 7, 2022

Prioritizing your country — and your pocketbook — instead of “the world” (whatever this amounts to) is normal. So naturally a lot of voters are gravitating towards political figures who promise respect for each one.

Recent polls indicate that American voters are more concerned about runaway inflation than “threats to democracy.” To be sure, I doubt many are pondering whether the U.S. is really a democracy (it isn’t; it is a plutocratic oligarchy). Their concerns are over how long they will be able to afford gas and groceries, keep the lights turned on, etc., etc.: immediate worries caused by inflation.

I’ve no idea how many people trust the Federal Reserve to get inflation under control, in a way that doesn’t trigger a new round of unemployment.

If voters blame Joe Biden for economic instability, they will likely punish Democrats next month. Inflation is not the only problem that can be laid at the Bidenista doorstep. Look at the anarchy on our Southern border, the money already sent overseas to Ukraine that could be far better spent at home (especially with the devastation just wrought by Hurricane Ian), the support for gender fluidity and other woke rubbish, and so on.

Inflation is clearly the biggest concern, though, and understandably so.

The Establishment is naturally very, very worried. Its grip on dominant narratives (about the 2020 election, the covid-19 shots, the economy, etc.) is precarious. Its efforts to take down Donald Trump are moving at snail’s pace, as he and his attorneys keep throwing up roadblocks. The Democrat-controlled courts are having a field day giving long prison sentences to vulnerable Jan-6rs most of whom had no criminal records, just as the dominant left-leaning corporate media outlets are having a field day reporting it.

Winds might shift if Republicans retake part or all of Congress in November and “MAGA Republicans” begin monkey wrenching all this during the run-up to Election 2024.

This would be a huge setback for the Establishment — by which I mean globalists, of course.

Not to mention what a second Trump presidency would do! Hence the desperation of the Establishment to stop this from happening, whatever the cost!

Globalists also have to be worried about what is going on elsewhere. Millions of people all over the globe have figured out at least some of what is going on. They are finding representation in a chorus of leaders some of whom, like France’s Marine Le Pen, have been visible internationally for a while, while others are new outside their own nations.

Late last month Italy saw the triumph of a woman in an election I am surprised wasn’t stolen from her: Giorgia Meloni, 45, of the coalition formed between her Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) party and two other conservative parties.

This is no surprise. Italy, too, is dealing with roaring inflation, especially rising energy costs; a struggling economy; and longstanding political corruption. Meloni positioned herself as a Euroskeptical outsider who represents the interests of Italians (not “Europeans” and definitely not the entire globe). She will become Italy’s first woman prime minister. Were she not a conservative “populist,” radical feminists would be celebrating in the streets! But she opposes the pro-aborts, same-sex “marriage,” and gender fluidity. She also opposes open borders.

What she said to celebrate her victory: “I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am a Christian, and you can’t take that away from me.” She has also said, “Italy and Italians first!” in echo of Trump’s well-known “America first!” and “We need Americanism, not globalism!”

You won’t get any of this from any dominant Western corporate media, of course. To left-leaning mouthpieces of fake respectability such as the New York Times, you will hear that Italy is “returning to fascism.” I’ve lost track of the number of articles and blog posts that call Meloni a fascist or describe her victory as a “victory for fascism in Italy.” Most of these articles and posts bring up Mussolini within the first few sentences. That kind of guilt-by-association argument is the best they have!

I’ve not seen a single writer tell his/her readers what fascism is. I doubt the average journalist today is capable of such a feat, or is aware of the definition attributed to Mussolini. Paraphrasing slightly: Fascism should be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.

That is the globalist Establishment in a nutshell! It has spent the past half-century merging state and corporate power, and doing so on a global scale! This is what we peasants are not supposed to figure out!

Thus Meloni — and others such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro — are all part of the rising “threat to democracy,” i.e., threats to ruling oligarch interests that empower the globalist Establishment and its capacity to do as it pleases.

Even one of her critics, former prime minister Matteo Renzi, threw cold water on such allegations. What he said: “I’m not her best friend. We are rivals but she is not a danger to democracy. The idea there is a risk of fascism in Italy is absolutely fake news.”

Be this as it may, and despite the media attacks, Meloni will be the next prime minister in Italy who has pledged to represent the interests of working Italians over those of “Brussels bureaucrats” and their agendas.

She might even set her country on a path to real democracy, i.e., governance that answers to the people and not the elites and those they have made their wards (e.g., surging immigrant populations unable to speak a word of Italian).

All of this is run-up to the continuing Establishment reaction to Russian president Vladimir Putin—

Reactions to Meloni have been tame, compared to those following Putin’s September 30 announcement of the annexation of four eastern and southern Ukraine provinces — Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. These amount to 15-18 percent of the country. Whether Putin will be able to hold onto them is still an open question, as all are much closer to the Kyiv power center than was Crimea, brought into the Russian Federation following a favorable vote by the mostly ethnic Russian population of Crimea back in 2014.

Obviously, the loss of four regions of Ukraine to the Russian Federation represents yet another huge setback to globalism, more than was “annexing” Crimea, or the election of another antiglobalist in a country like Italy.

For an example of the intensity of the hysterics, check this out.

In the space of one article, globalist David Rothkopf describes Putin as “the Russian dictator” (who must be removed from office), a “megalomaniacal lunatic,” a “serial war criminal,” and “not a legitimate leader.”

“Joe Biden” (or whoever was whispering into his earpiece) echoed, “For God’s sakes, this man cannot remain in power!”

The Bidenistas quickly “clarified,” stating that they were not calling for regime change in Russia.

Oh no? Say it isn’t so, Joe!

Does Rothkopf really believe that such an action is our call, at least after accusing Putin of violating the territory of a “sovereign nation” (almost as if globalists really believed in such things)? This would be standard Western Establishment hubris and hypocrisy, super-spreading its own brand of globalist megalomania.

Rothkopf describes Putin’s speech as “demented” and as a “rambling … rant.”

Let’s look at it. Here are excerpts from what Putin said (you can read the entire 37-minute speech here):

MESSAGE TO KYIV

“I want the Kyiv authorities and their real masters in the West to hear me, so that they remember this. People living in Luhansk and Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia are becoming our citizens. Forever.

“We call on the Kyiv regime to immediately end hostilities, end the war that they unleashed back in 2014 and return to the negotiating table.

“We are ready for this … But we will not discuss the choice of the people in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. That has been made. Russia will not betray them.”

DEFENDING ‘OUR LAND’

“We will defend our land with all the powers and means at our disposal.”

‘NATION DISMEMBERED’

“In 1991, at Belovezh Forest, without asking the will of ordinary citizens, representatives of the then-party elites decided to destroy the USSR, and people suddenly found themselves cut off from their motherland. This tore apart and dismembered our nation, becoming a national catastrophe …

“I admit that they did not fully understand what they were doing, and what consequences this would inevitably lead to in the end. But this is no longer important. There is no Soviet Union, the past cannot be brought back. And Russia today does not need it anymore. We are not striving for this.”

‘GREAT, HISTORICAL RUSSIA’

“The battlefield to which fate and history have called us is the battlefield for our people, for great historical Russia, for future generations, our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”

NORD STREAM ‘SABOTAGE’

“Sanctions were not enough for the Anglo-Saxons: they moved on to sabotage. It is hard to believe but it is a fact that they organised the blasts on the Nord Stream international gas pipelines, which run along the bottom of the Baltic Sea … It is clear to everyone who benefits from this.”

‘NUCLEAR PRECEDENT’

“The United States is the only country in the world that has twice used nuclear weapons, destroying the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and setting a precedent.”

“Even today, they actually occupy Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and other countries, and at the same time cynically call them allies of equal standing.”

WESTERN ‘SATANISM’

“Now they have moved on entirely, to a radical denial of moral norms, religion, and family …

“The dictatorship of the Western elites is directed against all societies, including the peoples of the Western countries themselves. This is a challenge to all. This is a complete denial of humanity, the overthrow of faith and traditional values. Indeed, the suppression of freedom itself has taken on the features of a religion: outright Satanism.”

COLONIALISM

“The West … began its colonial policy back in the Middle Ages, and then followed the slave trade, the genocide of Indian tribes in America, the plunder of India, of Africa, the wars of England and France against China …

“What they did was hooking entire nations on drugs, deliberately exterminate entire ethnic groups. For the sake of land and resources they hunted people like animals. This is contrary to the very nature of man, truth, freedom and justice.”

EDUCATION AND GENDER

“Do we really want, here, in our country, in Russia, instead of ‘mum’ and ‘dad’, to have ‘parent No. 1’, ‘parent No. 2’, ‘No. 3’? Have they gone completely insane? Do we really want … it drilled into children in our schools … that there are supposedly genders besides women and men, and [children to be] offered the chance to undergo sex change operations? … We have a different future, our own future.”

That is what Putin actually said. You may disagree with some of it. I don’t agree with all of it. But note the year he says the war actually began: 2014, not 2022. That was the year a NATO-backed, U.S.-backed (and CIA-backed) coup ousted a democratically elected government and instilled the present regime (a cesspool of corruption, exemplified by Hunter Biden’s past relationship to a Ukraine corporation and his infamous laptop information about which Big Tech censored back in 2020).

The new Ukraine government, fascists in any accurate sense of that term, almost immediately began bullying and brutalizing ethnic Russians living in what soon became the “breakaway regions” of Luhansk and Donetsk which border Russia.

Putin rightly observes the weakness of this White House and finally acted to put a stop to it.

He accuses the U.S. of sabotaging the Nord Stream pipeline. Naturally, to controlled Western Establishment media, this is a “baseless conspiracy theory” (one wishes they would get some new material!).

In other words, again, “the Russians did it”!

But what would Russia have to gain from destroying their own facility?

This is the most probable account of the Bidenista-led sabotage of the pipeline.

And what a golden opportunity to force Europeans to shift toward “green energy” guaranteeing that many will freeze to death, if not this winter than certainly next.

Note that Putin repudiates the (common) claim that he is trying to reinvent the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is history. But the Russian Federation as a sovereign entity in a multipolar world (i.e., a world not yet controlled by Anglo-European globalists) plans to stick around. Here Putin gives voice to what could be called “great historical Russia,” an organic entity bound by history and tradition, tying a specific people to a specific part of the world. These are things globalists do not and will never understand, because they cannot be reduced to money and power.

Putin is not a materialist (as were his Soviet predecessors). Orthodoxy has a solid foothold in Russia as a branch of the Christian faith that developed independently of Western Catholicism and Protestantism. This explains his perhaps hyperbolic use of satanism. Read it again: he speaks of a “radical denial of moral norms, religion, and family…. The dictatorship of the Western elites is directed against all societies, including the peoples of the Western countries themselves…. This is a complete denial of humanity, the overthrow of faith and traditional values. Indeed, the suppression of freedom itself has taken on the features of a religion: outright Satanism.”

Even if one rejects the Satanism label as hyperbole, is this not an accurate description of much of the materialist West? When it has not attacked the family unit openly (e.g., in the name of “women’s rights”), it has enabled economic arrangements that slowly destabilize families, e.g., the welfarism-in-reverse I have previously mentioned which redistributes wealth upward; it has debauched its currency; its corporations have outsourced jobs to cheap-labor countries so that CEOs can get richer while both parents in families of lesser means sometimes must work two jobs to pay the bills with the debauched currency. When family members never see each other except to sleep, that doesn’t exactly help them maintain stability, or properly nourish the next generation.

To get a sense of the kind of colonialism Western corporatists/fascists (the real thing!) have sponsored, all you need to do is read John Perkins’s bold and revealing The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2015). (A third edition of this magnificent treatise is due out next year!)

Finally is Putin’s open ridicule of the gender fluidity that has become the norm in American “education” with children now being shown drag shows and enticed to question their “gender.” He stops short of calling this institutionalized child abuse. I am not sure why.

In short, Putin has committed thought crimes. This, in addition to being a Russian nationalist who repudiates Western materialism, secularism, and liberalism — the faiths that together have brought us globalism (and the death culture of the pro-aborts). Globalists would transform the entire planet into a single, uniform mass consumption monoculture dominated by a few corporate leviathans with the technology to keep us all under surveillance and control, with the capacity to deal with dissent and noncompliance by shutting off participation in the economy. Eliminating cash transactions will further this. Globalists want a world government standing over controlled political classes, with no nationalists or autonomous political economies of any size allowed. When they have in place the kind of world regime they want, vocal support for people like Trump or Putin or Meloni or Bolsonaro will simply be criminalized.

The real war of the twenty-first century, still shaping up and which has tremendous destructive potential if it ever involves nukes or even “weaker” measures such as cyber-warfare, is between globalism on the one hand and everyone else on the other. Not just nationalists such as Trump or Putin and Meloni, but everyone who wishes responsible freedom, within the bounds of worldviews and traditions of their choosing. This means not being dictated to from the outside, or subject to corporate-directed forces they neither voted on, nor are in a position to influence.

Globalists, as I’ve noted previously, control most of the world’s resources, courtesy of the emphasis of their worldview on money and the indefinite expansion of their power, while the rest of us just want to live our lives and be left alone. Globalists control most corporate media: hence the ease of demonizing Trump, Putin, Orbán, Le Pen, Bolsonaro, and now Meloni, all of whom threaten globalist goals by presenting their nations with a viable alternative that puts them first.

There is a great deal at stake with the Kremlin-Kyiv standoff. If the four annexed regions transition into roles as regions of the Russian Federation, this will embolden nationalists elsewhere as globalism loses even more credibility. And then we have no way of knowing what havoc globalists are capable of unleashing on a world that stubbornly refuses to be dominated. Another, more destructive plandemic? A massive cyberattack? Allowing nukes to decimate what they cannot control while they hide out in underground bunkers and huge facilities they have constructed to ride out an apocalypse of their own making?

But on the other hand, should Putin be forced to back down — or perhaps even be overthrown by hidden globalists in his midst — this will embolden them! In an era of heightened Big Tech surveillance and censorship, injuries and deaths being caused by Big Pharma mRNA “vaccines,” alongside these vicious attacks on leaders demanding national autonomy and economic independence, further emboldening globalists is the absolute last thing the world needs.

———————

While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published soon.

Thank you, ‘Joe Biden’!

This will mean reduced visibility on NewsWithViews.com. It might even mean a “farewell” piece in December, even if only temporarily. Those are the breaks. I am not independently wealthy. To reverse this while there is still time (i.e., before a new client accepts my offer), please consider pledging today by going here and signing up.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

Should Conservatives Be Paying Homage to Queen Elizabeth’s Memory?

By Steven Yates

September 17, 2022

Queen Elizabeth II was born April 21, 1926, and passed away September 8, 2022. The world she left was horrifically different from the one she was born into. Understatement of the century. Should conservatives honor her life and legacy?

My answer would be a qualified Yes. My answer acknowledges that she wasn’t perfect, nor was the Royal Family free of assorted question marks. Be this as it may, Queen Elizabeth’s life seemed to reflect something that is rapidly disappearing: class. Not in the economic sense. In the sense of cultivated behavior that reflects dignity, self-respect, proper manners, and a sense that with great wealth and power (she had both) comes great responsibility — not to gain more wealth and power, but to watch over and serve that portion of the world to which one has been entrusted.

A controversy has erupted over conservatives paying respects to her memory. Tucker Carlson defended doing so in one of his recent commentaries.

I imagine that was hard for liberals to hear. After all, British colonialism is very much out of fashion. To defend it? Gasp! How unwoke can you be?!?!

Carlson, to his credit, couldn’t care less about being woke. So as he is wont to do, he provided a dose of truth in a world saturated by wokery’s lies.

The British empire, rising as did beginning in the seventeenth century and whatever else one says about it — no one says it was perfect — was more humane, decent, and civilizing than anything the twentieth century produced.

What did the British empire help bring about? Rising living standards everywhere it and its agents set up shop. Improved medical care. Falling crime rates.

What happened after it withdrew (and became the present-day Commonwealth)? Living standards fell. Governance grew deadly. Uganda, as Carlson points out, got Idi Amin for a spell. Rhodesia eventually became Zimbabwe, with everything that name invokes, going from one of the richest countries in the world to one of the poorest in just one generation. South Africa got “majority rule,” but also massive political corruption, violent crime, and a minority of whites who justifiably fear for their lives. Now Chinese economic hit men are moving in. How many Africans silently wish the British had never left?

Just the truth here, without trigger warnings that have become hallmarks of a hypersensitivity that protects lies, wokery, and corruption.

What made the British empire a superior form of life? That’s an easy question.

It was joined at the hip with what was still fundamentally a Christian-based civilization, even if secularized financial elites were already sabotaging its upper echelons.

By the time Elizabeth II was born, Christian culture was being dismantled apace, and being replaced by materialism. What enabled materialism in addition to financial liberation were Darwinism, Freudianism, and the rising technocrat mindset that started with Auguste Comte. This mindset rejects original sin and embraces its opposite: human beings can perfect themselves by their own means. All we have to do is place ourselves in the hands of “the experts.” Technocracy proclaims itself the path to a “scientifically designed world” and to a more perfect human. This last is called transhumanism.

GloboCorp — or the superelite, hellbent on establishing a world government serving its global corporations — is a natural product of this worldview. Present-day elites are as different from those of yesteryear as night is from day. There were elites of yesteryear who merited being called aristocrats. To them, excellence mattered. Grace mattered. Proper décor mattered. Leadership meant service, not domination.

Achievement mattered. The first corporations emanating from the Anglo-European world spread the rising scientific-technological-commercial mindset, but within an ethos that sought to improve the lives of those to whom its purveyors had been entrusted. True, they did not always succeed, because those they contacted weren’t welcoming of what the West offered. Sometimes this was indeed Westerners’ own fault. A Christian worldview is no guarantee against corruption and wealth’s abuses. Corporations such as British East Trading Co. controlled as much wealth as governments. Wealth is power. Power corrupts. No one with a brain denies this.

Nevertheless, the visible aristocrats of the day were about something other than money and power, and this makes them very unlike their equivalents today.

Money and power become the summum bonum of every culture materialism overwhelms, whether those who think materialism reflects “the scientific view of the universe” or not, whether they wish to retain (essentially Christian) “ideals of truth, justice, and equality” or not. Sometimes sooner, sometimes later, materialism engenders death cultures.

Communism and Nazism were about power and domination, and the result was the mass slaughter of millions of innocent people. Both are rooted in variations on the modern materialist worldview, in which there is no Creator, no transcendent reality, no moral compass rooted in eternal truths, and hence nothing above history and society — and those able to seize the reins of power.

One of the most important consequences of the materialist outlook: when all is said and done, lives don’t matter, especially if they become inconvenient. Entire populations are thus expendable. Our holocaust is hidden by such innocuous-sounding euphemisms as women’s reproductive rights.

Thus Communism, thus Nazism, thus the pro-abort mindset of Planned Parenthood: sick branches from the same diseased tree and roots.

Neither do capitalism and materialism mix! I think none other than Adam Smith understood this at some level. His Wealth of Nations notes that businessmen are subject to corruption and that “market forces” alone are insufficient to prevent the formation of cartels and monopolies. He was thinking of government regulation, of course, and that invites the question, who regulates the regulators? In the absence of self-regulation in accordance with a Christian worldview in which consciousness of human imperfection and temptation are part of the culture, capitalist institutions are as vulnerable to corruption as those of overtly totalitarian systems like communism and Nazism. It just takes longer. Sadly, Smith was a product of his century. Leading intellectuals were rejecting Christianity. Thus he never took this last step, preferring instead a “morality of sentiment” shared with his correspondent and close friend the Scottish philosopher David Hume.

Even self-regulation at this level won’t do the job perfectly, of course. Original sin again….

Materialism become the dominant worldview of the twentieth century among academic and political-economic elites and superelites — whether they understood it in these terms, or not (most did not). The academics systematically confused materialism, a worldview (supplying starting points for reasoning) with science (a range of methodologies and results). Their claim to epistemic authority — “we know the truth” — gave materialism cultural as well as intellectual power. Capitalistic enterprises were not immune. A term I have sometimes used for the spread of materialism from the pristine labs and hallways of academia through the rest of a civilization is cultural osmosis.

Neoliberalism, the brand of capitalism that dominated the West by the turn of the millennium, had already financialized the economy and redistributed wealth upward — welfare-statism in reverse, I have called this. When money becomes your sole value, you will sell out not just your employees but your nation. Hence corporations moving jobs to cheap-labor countries, hiring illegal immigrants willing to work cheap so that all wages are driven down, all in addition to gains made from going public and selling shares. Hence the purposeful pursuit of technology that eliminates jobs and dumps tens of thousands of people into the streets. Hence the devaluation of currency via money printing, which is all that will prop up a fundamentally unsustainable system so that those who profit from that system can continue indefinitely.

In this environment, the middle class starts to disappear. Its earnings no longer keep up with its (inflated) expenses. Society as a whole gravitates toward techno-feudalism, a state of affairs in which the superelite dominates, regional visible technocratic elites, both political and economic, advance agendas assisted by cadres of cooperative administrators, and real freedom diminishes. The majority, without the know-how to escape this kind of system (and “educated” to believe they live in a democracy), live increasingly miserable lives working “gigs” for low pay, indebted to “payment plans” with no end in sight. This is the new serfdom, tied not to land as such but to the money system. To keep their sanity, the masses respond to whatever pleasurable escapes are made available by corporations, which include drugs and eventually every form of sexual fetish and perversion. Moral arguments against all these will have all but disappeared, demonized when they do appear as calls for “theocracy.”

Today’s government schools, of course, are encouraging small children to question their “gender.” As recently as three decades ago, this would have been condemned as child abuse. The sexually confused were seen as mentally ill. Today you can get kicked off Big Tech’s platforms for saying such.

What does all this have to do with Queen Elizabeth and the Royal Family? I am not claiming they’ve stayed free of the corrupting effects of what was trending all around them. Indications are, though, that Queen Elizabeth was profoundly disappointed by the divorces and scandals that have dogged later generations of Royals. Tradition, however, kept her from weighing in on political matters. I cannot help also having sensed, for some time now, her dignified if stoic refusal to be transformed into a celebrity, which has become the unfortunate fate of her grandchildren and their spouses.

Goes without saying, the superelite are not following the example she set. Led by Klaus Schwab and his Young Global Leaders, they scheme to complete their global empire based on surveillance and control, not dignity and service. Meanwhile, wars they fomented lay waste to nations, economies crumble under the weight of irrational policies, political systems fragment on fomented division and justifiable distrust of authority, formal education continues to disintegrate under the weight of wokism, and cultures descend into barbarity.

As an exemplar of this last, consider this tweet by one Uju Anya of Carnegie Mellon University: obviously, given that name alone, an academic affirmative action charity case:

I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.

See what I mean about formal education disintegrating? What can one say to the sociopaths that have inundated its once honorable lecture halls? What is scary is that such people may have as many as several hundred university students fall under their sway each academic year.

Some will reply angrily to all this that the Queen associated with, and even knighted, people who turned out to be pedophiles. If true, this is just one more symptom of the corruption of our era. She herself seemed to remain above all such frays. Even should it turn out that she looked the other way as much as possible, her British stiff upper lip intact, just the dignified appearance she maintained for as long as she lived might well be remembered as among the last anchors against the long-term collapse of Western civilization.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

These columns present a perspective unavailable elsewhere: of personal freedom and community autonomy, based on a philosophically-informed conservatism within a Christian worldview holding that in the last analysis, we all answer to our Creator.

This stands opposed to the major threat of our time: a sociopathic superelite using technology and financialization to gain world domination, unleashed by secular materialism and the latter’s having collapsed all forms of valuation other than money and power. Globalists see themselves as answering only to each other. They do not believe in a Higher Power. They are the culmination of the materialist / secularist / liberal worldview.

My perspective incorporates accounts of how emergencies of various sorts arise or are manufactured, how controlled media hysterics generate fear in populations, and how these enable controlled governments to grab power and do the superelites’ bidding. Hegelian dialectic: crisis, reaction, response. Foment a crisis or through inaction allow it to develop; the crisis leads to a predictable reaction within populations (“Do something!”); those with power move in with the response they had planned all along.

These ideas are dispensed essentially for free. The editor of this site cannot afford to pay writers such as myself. Nor am I on the payroll of a “think tank” or some other such entity. No university or corporate leviathan has my back. I receive no grants. I am an Independent. We live in a foreign country, because of the lower cost of living. My wife and I survive on what remains of an inheritance, my monthly social security deposit into my U.S. bank account, the occasional donation, “gigs” and “odd jobs” that come our way, and Patreon.com.

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Is the Establishment Trying to Goad Trumpists in De Facto Civil War?

By Steven Yates

September 6, 2022

A Background Report

I did not catch more than the first few minutes of Joe Biden’s teleprompted speech the other night, so it is unclear to me if he repeated the allegation that was circulating in Bidenista circles that Trump supporters are “semi-fascists.” What I heard was the usual predictable pap about the “threat to democracy” posed by “MAGA Republicans.”

We are, indeed, in a battle for “the soul of America.” I call it the narrative war, and whether it will explode from being a war primarily of words into something much hotter, remains to be seen. I think the Bidenistas may be trying to provoke acts of violence, acts that can and will be used against anyone who takes the bait.

The Big Questions for Our Era: Will we continue moving ever closer to a technologically empowered form of feudalism (technofeudalism, if you will), as we were doing for several decades prior to the 2010s? It began with welfare-statism in reverse, redistributing wealth upward into the hands of a tiny fraction of the one percent, and would end in technology-enabled de facto totalitarianism, a totally surveilled and controlled society.

Will we continue to watch as the globe gradually integrates, in top-down fashion, into a single, highly centralized political-economic power system controlled by a few dozen extended families: the superelite, GloboCorp, call them what you will?

Will this continue to be passed off as “democracy,” “the rule of law,” the “liberal world order,” etc., ad nauseam?

Will it culminate, before the end of the 2020s, in the much-discussed Great Reset, which will include the complete replacement of cash with digital currency? What is digital, we should always remember, can be tracked, monitored, and switched off by remote, making dissent from approved narratives a thing of the past.

Or: will we rediscover freedom, meaning personal, familial, and community autonomy within the bounds of moral responsibility? Historians speak of the Great Awakening? (Several, actually.) Is a new Great Awakening possible now, whether in Alexander Dugin’s sense, or something a bit more Anglo friendly?

The superelites have doubtless studied history. They understand that feudalism was the status quo for centuries. As a political-economic system it was mostly stable.

Landed elites owned and controlled everything, of course. Serfs were tied to the land they worked. Theirs were lives of drudgery and misery. They worked from sunup to sundown, just to feed themselves and their own. By law they relinquished a portion of the fruits of their labors to their parasitic lords and masters. They worked for as long as they lived, sometimes dying miserable deaths at very young ages by our standards.

What killed this system?

Protestant Christianity.

According to Protestant Christianity, we are all equal in God’s eyes. His judgment will make no distinction between elites and commoners. Either you have Jesus Christ as your personal savior or you do not.

Philosophically, Christianity gave rise to a freedom movement the roots of which went back at least to the thirteenth century. This era, long before Martin Luther, gave us the natural law philosophy of Aquinas and a key implication of the Magna Carta of 1215, that the king can’t simply do as he pleases. Political activity, like everything else, answers to moral principles. Basic justice calls for such practices as the right of those accused of crimes to confront their accusers in a fair trial.

The basic ideas behind science and technology, coming a few centuries later, are rooted in the Christian idea that the universe is fundamentally rational, that God made man in His image which included our rational agency. Therefore the Creation is intelligible to the human mind, and all human minds have the potential to contribute to knowledge and knowhow. Technique became the test for this. If we’d uncovered a physical principle and mathematized it (as did Newton) and could apply it to the solution of some technical problem (e.g., propulsion), this would suggest we were on the right track even if we did not have all the answers.

Throw in the Gutenberg Press, which enabled anyone to read Scripture instead of rely on Church authority, and you have the ingredients of large scale Awakening (a term I now prefer to the somewhat sullied Enlightenment).

The freedom movement developed further in the hands of philosophers such as England’s John Locke, political strategists such as America’s James Madison, and later, economic thinkers such as France’s Frederic Bastiat. These, and numerous others, endorsed personal liberty, property rights, and free enterprise within the bounds of moral responsibility understood in terms of a transcendent reality communicated to us via Scripture.

The founders of America technically did not found a “Christian nation” where religion was embodied in a national church such as the Church of England, because they hoped that respect for Scripture as a source of moral authority would be built into the culture. If the culture failed, everything else would fail. Personal freedoms and free enterprise would become corrupted by decadence which would prove uncontrollable and increasingly destructive to civilization itself.

The hope of freedom, which inspired millions, meant the death of feudalism.

Christians will say that sin was still there, however, doing its dirty work.

For the landed elites had not disappeared. They adapted to the changed environment, and used new money systems to hijack industrial civilization. They established central banks in Europe and tried to do so in America. Andrew Jackson killed their second attempt (the Second Bank of the United States) in the 1830s. They adapted again.

By the mid-1800s the elites had devised public education which offered one kind of education to their children and another to the masses. The latter were not to be taught how to think or what to think about, except at the most superficial level. The elites did not want well-educated proles. So mass education in government schools aimed to teach discipline by routine, obedience to authority (especially the authority of governments and bosses in corporations), and trades. The children of the masses were to be taught enough literacy to read and follow instructions, basic arithmetic, and official narratives about “democracy in America.”

Most fell for it. Dissidents (many of them theologians) were too few in number to make much of a difference. Most could be written off as troublemakers.

The elites devised economic arrangements that circumvented competition and ensured that every major industry would be dominated by one key figure, e.g., Rockefeller in oil, Vanderbilt in railroads, Carnegie in steel, and so on. In Europe, the Rothschilds and the Schiffs (among others) dominated finance and could engineer panics. Their agents were at work in the U.S. Following the engineered Panic of 1907 they masterminded the Woodrow Wilson presidency and established the Federal Reserve System. This gave them effective control over the U.S. economy they have maintained ever since. Their enormous resources also enabled them to purchase control over major newspapers and establish new weeklies of their own (e.g., Time, The New Republic) as vehicles for furthering “public opinion” (as Walter Lippman called it). They continued to establish approved narratives as radio and eventually television developed as national media.

Change some of those industries and names. Think financial alchemy: George Soros. Think first technology and then vaccines: Bill Gates. From economics to transhumanism: Klaus Schwab. Social media: Mark Zuckerberg. I could name others, but you know who they are.

We’re in the present, and feudalism is being brought back apace. It was underway during the final decades of the last century, when it went by such names as neoliberalism and corporatism. These followed a period of genuine prosperity, ending at the end of the 1960s, during which the peasantry got sufficiently educated (and wealthy) to push at the comfort zones of the elites, especially when they protested elite-sponsored wars such as Vietnam.

The elites began to financialize the economy in the 1970s, starting when their servant Richard Nixon killed the gold standard. They began wrecking higher education through the simple mechanism of having it defunded following the disruptions of the 1960s, then allowing its further corruption with the rise of race and gender politics.

It would be, however, a “hard road to world order.” Too many people had figured out what was going on, having browsed big books like Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy & Hope, or running across scholars of the highest competence such as Antony C. Sutton who had documented the role of Wall Street elites in financing both Communism and Nazism.

What happened this go round was the IT Revolution and the emergence of the Internet: our era’s Gutenberg Press. As I’ve noted before, by the 2000 decade it was possible for anyone with an Internet connection to research any topic, create a website or blog, and post their results for the world to see. In this environment, control over information was impossible!

If feudalism requires anything, it is total, unquestioning consensus on such matters as who is legitimately in charge. Much else (e.g., sexuality) can be left up for grabs, because sex is such a fantastic distraction for the masses! While all varieties of sexual distractions were used very effectively, an aggressive minority of Internet researchers and authors was still able to disrupt the elite consensus at every level and in every subject era.

This all occurred during an era in which incomes were demonstrably not keeping up with expenses. Jobs were disappearing overseas. Quality was diminishing as built-to-last products made in America were replaced by disposable garbage imported from China. Corporations were getting richer as they maintained bought journalists and a bought political class. They no longer supported their employees, moreover, but were more likely to throw them to the wolves. Higher education was seen as essential although its quality was diminishing rapidly, even as its price skyrocketed.

In this environment, all the official narratives collapsed. This included those holding that the U.S. and other Western powers were really democracies in the sense of having political classes that answered to We the People, as opposed to They the Oligarchs (the elites). Support for arrangements that had been immensely profitable to the Oligarchs, such as “free trade,” collapsed. It was no longer clear that “globalization” would restore the rising tide lifting all boats that we had seen up until 1970.

Prior to around then, a fundamentally Christian culture still existed to counter secular/materialist elite domination. Thus in the 1960s Hollywood elites began to aggressively attack this culture through the entertainment industry.

Civil rights, originally aimed to fight racism and discrimination on moral grounds calling for basic fairness, were also hijacked and transformed into something divisive and destructive: replacing discrimination against minorities and women with discrimination against white men. “Abortion rights” signifies how the materialist death culture rose to full spectrum dominance.

The organized left, which once supported working people (labor versus capital), was hijacked by identity politics, which left the mostly white working class and, more and more, the middle class, floundering amidst a rising tide of inflation, joblessness, and debt-dependency. Naturally, these people turned to “populist” conservatism.

Trumpism was thus inevitable, in a disrupted culture in which genuine challenges to consensus thinking that looked increasingly discredited were technologically possible.

Just as inevitable was the Oligarch reaction to Trumpism, which began almost immediately after Trump upset their chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton, selected to become the First Woman President.

The reaction, however, featuring Big Tech’s algorithmic censorship and deplatforming, the exploitation of incidentals such as Charlottesville, and a rise tide of attacks on “conspiracy theories,” did not work. Too many people were not buying it.

Thus came the plan-demic, arguably the most massive power grab in human history!

Anyone who believes this to have been an unlucky accident, caused by a coronavirus that evolved in a bat, needs to read States of Emergency: Keeping the Global Population in Check by Dutch political scientist Kees Van Der Pijl (Clarity Press, 2022).

Welcome to the Narrative War!

One side includes the Deep State (CIA, other intelligence agencies, DARPA, etc.), mainstream corporate media (CNN, etc.), Big Tech (Google, Twitter, etc.), Big Pharma (Pfizer, etc.), and many other industries closely tied to governance or profiting from interconnectedness. This side handed power to the Bidenistas on January 20, 2021. As de facto descendants of those landed elites of yesteryear, this side owns and controls most of the resources, just as its ancestors did back when the feudalism of old was a mostly stable system. Today’s political economy is anything but stable, of course. So the Oligarchs are working overtime toward their Great Reset, and this includes doing everything they can to suppress, demonize, and destroy the other narrative.

Thus labels like semi-fascist, autocrat or authoritarian, superspreaders of misinformation, continued use of conspiracy theorist, and so on and so on.

The Oligarchs want technofeudalism, which would give the same level of control their de facto ancestors had — but from the standpoint of those outside their orbit would be a .ystopia of “gig” work, gaslighting, technology-based control (technocracy), and transhumanism.

Even the plan-demic has not been enough. There is still plenty of dissent out here. There are still tens of millions of people who would vote Trump into office a second time. Trump is not perfect. But he is all these tens of millions of people have, at least until someone else with the same level of charisma appears and steps forward. Hence he is being targeted for destruction.

The Oligarchy will foment violence, if it comes to that!

I think that beginning with the unprecedented raid at Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8 by the Bidenista-compromised FBI, the Oligarch narrative warriors are strategizing for End Game. What I think they envision: Trump is indicted by the Bidenista Department of Justice for mishandling classified documents (it is at least possible that in his haste to leave the White House in January 2021 he got careless). A second Trump presidency — the mere possibility of which terrifies the Oligarchs — is circumvented.

Lindsay Graham (once a Trump critic, if you go back enough years) has warned of “blood in the streets” if Trump is indicted and prosecuted.

Trumpism (the MAGA movement if you prefer) will still be around, but if just a few of its number can be goaded into violent, irrational action, civil war on their minds, it, too, can be discredited in the eyes of a poorly educated general public. For unless this movement gets better organized, the danger is of ultimately futile actions by individual “freelancers,” and small if well-armed groups easily put down by the immense police power of, say, Homeland Security, and then demonized in corporate media as have been the Jan-6ers.

Technofeudalism will then be our future, and all the court political commentators in corporate media can say, “We saved our democracy!”

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E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

Is the Narrative War About to Explode?

By Steven Yates

August 19, 2022

A little over a week or so ago, a man entered an FBI field office armed with an AR-15 and a nail gun. He was killed in a firefight later. Apparently he’d posted threats against the FBI on Truth Social, Donald Trump’s Twitter alternative.

Others face charges after threatening FBI agents and the federal government generally on social media. The judge who signed the warrant authorizing the raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence reports receiving death threats.

First things first. I repudiate such tactics unconditionally. Walking into an FBI office armed not only gets us nowhere, it is grade-A stupid! As with threats against police, it’s a great way to get yourself killed!

Not to mention the fact that anyone doing this is playing right into the hands of those railing hysterically about threats to the “rule of law” and to “democracy.”

DON’T DO IT, PEOPLE!

Let’s use our heads!

Sure, the FBI did something unprecedented in U.S. history: raiding the private property of a former U.S. president, ostensibly seeking mishandled classified documents (agents took Trump’s passports as if they expected him to flee the country!).

But let them prove the hypocrisy of A.G. Merrick Garland’s “No one is above the law,” when Trump is publicly accused of doing something Hillary Clinton was able to skate away from. Let the Bidenistas prove their hypocrisy by continuing to protect Hunter Biden and his now-infamous laptop.

Let’s continue shouting the truth from the rooftops WITHOUT ADVOCATING VIOLENCE!

President Trump himself has called for calm. The “temperature has to be brought down in the country,” was how he put it. “If it isn’t, terrible things are going to happen.”

What I fear is that even his voice will go ignored. It’s not hard to see why.

Large numbers of people are fed up. They are sick and tired of hearing about the Big Lie amidst Deep State and Corporate Media’s bigger lies and outright fabrications going back to Russiagate.

They are sick and tired of double standards.

They are sick and tired of lies about the economy

They are sick and tired of being called racists, or beneficiaries of “systemic racism.”

And they are sick and tired of the plan-demic.

We know now that the coronavirus did not “evolve in a bat.” People with their eyes open are tired of Legacy Media repeating lies about the “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” the “safety and efficacy” of the vaxes which are contradicted by all the VAERS data.

They are frustrated, not knowing what to do. Their sense is that “the system” turned on them long ago, which it did.

The Democrats used to be the party of the white working class. Not anymore!

They see an elite-sponsored hate campaign against the one figure who has tried to stand up for them, and fear this campaign might win the day.

Consequently there are hotheads out in the hinterlands whose mantra is “lock and load.”

All one has to do is browse Truth Social, or other sites like Gab and Telegraph.

These people will not start a civil war. They will just place themselves and their families in great personal danger.

Unless, of course, there are enough of them, and they decide not to go off half-cocked as did the guy in Ohio, and instead get organized.

If that happens, and they again rally around Trump, or possibly around the leadership of someone we haven’t seen yet, watch out!

I’ve been following the conversation expressing fears that civil war could blow up in the U.S. I agree that what would ensue would be quite unlike the War Between the States 1860-65. There were mostly clear geographical lines then.

Today’s “lines” are very different! They are cultural and economic, not geographical.

Today’s divides are rural versus urban, localist versus globalist, those who favor smaller government versus those who want larger government, those who support traditional ways of doing things versus purveyors of “disruptive” change, and those who do not worship the almighty dollar as a secular god versus those who do (or act as if they do)….

Above all, there is the vast difference between those who want to be left alone, versus those who refuse to leave them alone.

These divides cut across all the visible borders and boundaries. All “red” states contain a few “blue” urban centers. And all the “blue” states contain regions that do not identify with the cultural Marxism of academia or the money-driven cosmopolitanism of Big Business.

What the former in each of these pairs deeply resent is being looked down on, their interests disregarded, and then regarded as inferior and ridiculed publicly by unaccountable elites who have treated them like crap all their lives … and then wondered, back in 2015-16, scratching their heads, why those they dumped on and dismissed as backward Neanderthalic racists listened when Donald Trump spoke their language.

The latter in each pair have inverted truth and lies even as they continued the ruination of the real economy, i.e., the economy of ordinary people working at ordinary jobs, not the investment economy of the elites.

Through their chronic weakness, the Bidenista elites oversaw the clumsy pullout from Afghanistan that abandoned thousands of allies there and left U.S. equipment in the hands of the Taliban. This perception contributed to opening the door to the first war on European soil in three quarters of a century. The continued antics of clowns like Nancy Pelosi has set the stage for increased aggression against Taiwan by the Chinese Communist Party.

Because our Establishment — GloboCorp, if you prefer — has merged Communism with Capitalism’s vulnerabilities, once the latter is aligned with the materialist worldview.

This system, which many pundits dignify with phrases like the liberal world order, and which prevails outside the axis represented by Russia, China, Iran, and a few others, is a disaster, and it is no wonder there are thoughtful people who see it as fundamentally deceptive and wouldn’t mind if it went out of business!

It has proven, however, immensely useful for those driven by a lust for power (and profit)!

The prospect of a second Trump presidency literally terrifies these folks. They know that if it happens, their effort at global domination might be finished! For a second Trump presidency would be very unlike the first. Trump has doubtless learned a lot since he stepped into the White House in 2017, a complete outsider, clueless who to surround himself with. I imagine he is now far clearer who his friends and enemies are. Who he might appoint to key roles the next go-round I am uncertain, but I’m sure it will not be the ilk who repeatedly undermined him Jan ‘17 – Jan ‘21. Don’t expect any Mike Pences or James Mattises or Jared Kushners.

GloboCorp either prevents a second Trump presidency or else!

They’ve found the perfect female voice: Liz Cheney, formerly Wyoming’s resident RINO who sacrificed her seat in Congress to become a full-time Establishment narrative warrior. I fully expect her to run against Trump for the GOP nomination. It would not surprise me if, when she loses, she runs as an Independent to try to draw enough votes from Trump to give the Democrats four more years! (That is assuming the election is not again stolen outright!)

Stop Trump is the subtext that screams at me from every mainstream newsfeed!

An indictment — on whatever grounds — if made before Trump officially announces his candidacy, would not knock him out of the race but would definitely slow him down.

Even Tucker Carlson now thinks the Justice Department will move to indict him. I expect that if this happens, it will happen between now and November — assuming that comes off normally since one thing is almost certain: Republicans will retake part or all of Congress, making the stop Trump agenda harder.

Paul Craig Roberts wonders whether the Establishment will “uncover” a “white supremacist” plot on the part of the “deplorables” to steal the election.

This would increase the likelihood, he believes, of a federal takeover of the election! Then the Establishment can steal it!

I spent several paragraphs at the outset urging people on our side of the narrative war to control their tempers. But should any of several possible variations on the above scenario play out, how can any reasonable person expect them to do so? What will I be able to advise then, other than offering reminders of those millions of hollow point bullets Homeland Security purchased years ago.

I don’t think that was done so its personnel could hunt ducks.

The Establishment figured out long ago that a peasant revolt was at least possible.

The peasants, who have not millions but hundreds of millions of guns of their own, and any number of war-hardened Veterans on their side, could well give a good accounting of themselves even if they don’t win.

Were anyone with real power to read this, I would advise: do not indict Trump, and don’t hoke up some imaginary “white supremacist conspiracy” to give yourselves an excuse to hijack the November election!

Because of you do either one, or both, things could turn very ugly, very fast!

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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Thoughts on the Alex Jones Saga: “Conspiracy Theories” the Good, the Bad, and the Bogus

By Steven Yates

August 16, 2022

The Alex Jones Saga.

As most readers doubtless know, Alex Jones has been ordered to pay a whopping $49.3 million to two Sandy Hook parents whose child was allegedly killed in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012.

This may be the largest defamation award of all time, and with two more suits against Jones pending, combined awards might end up accomplishing what the Establishment wants, which is to put Jones’s media organization out of business.

I’ll admit, I’ve never been an Alex Jones fan. His bombast, exceeding that of the late Rush Limbaugh, was always too much for me. Sometimes, especially when appearing as a guest on someone else’s show, he simply lost it. Almost a decade ago, Piers Morgan interviewed him on gun control. For the first couple of minutes, Jones made reasonable arguments, however animated. Then he launched into a tirade. I know it’s CNN, but watch. Note that having deep-sixed Jones’s own channel, YouTube hasn’t censored this. Morgan, representing the Establishment, comes off cool and collected. Jones sounds like a loon. I did not trust him after that.

That said, we must acknowledge that he was in the forefront of those exposing globalism. He drew attention to unanswered questions raised by the Oklahoma City Bombing and, six years later, 9/11. Mainstream corporate media hated his guts from the get-go, especially when his audience began to rival theirs in size.

The question: did he go too far with Sandy Hook?

After all, it’s one thing to criticize members of the political class or other highly visible public figures as not being what they seem, or as working for malevolent powers. First Amendment rights afford lassitude regarding such.

It is quite another to claim that private citizens, such as Sandy Hook parents, are really “crisis actors,” in the context of claiming that one of the worst alleged mass shootings of the past decade was a hoax concocted by the Obama-era Deep State with the intent of bringing about more gun control.

Someone doing the latter better have all his ducks in a row, because the First Amendment wasn’t written to protect such allegations unless they could be backed up with rock-solid evidence!

Conspiracy Claims Can Go Overboard.

Before penning this, I checked my archive. Did I write anything about Sandy Hook when it happened? I found nothing on it here, or elsewhere. Looks like I went mostly silent for several months. Sometimes my “muse” deserts me. Or is overridden by circumstances. In 2012 I was exploring a foreign country, learning its language, meeting new people. Except for the election, what was going on in the U.S. was mostly off my mind.

Researching it a little now, I’m unsure what I would have said then. So this may be 20-20 hindsight.

First, some people go overboard with conspiracy claims. Not everything bad, or every act of violence, can be blamed on nefarious agencies. As the quasi-Freudian quip goes, a cigar is sometimes just a cigar.

Second, as I’ve often noted, much of what I write about doesn’t fit the conspiracy label. It relies on published materials, some penned by the “conspirators” themselves or by those who have been close to them: readily available if you know where to look. If a conspiracy is something hidden from you, then superelite agencies — GloboCorp, if you prefer — are not hiding but just exploiting public preferences for what the Kardashians did this week. So we shouldn’t use that label. I’ve used the term directed history a time or two.

Third, when searching for conspiracy claims about Sandy Hook specifically, one thing stands out: disproportionately severe and costly backlash against those making them.

James Tracy, formerly a communications professor at a South Florida university, also alleged that Sandy Hook was a hoax. By 2015 he’d lost his teaching career following a legal battle with Sandy Hook parent Lenny Pozner over whether his son Noah had ever existed. Tracy had declared Pozner’s son’s birth and death certificates to be forgeries.

Jim Fetzer, a retired philosophy professor, and another author, co-edited a book of essays entitled Nobody Died At Sandy Hook (2015), which made the same claims as Tracy. Amazon carried the book for a while, then banned it. Pozner also sued Fetzer for defamation and was awarded $450,000!

I would have avoided the subject, but then I discovered this article by Ron Unz: a gamechanger I recommend wholeheartedly! Even before finishing this! Go there! I’ll wait!

Cognitive Infiltration: What It Is, Why It Is Dangerous.

Unz cited an author not (yet) widely known: Michael Collins Piper, who wrote several books critical of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. He specifically criticized the U.S.’s unconditional support for Israel. This made him powerful enemies, and he died in relative poverty in 2015. His posthumously published False Flags (2019) argues what seems to me a plausible thesis going something like this:

The IT Revolution, especially the Internet, made centralized control over information impossible. By the turn of the millennium we were in a period in which anyone could research anything and put the results on a website or blog available to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. Then one could build an email list and distribute their information to a huge and expanding audience.

This was our Gutenberg moment. But it arrived with its own dangers. You could find sober commentary on real world effects of globalization that differed greatly from what George W. Bush’s court economists said. You could also find claims that the Bush administration answered to space aliens.

Piper put his finger on something that occurred to me long ago: how easy it would have been back then (maybe still is) for globalists to “seed” the Internet with bogus “conspiracy theories,” planting what were already called urban legends, then get them in front of the Alex Joneses of the world hoping they would excitedly latch onto them. Those whose critical thinking skills had not atrophied would turn away, thinking all claims of nefarious activity behind the scenes are the province of nutjobs.

The process is called cognitive infiltration.

I’ve happened upon conspiracy claims I can’t take seriously. Some sound credible until you think them through.

Surely we noticed that mixed in with sober analyses of whether jet fuel could burn hot enough to bring down the steel-reinforced Twin Towers into their own footprint on 9/11 are claims that there were no planes! Those were holograms! Directed energy weapons brought down the Towers!

This is one such claim. There are others.

And what bothered me about films like Loose Change, which contended that a missile, not a plane, struck the Pentagon, were two simple questions.

First, the approaching plane was seen/heard by hundreds of people in vehicles or on foot that morning. If a missile hit the Pentagon, what happened to the plane? How was it gotten out of Washington airspace without anyone seeing it, or tracking it on radar?

Second, where was the missile fired from? Answers to such queries (when addressed at all) left me dissatisfied. These elements of 9/11-was-an-inside-job claims seemed dubious — unlike very credible claims that the event was known about in advance because it was planned in advance, and that something other than burning jet fuel brought down the Towers. Not to mention the loopy idea that Congress pulled the 400-plus page USA Patriot Act out of their derrieres in just six weeks!

Were we seeing calculated efforts to destroy the credibility of all inside-job / false flag thinking about 9/11?

Is Cognitive Infiltration Making Us Crazy?

It is difficult to write from this perspective, because so many patriots are sold on claims that ultimately don’t make sense. These well-meaning folks appear to constitute a substantial audience.

Talk radio show hosts thus risk alienating listeners by being nuanced, by suggesting, “Wait a minute…. Let’s think carefully about this.”

Writers such as myself risk losing readers.

When I revealed my doubts about the-moon-landings-were-faked thinking a couple of years ago (here and here), I received hostile emails saying I’d destroyed my credibility, a few saying they’d never read anything I wrote ever again!

The problem: I just can’t envision tens of thousands of engineers being fooled in pretty much the same way seven straight times! Engineers are not stupid! Thus the envisioned scenario seems to me highly unlikely!

And: what about the upsurge of flat-earthism over the past few years?

I am unable to engage at all something so patently ridiculous. Once a flat-earther replied to my sole online comment on the subject with something like, “Newton led the Royal Society! The Royal Society was controlled by Freemasonry! Freemasonry serves Satan! Therefore Newton’s theory and globism [sic.] are Satanic! Gravity doesn’t exist! Show me some gravity! Things float in water, do they not? Where’s the gravity there?”

That wasn’t exactly it (I’m going from memory), but it’s in the ballpark. How do you answer a screed like that? You don’t. You do the only thing you can. You walk away.

If such things are credible — if Satan has deceived us all to that extent — then we might as well give up seeking knowledge about the world altogether. My convictions have long been that physical science is possible because God created us in His image, creating our intellects in such a way as to be able to grasp, with some effort, the fundamental physical workings of His Creation. This is aligned with a school of thought known as presuppositional apologetics, which sees God’s existence is a first premise. If the first premise is false, then not just physical science but technology (which relies on physics at every juncture) is inexplicable.

That’s a Christian epistemology (theory of knowledge). Secular epistemologies tend to begin with sense experience. They’ve had to struggle mightily to stave off skepticism. It’s a long story.

In any case, learning the truth can be very difficult, made worse if your efforts are confounded with conflicting messages and narratives, some absurd and introduced on purpose to throw you off track and possibly even make you slightly crazy. Flat-earthism tells me there is an element out there that’s gotten progressively crazier.

Cass Sunstein: Architect of Cognitive Infiltration. The “Crisis Actors” Con.

Ron Unz draws our attention to a federal operative whose efforts overlapped the Bush and Obama years: Cass Sunstein, author of books on various subjects — and of an article published in an obscure academic journal back in 2008 suggesting that “conspiracy theories” should be fought not directly but through the infiltration method, which tries to drive people away from them by making them look ridiculous.

What he advocated, and what may have already been underway: superelite infiltrators enter the conspiracy fray with outlandish theories to compete with those of serious researchers. Then, over time, they ratchet up the outlandishness.

Sadly, the superelite mindset gets a few things right. The masses are by nature followers. In a society the educational system of which has basically gone off the rails, and in a culture driven by constant titillation and excitement, it will be easy to lead a lot of people by their noses. Especially those encouraged, or who have encouraged each other, to see and believe they’ve been manipulated by hidden, malevolent forces disrupting their lives and livelihoods.

Piper suggested that Sandy Hook was the Sunstein strategy’s first major test. Unz quotes him:

The Sandy Hook affair was tailor-made for putting the Sunstein gang’s experiment in motion. It involved violence. It involved the explosive issue of gun control, inasmuch as the incident was said to have been a mass shooting. And it was another sensational school shooting — and one at a grade school, no less.

The dynamics were absolutely on target — no pun intended — for the Sunstein thesis to be put to the test.

And, quite predictably, the mass media — as a consequence of its typically reckless nature — played right into the scheme. The frenzied rush in the heat of the moment to get “the scoop” led to sloppy reporting and presumably otherwise honest mistakes by journalists.

And naturally, a lot of these errors were quickly the subject of discussion among emailers and those participating on Internet discussion forums who were concerned about the obvious push for further gun control that was accompanying the media reportage relating to the events at Sandy Hook.

At this point Ron Unz interjects:

Piper argued that a small group of establishment operatives successfully manipulated the conspiracy community on the Internet, promoting ideas that soon captured the imagination of these activists, many of whom were excitable and overly gullible:

Piper again:

One of the first and most outrageous of these Internet “revelations” that did so much to make sincere truth seekers look foolish was the oft-repeated theme that “Sandy Hook was a hoax” and that no children were even killed there…. Even the introduction of the word “hoax” was carefully calculated and with the mass media reporting that “conspiracy theorists” were using that term to describe the tragedy, many in the general public began to doubt the sanity of a lot of good people who were rightfully raising questions about what happened at Sandy Hook and the way that it was being exploited…

This was their first big “test tube” case and it was proving to be a success, perhaps beyond even their wildest dreams….

The Crisis Management Conspirators mesmerized and manipulated American patriots and other skeptics via a nonstop wave of Sandy Hook “factoids” that quickly spread like wildfire across the Internet. And patriot websites by the hundreds — by the thousands — were picking them up and reporting them. These legends — spawned by the Crisis Management folks — because the staple daily diet of email addicts who were eagerly helping distribute the latest Sandy Hook “revelations”….

Precisely because so much disinformation was being repeated by well-meaning and entirely innocent folks, a lot of good patriots concluded that something had to be amiss with the “official” Sandy Hook story or otherwise — they said — so many good patriots on so many websites and elsewhere wouldn’t be raising these questions.

As the saying goes (I’ve quoted it before), what tangled webs we weave….

The idea is that if you can’t defeat your opponent in open debate, furtively join them and sabotage them from within! It’s a species of fifth generation warfare, fought with misdirection and subterfuge.

I think this explains the false rabbit trails I’ve mentioned and probably others besides. At least we should think about it. Continuing:

[O]ne of the biggest cons of all perpetrated upon legitimate truth seekers was the legend of the “crisis actors” … that came to be an article of faith surrounding Sandy Hook…. As we’ve already noted (perhaps all too often) in the wake of Sandy Hook many people actually believed that there hadn’t even been any gunplay at all — that no children and no adults were shot that day, that it was all a big staged event, with the purported victims and their families (along with law enforcement) in on the deal…. And in many respects, it may have been one of the most ingenious scams ever pawned off on American patriots designed to misdirect their attention.

Notice how specific superelites can be credited with “anticipating” the coming of Captain Covid. The obvious example is Event 201, organized by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum, carried out at John Hopkins University on October 18, 2019. Another of those events that happened “in view,” i.e., not exactly hidden but not reported in corporate media. You had to seek it out, or you’d not know about it.

We find nothing of the sort with “crisis actors.” To the best of my knowledge no one has claimed credit for the idea. Someone will point out that we have seen ads for crisis actors. Yes, ads that could easily have been placed by agents of Piper’s/Unz’s Crisis Management Conspirators where patriots would see them.

If this line of reasoning is correct, it seems that Alex Jones — among those others we mentioned, and more besides — fell right into the trap the Sunstein crowd laid for them, and are paying the price.

What Might Have Happened at Sandy Hook.

Are there legitimate questions about Sandy Hook? Probably. But which of the following is more logical:

A subgroup within the superelite plan a hoaxed “mass shooting.” They recruit dozens of “crisis actors” to pretend to be parents of murdered children. They enlist local law enforcement as well as local media.

Now consider an alternative scenario … the elites just send in a trusted, trained professional killer, a bona fide psychopath, who possibly uses the Lanza kid as a patsy (akin to Oswald and JFK, or Sirhan and RFK). He does a job about which most of the after-the-fact reportage was essentially correct: twenty children and six teachers or administrators were shot to death by someone who knew exactly what he was doing.

We have a timeline indicating that the shooter got off a rough average of one shot every 13.8 seconds — do the math. Some shots were reportedly much closer together, meaning much less time between them. I know of no information on how many shots missed, the bullets lodged in walls, but that would reduce the average time between shots still more.

The former would have been a massive undertaking! Agents of the superelite would have to buy the silence of each one of the dozens of people “in the know,” or otherwise threaten them, and manage to fool hundreds of other local people, continuing the masquerade indefinitely. There would always be the risk of someone credible blowing the whistle.

An advantage of the latter scenario is that it could have been accomplished without involving anyone outside a tiny inner circle. It accuses no one of being a “crisis actor.” Parents, police, the media, etc., could have been kept in the dark. What happened to the real shooter? Some reports indicated a “second shooter” initially apprehended outside the school moments later. This person seems to have disappeared. Or the real shooter, having left his weapon(s) with the Lanza kid (who received the final bullet), could have found a place to quickly change clothes, then pose as a parent and simply walk out with everyone else exiting the building in a state of panic.

I can’t prove that this second scenario is what happened, of course. I wasn’t there, and I doubt you were either, gentle reader. But consider the old and venerable principle known as Occam’s Razor. Roughly stated, other things being equal: given two competing ideas or explanations for the same event, the one with the fewest moving parts or basic postulates — structurally the simplest — tends to be the right one.

This idea has worked time and time again.

(In a universe designed by a rational God, a cosmos in which the deepest truths are ultimately the simplest makes sense, does it not?)

What Really Matters: the Superelite and Their Goal of Global De Facto Totalitarianism.

My thesis has long been, and continues to be: a small group of humanity, fundamentally sociopathic and seeing themselves as most fit to rule, is obsessed with power and global domination. This group has been using financial systems, economies, and over the past two and a half years, the psychology of mass hysteria, to extend their control over the world. They want a world government that will further enrich their global corporations, while exercising de facto totalitarian control over populations. This group recruits other sociopaths out of general populations who show a willingness and readiness to kill for the cause. They now have the technology enabling them to shift this scheme into high gear, and are using it!

The evidence for this is literally overwhelming!

The superelite, or GloboCorp, will stop at nothing to get what they want. Constitutional patriots in the U.S., as well as nationalists and so-called populists in Europe and elsewhere — also Christians the world over — continue to stand in their way.

They suffered a setback when the Internet got away from them. They partly lost control of national and international narratives, and since 2016 have pulled out all stops to get their power back. They see figures like Trump and possibly Putin as existential threats to their plans for the world. These figures don’t do their bidding as did the Clinton’s and Biden. They can’t be controlled. And they’ve proven strong enough to stand up against the superelite while leading populations at the national level. Hence controlled corporate media demonizes them as “fascists” and “autocrats.” Hence also the campaigns of censorship by Corporate Media and Big Tech which began after Trump’s upset victory in 2016.

The superelite know they are running out of time, because of the number of people out here who know about them and are organizing to oppose them, or at least get free of them.

Hence, finally, the frantic effort to block a second Trump presidency, which would be a catastrophe … for them!

Conclusion.

These are the sorts of things that merit our focus. We should avoid going down false rabbit trails, often based on incidents like Sandy Hook that go off the beaten track. Alex Jones’s fate shows what can happen when both prominent voices and their followers fall victim to cognitive infiltration.

Imagine the pain felt by parents who really did lose children in a mass shooting that, yes, really did happen even if by some chance Adam Lanza wasn’t the shooter! How would you cope, when you were accused in public of being a “crisis actor”? What would you do?

The situation is worse. For the past several weeks I’ve not seen a single reference to Jones that did not demonize him with the conspiracy theorist label. Some authors go further, denouncing him as a liar, despicable, malicious, and so on. In the wake of Jones’s likely financial ruin, millions of people watching it all will conclude that pursuit of anything smacking of “conspiracy theory” is not just nutty but evidence of personal malice! They will avoid it like the plague, and thus never see what is really going on in the world.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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Steve Bannon: Narrative Warrior

By Steven Yates

July 29, 2022

Steve Bannon’s “contempt of Congress” show trial for refusing to answer the January 6 Committee’s subpoena came and went. Bannon and his legal team didn’t mount much of a defense. Establishment media (e.g., CNN, MSNBC, etc.) immediately claimed victory. They misunderstand. I think Bannon’s lack of putting up a serious legal defense is his way of giving the Establishment his middle finger. Acknowledging that these people are going to do as they please and call it “the rule of law.” And that those on his side of the narrative war are smart enough to figure out his strategy.

Evidence for this interpretation of events can be heard in statements made after his conviction, to the effect that in the future “there’s going to be a real committee.”

And in his post on GETTR the Friday of his conviction that “I am not backing off one inch.”

Look at it this way: Bannon, age 68, despite his somewhat slovenly appearance, is a very sharp guy. (If you look at history, you’ll find many formidable intellects who cared little about how they looked or were perceived by the powers around them.) He’s called for “4,000 shock troops” to fight the narrative war. “This is taking on and defeating and deconstructing the administrative state,” he said. “Suck on it. We’re destroying this illegitimate regime.” He spoke further of “dismantling” it “brick by brick.”

No mincing of words!

Reiterating: Bannon knows that Election 2020 was stolen, that claims of this being a “big lie” based on “conspiracy theories” are themselves baseless, that a narrative of attempting to “overturn the election” has been constructed around January 6, and that although the Establishment got back in power two weeks later, its hold on power is precarious. This is especially true with the economy having tanked since January 21, 2021. It is probable, moreover, that the GOP will retake Congress in three short months, and that the Bidenistas will find themselves under investigation — starting with Joe Biden’s slovenly son Hunter’s now-infamous laptop.

What people care about are gas prices, higher prices for all basic foodstuffs and other necessities, inflated rent and mortgage payments, and other things affecting them directly. The more intelligent are thinking about and preparing for impending shortages. Do they really care about the “insurrection” narrative that the January 6 Committee has foisted on viewers through controlled Corporate Media?

Speaking of which: all people need to do to get a more truthful perspective on what happened that day is watch this documentary from The Epoch Times. I recommend subscribing to watch it. It will be the best money you spend this year. A couple of teasers: the film makes clear that it was Capitol police, not the “insurrectionists,” who started the violence. It is also now clear that a couple thousand people entered the Capitol. Around 850 Trump supporters have been chased down, incarcerated, prosecuted. If you watch the videos closely, you’ll see people inside the Capitol who have never been identified and do not look like Trump supporters. A couple such individuals were adjacent to Ashli Babbitt when Capitol cop Michael Leroy Byrd shot her to death without provocation. There are other scenes of graphic violence by Capitol police, including the beating that may have killed Roseanne Boyland, 34, whose death was attributed to a “medical emergency.”

Returning to Steve Bannon: it’s not like he’s in danger of being simply tossed in the slammer and the keys thrown away. His conviction is under appeal, and if he loses the appeal and is given time, his status as another political prisoner will be obvious. He is too visible to be “disappeared.”

Bannon knows every bit of this, and is doubtless using it.

Because he’s a narrative warrior — whether he thinks of it in those terms, or not.

As someone who understands the Establishment’s big lies, he’s not going to deal on its terms — even if, at present, it has the upper hand.

For that could begin to change starting in November. If Trump announces despite the possibility of the Bidenista-compromised Justice Department coming after him, the narrative war will get hotter still, and things will change further.

There is no telling what the Democrats will do. The other night my wife and I lay in bed watching Joe Biden and a South Korean delegation. The South Korean delegate spoke while Biden stood like a potted plant. When Biden finally began to talk, his speech was slow, halting, and barely audible. It was evident that he was reading directly from a teleprompter. I was waiting for the next “end of quote” or some similar gaffe.

If Biden fails to finish his term because of advancing dementia, then what? I’ve seen scenarios that include Kackling Kamala first assuming the reins and then stepping down under some faked pretext. The question is, who will she make her VP in the meantime, to continue the Establishment reign? Nancy Pelosi? California Governor Gavin Newsome? Either would be as big a catastrophe as Biden if not worse.

In short, the Democrats will struggle to come up with someone their globalist-controlled DNC will get behind as having at least minimal credibility. I would not rule out Hillary!

If Trump is the GOP nominee, then other things being equal, he will run right over that person.

Bannon surely knows all this, too. He’s probably reasoned it out, that all he has to do is wait and be patient.

All of which scares the Establishment out of its collective wits.

This explains the January 6 Committee itself, and the desire to bring uncontrollable loose cannons like Bannon to heel this year before Establishment power again begins to slip. It explains the Committee’s reaching out for anyone and everyone who might have been involved in promoting the “insurrection,” such as Ginni Thomas, conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife. Bringing her down would be a major step towards bringing him down, which the cultural left has wanted to do for years: a twofer!

All of this also explains the intense focus in Corporate Media on safeguarding, shoring up, etc., “democracy,” which some define as two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for supper.

Democracy is one of the Establishment’s primary propaganda words. The real thing involves majority rule, with the political class held accountable. We have not had either, anywhere in the Anglo-European world, for so many decades you might as well stop counting. I doubt that majority rule is even possible. Not that it would be desirable if it was. Responsible voting in honest elections is the closest we have come. But instead of political classes accountable to voters, what we have had is rule by a tiny, moneyed superelite that has been busy consolidating its power, its members never having been elected to anything. Who elected Klaus Schwab to direct the Great Reset?!

Covid enabled the superelite’s biggest power grab ever.

What some of us want, on the other hand, is to answer to our God, serve our families and clients and other associates with our superpowers, and otherwise be left alone — especially by governments, global corporations, and other predators.

One other author may have figured out Bannon’s strategy, based on his grasp at some level of all this. She doesn’t like it at all, but reveals with great eloquence the Establishment’s sheer terror:

In this week’s posturing before the Washington, D.C., U.S. District Court by the legal team defending Bannon, one thing became clear. These guys are not in it to win it. At the very least, they’re in it for the appeal. And if, in the meantime, they craft a counternarrative that works for Bannon’s podcast audience, riling up the nativist right, introducing more general chaos into American political discourse, and somehow advancing Bannon’s cause of spreading worldwide fascism, well, so much the better.

Or, as right-wing provocateur Jack Posobiec said on Monday’s edition of Bannon’s very successful podcast, War Room Pandemic, “Now Stephen K. Bannon, the former chief strategist of the president of the United States, is on show trial for this, and … both sides know that the only reason he is there is because of the effectiveness of the War Room posse, the effectiveness of the national populist movement, and the fact that he was architect of so much of the MAGA movement 2016 (presidential election) victory, and they’re trying to take him off the playing field for 2024. This is the regime going after the opposition.”

Look at the language. Crafting a “counternarrative”? “Riling up the nativist right”? “Spreading worldwide fascism”? “Right-wing provocateur”?

These are the ways voices of the Establishment protect their narrative, convincing themselves that nothing else is legitimate. The description of “the regime going after the opposition” makes perfect sense.

Alongside the realization that for “the regime,” time is again growing short, because the Steve Bannons and Donald Trumps of the world are not going anywhere.

Whatever else happens, I’ve said it in various ways before and I’ll say it again: I think there’s a major donnybrook ahead. Maybe more than one. These two narratives are not compatible. They cannot both exist under the same political roof and legal structure. Once November comes and assuming Republicans retake control of Congress, we can expect the cultural left (which serves the superelite’s narrative) to pull something. Or something might happen they can use, as they did the death of George Floyd. And then we can reasonably predict that the Establishment itself will pull something. It could be another virus (something bigger than monkeypox which may be just testing the waters), or the cyberattack about which I’ve also written intended to take down the entire Internet for long enough to Build it Back Better.

What we can be sure of: the “regime” will do everything in its power to try to prevent Donald Trump from getting back into the White House! It has tremendous wealth including that of billionaires at its disposal!

Steve Bannon probably understands this. What I hope is that he also understands exactly what he (and others) are up against.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

These columns present a perspective unavailable elsewhere: of personal freedom and community autonomy, based on a philosophically-informed conservatism within a Christian worldview holding that in the last analysis, we all answer to our Creator.

The Intellectual Suicide of Academia and Corporate Media

By Steven Yates

July 16, 2022

-The Khiara Bridges Chapter–

Just recently, an exchange between Josh Hawley (R.-Mo.) and a law professor at UC-Berkeley named Khiara Bridges at a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting in the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade went viral. The exchange went like this:

JOSH HAWLEY: Professor Bridges, you said several times, you’ve used a phrase I want to make sure I understand what you mean by it. You’ve referred to people with a capacity for pregnancy. Would that be women?

KHIARA BRIDGES: Many women, cis women, have the capacity for pregnancy. Many cis women do not have the capacity for pregnancy. There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy, as well as non-binary people who are capable of pregnancy.

J.H.: So this isn’t really a women’s rights issue, it’s a—

K.B.: We can recognize that this impacts women, while also recognizing that it impacts other groups. Those things are not mutually exclusive, Senator Hawley.

J.H.: So your view is that the core of this right then is about what?

K.B.: So I want to recognize that your line of questioning is transphobic and it opens up trans people to violence by not recognizing them.

J.H.: Wow, you’re saying that I’m opening up people to violence by asking whether or not women are the folks who can have pregnancies?

K.B.: So I’m— I want to note that one out of five transgender persons have attempted suicide. So I think it’s important—

J.H.: Because of my line of questioning?

K.B.: Because—

J.H.: So we can’t talk about it?

K.B.: Because denying that trans people exist and pretending not to know that they exist—

J.H.: I’m denying that trans people exist by asking—

K.B.: Are you?

J.H.: —if you’re talking about—

K.B.: Are you? Are you?

J.H.: —about women—

K.B.: Are you?

J.H.: —having pregnancies?

K.B.: Do you believe that men can get pregnant?

J.H.: No, I don’t think men can get pregnant.

K.B.: So you are denying that trans people exist! Thank you!

J.H.: And that leads to violence? Is this how you run your classroom? Are students allowed to question you—

K.B.: Absolutely!

J.H.: —or are they also treated like this where—

K.B.: No, no, no, they’re allowed to question!

J.H.: —they’re told they’re opening up people to violence by questioning?

K.B.: We have a good time in my class! You should join!

J.H.: I bet!

K.B.: You might learn a lot!

J.H.: Wow, I would learn a lot. I’ve learned a lot—

K.B.: I know!

J.H.: —just in this exchange.

K.B.: Absolutely!

J.H.: Extraordinary.

K.B.: Yep.

So what did Sen. Hawley learn? Judging from the look on his face, I would surmise he left the exchange convinced he was dealing with a certifiable nutjob. With a nose ring at that, symbolic of the regression to tribalism heralded by identity politics.

He might also have inferred: one of many, in American academia. For obviously Professor Bridges did not hire herself. Academic hiring (which I saw up close a few times, back in the day) is a lengthy, bureaucratic process. Numerous higher-ups must sign off on permanent appointments. Many of these higher-ups have agendas. Filling quotas of “underrepresented groups” — women, ethnic minorities, and more recently, sexual minorities — has been one of them for quite a while now.

We see the result, with bizarre neologisms like cis women and trans men (now common in academia), and the wild, impulsive leaps Professor Bridges makes from seemingly banal questions like, Are we talking about women? to insinuations of violence and suicide.

American academia has fallen to the point where one is not allowed to state openly that those capable of normal pregnancy are biological women.

That’s intellectual suicide.

Also of interest is how corporate media handled the exchange. The idea that Sen. Hawley somehow lost the encounter, or engaged in a “transphobic” line of questioning, was picked up. The mental confusion over who can get pregnant was missed.

This is corporate media suicide.

Just the titles of the various reports are enough.

From the initial article I ran across (Yahoo, aggregating from ultra-left HuffPo): Professor Schools Sen. Josh Hawley for His Transphobic Questions During Abortion Hearing.

Or, from the same source: Law Professor Takes Down Josh Hawley.

Really? Did whoever wrote these headlines actually view the exchange?

From Yahoo News itself: Professor Scolds Sen. Josh Hawley During Abortion Hearing: ‘Your Line of Questioning Is Transphobic’.

From the hard-left The Advocate (also courtesy of Yahoo’s news feed): Watch Law Professor Khiara Bridges Blast Josh Hawley’s Transphobia.

From Vox (picked up by MSN and other feeds): Josh Hawley’s Viral Transphobic Comments Explained.

From NBC News: Law Professor Khiara Bridges Calls Senator Josh Hawley’s Questions About Pregnancy ‘Transphobic’.

From Business Insider: Berkeley Law Professor Tells Josh Hawley He’s Paving the Way for Violence Against Transgender People By ‘Denying That Trans People Exist’ and Can Be Pregnant.

Those should do. If you are so inclined, gentle reader, you can find more accounts of how major news media online and offline reported this incident here.

Lemmings could not do better.

It should go without saying, Hawley was not “denying that trans people exist” or can get pregnant. He was denying, by implication at least, that “trans men” are really men. If they can get pregnant, it is because they are not men but women. Period.

This should not be rocket science, but this is where we are in 2022, when a national senator is no longer allowed to say that only women can get pregnant without getting “schooled” for it (interesting word, that!), and when intellectually suicidal law professors deny biological reality in order to use “inclusive language.”

And when corporate media, given its leftward leap into wokery over the past couple of decades, describes an exchange such as this as “taking down” one of the few political figures who seems to have a grip on reality.

I recently explained this to a friend, who finally interrupted with something like, “How can someone get to be a law professor and be that stupid?!”

My response may have sounded, at first glance, like I was coming to Khiara Bridges’ defense. I pointed out that she has a doctorate in anthropology as well as a law degree. She’s written a couple of books, even if one of them is on critical race theory.

The point isn’t easy to grasp at first, but this isn’t about intelligence. It’s about your basic worldview and the direction you take it. Your reasoning — good, bad, or indifferent — and the lens through which you see the world, will follow your worldview.

Some philosophical materialists, for example, are brilliant thinkers — and if their thinking is brilliant enough it will take them into a mental cul-de-sac, which they may recognize as such or not. An example is the British-born philosopher Colin McGinn (b. 1950), who spent much of his career trying to answer, “How can human consciousness exist in a material universe?” He eventually concluded that the human brain isn’t “wired” to understand itself. Some call this the “new mysterianism.” It is a way of throwing up one’s hands in a gesture of despair. Most academic philosophers feel compelled to see everything through the lens of materialism, just like most academic scientists.

I thought it a good idea to toss a nonpolitical example in here, because readers can consider it dispassionately. For if someone begins with the political premise behind, say, critical race theory (that racism has been built into the structure of the American Constitutional political and legal system from the start, and so permeates American life whether we know it or like it or not), that person will see every situation through that lens, never question it, and hit a parallel cul-de-sac: how could the best-intentioned social engineers end racism from American society without ending American society itself? (Which may, of course, be the real goal of critical race theory.)

That such considerations are over the heads of cultural leftists is to be expected. I would be interested in a survey of how many of Professor Bridges’ students could get the year of the U.S. Constitution’s ratification right, or what they would come up with if asked to write about — for example — Federalist Papers 10 or 51. Or, more broadly, how they would respond to queries about the influence of various strains of Christianity on the history of the legal system in the U.S.

In short, if her students are learning anything.

Have they been taught anything except case law and how to view the American legal system through any lens other than race and sexual confusion?

This is the seemingly unstoppable train American academia has been on at least since the late 1980s, and when we watch exchanges such as the above, we see that train going over an intellectually suicidal cliff. When viewing how corporate media has reported the exchange to the public, we see that cliff broadening, as like lemmings, woke-era presstitutes mindlessly follow the academic “experts.”

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

This stands in contrast to the major threat of our time: a sociopathic superelite using technology and financialization to gain world domination, unleashed by secular materialism and the latter having collapsed all forms of valuation other than money and power. Globalists see themselves as answering only to each other. They do not believe in a Higher Power. They are the culmination of the materialist / secularist / liberal worldview.

This last had been rising, but over the past few months has fallen dramatically! I have no theories why, except that I am not one of their “creatives” consistently dispensing “infotainment” on the site. Nor is the site especially truth-teller friendly.

Where this is going: the lights on this project could go out at any time, and just when they are needed most! If you value what I do, please consider becoming a Patron or arranging some other means of support to help keep this project alive (I accept donations via PayPal). Do not do it for me. Do it for you. Do you want to help spread truth, or do you prefer to live in a fake reality based on official narratives steeped in lies?

We all benefit from helping disseminate truth, and from furthering the idea that persons and freedom have intrinsic value because we were created in God’s image. These things will not preserve and defend themselves. So please consider becoming a Patron today by going to the site linked to above and making a small pledge. If just 100 people reading this were to pledge $5/mo., that would be $500 extra each month in defense of truth-telling!

If Trump Plans to Run in 2024, Time to Announce His Candidacy Is Now!

By Steven Yates

July 6, 2022

If there is one takeaway we should get from the scripted January 6 Committee hearings, it’s that its members, which include two hardcore Establishment Republicans, want to prevent another Trump presidency — by any means necessary!

The best way to do that would be to open the door to the Justice Department charging Trump with crimes ranging from seditious conspiracy to fraud, based on the official narrative (he tried to “overturn” a “free and fair democratic election”) and testimony at the hearings.

The Committee is forging ahead even though claims that Trump tried to grab the steering wheel of the presidential SUV are disputed. Other claims of Trump behaving violently (e.g., throwing soiled dishes against the wall on at least one occasion) are also questioned by a New York author who has been in a position to observe the man for decades and describes him as unlikely to engage in such acts. Caren White sensibly asks, if Trump had actually done this, wouldn’t we have heard about it long before now? Wouldn’t claims that he tried to grab the steering wheel of a moving vehicle have made instant headlines when they happened?

In other words, much as I hate to ask, where is the proof that these events really occurred? By the same standards of proof the Establishment has required of those alleging fraud during the early morning hours of November 4, 2020.

We are dealing with people who are not above making crap up. Criminal charges based on the official narrative of an attempted coup to block the “peaceful transition of power” — even if made on the basis of hoked-up “evidence” — would be sufficient to block another Trump run for high office while the case moved forward.

Which is why, if Trump plans to run in 2024, the time to announce his candidacy is now!

True, this would be unprecedented. November midterms are still four months away. But we have an unprecedented situation on our hands, and it’s time to pivot.

I’ve noted — many times — that we are in a war of narratives. Just over two thirds of Republicans either believe the election was stolen outright, or at least think there were enough “irregularities” to warrant investigation. They do not believe “there’s no evidence of fraud.” They think the evidence was memory-holed back in November 2020.

Almost a third of Independents agree.

From that standpoint, the Bidenistas are illegitimate, these hearings are illegitimate, and any prosecution based on them would be illegitimate.

My writing such things won’t stop this runaway locomotive, of course. Nor will any prosecution or labels (“extremist,” “white supremacist,” “fascist,” etc.), or threats,dislodge Trump and his supporters.

It is likely that some among the latter would deem a Trump prosecution as an act of war, as I’ve stated before.

All of which is why I urge sensible people to get out of big cities and even suburban environments if you can! Because we are watching two locomotives on the same tracks on collision course.

When they hit, assuming one side or the other doesn’t back down, things are going to get ugly!

The economic situation is likely to make matters uglier. For even if the Supreme Court has become a bastion of relative sanity—to the point where their conservative members have had to seek protection from leftie “peaceful protesters” outside their homes!—the last 18 months of the Bidenista regime have been catastrophic by any measure!

Everyone with a functioning brain knows this!

I’ve recently had the opportunity to have a few conversations. I’ve observed during these that you don’t have to like Trump personally. No one I know thinks he’s the most likeable guy on the planet. But as was said of Bill Clinton (who was personally very likeable), he got things done!

By all the official measures the Trump economy was roaring! We were on track for energy independence. Gas prices were under $2/gallon. Unemployment among Hispanics and African-Americans had fallen to record lows. The Dow was surpassing previous highs almost daily. Inflation was practically nonexistent. The situation on our Southern border was under control.

And unlike Clinton who had the winds of corporate media at his back, Trump did all this despite the most intense hate blasts ever directed at a president in America.

Had it been an Establishment figure in the White House, the above would have been considered major triumphs!

Trump did not start any new wars, moreover. Bill Clinton could not make that claim. And had Hillary won in 2016, U.S. troops would have been in Syria within a year. Bet on it. Also bet on ISIS still being in business and beheading Americans.

I did say, by all the official measures. We were on our way to economic heavy weather as well as significant political unrest both domestic and foreign. In 2019, both became manifest. But Trump did not control the Federal Reserve. The money printing presses started long before his watch. He did not invent inequality, nor did he invent the systems of financialization developed and honed by GloboCorp, which had begun to work their economic magic of welfare-statism-in-reverse (redistributing wealth upward!) long before his watch.

Biden killed over 10,000 jobs immediately when he closed the Keystone Pipeline with one signature. Inflation is roaring, not the economy; economists are talking recession again. Gas is averaging around $5/gallon and threatening to go higher. Our Southern border is once again an utter mess, with thousands trying to get across (and some succeeding). Biden’s abrupt pullout from Afghanistan stranded Americans there and left tons of U.S. equipment in Taliban hands. Finally, Putin moved on Ukraine because whatever other factors were involved, the Russian leader could be sure that the doofus in the American White House was too incompetent to lead any opposition against him.

So factually, are we better off or worse off than we were in 2020?

It’s a no-brainer, people!

None of this has mattered, because of how corporate media is protecting this disastrous administration with official narratives, while trying to destroy the legacy of its predecessor.

It is what it is, however, and I cannot emphasize enough what the freedom movement is up against. It starts with realizing that the truth is almost completely opposite what we get from the Establishment and its presstitute corporate media.

“Saving our democracy,” that is, refers to preserving systems that empower globalists who control economies from the top, while placating the masses with bread and circuses. Calls to preserve the “liberal world order” (such as one Bidenista recently issued over paying record-high gas prices) are the same.

And keep in mind that if you reject the Establishment’s narratives, you are ”spreading misinformation,” supporting “the Big Lie” (or “election denialism”), engaging in “right-wing extremism” or “fascism” or promoting “baseless conspiracy theories.”

It’s all upside-down, in other words. If you, your family or your community and associates want to be free of globalist structures and their effects, you’re “illiberal” and “authoritarian.” I’ve written how Viktor Orbán, a Hungarian nationalist who puts his country and its people first, is routinely labeled such. He’s hardly alone.

The possibility of such a figure, with a solid, populous movement able to defend itself with force of arms if necessary behind him, fully entrenched in the American body politic, doubtless scares the crap out of the globalists!

GloboCorp (Establishment) plans have long been to bring down what is left of the American middle class,replacing financial independence earned through work with permanent debt-serfdom, using the inflation the superelites created as a primary tool to pave the way for their Great Reset.

Speaking of which, Klaus Schwab and his cohorts are not hiding!

Six books, additional summaries of such, some available in Spanish translation, are readily available!

This is why any intelligent person buying the line that the Great Reset is a “baseless conspiracy theory” baffles me completely!

Fueled also by the “pandemic” the globalists also created for the purpose of bringing populations under direct control (conceivably minimizing the number of “useless eaters” out here), the Great Reset will introduce central bank digital currency, the use of which will be (1) monitored, and (2) required, as physical cash will slowly disappear.

I’ve personally encountered vendors already refusing cash. While in Florida recently I bought a replacement land phone. “Cash or credit?” I asked. “Debit or credit cards only,” came the curt reply. These companies probably do not know what agenda they are serving. All they know is that spending on credit has been super-streamlined and made über-convenient for both business and customer.

That’s called “nudging.”

The Great Reset is as much about psychology as it is political economy. An obviously intelligent gentleman working in a prominent bookstore in South Florida responded to my query with something like, “so we’re moving toward a world in which a handful of global corporations supply everything because they own everything” while shrugging his shoulders: “Since there’s nothing you can do about it, why should you care?”

My point has been that we are dealing with sociopaths at the top who are obsessed with total power over controlled masses who have been rendered psychologically helpless as well as economically debilitated and miseducated into thinking they live in a democracy.

Very few figures on the world stage have galvanized movements able to slow or even halt the globalist locomotive. Trump has been one of those figures, likeable or not. Can he and his supporters succeed? I don’t know. Can they survive the fallout from the ill-advised January 6 incursion which has been weaponized against them? I don’t know that, either. The largest resources and propaganda machine in human history are all arrayed on the Establishment side, the intent being to keep the Great Power Grab of 2020 (plandemic plus stolen election) in place.

For another Trump presidential run to be legally blocked would be a major triumph for the Establishment!

Trump’s enemies are moving fast! Which is why, if he plans to run again, his being coy about it must end! It’s time, as my late father might have put it, to either do something or get off the pot. If he does not plan to run, it is time to step aside with a decisive statement so someone such as Florida governor Ron DeSantis can step up when the time is right. Assuming he wants the job.

***********

Where this is going: the lights on this project could go out at any time, and just when they are needed most! If you value what I do, please consider becoming a Patron or arranging some other means of support to help keep this project alive. Do not do it for me. Do it for you. Do you want to help spread truth, or do you prefer to live in a fake reality based on official narratives steeped in lies?

We all benefit from helping disseminate truth, and from furthering the idea that persons and freedom have intrinsic value because we were created in God’s image. These things will not preserve and defend themselves indefinitely without ongoing financial support, however. So please consider becoming a Patron today by going to the site linked to above and making a small pledge. If everyone reading this were to pledge just $5/mo., that would be $500 each month in defense of truth-telling!

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

Roe v Wade May Be Gone, but the Death Culture Remains. This Is Why

By Steven Yates

July 2, 2022

Friday, June 24, 2022 will go down in history as the day one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in U.S. history was finally reversed: Roe v Wade (also Casey v Planned Parenthood).

The claim that “abortion rights” are “found” in a Constitutional “penumbra” is dead in the water.

The death culture (one might call it) — a culture in which women and more than a few men will take to the streets protesting eliminating a “right” to kill unborn babies — is still very much around, though, and clearly isn’t going anywhere.

In anticipation of last Friday’s decision, police in riot gear were seen on their way to the SCOTUS building. Can you imagine this happening in years past when SCOTUS decisions favored the cultural left (as in, e.g., Obergefell v Hodges)?

Police remained busy as protests erupted in leftie-controlled big cities. Calls to “burn down” the SCOTUS building were heard; highways were blocked; prolife women were assaulted by more of those “mostly peaceful protesters.” Antifa was on the move. Some trying to film had phones knocked from their hands and were forced to flee. Evidence continues to amass that most politically-motivated violence in America comes from lefties, despite “expert” pronouncements reciting official narratives about “right-wing extremists” and “white supremacists.”

I had little interest in the abortion issue until the day I was “asked” to teach a contemporary moral issues class and handed the textbook. There it was, the lead unit.

I dove in with few preconceptions of what to expect. The selection of readings seemed fair, in the sense that both sides were represented. Articles by “pro-choice” women professors were balanced by tracts such as an excerpt from a Pope John Paul II encyclicalre titled “The Unspeakable Crime of Abortion.” Other authors argued that abortion was either never acceptable, or was acceptable only in those rare cases when the mother’s life was threatened if the pregnancy was carried to term, or in cases of rape or incest. There were seven or eight essays in all, with questions for reflection at the end. The textbook didn’t try to resolve the issue. Current ethics textbooks never do.

What impressed me was the concern for fundamentals on one side — fundamentals here meaning: concern for what a human person is, and what ultimately grounds our saying human beings have rights — any rights? Versus those assuming a standpoint in which such issues are fully decided by legal rulings or cultural consensus, and we’re just working out the consequences.

I was unprepared for how intellectually weak and sloppy “pro-choice” reasoning (dating mostly from the 1970s) really was. Some students weren’t having it. When I posed a rhetorical question drawn from the introductory reading at the start of the discussion: “Is a fetus human?” one girl retorted, “Well, it isn’t a fish.” Of course, the debate as framed in textbooks isn’t over whether the unborn are genetically human but whether they are persons, members of the moral community. A dichotomy is simply presumed.

One author demonstrated clearly, however unintentionally, the logical minefield we enter when essential criteria for personhood cease to be complete human DNA, and when rights cease to be God-given and become legal pronouncements (or “social constructions”).

Her name was Mary Anne Warren, and she presented five “criteria for personhood” which relied on a science fiction thought experiment. She asked for the circumstances in which travelers to another planet would recognize members of a presumably very different alien species as persons like us with rights.

As I sometimes say, you can’t make this stuff up. This was to be her test for whether the unborn — who are unlike adults! — are persons.

Some of her criteria — seeing in them evidence of complex cognitive ability — ruled out not just newborns but small children, people in comas, and many Alzheimer’s sufferers. Other criteria — an ability to feel and respond to pain—utterly failed to rule out unborn babies.

A different article tried to draw an analogy between the unborn baby and a famous but unconscious violinist, to whom a woman who had been kidnapped was hooked up so that their blood-streams were shared. She was to be forced to continue sharing her blood to keep the unconscious violinist alive for nine months.

It is hard to count the number of disanalogies in this ridiculous argument.

At first I wondered how this kind of stuff ever got published in refereed academic journals, much less anthologized in a textbook students were expected to read and take seriously. I soon came to realize that by the time of the course I was teaching, left-liberals were established gatekeepers of philosophy publishing on most social-philosophy and moral-philosophy issues.

Bingo. Because sloppy thinking isn’t the exception for academic-cultural lefties. It’s the norm. It is easy to be distracted by it, and not to see where the real fault line is. Much academic discussion is put together in such a way as to avoid the “big questions.” What I am referring to will be familiar to long time readers. The distinction is between those who believe that all valuation, especially moral valuation and therefore rights ascriptions, are grounded in a transcendent reality and that reality’s God, versus those who would find them exclusively in this world, which means: in legal maneuverings and cultural consensus. Which the latter really means in turn: in the choices of those with the money and power to enforce their collective will on everyone else.

Back in the 1830s sociology-founder Auguste Comte penned his “Positive Polity” essay which founded the philosophical ideology known as positivism. This became, I am convinced, one of the most important documents helping understand how we’ve ended up where we are.

Comte formulated his “Law” of Three Stages a rising civilization passes through.The first stage is the stage of pure faith: the “religious or fictitious,” as he put it. The second stage is the stage of pure reason: the “metaphysical and abstract” which he did not think was much better. The third stage is the stage of empirical science: the “scientific and positive.” With additions by scholars to come (Great Britain’s John Stuart Mill who oversaw the translation of Comte’s writings into English, and Bertrand Russell who wrote at length of “scientific philosophy,” among others), the third stage became the stage of science, technology, commerce, utility, and the firm belief that the human race could take its progress into its own hands. This included moral progress — without gods or other transcendent abstractions from the past. There was just this world, its workings disclosed by science and in which we big-brained primates act as economic agents.

Materialism was the logical result of third stage thinking (I have written about this here, here, here, and here, with a reply to a critic here; the entire package is upgraded here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). Upshot: materialism(sometimes called materialist naturalism, or just naturalism) is a theory of reality, or a metaphysics. It is not the conclusion of any specific empirical results or scientific findings. Rather, it came to function as a first premise, or starting point. Empowered by the writings of Darwin, Freud, and others, materialism as a worldview had taken over major universities by around 1900. Given the prestige of those “experts,” it spread outwards across education generally, culture, and especially government and law. A doctrine known as legal positivism had appeared and grown dominant. Legal positivism asserts essentially that rights, justice, etc., are what the legal system (i.e., its dominant voices) says they are — no more, no less.

Materialism denies the existence of any fundamental moral distinction between human persons and the rest of physical reality. The human race as a whole has no transcendent moral significance or higher purpose. It is in this physical/material world, the world disclosed by science, that “our highest ideals must find a home” as philosopher Bertrand Russell would write in his also-pivotal “A Free Man’s Worship” (1903). By “highest ideals” he meant social justice and freedom from war.

Can we begin to see how a philosophical ideology has cheapened human life?

We — as tribal beings in many respects — had been struggling to overcome our tribalist past. What was healthiest in Enlightenment thinking was its declaration that rights were universal, not mere possessions of this or that tribe. Enlightenment philosophers did not invent this idea out of whole cloth. They got it from Christianity, and the Christian idea that man (meaning all persons) was created in God’s image.

Combine Enlightenment universalism with the notion that we can start with ourselves and invent from scratch a moral code that defines rights, and you have something that is proving to be our undoing.

The trajectory the twentieth century followed should have indicated that there was something wrong with the idea that materialist secularism could ever be the basis for a workable ethics. The Great War, as it was then called, began in 1914, shattered Europe, and because of improved communications, had ripple effects on our side of the Atlantic. The war exemplified the level of destruction human beings had become capable of, which would only worsen with time.

What is sometimes called the Jazz Age ensued starting around 1919-20; this was also an era of nihilist art movements such as Dadaism, although the overall mood of the country was giddy and upbeat.

Further shaking the optimism of earlier eras were the Great Depression, the Second World War, the rising evidence of genocides which were hardly limited to the Nazis, the coming of nuclear weapons, the rise of the Soviet Union as a world power, and the onset of the Cold War (and doctrines such as “Mutually Assured Destruction”) which lasted until 1989-91. When the Soviet Union fell, we saw not freedom but consolidations of wealth and power, irresponsible financial machinations, the unrest all this has given rise to, and the divisions we now see.

Where does abortion fit in here? This is an easy question.

Tribalism had always cheapened the life of “the other,” those outside one’s own tribe, or just those deemed inconvenient. Through hard, patient work, some of it intellectual and some of it political, the Western world started to overcome tribalism. Getting rid of chattel slavery was a major step forward.

But beginning in the 1970s, tribalism started returning in various forms. Today we have identity politics: academic tribalism. But identity politics is hardly the only form tribalism can take. Our latter-day neo tribalism has been fueled by the general idea that what it means to be human can be redefined through political or legal will, and that inconvenient humans can be written out of the moral community (what the Nazis did to the Jews, and what Stalinists did to Ukrainians who resisted collective farming).

Add to this, finally, globalists and technocrats who believe themselves capable of designing their “new world order” (or “great reset”) based on nudges, surveillance and controls, all through social engineering. This is bound to involve eliminating “useless eaters” and the systematic impoverishing of those who refuse to get with the program. Aborting unwanted unborn children will be part of this and actually encouraged if the mother can’t afford a child, or another child.

Our tribalist instincts plus materialism yield the modern death culture.

Abortion-on-demand works by writing the unborn out of the moral community. They are genetically human nonpersons, as were Jews to the Nazis and resisters to collective agriculture were to Stalin and his minions. The idea that the unborn are nonpersons is the reason “liberated” women can shout, “My body, my life, my choice!” “Women’s reproductive rights!” etc., etc.

They literally do not see another moral agent involved.

“Pro-lifers” still have their work cut out for them, therefore. This is because the end of Roe obviously does not mean the end of the death culture. As some have put it, a single federal problem has just become 50 state-level problems. Some states will ban abortion altogether (some already have, others are moving to do so). Others will become havens where the practice will continue unabated.

The problem is materialism,hovering over the death culture like a shadow so pervasive no one sees it. Corporate culture is materialist through-and-through. Decision-makers within corporate culture are not well enough educated to recognize this, but they act on it. This is why Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Facebook, Disney, Amazon, both Uber and Lyft, and many others, are ready to pay travel expenses for employees seeking abortions in states where abortion is likely to remain legal.

This will continue unless the dominant worldview of the West is changed. I vote for changing it back to Christianity, and encouraging the sort of Christian culture in which all human beings are seen as having intrinsic value and therefore as important: as “mattering” if you will.This change cannot focus on a single issue, such as abortion. It must be holistic, and address a mindset. It will cut across a swath of other issues, including sexuality, child-rearing and education, the family unit, and how businesses should operate.

What I am talking about will be extremely difficult. We are already demonized as theocrats. We will have to police themselves, so we do not become theocrats. We face a definite uphill struggle against hostile powers behind the death culture who have vastly superior resources and control of all dominant media. But ending the dominance of the death culture is the only chance Western civilization has, and time is running out.

Steven Yates’s new book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock, 2021) is available here and here.

Steven Yates blogs at Lost Generation Philosopher, and has begun writing a philosophy course centered on freedom, its preconditions, and the choices a person must make in order to have it.

Do you wish me to continue? Please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

Will the January 6 Committee Fuel Civil War in America?

By Steven Yates

June 28, 2022

I’ve written frequently of narratives and of what has become one of the biggest fault lines in the American body-politic: the clash between those who firmly believe Election 2020 was stolen and those who call this “the big lie.”

The latter is the official narrative in Corporate Media, and it is the official narrative of the January 6 Select Committee. Both have refused from the start to consider any possibility that the election was stolen, however it was done and by whom. This included many of Trump’s own people, including his attorney general. One side is holding most of the cards right now while those they label “insurrectionists” sit in prison, their lives ruined.

Millions of people believe Election 2020 was stolen. Multiple polls show that almost 70 percent of Republicans think so, and some 28 percent of Independents agree. Forty percent of Americans doubt that Biden won legitimately. That is a substantial fraction of the population whom Corporate Media and the January 6 Committee are shutting out of the conversation and further alienating.

I’ve discussed my own evidence — which was available on the morning of November 4, 2020 to anyone with an Internet connection and able to read graphs. And as much hysteria as death threats against Adam Kinzinger (RINO—Ill.) generate, this cuts both ways: some who signed affidavits under penalty of perjury testifying to wrongdoing at polling places have dropped from sight because of such threats against them or family members — or the sort of campaigns of personal destruction today’s Corporate Media presstitutes specialize in. These people do not have a Congressman’s resources to protect themselves. Even a former Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, had his home raided early June 23. He was put out in the street still in his pajamas, while the thought police seized his electronic devices. Clark’s thought crime: he did not accept the official narrative and communicated to Georgia election officials that there was sufficient evidence of fraud in that state to warrant investigation.

Those who respond “there’s no proof of election fraud” misunderstand something, and it might be useful to sort it out, because proof and evidence are slippery concepts.

Absolute proof does not really exist outside pure mathematics and formal logic. I can’t prove that you exist or that the sun will come up tomorrow morning—although basic physics supplies very strong evidence of the latter, at least.

Evidence is not proof. Evidence can be reinterpreted, so that it seems to be something other than it is. Or it can be blacklisted (dropped down the memory hole) and its advocates labeled “conspiracy theorists” to discredit them so that whatever they claim is ignored. Or deemed a “lie.” Note that calling someone’s evidence-claim a “lie” is stronger than calling it “false.” People make innocent mistakes and get things wrong. Accusing them of promoting a “big lie” implies not mere wrongness but malicious intent.

Bottom line: no, we don’t have absolute proof of a stolen election. But we do have evidence, in the form of those hundreds of affidavits that have been memory-holed as well as the video evidence provided in Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules and in Mike Lindell’s films.

The fault line now appears uncrossable. Trump called on the January 6 Committee to urge consideration of “the irrefutable evidence of massive and totally pervasive election fraud….”

Response: Trump is calling for “the impossible” because “it never happened.”

That’s the denial.

A characteristic of clashing narratives is that those on one side, where sometimes an entire worldview is at stake — or a view of one’s country and how it really works — is that they literally cannot see or hear what has been made available by the other side. Exemplifying this is William Barr’s testimony before the committee trying to refute 2000 Mules. While observing the two million or so cellphones in use on any given day in a big city such as Atlanta and that hundreds are likely to have been in the vicinity of one of those mail-in ballot boxes, he utterly fails to see that the film was about what was happening at night, during wee hours of the morning, which is when the fraud would have taken place. This is when the vote spikes I’ve mentioned were recorded.

Such things seem literally invisible to those who believe the dominant narrative.

This is not mere hair-splitting. This fault line is tearing at the very fabric of the country, including the Republican Party itself which is fully divided between its Establishment (represented by Liz Cheney, Kinzinger, etc.) versus Trump and his supporters. The Establishment has a seat at the table of the center of power. The latter were kicked out of a militarized Washington on January 21, 2001.Caught in between are the Jan-6ers, the now more than 840 political prisoners who breached the Capitol on January 6.

What is bad is that there may be no “rational” resolution to this. Kitzinger has warned, and about this he may be right, that it presages a “messy” Election 2024, especially as among Republican candidates for this fall’s midterms are some who do not accept the dominant narrative. Stolen-election allegations are not going to go away.

What is worse is that the January 6 Committee (as I wrote a couple weeks ago) is laying out a path for Trump to be prosecuted for a crime, for having instigated the January 6 “insurrection” which is part of the dominant narrative. This would be something the Justice Department headed by Bidenista Attorney General Merrick Garland would pursue. The accusation would be that Trump tried to stage a coup to reverse the results of a democratic election.

The real Establishment motive, I am convinced, is to prevent a Trump candidacy and likely victory in 2024 (because the Democrats have no one), continuing the derailment of globalism we had begun to see by 2018-19. Recall that by all official measures the mid-2019 U.S. economy was roaring: the Dow was at an all-time high, unemployment was at record lows including for African-Americans, gas prices were under $2/gallon, and inflation was nearly nonexistent.

All now memory-holed….

Trump remains characteristically coy about his exact plans — but he just set about circumventing any conclusions or recommendations the January 6 Committee reaches/makes by declaring his candidacy for 2024 ahead of the 2022 midterms, unprecedented as this would be. And then simply refuse to withdraw his candidacy if/when the Justice Department tries to charge him with a crime, alleging politically-motivated persecution.

Then what?

Whatever Trump does, his base contains elements who will consider accusing Trump of a crime not mere persecution but an act of war. They will respond accordingly. Label them “extremists” all you want. That’s just another word (like “conspiracy theory”). They won’t care. We should all note that gun sales have gone through the roof. It seems clear that unlike Australia,the thought that red-blooded Americans will give up their guns are probably delusional. Millions are instead prepping for things to get ugly!

The January 6 Committee is widening this fault line, a process likely to continue until it is not merely uncrossable but with the right trigger(s), leads to open violence. What happened on January 6 will look like a school cafeteria food fight by comparison. Especially should Corporate Media go beyond demonizing those who are sure the election was stolen and the Bidenista Justice Department starts doing to them what the thought police did to Jeffrey Clark. Am I advocating a violent response? Of course not! But I can scold as much as I like that conservatives ought to set out to form autonomous communities and prepare to separate from the globalist-controlled regime, but I do not think many such people are reading — and will not, in any event, be in any mood to “be reasonable” if the man they consider a hero, who set out to reverse the direction the country has gone in since the 1970s, is prosecuted from inside the swamp he tried to drain in the manner of a banana republic.

It will be a civil war by any other name, and as many have argued persuasively, because of the lack of clear geographical divides — red states contain many blue enclaves and blue states contain red enclaves — such a war will be magnitudes messier than the war fought from 1860 to 1865 which conventionally goes by that name.

Steven Yates’s new book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock, 2021) is available here and here.

Steven Yates blogs at Lost Generation Philosopher, and has begun writing a philosophy course centered on freedom, its preconditions, and the choices a person must make in order to have it.

Do you wish me to continue? Please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

Rewriting History

By Steven Yates

June 18, 2022

First things first. I would never have said that invading the Capitol on January 6, 2021 was a good idea. I said as much as the time. I was warning friends to steer clear.

I do not know how many people had assembled in Washington that day, but the number surely exceeds 15,000. I commented at the time: we saw no burned buildings or overturned cars; there were no random assaults on uninvolved passersby. No areas of the city were taken over and blocked off by “extremists.” By the standards of recent years, the crowd — most there to support Trump’s attempt to save his presidency — was extremely well-behaved. Most probably had no idea until they saw the news that night that a few hundred had breached the Capitol — even though the majority of those were peaceful.

Most are now political prisoners, and the visibly partisan inquiry known as the January 6 select committee looks to be headed in a single direction: not just nailing the official narrative that Election 2020 was “the most secure in history” as official history, but securing the “deadly riot” and “insurrection” narrative in a way that would open the door to actually indicting Donald Trump for a crime! This would be unprecedented! Never before in all of U.S. history as a past president been indicted for a crime. Nixon might have been, but he was pardoned, and it was clearly in the country’s best interests that he be pardoned.

That sort of thing happens in so-called banana republics!

Having to fight a criminal indictment which could be dragged out well into the next election season would prevent Trump from being a candidate in 2024! This, I submit, is the committee’s real goal. That Trump might run away with the GOP nomination and conceivably win a second term in the Electoral College scares the globalist ruling class to death!

The first installment of the Committee hearings were streamed live on June 9, and it was clear to me we were watching a carefully scripted performance. This whole fracas turns on one question:

Was Election 2020 stolen, whether by the Democrats or by someone else (possibly including foreign actors) acting on behalf of the Democrats?

The dominant side in the debate calls this the Big Lie, of course. It ridicules and demonizes the claim at every opportunity, never passing up a chance to call it “a false narrative,” “baseless,” a “conspiracy theory,”etc. I don’t need to recite the litany. We all know it. This side is moving in the direction of alleging that Trump tried to incite a coup in order to stay in the White House.

Many Republicans, including some running for office (or reelection) this coming November, are just as convinced that the coup already took place — on November 3-4, and then on November 7, when Joe Biden was declared the winner by corporate media despite major swing states not having announced who would get their electoral votes.One poll, from last year, shows two-thirds of Republicans believing Election 2020 was “rigged.” Among independent voters, the figure is 28 percent. Polls probably understate these percentages, since there are people who withhold their real beliefs from pollsters they don’t know or trust. What figures we have doubtless terrify the ruling elites.

What I recall: going to bed late at night of Tuesday, November 3, not sure if Trump would be reelected, but confident of his chances since the Democrats, for whatever reason, had picked one of the weaker candidates on their slate.

My biggest concern was that if Trump won reelection, leftist groups like Antifa would take to the streets, that we would again see riots that would continue until they forced Trump to declare martial law and put them down by force.

But would Trump actually do that?

That he was in this predicament indicated how the globalist-leftist alliance had boxed him into a corner. He would be damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. For if instigated riots broke out and Trump responded with police power, even military force if it came to that, he played right into the hands of those who call him an incipient dictator. He’d done surprisingly little to put down the George Floyd riots earlier that year, suggesting that with the right Soros dollars flowing into the right hands, the ploy would be easy to accomplish.

Thus in the post-election apocalypse I feared, Trump would win but be forced to use brute force to stay in office. This alone would transform the country forever. His only alternative would to step down — also effectively ending “democracy” in America (outside the Real Matrix, “democracy” in America ended long ago, of course, assuming it ever existed at all; we can read every contemporary reference to securing “our democracy” as securing control by its Establishment of ruling elites).

Those were my thoughts November 3 – 4. I went online and saw several reports of massive vote spikes in wee hours of the morning. All were “mail-in” votes for Biden. The claims were accompanied by charts where you could see the spikes in red.

The fraud was evident to anyone able to read those charts!

Not more than ten or so days later, when I went to retrieve the links to document the fraud for an article, they’d been scrubbed from the Internet! The evidence I’d seen with my own eyes was gone! Reproductions existed but were very hard to find!I was horrified!

Following a couple of articles on this site I had a brief, three-way email correspondence with two people both in Michigan who claimed to have witnessed ballot-stuffing and had signed affidavits to this effect. They quickly ceased to pursue the matter. They reported (to me, anyway) receiving death threats and threats to family members. One was also dealing with being publicly humiliated being dragged through the mud for a personal peccadillo totally unrelated to election fraud claims. This is a typical Corporate Media ploy: seize on any such extraneous circumstance and use it to destroy the credibility of someone who has become a threat. Both people ceased writing me since neither of us was using encrypted email.

Their affidavits, signed under penalty of perjury, disappeared down the Memory Hole. Alongside hundreds of others.

I had little trouble envisioning scenarios similar to theirs playing out in Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and probably elsewhere, out of sight and out of mind, so that bought judges in those places could declare election fraud claims “baseless” since “there’s no evidence.” (Always remember that such people work for the system, not the pursuit of truth and justice.)

Trump’s bought attorney general, William Barr, could then summarize the Establishment view of stolen-election claims: “Bull***t!” Corporate media could site his judgment as authoritative (still does). Trump appointed him, after all.

So what happens next?

Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules came out recently, and purports to document how people he calls “mules” delivered “mail-in votes” late at night, caught on security cams. The film shows how such clandestine actions repeated over and over again could have easily swung the election in affected states.

Most secure election in history? There is doubt all over the place!

This is what the ruling elites — the Establishment, GloboCorp, whatever — must suppress at all costs! If enough Republicans and Independents decide to act on the conclusion that Election 2020 was stolen, they lose part of their power in November and conceivably lose the White House again in 2024! (Unless there’s another “rig,” of course.)

Hence the Establishment is playing the “insurrection” narrative for all it is worth, and will doubtless continue with these “hearings” on into election season.

The problem for them: there was no “insurrection.” An actual insurrection tries to overthrow the government. No one on January 6, 2021 was trying to do that. What was desired, at least by some, was preventing the certification of Biden as winner, under the assumption that Biden’s “win” was not legitimate in several states.

Nor was there any “Capitol riot.” Riots are what took place last summer, with hundreds of millions of dollars in damage done to buildings and other infrastructure. Nothing like that happened in D.C.

So what really happened? A legitimate (First Amendment) assembly petitioning the federal government for redress of grievances — with a small handful of individuals getting carried away — possibly egged on by outsiders.

For the truly terrible thing is that a few Senators had been prepared to discuss the doubts that Biden “won fair and square.” We might have had a chance to see a public review of the evidence. Those who entered the Capitol either didn’t know this, or really had been infiltrated by forces hostile to Trump (Antifa and the FBI being the most likely suspects). Several on-the-ground witnesses later recalled seeing people in the vicinity of the Capitol who were clearly not Trump supporters. Let us always remember that using agent provocateurs is the oldest trick in the book.

Be all this as it may, with the Bidenistas having secured the Executive Branch and Democrats, the Legislative Branch (what we may call the corporate left had control of Corporate Media and Big Tech all along), the Establishment had control over the narrative — which they have maintained ever since.

Hence the January 6 Committee, with Establishment GOP voices like Liz Cheney (daughter of the ultimate Establishment man, Dick Cheney).

I submit again that their goal is to thwart even the possibility of a second Trump presidency by circumventing any attempt Trump might make to run in 2024. The Establishment elites know that their present lock on power is far from absolute, and they doubtless know about the above polls (and their limitations). Most of their narratives collapse under scrutiny. Hence the censorship of such scrutiny by Big Tech (e.g., the scrubbing of the documentation of those vote spikes I and others saw on the morning of November 4, 2020).

Bottom line: there was no “attempted coup” on January 6, 2021. The real coup had already taken place. It happened November 3-4, 2020. So far, the perpetrators have gotten away with it. I would not be surprised if this Committee is able to see to it that they continue to get away with it. If the global covid power grab is the biggest power grab in history, this power grab probably comes in second.

History, Rush Limbaugh once said, is what happened. History is rewritten, however, to further specific narratives about nations, national elections, presidencies, “white supremacy,” “liberal democracy,” and so on. Bought members of the political class, bought attorney generals and judges, bought media “presstitutes,” and many others, through incessant repetition of official narratives and their use of words like baseless and conspiracy theory, do everything they can to cement their narratives firmly in the minds of the masses.

Steven Yates’s new book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock, 2021) is available here and here.

Steven Yates blogs at Lost Generation Philosopher, and has begun writing a philosophy course centered on freedom, its preconditions, and the choices a person must make in order to have it.

Do you wish me to continue? Please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

Inflation: Prelude to Globalist Central Bank Digital Currency?

By Steven Yates

June 7, 2022

“Allow me to issue and control a nation’s money, and I care not who makes the laws.” -Mayer Amschel Rothschild

“Who controls the issuance of money controls the government.” -Nathan M. Rothschild

Inflation is roaring. This is common knowledge. Inflation is not just roaring in the U.S., where gas prices have soared to well over $4.60/gallon and are averaging over $5/gallon in several states. It is roaring worldwide. Both food and gas prices having risen in Chile where we live. I encounter similar stories from elsewhere.

I’ve not seen specific statements on such from the globalist ruling class, at least not yet, but I suspect we are being set up for globalist central bank digital currency (CBDC). This is not to say there aren’t such statements. I’ve not searched exhaustively, and globalists have a penchant for telling us what they plan to do—knowing that few will seek out information that isn’t on CNN, and those who do will be marginalized as conspiracy theorists.

Here, straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak—from the globalist Atlantic Council — is an accessible account of CBDCs and where they stand.

What we learn: in May 2020 (two months into the plan-demic), 35 countries were looking into CBDCs. Now, 105 countries representing 95 percent of global GDP, are considering them. Fifty have advanced to a development stage, with ten having launched a CBDC. China has piloted a CBDC planned for launch in 2023. The European Central Bank plans to introduce a “digital euro” by mid-decade.

Of G7 countries, the U.K. and the U.S. are the furthest behind. Think Brexit; think Trumpism. These are the places where globalism has received the most pushback. The Bidenistas have responded. “Joe Biden” signed an executive order calling for the “responsible development” of a digital currency.

Nineteen of G20 countries are working on CBDCs, with 16 in development or ready for the pilot stage. Included in this list are South Korea, Japan, India, and Russia.

Finally consider this paragraph:

The financial system may face a significant interoperability problem in the near future. The proliferation of different CBDC models is creating new urgency for international standard setting.

There’s your dog-whistle. What it really says: individual nation-states’ central banks developing their own CBDCs is a transitory step. The goal is to go global via “international standard setting.” With the central banks in the world answering to the Bank for International Settlements, this should not be difficult to accomplish.

And don’t think you will have a choice, peasant, when this begins to affect you: when, that is,major stores begin refusing your cash. Or when, out of nowhere,you confront new hoops to jump through at banks in order to withdraw cash from “your” account.It’s to ensure “your security,” of course.

This move, from roaring inflation to a global CBDC, will be Hegelian dialectic in operation, all around you and right in front of you.

What is Hegelian dialectic?

The phrase derives from the early nineteenth century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, the first to put his finger on it. His ideas were greatly amplified by Karl Marx.

Marx was not the only beneficiary of Hegelian thought. Hegel is one of the half dozen or so most influential philosophers of all time.Sometimes his dialectic is written obscurely as: thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Think of it instead as this triad: crisis-reaction-response.

Here’s how it works in the real world: a crisis is manufactured or allowed to develop (thesis). The crisis provokes a reaction (antithesis: “Somebody do something!!”). Those with the power to make things happen come to the rescue with the response, which is what was wanted all along (synthesis). The pushback the ruling class would have received before the crisis is reduced to the “extremists” and “conspiracy theorists.”

In his magnificent work States of Emergency: Keeping the Global Population in Check (Clarity Press, 2022), Dutch political scientist Kees Van Der Pijl argues convincingly that the entire covid “pandemic” was a concerted effort by the globalist ruling class to bring increasingly restless populations back under control before the global economy melted down and they had a mass revolt on their hands.

First, what he calls the IT Revolution happened (1970s to 2007). In the past I’ve described the Internet as our era’s Gutenberg Press, which got away from the DARPA elites and threatened to bring actual democracy to the world’s masses, while exposing massive corruption and false narratives.

Then came the meltdown of 2008: most directly a consequence of years of irresponsible practices by banking leviathan,especially with the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall which separated commercial banks from investment banks. During the years 1999-2008 we witnessed “bundling” of loans into dangerous financial instruments with confusing names like credit default swaps. Reckless financial behavior spread across swaths of the economy such as the housing market. Remember the housing bubble of the later G.W. Bush years and the subprime lending fiasco of 2007? Remember the houses deemed “underwater” and the people who walked away when they suddenly owed more on their once-overpriced McMansion than it could be sold for?

The amount of money lost awakened even more people — members of the peasantry (in super elite terms) who figured out that the rules they grew up believing in no longer applied, if indeed they ever did.

The Federal Reserve response to the 2008-09 catastrophe, moreover: print money, print money, and then print more money! The Fed created trillions out of thin air! The printing continued, long after the recession had officially passed. This was clearly the only means of keeping an otherwise unsustainable political-economy afloat.Most of the phantom wealth went to Wall Street, which is why, during the Obama years, the markets first soared back to where they had been before the crash, then surpassed their previous highs and just kept on going! This separation of digital wealth from the real economy probably saved us from roaring inflation back then.

But around September 2019, the wheels started to come off again. Think repo. We all know what happened next, and came to fruition in March 2020.

Now, in 2022, the covid narrative has largely collapsed. It has become clear to thinking people that the carefully orchestrated draconian responses were never about public health, but coerced compliance. The narrative surrounding Russia-Ukraine has also convinced only the already-convinced, but the sanctions against Russia have exacerbated supply-line disruptions and shortages that covid lockdowns had already precipitated.

The new monkeypox narrative is being greeted with howls of laughter, at least in my circles. Was I not writing about this very sort of thing a few months back: that releasing another bug might be an option the ruling class was considering? Another option of theirs: a cyber attack that would temporarily shut down an Internet the ruling super elite can’t effectively control, especially with Big Tech censorship having been exposed and efforts such as the Bidenista “disinformation board” being openly ridiculed.

The operand issue is control, of course. The ruling class does not want to provoke a reaction they would have a hard time controlling as its effects rippled across the world. They do not want to precipitate either a mass panic or a peasants’ revolt.

Enter massive inflation. It focuses the peasants on their pocketbooks. They have to tighten their belts just to get to work every day (now that numerous CEOs are saying, “return to a physical office or quit”). They aren’t going to panic en masse, because there is always some shill “economist” telling them “things aren’t as bad as they seem” or will “turn around quickly” or “Look at how low the unemployment rate is!”

Some of these numbskulls say inflation is a good thing. Gas too expensive? Drive less, have a smaller “carbon footprint.”

In other words, peasant, keep doing what you’re told.

The reality is that fiat currencies are collapsing. Too much has been created out of nothing. Money has thus lost its purchasing power. The more of anything, the less value individual units can command. This is Econ 101 stuff (or should be): increase the supply of anything and its price falls. One reason corporations have never, at the highest levels, wanted real competition (as opposed to covert collusion) is that real competition by more economic actors increases supply. This brings prices down and threatens to collapse profits.

Which is why marketing and competition for customers, clients, jobs, etc., are, in the immortal words of Leona Helmsley, “for the little people.”

The point being: the more the peasantry is forced to focus on immediate concerns of putting gas in their vehicles and food on their tables, the less time and energy they have to watch what “their” rulers are doing.

What the latter are doing is preparing to introduce CBDC(s), as part of the effort to force everything and everyone onto the digital grid where their behaviors can be watched—and eventually controlled, as I’ve also noted. Well-placed CEOs in a position to know (because they have been to, or participated in globalist World Economic Forum confabs) anticipate this system to be in place within five years.

Cash transactions will not fit into this “new normal.” Hence the calls we already see for more and more “contactless” (i.e., digital) payments. Hence the Federal Reserve holding discussions on applying digital currency at the level of workaday retail.

Cash can spread the coronavirus, didn’t you know? It is also used by drug-smugglers, sex-traffickers, money-launderers, and other assorted criminals.

Cash is bad will be that official narrative.

Inflation is thus the crisis. If it worsens, as I expect it will, the outcries and demands that something be done about it will be the reaction.

CBDC will be the response, to be sold to a peasantry eager for relief. With significant benefits! All the controlled media need do is elite-splain that those who go along with the “new normal,” the new payment systems, will pay less for everything.

Inflation? Problem solved! The rapidly developing surveillance-and-control grid will be significantly enhanced, probably past the point of no return.

Steven Yates’s new book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock, 2021) is available here and here.

Steven Yates blogs at Lost Generation Philosopher, and has begun writing a philosophy course centered on freedom, its preconditions, and the choices a person must make in order to have it.

Do you wish me to continue? Please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

Mass Shootings: Manifesting the Nihilism of the West?

By Steven Yates

May 31, 2022

I’d planned an article on Peyton Gendron, the shooter who killed ten people in a Buffalo and injured three others in a Buffalo, N.Y. supermarket on May 14. Then I woke up this morning — it is May 25 as I write this — to learn that Salvador Ramos, also 18, shot and killed 21 in a Texas elementary school, 19 of them children.

I wanted to ponder the Great Replacement, given Gendron’s 180-page manifesto, the fact that the usual suspects demonized the idea as a “baseless racist conspiracy theory,” and the further fact that declining white populations all over the West can be read straight out of the demographics. Because this last is evident to anyone who can read and understand graphs, the only issue up for debate is whether this is a natural development however unlucky for white people, part of yet another long term nefarious scheme by the ruling elites, or just the result of monumental stupidity by the political classes of America and Western Europe who opened their borders and permitted unlimited immigration.

In light of May 24, I scrapped that article. Enough just said. We have bigger fish to fry.

For starters, however much Corporate Media, the Bidenistas, and leftists as a whole demonize white males, not all mass violence is committed by white men.

Not by a long shot!

The guy who drove a vehicle into a Christmas parade late last year was black. The Colorado supermarket shooter was a Muslim. The subway shooter in New York a few weeks back was black. Salvador Ramos is Hispanic. Whatever is going on is not ethnicity-specific, however much pseudo-pundits try to make it so.

But most of these kinds of killings are occurring in the West. The lion’s share are happening in the U.S.

It isn’t simply a ready availability of guns. I’ve yet to hear of a gun that got up and went on a rampage by itself. So-called gun control would never be more than a quick fix for something that would soon show up in other ways. Killers using vehicles as murder weapons, for example.

I don’t think seeking political solutions is going to get us anywhere. Because this is not fundamentally a political problem.

Something much deeper is going on, and the political class is helpless against it.

Some are speaking of a mental health crisis. We’ll probably see a dozen or so analyses probing that theme in the near future. I don’t disagree, not really, but I don’t think such a diagnosis goes deep enough, either.

Let me just state what I think this comes down to. Behind the bulk of our contemporary crises is secular materialism. Secular materialism drives much of Western civilization.

Materialism is a worldview, a thesis about the nature of reality, how we fit in, and what life is or ought to be about.

It is not a product or discovery of any science. As a worldview, it is a starting point, or premise.

Materialism denies that God exists. It asserts that human beings got here through a continuous natural process. From the standpoint of the physical cosmos, the totality of all that is real, there is nothing morally special about us: any of us. Morality is a human creation exclusively.

According to materialism, what can’t be counted, measured, and brought under control, isn’t real. Thus it yields a world based on empirical science (so-called, as its foundational level isn’t empirical at all), technique, commerce, and the myth of progress.

A world in which most of us, even in so-called advanced nations, are destined for slavery to the Almighty Dollar. (Or the Euro or Peso or Ruble or Yuan.)

Unease with this metaphysical ideology goes back at least to the 1800s, with novelists such as Fyodor Dostoevsky suggesting ominously that “if God doesn’t exist then everything is permitted.”

By around 1900, major philosophers such as Bertrand Russell were noting openly that in the universe disclosed by science as he understood it, morally speaking we are on our own. In the hands of anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict (1930s), morality evolved because of its survival value to human populations. It can be studied like any other natural phenomenon.

Different people have responded in different ways to this. Most, of course, turn away from the problem altogether. I get it. We’re all busy: working, or just living our lives.

A loose group of philosophers known as existentialists engaged the matter but granted all of materialism’s premises. French author Albert Camus thus pondered whether the fundamental problem of philosophy was whether life was worth living (see his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”). He did not conclude that suicide is justifiable. Ultimately he, too, turned from the problem. Live your life. To live “authentically” is to live without the “illusions” of God or immortality or any transcendent source of meaning. Find meaning in your own immediate experiences, “enriching” them as you can.

That was the 1940s. The Beats, in the 1950s, took up this theme enriching their experience with sex and drugs (e.g. “bennies”). Psychedelics arrived in the 1960s. By the 1970s, part of a generation was burned out. Another part simply caved, opting for one of the premises of a materialist life: money is what gives your life value. By the 1980s, greed was good.

Meanwhile, the mass killings had begun, and were starting — very slowly — to accelerate in number.

Life had become meaningless. In society, all but a tiny handful of us (celebrities, those in the political class, and a few billionaires) had become ciphers.

Obviously, lives taken don’t mean anything to the killers. Perhaps because life itself means nothing to them.

Unborn babies — aborted — don’t mean anything to the abortionist, or in most cases to the would-have-been mother.

We are coming dangerously close, in elite circles, to the view that elderly “useless eaters” can be euthanized: “put to sleep” like animals. Especially those with conditions like Alzheimer’s — and why should it stop there? Modern medicine has operated under an unstated materialist ethos for a long time now: people are just bodies, bodies can be drugged up, injected, cut open, and when these fail, put down. Especially if maintaining them is unprofitable.

Nihilism is the philosophical thesis that nothing truly matters (the word derives from the Latin nihil, meaning nothing).

This is where we are, in the West, whether we know it or like it or not.

Most of our philosophy and political-economy, and entire industries, especially entertainment, are efforts to evade this. The first retreated into hyperspecialization. Political-economy has flown into competing ideological delusions. The entertainment industry, finally, reaps windfalls through creating and supplying steady streams of distraction people can use to numb their minds. Others kill their minds with alcohol or drugs — or, the culmination of this process, their bodies with suicide.

A few became purveyors of this or that form of self-actualization, an idea derived from psychologist Abraham Maslow. So we put self on a pedestal. Then what?

The bottom line is that human beings cannot simply exist. We are not mere animals. We cannot flourish without the firm belief that we have some higher purpose for doing so. This purpose cannot be hoked up out of thin air. It is not to be found in a job or career or even becoming a “creative.” Many have thought this and then come up short. Nor is meaning to be found in political activism — which is gradually failing us all.

Some respond to the particularities of their circumstances and respond with rage at the injustice of it all. They become human time bombs.

Fully healthy-minded people believe their lives, and the lives others — those around them and human beings generally — have intrinsic value: value not derived from what’s in their wallet or bank account, their social connections or position, the number of followers they have on Twitter, or anything else temporal and ephemeral. How many people today have this sense?

I’d wager, the number is disconcertingly small!

It surely excludes the person who picks up a firearm and shoots into a classroom of children. Such a person, knowing he could be killed by law enforcement and perhaps even welcoming such a death, clearly places no intrinsic value on his own life.

Some will reply:lives have never had “intrinsic value” outside one’s own tribe.

It is true that materialism is not responsible for moral tribalism.

What was healthiest in Enlightenment thought tried to end moral tribalism by finding criteria for membership in a universal moral community that transcended tribalism of various sorts (nationality, ethnicity, and so on).

It counseled us to adopt the view that all lives have intrinsic worth, and to start building a world that manifested this.

The unhealthy side of the Enlightenment elected to base its efforts on secular materialism. It followed the worldly (secular) turn of the scientific and industrial revolutions, where things could be measured, counted, controlled, made money from, etc. It ceded the transcendent to the poets. It forgot that modern science had a Christian foundation. The first requirement of science, after all, is the idea that the universe we seek to understand is orderly and not chaotic, or prone to sudden, inexplicable change (such changes occur but are explicable). The second is that the order in nature is intelligible to the human mind.

Cultures where such notions were absent did not develop science. Period. They may have developed crafts, such as fortune-telling based on astrology, but crafts are not sciences.

If the world was created by a rational and morally perfect God, and if we were created as finite rational agents able to grasp, at least somewhat, the order in the Creation — the two conditions are satisfied. We also have a basis, if we are willing an able to infer it, to argue from our having been created in God’s image that all human lives have intrinsic value, and elect to further policies that recognize and reflect this commitment.

It seems to me that somewhere in here is the basis for much that liberals once wanted, back when liberalism was sane. I am not comfortable with the sort of conservatism (or libertarianism) which sees us as a bunch of individuals running around. Nor would I promote the idea that, as my late father once said, that “what’s good for Big Business is good for America.” With Big Business have filled up with technocrats, today that is not just false but dangerous!

A healthy conservatism gets comfortable with the ideas of family (extended and not just nuclear), mediating institutions, community, and so on. We live in a world of others, not just self, and one part of a meaningful life is exemplified in using the superpowers God gave us to serve others in order to benefit ourselves — and sometimes without benefit to ourselves.

Yes, there is room to argue that women who have children they would otherwise have aborted should not merely be preached to about how they did the right thing but materially supported within caring families and communities.

Remove God from the picture, and every bit of this disappears. Little by little.

You end up with existentialism. You end up with postmodernism. With escapism of various sorts. You end up with neoliberalism and neoconservatism. The first of these is about capital accumulation as an end in itself. This will breed little socialists when it concentrates wealth in the hands of the elites. The latter is about imposing capital accumulation on as much of the world as possible through military force where necessary. This breeds terrorism and other forms of violent reaction.

At home, we have identity politics: the retribalization of the world. You end up with violent groups and ideologies based on hate, whether of the extreme right (e.g., the KKK) or the extreme left (Antifa, critical race theory).

All part and parcel of a nihilistic civilization which denies its nihilism, but generates walking time bombs. Those not driven to rage by whatever particulars will destroy their lives and the lives of those around them more “peacefully” and hedonistically with illicit sex or porn, by overeating, by abusing drugs, etc.

We end up, at home and abroad, with a global civilization falling increasingly under the sway of that really dangerous minority, billionaire sociopaths who try to satisfy their compulsive craving for meaning by exercising power: GloboCorp, with its cabals of technocratsusing technology to centralize the world under a single surveillance-and-control structure. The only difference between the Great Reset and overt totalitarianism will be the former’s preference for “nudges” based on incentives over guns pointed at people’s heads.

If anyone believes he/she has a solution to this other than revival, rediscovering and recovering the Christian God, inviting Him back into society and into our lives, making His moral imperatives the basis for our families and our communities, I’ll be happy to hear it. For:

“The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ -Psalm 14:1

“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows his handiwork.” -Psalm 19:1

“Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘Consider your ways!’” -Haggai 1:7

“So I turned to the Lord God and pleaded with him in prayer and petition, in fasting, and in sackcloth and ashes. I prayed to the Lord my God and confessed: “Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with those who love Him and keep His commandments, we have sinned and done wrong. We have been wicked and have rebelled; we have turned away from your commands and laws. We have not listened to your servants the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes and our ancestors, and to all the people of the land. Lord, you are righteous, but this day we are covered with shame—the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem and all Israel, both near and far, in all the countries where you have scattered us because of our unfaithfulness to you. We and our kings, our princes and our ancestors are covered with shame, Lord, because we have sinned against you. The Lord our God is merciful and forgiving, even though we have rebelled against Him; we have not obeyed the Lord our God or kept the laws he gave us through his servants the prophets.” -Daniel 9:3-10.

“For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God … the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” -Romans 3:23, 6:23.

Steven Yates’s new book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock, 2021) is available here and here.

Steven Yates blogs at Lost Generation Philosopher, and has begun writing a philosophy course centered on freedom, its preconditions, and the choices a person must make in order to have it.

Do you wish me to continue? Please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

The Real War

By Steven Yates

May 17, 2022

An article of mine a few weeks back began quoting the late and highly respected science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein. I repeat it, both because it’s a zinger and because some readers didn’t get it:

“Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” –Notebooks of Lazarus Long

I often receive emails from a gentleman who seizes on one or two items in an article and then launches into an all-out verbal assault on Trump. I have not been able to get it across to this gentleman—who I think means well (as do some liberals) — that Trump versus Biden is not the real fight right now, not the real war.

A recent editorial posted on the British alternative commentary site Off-Guardian gets this three-quarters right (in my humble opinion).

What this brief item did was list the “big topics” (aside from covid) that get beaucoups of Corporate Media coverage:

Russia versus Ukraine….
Biden(istas) versus Trump(ism)….
Labour versus Tories…. (this is a British site, remember—but perhaps a few British readers will see this).
Men versus women….
LGBTQ versus straight….

To which I would add: “pro-choice” versus “pro-life”: for “gender fluidity” or against it, and the fracas over critical race theory in government schools….

The editorial bluntly opines:

All those things are either pure theater, invented controversies, or internal struggles between rival gangs of exploiters.

Some are indeed theater.

I honestly don’t get what could be going on inside the head of someone who thinks he/she/??? can be “any gender he/she/??? likes.”

Others are fomented fights between pressure groups.

The op-ed continues — and this is what we need to burn into our brains with iron brands if necessary:

There is a titanic struggle going on right now globally between the forces of darkness/enslavement and the human desire for truth and freedom….

The real struggle is the one the “pandemic” lie inadvertently exposed to us all in stark clarity, and which we are all now being driven to forget as quickly as possible by all the above distractions.

It’s between us as individual humans and the techno-fascism that is being rolled out globally.

It’s between truth and the matrix of lies we are being invited to live in, populated with fake binaries, fake crises, fake solutions, and fake heroes.

The real war, that is, is between the globalist ruling class — the superelite, GloboCorp, or whatever designation you like — and everyone who wants to live a free life.

What do we mean, a free life?

Not absolute freedom to do whatever one pleases. That’s anarchy, not freedom. It is a life based on responsible self-determination; on beliefs and traditions one grew up with and which had staying power because they worked: they enabled families, institutions, and communities to function over time;in which one is free to worship God openly and publicly as the foundation of moral truth; and in which psychopaths/sociopaths are either booted out or end up jailed because they commit crimes punishable according to the rule of law.

Above all, a free life is a life filled with hope, and optimism that the future really can be — will be — better than the past, because we are free to identify, and then work to achieve, our personal goals and dreams while serving our families and communities.

Burn this into your brain as well:

That’s not what the globalist ruling class wants!

They collectively believe society must be centralized (whether along “capitalist” or “communist” lines) because they want people to be controlled.

The best two ways of controlling people: (1) control their educations and the information that reaches them, and (2) control the material or economic conditions of their lives.

The globalist ruling class has been furthering both for well over a century now.

Government schools were originally created from the Prussian (not American) idea that the state owns the individual; the individual does not own him/herself. As they developed back in the mid to late1800s,schooling “evolved” into a two-tiered scheme: “liberal arts” education for the children of the elite, based on Platonism, and vocational training for the peasantry. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato presented our first detailed description of a society ruled by “philosopher-kings” and controlled by “guardians” in his Republic, and the peasants would know their places. The last thing elites want is a peasantry able to think. Hence the ratcheting down of subjects like history and philosophy, and their diversion into academic subjects unable to effectively challenge real power (this is not to say they were unable eventually to make noise about race and “gender”).

The ruling elites gained control of the financial system via the Federal Reserve. Woodrow Wilson was placed in the presidency in 1912on the strength of his promise to sign the Federal Reserve Act. This might have been the first election “rigged” by the elites. They enhanced their global control when they created the Bank for International Settlements in 1930. It has been onward and upward ever since, arriving at the World Economic Forum’s very public confabs and calls for a Great Reset.

Long before that, the ruling elites gained control over mass media using already deep pockets to buy newspapers and furnish editors who would ensure that current events, from wars to economic downturns, were presented in ways beneficial to the ruling elites; and they created their own publications (Time, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, etc.). When radio and television came along, they controlled those as well.

They would gain control over public health, as Rockefeller money subsidized allopathic medicine, medical schools, and medical literature, while actively suppressing all information about natural remedies and/or homeopathic healing which had been in use by various peoples for centuries.

It is important that the globalist ruling class not be designated capitalist, or communist. It is tempting to its ideology as a mixture of the worst of each. But the ruling elites have no ideology except a firm belief in power and their fitness to wield it.

They are the ultimate supremacists!

Thus they use capitalist schemes because these earn massive profits that can be funneled into tax-exempt foundations supporting studies of how to increase social controls of various sorts. They use communist ones when they help undermine property and subvert personal initiative and freedom directly.

The ruling elites’ brand of capitalism gave them control over public health. One result was the shift from healing acute conditions to managing chronic conditions for profit. The growth of the processed-foods industry and factory farming greatly contributed to this: a lethargic population addicted to unhealthy additives in processed foods is substantially easier to control!

They used communist systems to control academia and media, because these are ultimately based on group think. As an ex-academic, I can certify that while vigorous discussions inside unstated but very clear parameters of micro-specialization are incentivized, those thinking for themselves about, e.g., affirmative action, or feminism, or evolution, or materialism as a worldview, are quickly ostracized!

Today, honestly questioning the wisdom of encouraging children to “transition” to another “gender” can be career-ending.

Basic biology is verboten. For sensible discussions, look elsewhere.

I mentioned that I agree with the Off-Guardian editorial three-quarters of the way.

The final quarter, my area of disagreement, is that the issues raised are not nothings. Abortions-of-convenience devalue human life. Period. We either accept that human lives have intrinsic value, or we can expect the consequences we see, which is children being used as political pawns — when they are not killed by random shooters in places like south side Chicago.

But Yates, liberals and other secularists will argue, human life never had much “value” outside one’s own tribe. Study the history of wars, genocides, racism, rape and the abuse of women, child abuse and abandonments, etc.

We once had hope of conquering or at least minimizing those problems. What was healthiest in Enlightenment thought stressed our common humanity. But again:

The globalist ruling class is not furthering any such goals.

Again, its goals are total surveillance and control. Its methodology is technocracy, which gives “scientific/technical experts” (think: Fauci!) decision-making power.

Some believe the covid-19 “vaccines” are an intentional long-term depopulation effort, which would be a genocidal crime against humanity literally off the scale!

Other writers don’t go there—but see these shots as both an endless cash cow for Big Pharma as well as instruments for bought political classes to force peasantries into desirable mass behaviors with vaccine passports, green passes, etc., to be gradually eased into global digital IDs.

Roughly 90 percent of central banks, moreover, are working on central bank digital currency.

I have described what the culmination of this campaign will look like in previous articles: technocrat-led squadrons of data entry clerks will assemble all your personal information in one digital location, accessible with a smartphone able to read QR-codes.

Your personal information will include details of birth and parentage, education, employment history, health records including any genetic issues (these could be used to deny you certain kinds of insurance), vaccination records,driving records, passport if you have one, brushes with the law if any—and above all, your financial records including all your transactions which will be “contactless,” i.e., digital. Your spending on non-elite-approved things (too much gasoline, too much electricity) could be curtailed by remote, as part of a Chinese-style “social credit” scheme.

Dissent visibly, and you risk having your digital ID turned off by remote. Result: you can’t legally buy food. This will be easy once the food supply is totally controlled.

Perhaps the worldwide roaring inflation we are presently seeing, which if it continues long enough will make it difficult for the peasantry to purchase the necessities of life, is a means of “nudging” them into actually clamoring for such a system!

Hegelian dialectic (the other major philosopher of the globalist ruling class is G.W.F. Hegel): crisis, reaction, response. Foment a crisis, or through inaction allow one to develop on its own; the crisis is intended to provoke a predictable reaction (“Do something!”). The globalist ruling class, acting through its governmental and corporate agents, initiates the response it wanted all along— often without a ripple of protest.

The plan-demic was the biggest crisis of our lifetimes!

Neither the 9/11 attacks nor the financial meltdown of 2008 come close!

And have you noticed that since the plan-demic, QR-codes are now everywhere, even on TV commercials?

Vax requirements have been fought in the courts in the U.S., but the mobility passes they give rise to are now the norm in Europe, South America, and elsewhere.

We are definitely in a more controlled society.

Some call it the “New Normal.”

Resistance is still possible, but getting increasingly difficult!

Bottom line: we are at war, and it has nothing to do with Russia. It has only marginally to do with the other issues you’ll encounter on the front pages of globalist ruling class owned rags like The New York Times and The Washington Post. Or CNN and MSNBC or any other mainstream cable outlets.

My Christian friends say, God is in control, even if we feel like crying out as the Old Testament Prophet Habakkuk did (Habakkuk 1:1-4).

God’s being in control, and conceivably using the globalists to work His will in a world that rejected Him long before they came along, remains the Christian’s source of hope.

I do not know what atheists have to hope for. Because left to our own devices, we truth-and-freedom types are presently losing the real war, and losing badly!

The globalist ruling class controls political systems, financial resources via billionaire-owned corporations, and the most advanced technology in human history!

They are using all three, and moving fast!

We do have the choice to refuse to go down without a fight, while praying for God’s eventual deliverance.

The fight begins with listening to truth-tellers, learning what is really going on behind the crap Corporate Media spews, and then taking appropriate actions.

The Off-Guardian op-ed thus ends:

The choice is ours. Wake up, or get in line for the New Normal global prison.

Steven Yates’s latest book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock, 2021) is available here and here.

Steven Yates blogs at Lost Generation Philosopher, and has begun writing a philosophy course centered on freedom, its preconditions, and the choices a person must make in order to have it.

Do you wish me to continue? Please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

The Narrative and Culture Wars Just Got Hotter

By Steven Yates

May 10, 2022

Twenty twenty-two continues to be a most interesting year!

Almost two weeks ago as I write, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. Whether he’ll really make it a free speech site I’ve no idea, of course, but this isn’t what makes the event interesting.

Every leftist with a media platform flew into hysterics. One Small Step for Musk, began a headline on Medium that came to my attention, One Giant Leap for Fascist Trolls!

You can’t make this stuff up!

Leftists make one thing clear as crystal: they do not believe anyone should have free speech, without consequences, except them!

They are blind as ever about who they are really helping.

As if in counterpoint, the Bidenistas announced their real, live Ministry of Truth. They don’t call it that, of course. They call it the Disinformation Governance Board, and it will operate through the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). I don’t think there is much doubt about what this outfit will do, despite the aura of mystery some have tried to create around it.

The woman put in charge, Nina Jankowitz,is a real piece of work. A Bryn Mawr graduate, she has been in and out of elite “think tanks” and written approved narratives for corporate media publications. She supported the Russiagate hoax and was a loud shouter about how Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” She wrote a book about how the Internet is “toxic” for women, and another selling herself as a “disinformation researcher.” She thus established herself as a creature of both the far left and the super elite in one (well, two) fell swoop(s).

She is also, to put the matter politely, quirky. She refers to herself as “the Mary Poppins of disinformation,” whatever this means.

I’m not joking!

She’s also on TikTok, the site where juveniles with attention spans measurable in milliseconds make videos for other juveniles with attention spans measurable in milliseconds. Apparently no one disclosed this before DHS hired her.

This all makes me wonder if the folks at DHS have completely lost their minds and appointed a cartoon character to head their latest abomination. Perhaps we’re supposed to lose ourselves in the comedy and not notice that America just took a quantum leap toward Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four!

So let’s not get carried away. Even if Jankowitz looks for all the world like a marriage of mindless devotion of approved narratives and TikTok silliness, we’d be equally foolish to underestimate the potential of someone like this to damage whatever is left of the free flow of information, online or offline.

There are at least two moves underway in Congress to dislodge the Bidenista Ministry of Truth before it has time to get further lodged. One comes from Lauren Boebert (R-CO), the other from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO). The former told Fox News:

“This kind of stuff is terrifying. We in Congress have the power of the purse. It is our duty to shut down this department immediately. I’m calling on leadership in the Republican Party – Leader McCarthy, Whip Scalise, and others — to join me in calling for this department to be shut down and defunded.No tax dollars should go to where Biden can use the power of the federal government to silence truthful stories like what Big Tech did with the Hunter Biden story….”

Sen. Hawley was even more direct: “Biden’s so-called Disinformation Board is unconstitutional and must be dissolved immediately…. This is nothing short of a censorship committee vested with the full powers of the federal government to monitor dissenting speech and opposing viewpoints under the guise of national security. The American people need a full accounting of who signed off on this Board and who approved such a radical, anti-free speech activist to lead it.”

Twenty Republican-led states are also threatening legal action.

The trouble is,even very determined opposition has yet to stop the DHS when its upper echelons wanted something. Remember Real ID?

One of the reasons none of these people don’t want free speech is because they don’t want Constitutional limitations on an all-powerful central government. Most defenses of free speech are rooted in that ever-pesky First Amendment.

Speaking of the Constitution, even this is overshadowed by the third development of the past couple of weeks: the leaking of the Alito opinion strongly suggesting that the U.S. Supreme Court is about to overturn two of the worst decisions of the twentieth century, Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey.

What interests me here are two things. First, again, are the leftist hysterics, invoking images of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, back-alley abortions using coat hangers, and so on. We’ve gone beyond hysterics in this case and are entering the realm (again!) of open violence by leftists.

So then, second, there is the question of cui bono. Think this through, and you might be motivated to put down Margaret Atwood and pick up George Orwell.

I’ve never believed for a second that the superelites—GloboCorp—those with real power—care two hoots about “women’s reproductive rights” or “gender pronouns” or anything else presently being shouted about on the streets or pontificated in the halls of ivy. These are all too distant from the real centers of power in this world. One has to wonder what is going on in those centers, behind closed doors, while corporate media rivets the masses’ attention first on one bit of theater and then the next.

Not that the abortion issue isn’t real, and vital. Of course it is, but it is important to keep in mind that the even the reversal of Roe and Casey could leave us worse off if mass violence results. Could this be the intent of the leaker, to create an atmosphere of violence before the decision to that if the Supremes indeed overturn so-called abortion rights, the country will explode?

I’m not inside the person’s head, but we’ve come down a very dangerous road, and I don’t blame anyone for thinking we’ve passed the point of no return.

Nearly all the political violence of the past decade has come from leftists. They retain the kind of cultural power that comes from control over most mainstream media narratives, nearly all of academia, most Big Tech, a substantial fraction of the corporate world, very influential outfits like the Southern Poverty Law Center, and since January 20, 2020 the Executive Branch of the U.S. federal government. Hence many leftist perpetrators of violence get slaps on the wrist at best, even when they get caught.

Reactions to leftist-initiated violence are what will get demonized, prosecuted, and where possible, used as an excuse for still more centralized power (when “Joe Biden” or whoever is whispering into his earpiece tries to remind us how dangerous “extremist white supremacist groups” are). How can I say this? Because we are looking at the playbook with Charlottesville, and with the George Floyd riots. It remains the approved narrative that Unite the Right started the violence in the former, and it remains official doctrine that the thousands of George Floyd rioters were “mostly peaceful protesters” despite the hundreds of millions of dollars in damages done in over a dozen cities. Meanwhile, the few hundred people who invaded the Capitol on January 6, 2021 are demonized as violent “insurrectionists” and remain incarcerated.

This is the cultural power of the left.

Who really benefits from this cultural power? This deadly combination — disruptions on top of disruptions, Orwellian linguistic reversals (where truth-telling becomes “disinformation,” plain biological facts are simply ignored, and responses to leftist violence become evidence of “white supremacism”), and continued gaslighting about all this — are how leftism has become a key tool of those who want to build a world government whose instruments are sowing confusion, causing economic disruption,and when these fail, brute force, to get a society based on surveillance and control.

When globalists are finally positioned to order governments to do whatever they have to in order to suppress dissent, free speech won’t be the only casualty. Not by a long shot.

Steven Yates’s new book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock, 2021) is available here and here.

Steven Yates blogs at Lost Generation Philosopher, and has begun writing a philosophy course centered on freedom, its preconditions, and the choices a person must make in order to have it.

Do you wish me to continue? Please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

Back to Basics: Freedom? Or Serfdom? The Choice Is Yours

By Steven Yates

April 29, 2022

As I write this, my copy of Scanned: Why Vaccine Passports and Digital IDs Will Mean the End of Privacy and Personal Freedom (White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2022) by Nick Corbishley, arrived in yesterday’s mail. I’ve not yet had time to read the whole thing, but what I have read lays out very well the existential threat to our freedoms — the ones that matter, anyway.

Early on, Corbishley explains how the past two years plus have changed the equation, and why believers in freedom will not like the “new normal” if nothing can be done to stop the juggernaut before the window of opportunity closes.

An investigating journalist with a history degree who has written for the European “alt-economics” blog Naked Capitalism among other sites, Corbishley states that his book is for everyone, “vaccinated” or not. His focus is less on the gene-therapy injections and more on what they are being used for.

He warns of a global-scale digital ID grid for which the technology is fast falling into place. He notes (as I and others have done) how the mass hysteria campaign that began in earnest early in 2020 paralyzed critical thought, how constantly changing international travel rules have left people stranded and made others fearful of making any travel plans at all, doubtless part of the intent. Other arbitrary changes have resulted in people being “fully vaccinated” on one day and not “fully vaccinated” on the next.

As for the injections themselves, he reiterates what I and others have also emphasized: they are very different from previous (actual) vaccines. Previous vaccines actually conferred immunity. How many smallpox or MMR “boosters” you have needed, following childhood immunization?

No “vaccines,” moreover, have ever been mandated for (i.e., forced upon) adults by governments or employers before. No previous “vaccines,” once integrated into digital technology, have ever had the potential literally to lock out of the economy those whose choice is to not partake. As we know, refusing covid “vaccines” has already led to mass firings, including of experienced health care professionals at institutions whose official stories are of overwhelm by covid patients—what sense does this make?There are places where, absent a “green pass” (in our area it is called a “mobility pass”) you cannot enter restaurants, clubs, malls, theaters, airports, or in some places (Lithuania is an example) even grocery stores. There are places where the “unvaccinated” see higher health insurance premiums and even the possibility of being refused medical care!

We are well past the “nudges” of what I elsewhere called Stage 3 vaccine “compliance” when countries threaten to lock you out of their economies and health care systems!

Corbishley does not appear willing to venture into speculations about what these things are doing to people’s bodies. But he does make the obvious point that also unlike all traditional vaccines which took five or more years to develop and test for safety and effectiveness, these were rolled out in less than a year, use a new and experimental technology, and were given “emergency use authorization” instead of full approval.

What happens next, now that around 10.8 billion of these shots have been administered worldwide?

Who actually knows?

All we can do is pray that the billions who have received them have not been turned into biochemical time bombs, as part of an elite-driven depopulation campaign.

Some argue that no one they know of has had more than minimal negative effects. I only know of one such person who took the Moderna shots, began feeling ill a couple of weeks later, and died miserably from systemic organ failure after four months of suffering no one could alleviate. His grieving family asked his doctor point blank if the covid shots were responsible. They received an evasive, “We’ll know in a few years.”

If these shots really do turn out to be the prime mover of a mass depopulation effort, there is no category of criminality able to cover it. Crimes against humanity doesn’t do it. If, say, five billion people have had these shots and only 1 percent dies from them, do the math. That’s 50 million people!

The rest are in danger of the kind of “social credit” system that was already being implemented in Communist China, already a full-fledged technocracy operating on a docile population.

The technology able to transform “green passes”or “mobility passes” into global digital ID already exists, and is being furthered apace. Once the global social credit system is in place, your digital ID would be, literally, a license to live in the world. Without it, you would not be able to work, enroll at a university, travel including inside your own country, enter malls and stores, or even receive medical care.Not just your covid “vaccination” records but all your personal records could easily be input and recorded where any bureaucrat or technocrat could access them — will access them to determine whether you should be given or denied specific services.

Your records will include your full name, birth records and parentage, ethnicity and nationality; your full formal education records;your employment history or history of businesses owned;your medical history including all vaccinations and any hereditary genetic issues; transactions which will all be digital once physical cash is eliminated, including any outstanding debt you owe;your driving record including if you own a vehicle;and your history of interactions with the legal system and criminal history (if any).

Finally, and — this is the dangerous one for truth-tellers — your digital ID will incorporate your political party affiliation if any (and none, if that option exists, could be considered a red flag!), and especially any record of statements you’ve made dissenting from official narratives on social media or elsewhere.

This kind of system will doubtless be sold on its convenience.

All your information in one place, perhaps on one card!

No more need for birth certificates, drivers licenses as such, credit cards in the ordinary sense, passports, or other separate forms of ID that can be lost or stolen.

Since the masses love convenience, I don’t think the percentage of refuseniks will be larger than those who have refused the gene-therapy injections.

And I am sure data entry clerks could be trained to work for 25 bucks an hour to locate and input all this information into hundreds of millions of global digital IDs!

Don’t have your shots up to date? Or do you dissent? Your digital ID can be deactivated by remote, for however long the controllers (who might well be AIs!) choose to keep it off.

If you are in a place where a mobility pass can be turned off if you haven’t gotten “your” covid “booster,” you have already lost control over your body and what goes into it!

How did we get here, to the brink of Dystopia?

Back to basics time!

The historical-intellectual tradition I have long identified with began arguably with the Magna Carta, which introduced the idea that the king can’t do just anything he pleases. This document outlined writ of habeas corpus and due process.

That was in 1215. There was no comprehensive theory of rights (to property, etc.) there. We had to wait over 550 years to get to the implementation of a system whose founders consciously sought controls over power with checks and balances. And that system was far from perfect in its ability to maintain itself, as subsequent history shows abundantly.

One of my realizations — I’ve oft repeated it — is that every society contains a minority that is fascinated by power. This minority may be as few as 1 or 2 percent, or it might be more. Fascination with power probably comes in degrees.

Most people just want to take care of loved ones, pursue private goals, and otherwise just live their lives and be left alone. Historically, most populations have only been able to do this inside constraints imposed by the powerful, from pharaohs and kings and Caesars down to modern totalitarian dictators.

Since most people prefer stability to constant change and upheaval, and since tyrannies may afford stability, many populations have adapted to life under brutal tyrannies. Witness North Korea.

But while we of the so-called “free world” have never lived under an overt dictatorship, we have never been as free as most of us like to think.

Public education aimed at the masses was designed back in the late 1800s to condition obedience into children, and prepare them to serve the needs of big business. (Source: John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Educati0n, 2000-01).

The economy was effectively centralized via its financial system in 1913 when Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act.

In a work called America’s Sixty Families published in 1937, Ferdinand Lundberg revealed that even then, the U.S. was essentially a plutocratic oligarchy passing itself off as a democracy. By this time, mass media (then consisting of newspapers and weeklies) was largely controlled by the oligarchs.

They doubtless found establishing control over major institutions surprisingly easy. For most people either do not care about freedom or do not really want it, no matter how much they have been conditioned to say they do. In the early 1920s in his muckraking classic Notes on Democracy, H.L. Mencken wrote:

The truth is that the common man’s love of liberty, like his love of sense, justice and truth, is almost wholly imaginary. As I have argued, he is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. He longs for the warm, reassuring smell of the herd, and is willing to take the herdsman with it. Liberty is not a thing for such as he. He cannot enjoy it rationally himself, and he can think of it in others only as something to be taken away from them. It is, when it becomes a reality, the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority of men, like knowledge, courage and honour. A special sort of man is needed to understand it, nay, to stand it — and he is inevitably an outlaw in democratic societies. The average man doesn’t want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.

I think we take the capacities for choice we have had too much for granted. Americans have been subject to “nudges” for generations but never lived under an overt dictatorship. The question before us, in that case: are we so adaptable, so prone to accepting restrictions on our freedoms (and the end of our privacy) in the name of convenience, or sufficiently vulnerable to media-induced hysteria that we are willing to allow our former health choices to be dictated by technocrats?

The result would be covert tyranny without visible tyrants, a techno-feudal serfdom of the digital system itself that would have shocked both Huxley and Orwell with its comprehensiveness.

The absolutely stupidest reaction to this, which I keep seeing on mainstream sites, is to call this a “baseless conspiracy theory”!

Are those QR codes you are now seeing everywhere hallucinations! Where we live, even restaurant menus have largely disappeared! You can only access the menu through its QR code on your smartphone! That’s only the beginning of the all-encompassing digital control grid being constructed all around us, using the most advanced information technology in human history!

Perhaps more people will believe me when venders start refusing to take cash, apologetically telling consumers they have to either pay for goods and services including rent and utilities exclusively with credit cards (or as they will likely be called, “smart cards”) or online. They will be required to do this.

Do we want freedom, or serfdom?

Those for whom freedom is a core value need to start standing up and saying so, loudly, and in sufficient numbers to make a difference (my writing these articles is definitely not good enough). That means rediscovering, or perhaps discovering for the first time, freedom’s preconditions: responsibility and sufficient real education to take care of oneself, and the character to deal consistently with others honestly and with empathy.

Otherwise, our planetary near-future definitely will be digital serfdom in the techno-feudalist system being constructed piece by piece. Expect it to be completed by 2030, which means that much of it will be in place long before then. You will own nothing, have no privacy, but be happy—or so the World Economic Forum (is its existence a mere “theory”?) assures you. Our efforts to have placed checks on power will have failed, and no one reading this will live long enough to see them come back, if that can even happen on a societal scale. In the meantime, you will not even be able to control what is done to your own body in the name of “health” and technocratic “progress.”

Steven Yates’s new book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock, 2021) is available here and here.

Steven Yates blogs at Lost Generation Philosopher, and has begun writing a philosophy course centered on freedom, its preconditions, and the choices a person must make in order to have it.

Do you wish me to continue? Please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

Starting Over (and Finding Hope)

Steven Yates

April 12, 2022

“ … in any given society the Remnant are always so largely an unknown quantity. You do not know, and will never know, more than two things about them. You can be sure of those—dead sure, as our phrase is—but you will never be able to make even a respectable guess at anything else. You do not know, and will never know, who the Remnant are, nor where they are, nor how many of them there are, nor what they are doing or will do. Two things you know, and no more: first, that they exist; second, that they will find you. Except for these two certainties, working for the Remnant means working in impenetrable darkness; and this, I should say, is just the condition calculated most effectively to pique the interest of any prophet who is properly gifted with the imagination, insight, and intellectual curiosity necessary to a successful pursuit of his trade.” —Albert Jay Nock, “Isaiah’s Job” (1937)

Every so often something happens to give me encouragement — hope, that even if the America I grew up in is gone, all is not lost!

A recent missive by Tom Woods, libertarian educator, historian and author who sends out a daily email (it is worth getting on his list, trust me), reports how a university freshman tore a veteran CNN anchor up one side and down the other with a few simple questions.

The setting was a conference with a typical Regime title: “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy,” April 6–8, sponsored by the Establishment Atlantic Monthly and the University of Chicago Center for Politics.

The conference theme, obviously, was narrative control — by those who know that outside the big cities and mass media centers they do not control the narrative. Naturally CNN was present.

During the Q&A the young man rose and addressed Brian Seltzer (3:42:10):

“My name is Christopher Phillips. I’m a first-year at the college. My question is for Mr. Seltzer.

“You’ve all spoken extensively about FOX News being a purveyor of disinformation. But CNN is right up there with them. They pushed the Russian collusion hoax, they pushed the Jussie Smollett hoax, they smeared Justice Kavanaugh as a rapist, and they also smeared Nick Sandmann as a white supremacist. And yes, they dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop affair as pure Russian disinformation.

“With mainstream corporate journalists becoming little more than apologists and cheerleaders for the regime, is it time to finally declare that the canon of journalistic ethics is dead or no longer operative?

“All the mistakes of the mainstream media, and CNN in particular, seem to magically all go in one direction. Are we expected to believe that this is all just some sort of random coincidence, or is there something else behind it?”

Tom Woods: “BOOM! I wouldn’t change a single word of that.”

I wouldn’t either. I would only sum up: five items and Corporate Media, which CNN exemplifies, either got all five spectacularly wrong by accident, or brazenly lied about them. Which do you think it was?

Seltzer’s nonresponse response began with a quip: “Too bad it’s time for lunch!”

When he got around to attempting a serious reply, it was embarrassing: “I think you’re describing a different channel than the one I watch. But I understand that that is a popular right-wing narrative about CNN.”

He then went off on a word-salad tangent on how journalists don’t always get things right, how hard it is to get things right, and how we all need to work together because people want to know what is true.

The student’s point stood unrefuted.

I guess we weren’t supposed to notice.

Journalistic“ethics” is not only dead, but has been dead for a very long time if it ever existed at all.

Would the Brian Seltzers of protected Corporate Media enclaves like CNN know the truth if it walked up and bit them?

In previous articles I listed the things Corporate Media has lied about going back to the 1950s (and it is possible to go back further). You cannot undertake any serious study of how these institutions work without reaching the conclusion that in so-called “democratic” societies lying to control the narrative is the rule, not the exception.

The Internet disrupted corporate de facto monopolization. Hence the massive censorship now in evidence on all the Big Tech platforms, passed off as “fact-checking,”fighting “disinformation,” etc., with conferences such as the above now a dime a dozen.

Surely it is the height of naiveteto expect CNN to report honestly about the origins of covid, the 2020 election, what happened on January 6, 2021, adverse effects of the mRNA gene-therapy shots (or their real purpose which probably has nothing to do with public health), and why Putin went to war in Ukraine.

What Mr. Phillips’s being in that place and speaking up tells me, though, is that there are people out there — some of them Gen Zers — who have a clue. They have figured out that they’ve been lied to and are courageous enough to call it out.

I am unconvinced that there are enough such people. Unlike most other writers on this site, I tend to think it too late to “save America.” I would be happy to be proven wrong. But the means of “saving America” have been readily available for a very long time now.Few will do what it takes, and few others will listen.

Dr. Ron Paul’s career in Congress proves this decisively.

Corporations large and small are too materialistic and busy enriching themselves, often at the expense of others and the country. The masses are too busy following celebrities, so that when one brainless celebrity slaps another brainless celebrity onstage, it makes headlines.

Aldous Huxley warned that the perfect dictatorship would be one in which the dictators allowed enough mass consumption and mindless entertainment that the masses loved their slavery.

Early last year I penned a series I keep coming back to, recommending that conservatives prepare to separate themselves from a corrupt and controlled mainstream society and form autonomous communities. And while unanticipated problems might come up — an increasing absence of available farmland, for example, as Bill Gates buys it up, or a false flag cyberattack (blamed on Russia) shuts down communications while globalists reconfigure the Internet — separation seems to me to have a better long term chance of success than trying,somehow,to retake the centers of power.

Haven’t conservatives been yapping about “taking our country back” for over 30 years now? What do we have to show for it?

Not zilch, but nowhere near what it takes.

We have a substantial homeschooling movement. There is visible dissent against official covid narratives. There are even a few people willing to talk about how the NATO / CIA axis has been poking and provoking the Russian bear in Ukraine for the past eight years.

The Establishment is terrified of another Trump victory in 2024. Hence my prediction that its denizens will do whatever it takes to keep that from happening! And I do mean whatever it takes!

I have little trouble envisioning alternatives to public schools demonized and shut down, just as I have little trouble envisioning a cyberattack that shuts off alternative media.

So it’s time to think in terms of starting over, and not just with “parallel institutions” but outside the doomed, GloboCorp-controlled mainstream altogether.

There is plenty of information on every aspect of what needs to be done, be it farming and food preservation, educating, or restoring localist economic activity based on trust, and embodying genuine free enterprise. Genuine free enterprise, like honest major media, has not existed on a large scale for so many decades you might as well stop counting. It does not mean corporations can do as they please without accountability because they are, well, “private companies.”

Getting a four-year degree is no longer a necessity. A learner can get better information on any number of websites for a tiny fraction of the price of a university education, and without all the gender-bending foolishness. There is a ton of educational content available on YouTube for free! Yes, yes, YouTube is Big Tech owned, but as long as it allows free access, make use of it!

But the question remains (I sometimes get this from readers): given my own admission that too few people are reading, or are likely to do anything likely to make much of a difference, is this all just whistling in the dark?

Whenever I find myself wondering if there is any point to writing these articles, I dig out my hard copy of “Isaiah’s Job” by early twentieth century iconoclastic author Albert Jay Nock. I close my laptop, grab an apple or something healthy to snack on, go outside and breathe the fresh air, find a shady tree to sit under, and read the words of someone wiser than I will ever be.

Paraphrasing the core message of this phenomenal essay (based on Isaiah 1:1-9):

God calls the Old Testament prophet to preach, to tell the masses how lost they are, how decadent they have become, that the Lord their God is more than merely annoyed, and that this is their last chance to clean up their act. The Lord then tells Isaiah, as if He’d had an afterthought: the masses won’t listen, and the Establishment will see him as a threat. It will demonize him and try to destroy him (sound familiar?). He will be lucky to get out of town with his hide intact.

“In that case,” one can almost hear Isaiah asking the Lord, “what’s the point?”

“The point,” Jehovah tells him, “is that there is a remnant out there you don’t know about. They are men and women of character, all plugging along as best they can, and are not subject to the cultural trance. They are steadfast and consistently do their best at whatever work they do even if the rewards are paltry. They are honest in their business dealings. They struggle to be kind to people even if they don’t receive kindness in return. They do all that they do not for mere personal gain but because it is right.

“And though they are invisible now, my Isaiah,” Jehovah continues, “when things go completely to pieces, as they will in a few years, the remnant’s work ethic, their resilience, their honesty and basic decency, and above all, their vision of a better future,will propel them into positions of leadership. They will then be the ones to build up a new civilization.

“You are preaching to the remnant,” God concludes. “Taking care of the remnant — encouraging them, shoring them up, giving them hope, is an honest job. So stop complaining,get about it, and stop wasting time.”

The remainder of Nock’s piece admonishes: don’t try to find the remnant. Don’t advertise to them. If you are impeccable with your words and deeds, they will find you. And they will be encouraged and hopeful, knowing they are not alone.

So attract them with your vision of a better world — a world not run by power-hungry plutocrats/technocrats, but one where people deal with one another, teach one another, and care for one another freely instead of through coercion, through peace and not violence, via relationships built on consistent honesty and trust.

Conservatives need a grand vision, and it has to be something more than make America great again. It can’t be Utopian, because conservatives are by nature non-Utopian. It can draw on great documents such as the Declaration of Independence and Federalist 51, among others. It must appeal to what is best in us, and thus attract the interest of the remnant.

We should stress that this is not a movement of “aging white guys.” Is Christopher Phillips old? No, he’s probably Gen Z. This generation (who started to be born right around the time of 9/11 and has gone through times of crisis) is starting to look interesting!

There are plenty of conservative women firebrands of all ages, moreover.

Many Hispanics will come on board. Officially, a record number of Hispanics voted for Trump in 2020 (and who knows what the actual count was?).

Engaging African-Americans will be more challenging since so many have been so brainwashed to fixate on slavery and other mistakes of the past, about which we can do nothing except resolve not to make those mistakes ever again. Sadly, many black Americans have given up. They lack a vision. They lack real leadership. The phrase Black Lives Matter rings with desperation — born of fear that their lives don’t matter (and GloboCorp couldn’t care less how many black children die by gunfire in south side Chicago). Even worse, a few now violently attack Asians as fiercely as whites. They could learn from Asians, some of whom came to America’s shores with nothing but what they could carry and unable to speak English. If they didn’t build businesses, their children did.

All of us — white, black, Hispanic, etc.; males, female, or gender-confused; rebels who identify with the right and voted for Trump or who identify with the left and voted for Bernie Sanders — have a common enemy: GloboCorp! Elsewhere I outlined how I use this term:

Who or what is GloboCorp? Is there really such an entity? You’re kidding me, right? GloboCorp (short for globalist corporatism, for anyone who’s spent the last 50 years in a cave) consists of the 300 – 400 extended families who run the world. The ownership class, in other words, owning/controlling well over half the world’s wealth, beginning with leviathan investment banks and central banks; the CIA, other spook agencies; defense contractors and the war machine generally; “think tanks” such as the Atlantic Council, the Trilateral Commission, etc.; corporate media; Big Pharma; Big Tech. Then there are the several thousand administrators and technocrats under those top families, with thousands more functionaries including bought political classes, Ivy League academics, and presstitutes as Paul Craig Roberts calls them. GloboCorp’s hubs are in obvious places: Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the City of London, Basel and Davos, Tel Aviv, Brussels, Dubai, Singapore, probably Beijing, etc. I could name names, but it would take too long.

These people, I repeat, do not care what race/ethnicity you are, what religion you adhere to (if any), what political party you are in, or how you self-identify ideologically.

Nor do they care who you have sex with or what “gender” you claim to be — but your “fluidity” amidst the circus like atmosphere in present-day academia is a useful distraction, as is celebrity culture.

GloboCorp is our common enemy, and a formidable one!

We should oppose GloboCorp’s technocracy, “transhumanism,” and its other forms of materialism with our Christian humanity; its desire for power with our passion for freedom; its fundamental destructiveness with our creativity and enterprises of various sorts; and its hatred of common humanity with our caring and yes, love, for one another and even for those who hate us and everything we stand for.

Can this defeat GloboCorp? I don’t know. There are no guarantees. That doesn’t mean the fight is not worth fighting, that lies told and hoaxes undertaken are not worth exposing. My reading of Revelation suggests that a demonic world regime will eventually seize power. We may then be tested as never before! But if we believe Scripture, we know how the story ends and where our true reward lies. For:

“These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off were assured of them, embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For those who say such things declare plainly that the seek a homeland. And truly if they had called to mind that country from which they had come out, they would have had the opportunity to return. But now they desire a better, that is, a heavenly country. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them.”

Hebrews 11:13-16, with our ultimate source of hope.

Steven Yates’s new book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock, 2021) is available here and here.

Do you wish me to continue? Please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

Our Lying Corporate Media III: Is Putin “One of Them”?

By Steven Yates

April 2, 2022

“All warfare is based on deception. Hence when able to attack, we must seem unable; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near. Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him. If he is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him. If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. If he is taking his ease, give him no rest. If his forces are united, separate them. Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected. These military devices, leading to victory, must not be divulged beforehand.” —Sun Tzu, The Art of War

CONTINUED FROM LAST WEEK….

Summarizing ground covered so far: just about everything Western corporate media has said about Putin’s incursion into Ukraine is false or at least highly misleading. But this is true of just about everything Western corporate media has said about every major event of the past century.Why would Ukraine be different?

Some allege, though,that Putin is “one of them”: a closet globalist.For that to be true, he would have to be playing us all. Does any evidence support this?

Start with the suspicious timing of the incursion. Putin moved just as the covid narrative was disintegrating, evidence was accumulating that the mRNA gene therapy injections are anything but “safe and effective,” and that with trucker-led freedom convoys and other protests around the world, we were looking at a potential worldwide mass revolt against the rising technocratic tyranny.

How better to get covid off the 24/7 hysteria-induction-box, at least temporarily, then with a war?!And with all the Hate-Russia/Hate-Putin conditioning actually predating the Russian-collusion fabrication of 2016, what better way to distract the public than with an incursion into Ukraine?

Note the parallels here to what the covid narrative accomplished. All the efforts by Democrats (and Establishment Republicans) to get Trump out of office were going down in flames. The impeachment effort that began in 2019, ironically involving Ukraine, showed little promise from the get-go, and went up in smoke in January 2020. With the economy roaring by all the official measures and unemployment at record lows including among minorities, Trump was looking at a re-election landslide! GloboCorp couldn’t have that!

So that month, the words coronavirus and covid-19 entered our vocabularies. Two months later, the GloboCorp-controlled WHO declared a global emergency.

Now, the globalists are positioning themselves to further a strategy for “living with covid”: technocratic bio security in which vaccine passports will only be a start. James Corbett believes this is what is happening, that the globalists are working from a timeline.

Could Putin be cooperating with this agenda while conducting a theater war in Ukraine?!

It’s an impolite question, perhaps, but I can’t quite get it out of my mind.

Brandon Smith again:

Vladimir Putin is a long time associate of numerous globalists. His friendship with New World Order ghoul Henry Kissinger started decades ago and they continue to meet for regular lunches as Kissinger acts as an adviser to multiple branches of the Kremlin. Putin has also maintained a steady relationship to the WEF, and Russia even joined Klaus Schwab’s Fourth Industrial Revolution Network just last year. The claim the Putin is anti-globalist is a lie, he is deeply involved in the globalist system and always has been.

The globalists are playing BOTH SIDES of the Ukraine conflict. This is reality. It’s very important to understand and accept this fact, otherwise you will not be able to grasp the events that happen next.

Putin recently threatened western governments with a reprisal the likes of which they have never seen before if they try to interfere in Ukraine. The problem is that many in the mainstream and alternative media automatically assumed this was a threat of nuclear war. I don’t think this is what Putin was referring to.

What I suggested a couple weeks back, following Smith’s ensuing discussion: an imminent cyber attack, likely blamed on Russia and — if this is the scenario that plays out — Russia could indeed be culpable though it will not be Putin but a globalist in the shadows behind him who pulls the trigger.

Quoting (this merits careful reading!):

Moscow, Russia, 13 October 2021 – Russia will take a leading role in shaping the trajectory of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Today, leaders from the Russian Federation and the World Economic Forum announced the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Russia.

Part of the Forum’s global Network, the new Centre will bring together leading businesses, policy makers and members of civil society to co-design and pilot innovative approaches to technology governance.

Over the past five years, the World Economic Forum Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network has expanded to 15 countries. Project teams worked across public and private sectors to built[sic.] new policies for drones and commercial aircraft to fly in the same airspace, government procurement of artificial intelligence and accelerated responsible blockchain deployment across the global supply chain.

The Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Russia will be hosted by ANO Digital Economy in Moscow. It will work across the global network to maximize the benefits of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things, while minimizing its risks.

The President of the World Economic Forum, Børge Brende, and the Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, Dmitry Chernyshenko, on behalf of the Russian government, signed the agreement today in Moscow.

“Rapid technological discovery is disrupting our economic and social systems. Coordinated, impact-orientated action is needed to manage this change,” says Børge Brende, President of the World Economic Forum. “The new Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in Moscow will be an important part of the Forum’s global network. It is important we work across borders to shape a future that leaves no one behind.”

“Today, Russia is building digital economy actively in industrial and social spheres as well as in public administration,” said Dmitry Chernyshenko, Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation. “We are now witnessing an unprecedented breakthrough development. The main purpose of the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Moscow is to grow awareness of Russia’s role as part of the global expert community. This is an opportunity to share experience and expertise gained by the World Economic Forum and its partners around the world.”

Chernyshenko continued, “There are plans of launching pilot projects on legal protocols, AI and IoT together with the Forum at the Centre. The first projects will be launched before the end of this year and will include self-driving cars, drones, medicine, and data processing. Russia has been actively implementing AI technologies over the past few years. Today there are more than 800 such solutions and some of them are already visible on international markets. In general, cooperation with the Forum will be carried out in various areas such as data policy, smart cities, export support and promotion of Russian IT technologies to foreign markets.”

“We are glad to join the global network of Centers for the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” said General Director of ANO “Digital economy” Evgeny Kovnir. “Our organization brings together leading Russian technology companies. We will work together with leaders from these companies and across the network to explore and implement the best international AI, IoT, and data policy solutions. We will bring Russia’s advancements in these areas to the global network and help to shape global progress in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

Fourth Industrial Revolution is just another name for the Great Reset, of course: building a global technocratic grid into which every nation on the planet is to be pulled via the digital economy, incorporating total surveillance and digital currencies, on top of AI-controlled driverless vehicles, in “smart cities,” the “green new deal,” etc. You will own nothing, have no privacy,and be happy. I presume the beatings will continue until morale improves, and all that.

There is also this, on Off-Guardian, a website you owe it to yourself to check out (not to be confused with the leftist, elite-controlled The Guardian).

Summarizing Ryan Matters’ observations:

First, as Brandon Smith observed, Putin has been close to arch-globalist and Trilateral Commission cofounder Henry Kissinger and accepted his counsel for years.

Second, Matters claims Klaus Schwab placed Putin among his “Young Global Leaders” alongside Tony Blair (U.K.), Angela Merkel (Germany), Emmanuel Macron (France), Justin Trudeau (Canada), Jacinda Ardern (New Zealand), Bill Gates (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), and others.

There’s a problem here. Putin is 69, making him the oldest person on that list. I was unable to find documentation for Matters’ claim. But never mind. His case will survive without it.

Third, when covid happened and the WHO issued its declaration, Russia issued lockdowns no less than any other nation. Moscow locked down as recent as October 2021 and ordered unvaccinated Russians over 60 to stay home for four months! In other words, the Kremlin went along with the covid-19(84) narrative as slavishly as anyone else.

Fourth, from the get-go Russia was moving full speed ahead with its own gene therapy injections—different from those of Pfizer, AstraZeneca, etc., but serving the same purpose and conceivably having the same long-term problems.

Fifth, Russian corporations worked with Big Pharma in developing the Sputnik V injections, even attempting to combine them at one point!

Sixth, Russia has embraced mandatory vaccine passports containing scannable QR codes—legislating them because of public skepticism. Sound familiar?

Seventh, Putin (alongside the Chinese Communist Party) has offered general support for globalization (i.e., economic globalism), Agenda 21 (now Agenda 2030) and the UN’s sustainable development agenda, and other trappings of globalism now being pitched as “pandemic control.”

Eighth, the Bank of Russia is developing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) not essentially different from what other central bankers are developing. A CBDC in whatever form will enable technocratic surveillance of all transactions,especially once cash has been eliminated: demonized through repeated association with drug and sex traffickers, then criminalized.

Ninth, the war in Ukraine is accelerating CBDC efforts, the justification being a perceived need to track transactions by Russians operating outside Russia — but as we just noted, CBDCs can be used to track us all. (See this.) The idea has the full support of Larry Fink, CEO of the $10 trillion investment leviathan BlackRock, also deeply in bed with WEF globalists and their Great Reset.

And tenth, summarizing all the above and more: central to the globalist agenda is the gradual destruction of all local, national, and regional economies and, from this, all national autonomy and meaningful sovereignty. Globalists figured out long ago that real power is attained through economic control, not military might. Once populations are reduced to pennilessness and political classes are brought to their knees through fomented civil unrest, globalists can move in with their Great Reset, providing CBDCsas relief.No one fires a shot.

The worldwide price inflation we are seeing — resulting from years of money printing keeping an unsustainable (in the original sense of that term) corporatist economy afloat as it funnels wealth and power to the top — is surely part of this agenda, another means of keeping the masses distracted and preoccupied while they are stripped of control over their lives. This is just as true of the projected food shortages, supply-line disruptions, and the rolling blackouts that would result from cyberattacks small or large.

What are we to make of all this? I don’t think Putin has a direct hand in day-to-day operations of the Centre in Moscow, but surely it wouldn’t have happened without his consent and cooperation.

So did he cut a behind-the-scenes deal with GloboCorp years ago? Is he playing us, we Western “right-wingers,” knowing that his being demonized in Western corporate media is theater and was never intended to be anything else? Is he putting up with some discomfort as he awaits his place at the conference table of the coming corporate-controlled world government, his reward for cooperating with the Henry Kissingers and Klaus Schwabs of the world?

Or is he “playing 3D chess” with the globalists, hoping he can defeat them in the long run, at least where Russia is concerned?

Doubtless there’s a Russian edition of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and I’d be very surprised if Putin hasn’t studied it with great care.

If he really is a Russian nationalist and as smart as I suspect he is, he doubtless figured out long ago how powerful GloboCorp is. To oppose these psychopaths openly is to play a very dangerous game. So that just isn’t an option.

This puts the Ukraine incursion in a different light. With Ukraine, Western political elites — the Biden Crime Family (think of Hunter’s infamous laptop), Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, others — have had multimillion dollar dealings with what is clearly one of the most corrupt corporate states in the world. I doubt GloboCorp wants all the back-room dealings exposed as at least part of the evidence trail leads to their doorstep.

Not to mention the biolabs that could be used to genetically engineer bugs able to cause future plandemics!

So conceivably Putin has turned on them and is playing his own game, cooperating to the extent he believes it will benefit Mother Russia. Again, it should be clear: however one looks at this, Russia and Ukraine have been on collision course since the CIA-backed coup of 2014 in the latter instilled a NATO-friendly (i.e., globalist-friendly) regime, which openly persecuted ethnic Russians in what became the eastern breakaway regions. Putin, long concerned about Russians stranded outside Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed, may just have gotten fed up with such provocations and decided the time had come to put a stop to them.

Still … the timing….

Sometimes, the best response to conflicting narratives is an honest I don’t know, and I’m awaiting the information that would enable me to decide. As I said last week, I am not inside Vladimir Putin’s head. I’ll leave that dubious art to his demonizers in America’s lying corporate media, who are being played like fiddles in either case. These idiots think the Great Reset is a “conspiracy theory” after all. What can one say? I can have more productive conversations with my cat.

Steven Yates’s new book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock, 2021) is available here and here.

Do you wish me to continue? Please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

Our Lying Corporate Media II: Demonizing Putin

By Steven Yates

March 27, 2022

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” —Walter Scott, Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field (standard text dated 1833)

“I want the truth!” “You can’t handle the truth!” —Lt. Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise) and Col. Nathan R. Jessup (Jack Nicholson), A Few Good Men (1992).

It is probably fair to say that Russian President Vladimir Putin is the most demonized man on the planet right now.More so than Kim Jong-Un, even when North Korea’s psychotic tyrant is having family members killed and conducting sadistic public executions. These range from firing squads with family members forced to watch, to anti-aircraft missiles that blow the condemned to bloody pieces in front of thousands of traumatized people.

Real crimes against humanity never get attention from our lying corporate media because North Korea has nothing GloboCorp wants. Maybe this is true of Yemen as well….

Casual brutalities aside, I find it amazing how many people seem able to get inside Vladimir Putin’s head. I’ve heard each of the following:

Putin is an autocratic dictator who wants to rebuild the Soviet Union and plunder Eastern Europe all over again.
Putin is insane, crazy, loco.
Putin is evil.
Putin is a thug and a war criminal (sayeth “Joe Biden,”e., a Bidenista handler).

Very rarely I’ve heard:

Putin is “one of them,” i.e., a closet globalist.

I almost never hear:

Putin is a Russian nationalist.

In the case of (1): he cut his teeth as a KGB agent. That was well over thirty years ago. (Incidentally, he will be 70 this year.)

I don’t know how to evaluate (2) since I’m not inside the man’s head, but I’ll venture to say, I don’t think so. We’ll see why below. Regarding those who believe (3) or (4), I would recommend a little less Netflix.

(5) and (6) alone are credible. One can hope that (5) is false, but mere hoping doesn’t affect the truth. Just in case, can we handle the truth? I’ll come back to this at the end, and in Part Two (to appear next week).

In the meantime, Putin is sure talking like a Russian nationalist, and that favors (6).

Corporate media typically blacks out English translations of his exact words.

He recently addressed an entourage of regional leaders in the Russian Federation and discussed the economic warfare being waged against Russia. He also spoke directly to the Russian people and to the world at large, including Americans.

To see how Western corporate media works, all you have to do is compare what Putin actually said to the demonic images conjured up. Actually reading the speech might prove helpful! That’s if access hasn’t been blocked by the time this is posted!

What we learn: the gaslighting and fomented hysterics that worked so well to paralyze the masses during the plandemic have been transferred directly to Russia and Ukraine.

We stand with Ukraine is now as much a virtue-signaling mantra as Follow the Science.

Everything to do with Putin’s objections to NATO showing up on Russia’s borders is down the memory hole, just like the information about our immune systems, vaccines, and public health disappeared early last year to make room for the experimental mRNA injections.

Yahoo! News serves up what can be taken as typical. One headline reads (see for yourself): “Putin echoes Stalin in ‘very, very scary’ speech.”

The first line reads:

The speech that Russian President Vladimir Putin made on Wednesday bore the hallmarks of unapologetic authoritarianism, Russia experts and observers said.

Which “experts” and “observers”?

The late Nikita Khrushchev’s granddaughter, for one, whom one would expect to be a credible source. But Nina Khrushcheva is an academic, ensconced in the (hard-leftist, globalist) New School for Social Research in New York City, where she is a professor of international relations. She is only quoted as saying, “We are well past 1934,” that being the year Stalin took power. No evidence is offered of her actually connecting anything Putin said to Stalin.

Following up, an Olga Lautman, identified as a senior fellow at the (globalist) Center for European Policy Analysis, was quoted: “Putin really wants to take Russia back to Stalin days…. He has always admired Stalin, and this speech is definitely angrier and stronger than previous speeches.” We’ll find out below if this is credible or not.

It was Bill Browder, identified as an investor (not a historian or authority on Russia), who used the epithet very, very scary. This he does on that renowned repository of international affairs expertise, the University of Twitter. He cites another Twitter verse denizen named Michael Elgort who invites us “to see what a speech of true fascism looks like.”

I have to wonder if these Establishment-anointed “experts” and other Twitterati read the same speech I did. I saw no references to Stalin. Maybe I just missed them. Should we wonder if this really is just another psyop: another concerted GloboCorp effort against a nationalist blocking their path to total global domination?

I can’t vouch for the translation as I don’t read Russian, but I’ve edited very little (I’ve even stuck with the translator’s British spellings). You be the judge. Putin:

We are meeting in a complicated period as our Armed Forces are conducting a special military operation in Ukraine and Donbass. I would like to remind you that at the beginning, on the morning of February 24, I publicly announced the reasons for and the main goal of Russia’s actions. It is to help our people in Donbass, who have been subjected to real genocide for nearly eight years in the most barbarous ways, that is, through blockade, large-scale punitive operations, terrorist attacks and constant artillery raids. Their only guilt was that they demanded basic human rights: to live according to their forefathers’ laws and traditions, to speak their native language, and to bring up their children as they want.

During these years, the Kiev authorities have ignored and sabotaged the implementation of the Minsk Package of Measures for a peaceful settlement of the crisis and ultimately late last year openly refused to implement it.

They also started to implement plans to join NATO. Moreover, the Kiev authorities also announced their intention to have nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles. This was a real threat. With foreign technical support, the pro-Nazi Kiev regime would have obtained weapons of mass destruction in the foreseeable future and, of course, would have targeted them against Russia.

In my last article I reviewed how the U.S./NATO axis has violated every agreement it made not to expand NATO eastward eventually ending up on Russia’s borders. I compared Russian sentiment to how Americans would view a Russian international network expanding into Mexico and building military bases — and God knows what else — practically on America’s southern border.

Putin is just leading up to his contention that the U.S. was overseeing bioweapons facilities with the cooperation of the bought Kiev regime, instilled back in 2014 through the CIA-backed coup:

There was a network of dozens of laboratories in Ukraine, where military biological programmes were conducted under the guidance and with the financial support of the Pentagon, including experiments with coronavirus strains, anthrax, cholera, African swine fever and other deadly diseases. Frantic attempts are being made to conceal traces of these secret programmes. However, we have grounds to assume that components of biological weapons were being created in direct proximity to Russia on the territory of Ukraine.

For this, Western media accused Putin of promoting “coronavirus conspiracies.” I am sure he was as impressed as we are. After all, none other than arch-globalist Victoria Nuland has confessed that these biological laboratories are (or were) real. Continuing:

Our numerous warnings that such developments posed a direct threat to the security of Russia were rejected with open and cynical arrogance by Ukraine and its US and NATO patrons.

In other words, all our diplomatic efforts were fully in vain. We have been left with no peaceful alternative to settle the problems that developed through no fault of ours. In this situation, we were forced to begin this special military operation.

Putin denies wanting to assimilate Ukraine into the Russian Federation except for the two breakaway regions that are mostly ethnic Russian. He charges the government in Kiev with carrying on ethnic cleansing in those regions, alleging further that eventually Kiev would move on Crimea which joined the Russian Federation in 2014 after a democratic vote:

I must note that, encouraged by the United States and other Western countries, Ukraine was purposefully preparing for a scenario of force, a massacre and an ethnic cleansing in Donbass. A massive onslaught on Donbass and later Crimea was just a matter of time. However, our Armed Forces have shattered these plans.

Kiev was not just preparing for war, for aggression against Russia – it was conducting it. There were endless attempts to stage acts of subversion and organise a terrorist underground in Crimea. Hostilities in Donbass and the shelling of peaceful residential areas have continued all these years. Almost 14,000 civilians, including children have been killed over this time.

As you know, there was a missile strike at the centre of Donetsk on March 14. This was an overt bloody act of terror that took over 20 lives.

Needless to say this went unreported in Western media, as Putin goes on to note. Zelenskyy has been portrayed as a saint, and his government depicted as under siege. This last might be true, but for entirely different reasons than are reported.

Continuing with a few more highlights:

Clearly, Kiev’s Western patrons are just pushing them to continue the bloodshed. They incessantly supply Kiev with weapons and intelligence, as well as other types of assistance, including military advisers and mercenaries.

They are using economic, financial, trade and other sanctions against Russia as weapons, but these sanctions have backfired in Europe and in the United States where prices of gasoline, energy and food have shot up, and jobs in the industries associated with the Russian market have been cut. So, do not shift the blame on us and do not accuse our country of everything that goes wrong in your countries.

I don’t think Putin has this quite right. The U.S. does not import much Russian oil. Price inflation is a result of Federal Reserve money printing that had been going full blast ever since the meltdown of 2008. But that’s a different article.

Speaking of the problems in our hemisphere, here is where things really get interesting:

I want ordinary Western people to hear me, too. You are being persistently told that your current difficulties are the result of Russia’s hostile actions and that you have to pay for the efforts to counter the alleged Russian threat from your own pockets. All of that is a lie.

The truth is that the problems faced by millions of people in the West are the result of many years of actions by the ruling elite of your respective countries, their mistakes, and short-sighted policies and ambitions. This elite is not thinking about how to improve the lives of their citizens in Western countries. They are obsessed with their own self-serving interests and super profits.

This can be seen in the data provided by international organisations, which clearly show that social problems, even in the leading Western countries, have exacerbated in recent years, that inequality and the gap between the rich and the poor is widening, and racial and ethnic conflicts are making themselves felt. The myth of the Western welfare society, the so-called golden billion, is crumbling.

To reiterate, the whole planet is now paying for the West’s ambitions and the West’s attempts to maintain its dominance by any means possible.

Holy conflagration, Batman! Small wonder GloboCorp’s bought “experts” find Putin scary!

It sounds here like he has their number, and doesn’t care who knows it, even if this means playing a very dangerous game!

In other words:

Corporate media is feeding us lies, and not just about Russia! As I noted in my previous article, both government and corporate media have lied about nearly every significant event going back so many decades you might as well stop counting!

Visible political classes serve the American Deep State which in turn serves GloboCorp—the super elite, call them what you will; Putin’s term is “the ruling elite.” Our lying corporate media is owned by the super elite frequently working through such entities as the Atlantic Council and the CIA. Goes without saying, they do not seek to improve the lives of ordinary people because, as I also observed, to them we peasants are the moral equivalent of cattle: to be bred, or not (depopulated with fake vaccines?), subjected to political-economic forces we never voted for, and otherwise moved about like chess pieces.

Refuseniks can expect economic warfare. As Robert Kadlec, military physician and one of the godfathers of bioweapons research wrote back in 1998:

“[T]he twenty-first century will be a century of economic warfare…. [The] emergence of economic competition … raises the possibility of a new form of warfare. This includes the development and use of biological warfare (BW) against economic targets.”

This guy was a prime mover of Operation Warp Speed back in 2020!

Returning to Putin:

…We must clearly understand that a new package of sanctions and restrictions would have been imposed on us no matter what…. For the West, our military operation in Ukraine is just a pretext for imposing more sanctions on us…. In the same way, the West used the referendum in Crimea as a pretext, which, by the way, took place on March 16, 2014, eight years ago today, when the residents of Crimea and Sevastopol made the free choice to be one with their historical homeland.

… The policy of containing and weakening Russia, including through economic isolation, a blockade, is a premeditated, long-term strategy. Western leaders are no longer hiding the fact that the sanctions are not directed against individuals or companies. Their goal is to deliver a blow to our entire economy, our social and cultural sphere, every family, and every Russian citizen.

In fact, the steps designed to make the lives of millions of people worse have all the attributes of an aggression, a war by economic, political, and informational means, and it is of a comprehensive and blatant nature. Again, the West’s top political circles do not even hesitate to talk about it openly.

Again: there was no “Russian invasion” of Crimea in 2014 outside Western corporate media fabrications. Globalists — based primarily, after all, in the Anglo-European world (New York City; the City of London; Brussels; Basle and Davos in Switzerland) — seem to wish to destroy Russia no less than they wish an end to American Constitutionalism.

Read on for more clues:

I want to be as direct as possible: hostile geopolitical designs lie behind the hypocritical talk and recent actions by the so-called collective West. They have no use – simply no use – for a strong and sovereign Russia, and they will not forgive us for our independent policy or for standing up for our national interests….

Yes … they will back the so-called fifth column, national traitors – those who make money here in our country but live over there, and “live” not in the geographical sense of the word but in their minds, in their servile mentality…

I do not in the least condemn those who have villas in Miami or the French Riviera, who cannot make do without foie gras, oysters or gender freedom as they call it. That is not the problem, not at all. The problem, again, is that many of these people are, essentially, over there in their minds and not here with our people and with Russia. In their opinion – in their opinion! – it is a sign of belonging to the superior caste, the superior race. People like this would sell their own mothers just to be allowed to sit on the entry bench of the superior caste. They want to be just like them and imitate them in everything. But they forget or just completely fail to see that even if this so-called superior caste needs them, it needs them as expendable raw material to inflict maximum damage on our people.

The collective West is trying to divide our society using, to its own advantage, combat losses and the socioeconomic consequences of the sanctions, and to provoke civil unrest in Russia and use its fifth column in an attempt to achieve this goal. As I mentioned earlier, their goal is to destroy Russia.

But any nation, and even more so the Russian people, will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and will simply spit them out like an insect in their mouth, spit them onto the pavement. I am convinced that a natural and necessary self-detoxification of society like this would strengthen our country, our solidarity and cohesion and our readiness to respond to any challenge.

The so-called collective West and its fifth column are accustomed to measuring everything and everyone by their own standards. They believe that everything is for sale and everything can be bought, and therefore they think we will break down and back off. But they do not know our history and our people well enough.

This is the bottom line, is it not?

Do we not see here condemnation of an Empire crumbling under the weight not just of its imperial ambitions but the corruption of its markets from its materialism? The prevailing faith in Russia these days is Orthodoxy.

Authoritarianism? Where?

Stalinism? Where?

“Very, very, scary”?

The only ones I see running in fear are those scared that their media fabrications might be exposed, or that their biolabs will be exposed to the disinfectant of daylight once the Russians get finished in Ukraine.

This all portrays Putin as a Russian nationalist, and since part of the GloboCorp-controlled Establishment playbook is to demonize nationalists as proto-fascists, Putin’s demonizing all across Western media follows. It has nothing to do with “authoritarianism.” As we see from the Kim Jong-Un example, the globalists couldn’t care less what a really bloodthirsty tyrant does!

Likewise, the carnage in Yemen receives no Western media coverage whatsoever!

But is there more to this story than meets the eye?

There is concern that Ukraine is just the next chapter in preparing the world’s masses for the Great Reset (see, e.g., this). I looked into these concerns, and the seem to me valid.

For what if this idea, that Putin is a Russian nationalist,turns out to be untrue?

But Yates (you ask), given the above speech, how could it be untrue?

One answer is that skilled actors give involved and sincere-sounding speeches in fiction films all the time.

Brandon Smith believes (5) above, that Putin is “one of them.” I’ve cited him before. He’s no fool. He’s an extremely meticulous observer and researcher. Many of his predictions over the years have been on target.

If it’s any help, Putin is no fool either!

Oh what tangled webs we weave….

TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK…. STAY TUNED TO THIS FREQUENCY….

Steven Yates’s new book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock, 2021) is available here and here.

Do you wish me to continue? Please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

Thoughts on Russia, Ukraine and Our Lying Corporate Media

By Steven Yates

March 14, 2022

“The vast population of this earth, and indeed nations themselves, may readily be divided into three groups. There are the few who make things happen, the many more who watch things happen, and the overwhelming majority who have no notion of what happens.” —Nicholas Murray Butler (orig. 1931)

I’ve hesitated to write on Russia and Ukraine. I don’t have boots-on-the-ground sources for events in that part of the world like I did for Charlottesville (for example). Most of what I’ve learned is readily available on alternative media. There are a couple of writers who hail from the region I read regularly, but neither is based in Ukraine.

I wasn’t convinced Russian president Vladimir Putin would invade Ukraine. It was unclear what he had to gain. The place is a basket case, after all. So when corporate media overwhelmed us with hysterical accounts of Russian troops marching in, I was suspicious. Had Russia really invaded, or was this another globalist / corporate media psy-op?

Footage, from multiple sources independent of one another, convinced me the invasion itself was real. I do feel for the 40 million or so Ukrainians. They did not ask for this, and are caught in the middle. As for the government in Kyiv, that’s a whole ‘nother matter!

But footage doesn’t tell us much, and corporate media hasn’t told us much more. A little history lesson might be in order.

Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, the U.S. made one agreement after another that NATO would not creep eastward, eventually showing up on Russia’s border.

Why did Russia think this a bad thing?

Well, what would Americans think about Russia (perhaps allied with China and Iran) forming an international organization that pulled in Central America and moved on Mexico, so that it could put missiles and God knows what else practically on America’s southern border? Especially if the Russian leadership had issued explicit promises that this would not happen.

There were assurances Eastern European countries would not join NATO. They did. Eventually NATO reached Ukraine, and there it met resistance. Both the government and the culture were pro-Russian. Viktor Yanukovych had won the presidency there in the closest thing you’re going to find to a democratic election in that part of the world.

We’re up to 2010, and the Yanukovych government was cutting deals with Russia while turning its back on the (globalist controlled) EU. Protests arose, most likely fomented, and Yanukovych was overthrown in the coup of February 2014 and forced to flee the country. A violent but pro-NATO, pro-U.S. regime came to power, with Petro Poroshenko becoming president in May. He was replaced by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a former comic-actor, in 2019.

He led the corrupt corporatocracy Putin invaded three weeks ago. One of its billionaire-owned corporations paid Hunter Biden gazillions (just one example; there are others from America’s political overclass). Which has to make one wonder: what was this government hiding that the Bidenistas (among others) do not want the Russians to reveal?

The day before the invasion, Putin recognized the independence of Ukraine’s two eastern breakaway regions, Donetsk and Lugansk. Both have large populations of ethnic Russians whose first language is Russian and spent the past eight years under Kyiv repression, including being forbidden by law to speak their own language in public. Naturally there was unrest in both, some of it violent, and naturally Russia got blamed.

Prior to the invasion I wondered if this was Crimea warmed over. In 2014, a democratic vote overwhelmingly (around 96 percent of Crimeans) approved Crimea’s separating from Ukraine and joining the Russian Federation. This was reported by lying Western corporate media as an invasion, evidence of Russian expansionism.

The first question one must always ask is almost embarrassing: how much of what comes to you over the boob-tube can be believed?

Or, more bluntly put:

When was the last time Anglo-American corporate media told the truth about any major event?

They spent two years hammering us about Russian collusion that never happened, trying to delegitimize the Trump presidency. This narrative kept America’s masses psychologically conditioned for a continued demonizing of everything Russian.

That’s just for starters.

Corporate media has lied consistently about domestic matters such as inflation and unemployment, always under reporting each. They lied about 9/11 and Osama bin Laden (who died of kidney disease a few months after 9/11, not in a hail of gunfire in Pakistan ten years later). Going back to the late 1990s, corporate media would have suppressed the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, had Matt Drudge not put it out over our then-novel Gutenberg press of the present.

Corporate media lied back in the 1960s and 1970s. There is solid evidence that both Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King Jr., were killed by conspirators within the U.S. government.

Small wonder some people believe the moon landings were faked!

The Establishment has lied all along about supporting“democracy.” Democratic elections, or what passes for such,are treated as legitimate as long as (1) Anglo-American moneyed interests are served, and (2) those in office serve the globalists behind moneyed interests. Refuseniks are demonized and eventually overthrown. Ask the Iranians (Mossadegh, 1953). Ask Guatemalans (Arbenz, 1954). Ask Panamanians (Noriega, 1989). Ask the Iraqis (Hussein, 2003). There are others. Many others. The list goes on and on.

So why would anyone in his right mind take for granted anything Establishment media says about Ukraine?

“I stand with Ukraine!” is the virtue-signal of the moment!

Are you sure? You’re standing with one of the most corrupt governments in the world. But I get ahead of myself.

Consider: when corporate media feeds us 24/7 hysteria, incessantly hammering a single narrative, alongside footage and images (e.g., of a scowling, photoshopped Putin) clearly intended to arouse emotions — fear or outrage — something else is going on.

Those who do not realize have learned NOTHING, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, from the past two years!

It is obvious to those of us with functioning brain cells: the c-virus was made in a lab, even if we don’t know the specifics. Its release was probably deliberate. With the U.S. economy booming by all “official” measures, the Democrat Party in shambles, and Trump on the verge of coasting into a second term? Come on, people, use your heads!

Nor are the gene-therapy injections “safe and effective” whatever the belligerent “fact-checkers” say. The best we can say is that a small handful of lots seem to be the deadliest. As for the rest, who knows? Many might be placebos.Or, everyone who got jabbed may have been turned into a walking, breathing biological time bomb.Some 10.8 billion shots have been administered in over 140 countries. Deaths from blood clots began almost immediately in Europe. An abnormal spike in deaths from a variety of causes has been reported by life insurance companies and mortuaries in the U.S. I don’t know who is keeping track elsewhere.

All we can do is pray we aren’t in the first stage of a crime against humanity beyond all previous imaginings!!

Again: the globalists are psychopaths who see those outside their orbit of three to four hundred extended families as the moral equivalent of cattle.

That includes, of course, the 40 million Ukrainians being used as pawns in this latest escapade!

There is now near certainty that despite predictable hysterical denials from the same Western Establishment voices, bioweapons facilities had been built in various locations around the country. (I posted a map of locations on my Facebook page; the censors almost immediately blacked it out with a False Information stamp. Need I say more?) Russia is emphatic that these facilities exist, and China has backed up Russia on this. Russian troops may have put some out of business. The Establishment reports these as attacks on medical centers, etc.

For more information on the biolab angle, consult Glenn Greenwald, one of the handful of real investigative journalists left. (Substack has become a truth-tellers refuge; Greenwald’s site there is worth subscribing to.) Ron Unz has also explored the matter. Both note how a single powerful globalist neocon, Victoria Nuland, seems to be present like an ominous shadow over all matters related to Ukraine. Lance Johnson, finally, notes how the U.S. Embassy removed all accounts of bioweapons facilities in Ukraine from its website.

All this is quite interesting in light of ongoing claims that the covid virus was made more infectious through Fauci-funded gain-of-function genetic engineering.

Again, the Establishment yarn is that the thing “evolved in a bat.”

If we’ve seen any evidence-free claim in the past two years, it’s that one.

Long and short of it: the official coronavirus / covid-19(84) narrative has disintegrated.

So now what?

One answer so far: Russia versus Ukraine, 24/7.

Same methods to paralyze critical thinking and take the minds of the masses in a desired direction.

Heck, it worked the last time! Mostly.

And we’re also seeing rising exposés on U.S.-Ukrainian biolabs branded as — wait for it! — conspiracy theories!

Heck, that worked the last time, too!

Mostly.

For again, there are just too many people not buying it. Which brings us back to: now what?

What gives me sleepless nights is wondering what the globalists have up their sleeves that we haven’t seen yet.

They will pursue a strategy that (1) benefits them both financially and in terms of establishing Total Information Awareness, total surveillance, and control; (2) harms everyone outside their orbit, using psychological and economic compulsion to get us peasants to give up our remaining freedoms; and (3) preserve the digital infrastructure necessary for total surveillance and control.

Brandon Smith makes a compelling case in a recent article against their triggering nuclear war.

Putin wouldn’t do it despite the accusations he’s threatened to use nukes. Were Putin to fire nukes, the retaliation would be near-instantaneous. Moscow and probably other major Russian cities would be incinerated. He doesn’t want that.

Besides, nuclear war wouldn’t satisfy (3) above. Brandon Smith writes:

The globalists are unlikely to spend the past several decades building up one of the most complex technocratic control grids in history to track and dominate the public only to then annihilate it all in the blink of an eye with nukes. A post-nuke environment would be impossible for them to control.

I think it safe to say that if we ever see nukes flying, it will be because the globalists have decided they’re going to lose and plan to take as much of the civilized world with them as they can!

What else might they have in their arsenal? A lab-engineered strain of smallpox? The world would go into the severest lock down yet seen — but could the globalists be assured they would avoid being infected? Would they have inoculations they knew worked because they had been tested over time (unlike the covid gene-therapy concoctions they foisted on the public)?

Smith continues: What is more likely, in my view, is a massive cyber-attack that targets the functionality of the internet itself, and it would have to happen relatively soon.

My money is on something like this. He goes on to observe how the Internet is now so integrated into economic activity in advanced nation at every level, that if it went down for just two weeks the result would be an unprecedented shock wave that took down markets and disrupted supply chains everywhere. Rolling blackouts would likely ensue and air travel would cease, as everything connected to, or depending on, an Internet connection, would go offline all at once!

And if you think gas prices are high now…!

During the blackout, GloboCorp’s tech engineers would “redo” Web functionality! They would set up filters and firewalls,and establish protocols, that would disable or render inaccessible all but “approved” government and corporate websites! This would mean the end of alternative media as we’ve come to know it, including this trusted site!

The Internet would be theirs, not ours!

Conditions would be put in place for us peasants to recover access! These could include almost anything GloboCorp wanted? (Statement of intent? National ID? Vax mobility pass?)

All in the name of “Internet security”; or “safety” from those dastardly “Russian hackers,” as doubtless the cyberattack would be blamed on Russia.

Such an attack, Smith observes, would serve the added purpose of hiding the crashing Bidenista-era economy manifested as roaring inflation and financial instability.

Ukraine would be off the radar!

For the attack’s duration and probably for a while after a semblance of Internet access was restored, you would only get emergency communications! The so-called need-to-know basis (and you, peasant, don’t need to know!).

I agree with Smith that the chances of something like this occurring before the end of this year are better than 50-50! It could happen sooner!

We could be wrong. I have been before. I pray we are. Do you want to take the chance?

When I go to the store, I buy two of everything I know we’ll need. One I use; the other I store. I’ve begun doing this for everything: non perishables, vitamins and minerals, cleaners and toiletries, pet supplies, etc. The ideal would be to have several months’ worth of everything in our storage room.

I do not recommend keeping large sums of money in the bank, or in any digital form! Banks stopped serving customers and started serving the Establishment years ago. You might never see your money again!

In a cyberattack, even cryptocurrencies will go poof! Wallets saved offline will still be unusable!

Only approved transactions, after all!

We should have learned from the events of two years ago that circumstances can change extremely rapidly!

I don’t think the grid will be down for more than a few days, because anything longer than that would create a mass panic, and a mass panic again might be difficult to control.

But I could be wrong about that, too, or that the response to such won’t be mass violence by governments against their citizens!

Bottom line: we are at war, but the war that matters is not Russia-versus-Ukraine. The war that matters is the fifth generation war GloboCorp is fighting against the peoples of the world, especially we who want to live free and peaceful lives, serving our God and our fellow humans in a free and decentralized marketplace of goods, services, and information.

What I recommend: tune out I-stand-with-Ukraine rubbish and concentrate on preparing for whatever GloboCorp psychopaths dish out next in their bid for absolute power!

Steven Yates’s new book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock, 2021) is available here and here.

Do you wish me to continue? Please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

Trudeau’s Police State, Truckers for Freedom, and the Coming Confrontation

By Steven Yates

February 26, 2022

The police attacks on the caravan of peaceful protesters against covid-19(84) vaccine mandates in Ottawa, Canada, illustrate what I said three weeks ago.

Governments, faced with opposition to what clearly ceased to be a public health issue some time ago and became a naked grab for power, have two choices. They can back down. Or they can do what Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did and go full Nazi. They can establish a de jure (not merely de facto) police state, and respond with intimidation, or with force and brutality.

Trudeau invoked the rarely-used Emergencies Act which gave the Canadian government dictatorial powers, including to plunder private funding sources and even bank accounts. Then he sent in an army of militarized police, some on horseback, to clear out protesters who hadn’t left on their own.

Close to two hundred arrests have been made. Authorities have pledged to track down truckers who left voluntarily, taking a page out of the playbook of the Land of the Free to the south, which spent all of 2021 tracking down and prosecuting/persecuting Jan-6rs.

Creating a new pool of political prisoners.

No discussion was launched of why protesters were in Ottawa in the first place!

Libertarians have a point when they target governments as institutions with a legal monopoly on the use of force and violence to exact their will on unwilling or reluctant populations. This makes them inherently dangerous.

Where Libertarians miss the mark is on locus of political (and economic) control, which (in advanced nations, anyway) is not government.

Trudeau serves the globalist overclass — GloboCorp, if you prefer; the super elite, if you want. He serves them no less than the Bidenistas and most European governments (also governments of Australia, New Zealand, etc.).

Hence it was predictable that he wouldn’t back down.

The Trucker Freedom Convoy faced at least two disadvantages in getting its message across. One is the purposefully induced confusion between the idea just of getting the covid-19(84) injection and choosing to get it.

As I’ve sometimes said: if you want to get the injections, get the injections. If you believe your safety is more important than your freedom, and you also believe the jabs are really protecting you from the deadliest disease since the bubonic plague, then by all means, get them. As a believer in freedom, I’d be the last person to stand in your way.

But respect the right of others to refuse the injections.

This concept of freedom of choice eludes most people (all left-liberals) unless we’re talking about abortion — which isn’t a mere right of choice since it kills another living being with intrinsic value (perfect for a materialist-based death culture).

Then there is the third group that is neither governmental nor freedom-inclined. Probably almost all are vaxxed. They believed “their” government and its health “authorities” would never lie to them. There are lots of terms for this majority, some not especially polite: sheeple, “normies,” blue pill people, or lower-veilers. Most are fundamentally decent, and in Ottawa they got caught in the middle.

Naturally, the globalist-controlled media emphasized their plight: dealing with truck horns all hours of the day and night, not being able to drive freely on city streets, etc.

You can always expect globalist-controlled corporate media to exaggerate whatever makes its enforcers look good and freedom fighters look bad. Naturally, the former celebrated last weekend when Emergencies Act empowered police moved in and forced the truckers out of downtown Ottawa — having rigs towed and sometimes breaking truck windows.

Trudeau’s actions in Canada serve as potential precedent for governments elsewhere to deal with anti-mandate protesters using brute force.

A similar convoy is on its way to the Asylum on the Potomac. I don’t have specifics, although according to Truckers for Freedom, March 2 is a likely start date. It may happen sooner. (Were I helping coordinate such an event, I’d drop as many false and conflicting rabbit trails as I could all over Facebook, Reddit, etc., to confuse the enforcers as much as possible, while using the most heavily encrypted messaging software I could find to communicate with my compatriots. Two or more can play the misdirection game.) You can support this effort here. But be advised: money intended for Canadian truckers was intercepted when elite-controlled GoFundMe cut them off. The same thing could easily happen — probably will happen — in the U.S. if this convoy rolls up onto the infamous Beltway. (Apparently, fences are already going up inside the city.)

And given that a Christian crowdfunding site picked up where GoFundMe left off and was hacked, names and amounts divulged, that could happen again and cause donors problems down the road. Not trying to discourage anyone here, just outlining plausible scenarios.

Early this morning as I write this (it’s Feb 21), the following appeared in my inbox. The anonymous author wrote as follows (and I am sure, given that online bots have invaded even email, the misspelling of vaccine is deliberate):

Canadians’ breaking point came when Justin Trudeau effectively put tens of thousands of Canadian truckers out of work with needless vaxxine mandates that do not serve the interests of Canadians on any level – especially those who supply Canadians with everything they need.

In response, our truckers said they’d had enough and they drove to Ottawa to peacefully tell our political tyrants and morons they’d had enough.

In doing so, they struck a nerve with millions of other Canadians who have now joined them in solidarity against the vaxxine mandates and restrictions the Canadian prime minister has instated.

Consistent with the natural disposition of Canadians, their protest has been peaceful, non-violent and family-friendly as a public gathering.

Furthermore, the protest is comprised of vaxxinated and unvaxxinated Canadians alike. In fact, there are far more vaxxinated protesting than are unvaxxinated ones. Instead of listening to their legitimate grievances, however, Justin Trudeau ran into hiding. First, behind his kids, claiming that they had COVID and then later declaring he had it, too, and so wasn’t able to address their concerns.

What he didn’t realize then and seems not to realize now is that, as a double-jabbed and boosted leader, who actually caught COVID, he completely invalidated his messaging about the efficacy of the vaxxines to the Canadian people.

In fact, by affirming a COVID-positive status, he proved what Canadians have known for a long time: the vaxxines aren’t working. You can still catch and spread COVID, whether you’re vaxxinated or unvaxxinated and this effectively eliminates the distinction between vaxxinated and unvaxxinated people and with that distinction erased, vaxxinated and unvaxxinated Canadians have now joined together to say, ‘Enough!’”

We now know there is no difference between us and we’re all in the same boat together. All Justin Trudeau has really wanted to do is use lies and divisive language to divide Canadians, to cause fissures and fractures between them and to use hate and discord as a form of coercion for his Globalist handlers’ agenda.

And rather than listen to the eminently rational complaints of the millions of Canadians protesting, the Trudeau government responded with what is the equivalent of Martial Law; it has begun to freeze protestors bank accounts, threaten property seizures, arrest, prison, massive fines, the cancellation of insurance and permanent restriction of international travel, especially of truckers and thus, forever restricting their ability to work.

This heavy-handed response and a refusal to listen is the hallmark of a tyrannical leader who cannot be rationally be deemed worthy of holding office any longer.

The same, of course, will apply to the Bidenistas if they mount a similar response to an American convoy.

There are added dangers, such as infiltration by agent provocateurs, e.g., the FBI and Homeland Security. While I doubt many of the latter are able to drive a big rig, if truckers gather on the ground, their vehicles parked, and start mingling on foot, they will no longer have surety that everyone in their midst is one of them. This is a danger in any society of anonymous masses. Tucker Carlson thinks the Jan-6ers might have been infiltrated, and viewing events of that day using three computer windows onto the scene I wondered if a few antifa types were posing as Trump supporters in and around the Capitol that day.

The above writer suggests an alternative protest: work stoppages. Continuing:

So here is what we need you to do, to stand in solidarity with them on February 21, 2022: Those representing the truckers and their families have requested that everyone who wants to stand with them, choose not to go to work for a fixed period of time.

Here’s a specific call to truckers and Canadians:

First, if you’re a trucker of any kind in Canada, on February 21st, 2022, if you want to stand in solidarity with those fighting for your freedom, stop hauling, altogether – not just for a week but until the vaxxine mandates are lifted, Justin Trudeau resigns and/or the Liberal Party appoints a new leader and the invocation of the Emergencies Act is revoked by the Canadian Parliament.

Haul nothing. Park your rig and refuse to haul a single item until Trudeau and the mandates are gone.

If you own a trucking company, encourage your employees and contract-holders to take the same stand, and have them partner with their brothers and sisters in Ottawa.

The government of Canada does not own the people of Canada. In fact, under Section 7 of the Constitution, Canadians have a right of liberty, which means all of us have the right to stay at home.

To our American brothers and sisters in the trucking industry, we would ask this: if you want to stand with us here, in Canada, refuse to haul anything into Canada until the mandates are removed and encourage your fellow haulers to do the same.

While we encourage people to come lawfully to Ottawa, to make their voices heard, if you cannot come, you can still take your stand with those who are there.

This is a peaceful protest that the Emergencies Act has absolutely no authority to override – unless, of course, the government conscripts you by fiat for slave labor.

In fact, it is not rooted in violence or hate but in complete passivity – and actually, in inactivity.

Beyond this, there is this call to the rest of Canadians who support our brave truckers and their families, and that is this: It is absolutely unfair that brave Canadians stand alone and risk everything in Ottawa in freezing temperatures for everyone else. So every Canadian who stands against tyranny needs to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them.

They’re the ones risking their homes, freedom and livelihood and it is completely unacceptable that Canadians cheering what they’re doing reap the benefit of their courage without also sharing in their sacrifice.

Therefore, we’re asking, that beginning February 21, 2022, no one go to work until the mandates are lifted and Justin Trudeau resigns or is removed as leader of the Party by his party.

Asking that Justin Trudeau be removed as leader of his party is not an attempt to overthrow the government but a reasonable petition to members of Parliament to use the lawful powers imbued to them by their office to remove someone from leadership who is clearly no longer serving the interests of Canadians.

Therefore, make whatever arrangements you need to make for as long as you need to make them to stay at home from work. We recommend to everyone that they stock up on supplies and be prepared for protracted shortages of goods. We also ask that you forward this message to everyone in your network on every platform available to you, not only so that they can stand but so that they can prepare.

As well, we ask you to call your Member of Parliament and demand that they call their Liberal and Conservative and NDP counterparts in Parliament to ensure an end to the mandates and the revocation of the invocation of the Emergencies Act.

If you’re a Member of Parliament, a legislator or the premier of a province and you’ve received this message, it is also time for you to get a backbone. The Canadian people have watched you flip-flop on your position so many times, it is difficult to believe you have any integrity left and we’re sick of it.

It’s time to prove you have a measure of backbone remaining. So take a principled stand and admit that nothing you’ve attempted to implement to deal with COVID has worked. Masks haven’t worked. Distancing hasn’t worked, quarantines haven’t worked and the vaxxines aren’t working. And you know it.

In fact, the data shows that huge numbers of vaxxinated people are now extremely sick and they’re rightly pissed-off. Many of them feel completely duped and actually comprise a large number of the protest groups now amassing.

Near the end of 2020I watched the injections begin to be rolled out—knowing that never in the history of medical science and technology had a legitimate vaccine been developed and proven to be both safe and effective in just a few months!—and immediately wrote that this would be the big fight of the following year. It remains a big fight.

But it is not the biggest fight.

A major confrontation is coming! Numerous reputable scholars (one of the latest is Kees Van Der Pijl, the very astute Dutch political scientist about whom I wrote recently) help us frame it.

It will not be “left” versus “right” as those words are bandied about. I know folks who self-identify as left who agree with me completely about this.

Noris this a clash between “rich” and “poor”; there will be “rich” people who suffer terribly if they earned their wealth honestly and are not on board with The Agenda.

Nor is it about race/ethnicity/religion. African-Americans, Caucasians, Hispanics, Asians; Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc., are threatened equally.

Finally, this is not about sex/gender, although so-called gender fluidity has presented a nice distraction, alongside critical race theory, driving groups apart so their focus is nowhere near the real centers of power.

This is about the superelite, the Globalist overclass — GloboCorp — making Fifth Generation Warfare against We the People, and We the People discovering this and fighting back!

GloboCorp consists of power-hungry psychopaths who have been planning world domination for so many decades you might as well stop counting. Having been found out, they are now pulling out all stops to make it happen. Many observers have concluded that this is what SARS-Cov-2 was all about!

They see us as livestock. Literally.

Which may be why their denizens in lab coats concocted something causing rising numbers of deaths from a variety of causes, and may be the central feature of a long-term depopulation agenda.

Culling the herds!

Van Der Pijl names names. So have I, and so have others.

Fauci is almost certainly a psychopath who bears a huge responsibility for destroying the credibility of medical science and public health institutions in America, but he’s hardly alone. He’s just one highly visible figure in a huge network stretching across multiple organizations from federal bureaucracies such as the NIH to the globalist UN (of which the WHO is a division), and myriad private (or mostly private) entities: Gates and Rockefeller among other deep-pocketed tax-exempt foundations, the World Economic Forum, the City of London and its many appendages, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Atlantic Council, the Tavistock Institute, the Aspen Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, and others.

Add Big Pharma to that list (Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, etc.), Big Food, Big Tech, a few war-machine outfits like BlackRock, and you have what I collectively call GloboCorp.

We are talking about a control grid of, at most, three to four hundred extended families, plus several thousand more technocrats, bureaucrats, political-class stoolies (Trudeau fits into this category as does Biden), and probably thousands more functionaries who sold their soul to the devil for a paycheck. Doubtless a very small group of those families (according to some writers the number is thirteen) run the show and assign marching orders to the rest.

There are a lot more of us than there are of them, and they know it — but they also control the bulk of the world’s economic and financial resources, governments, war-capable technology, so-called think tanks and NGOs, moneyed media outlets able to shape public opinion, and increasingly, usable land. They have been able to use “public schools” and the entertainment industry to cultivate populations of short-attention-spanned “normies” who neither know nor care about any of this, and this has worked to their advantage. But we red-pilled types have grown in number and in credibility, and now the situation is nearing a tipping point.

GloboCorp has multiple options, as I’ve discussed. Among them is a controlled demolition of the U.S. economy designed to wipe out the remainder of the middle class, destroy the dollar (opening the door to a digital global currency), conceivably coupled with gold confiscation and criminalizing private transactions using bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

A takedown of the U.S. economy, perhaps via a cyberattack that would be blamed on Russia,it would destabilize all other economies large and small because of the interconnectedness of all the fiat currencies and financial networks. The point here is to take out everybody’s will and capacity to mount effective resistance.

Maybe this won’t happen. Maybe we’ll see another plandemic, something far more virulent than SARS-Cov-2 turned out to be. I don’t know. GloboCorp has its inner circles and back-room sanctums, and I’m nowhere near any of them.

What I would do: read my series on separation and the formation of intentional communities (starting here). Begin stocking/storing extra supplies of everything you need in preparation for more supply-line breakdowns and shortages. I recommend having supplies of all staples— non perishables, vitamins, cleaners, toiletries, first-aid kits, etc.—able to last you six months and preferably longer.

And don’t advertise! If a massive economic shutdown should throw millions out of work (and if work-by-remote options are also gone!), the “normies” who dismissed all this as “conspiracy nuttery” may have few qualms about doing some plundering of their own!

Prepare to be demonized in GloboCorp-controlled mass media, because you will be blamed for whatever chaos ensues once GloboCorp makes its next move. Then be prepared for a long and protracted struggle which could well be a battle to the death, because it is likely to be: us, or them.

Finally, remember the words of the Prophet Habakkuk (1:6-9, 3:17-19):

“ … I am raising up the Chaldeans, a bitter and hasty nation which marches through the breadth of the earth, to possess dwelling places that are not theirs…. They are terrible and dreadful; their judgment and their dignity proceed from themselves…. They all come for violence; their faces are set like the east wind. They gather captives like sand….

“Though the fig tree may not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines; though the labor of the olive may fail, and the fields yield no food; though the flock may be cut off from the fold, and be no heard in the stalls— Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation. The Lord God is my strength; He will make my feet like deer’s feet, and he will make me walk on my high hills.”

Steven Yates’s new book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock, 2021) is available here and here.

Do you wish me to continue? Please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

In Defense of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán

By Steven Yates

February 11, 2022

“We must fight against an opponent which is different from us. Their faces are not visible, but are hidden from view; they do not fight directly, but by stealth; they are not honorable, but unprincipled; they are not national, but international; they do not believe in work, but speculate with money; they have no homeland, but feel that the whole world is theirs.” —Viktor Orbán, ceremonial speech on the 170^th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 (March 15, 2018).

“Let us confidently declare that Christian democracy is not liberal. Liberal democracy is liberal, while Christian democracy is, by definition, not liberal: it is, if you like, illiberal. And we can specifically say this in connection with a few important issues – say, three great issues. Liberal democracy is in favor of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture; this is an illiberal concept. Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration; this is again a genuinely illiberal concept. And liberal democracy sides with adaptable family models, while Christian democracy rests on the foundations of the Christian family model; once more, this is an illiberal concept.” —Viktor Orbán, Tusnádfürdő speech, July 28, 2018

“Hungary was led to bankruptcy by a government of former communists pursuing liberal policy. This example strengthens the conviction that in fact there is no such thing as a liberal: a liberal is nothing more than a communist with a university degree. If we had taken their advice, right now Hungary would be in the intensive care ward, with the tubes of IMF and Brussels credit attached to every limb. And the fingers on the valves regulating the flow of credit would belong to George Soros.” —Viktor Orbán, State of the Nation speech, February 19, 2020

Anglo-European Regime Media hates Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—who since 2010 has led his country in a direction independent of the liberal-leftist-globalist mindset that dominates the European Union (and Regime Media itself, of course).

He’s been hit with the usual demon words: autocrat, authoritarian, proto-fascist, xenophobic, and so on.

Who is Viktor Orbán, and why is he important? Why is he so despised? What does he have to do with the narrative wars being waged on our side of the Atlantic?

Born in 1963, he studied law in one of Hungary’s major universities. He went into politics following the collapse of the Soviet Empire which freed his country from the 1945 – 1989 Communist dictatorship. He has served as prime minister twice, the first time from 1998 – 2002. He was elected again in 2010.

He is up for reelection in less than two months.

Orbán leads the country’s conservative Fidesz Party. He has unabashedly stood up for Christianity and defended strong families—establishing policies that incentivize parents to have children. He has stood against unlimited immigration and open borders. He actually had built an electrified fence along the country’s border with Serbia to keep illegals out. It is important to note: Orbán has not blocked immigration tout court. Just illegal immigration.

His efforts on behalf of Hungarians have worked! Arguably Hungary is a stronger and more prosperous country today than it was twelve years ago!

If this alone is not enough to arouse the ire of leftists who despise independent success whenever and wherever they see it, European or American, Orbán has openly attacked George Soros — also Hungarian-born but cut from a very different piece of cloth!

Orbán’s person and accomplishments were recently highlighted on a Tucker Carlson Original entitled Hungary vs George Soros (the second such program I know of, the first being on possible FBI involvement on January 6, 2021). This just-under-30-minute presentation has aroused still more hostility from all the usual suspects.

Watch the video. All Tucker does is allow the Hungarian leader to speak for himself. With Tucker as guide, Orbán allows us to see inside the country he has led and shaped for the past 12 years.

What we see is an unabashed nationalist. If he had a tagline, it might read, “Hungary for Hungarians!” And why not? As Carlson points out—and as anyone who digs into the regional history can confirm — Hungarians as a distinct people have been subject to sometimes brutal conquest and outside rule numerous times over the past few centuries: the Ottoman Turks, the Hapsburgs, the Nazis, and finally the Communists.

And now the EU, which unlike its predecessors but like most globalist entities dominates through financial control and cultural subjugation instead of overt military conquest.

Orbán understands that there are more subtle ways to destroy a country than by subjecting it to overt totalitarian rule by foreign invaders.

Just force open its borders. Never mind whether the justification is freedom of migration or “free trade.” Just let inside anyone who wants to enter!

Then do not compel assimilation, or teach them the language! Instead, let them form colonies and slowly dilute the traditions and practices that make up a national identity!

Censor criticisms or depictions of the results by calling them racist and xenophobic!

Within a generation or two, you no longer have a country with its own culture and identity!

This is what multiculturalism and political correctness have done elsewhere in the EU. Just look at the messes that characterize France, or Germany, or even the U.K (Brexit notwithstanding). The banking and other political-corporate oligarchs who run the EU doubtless live in gated and heavily-guarded communities and do not have to see the carnage on the streets and in deteriorating neighborhoods.

If you want to destroy a nation, moreover, support NGOs that serve as conduits of moneyed support for liberalism/leftism/globalism. Support academics who promote leftism and technocracy to a generation of students who then will not have been exposed to anything else. This is all where George Soros comes in.

Among the reasons Orbán is hated is that while opposing all these tendencies that dominate elsewhere he’s openly called Soros onto the carpet.

According to Regime Media, that’s not only being a “conspiracy theorist” but an “anti-Semite” to boot (Soros being Jewish)!

Orbán has called Soros “the most corrupt man in today’s international politics,” that he stands behind the financiers of the EU who threaten Hungary and monetizes their marching orders, which include supporting initiatives within the country that would force it to dismantle its border protections.

The war of words between the two escalated in 2020 following Soros publishing an article in the globalist Project Syndicate accusing Orbán of doing the very thing he has been doing for years, and advising that both Poland and Hungary be punished for rejecting a 1.15 trillion euro seven-year budget package that would enable EU member states to “become part of a unifying European empire under the banner of a global ‘open society,’” as Orbán put it. He invokes the “rule of law” so as to avoid having to call it rule by the elites.

Orbán calls Soros an “economic criminal” who “made his money through speculation, ruining the lives of millions of people, and even blackmailing entire national economies….” He adds that many believe prime ministers must not debate with economic criminals, just as governments “must not negotiate with terrorists.”

Soros embraces the idea of Europe as Empire. Orbán rejects this idea, contending that every attempt to build an empire in Europe has failed. Thus:

“ … the Soros network, which promotes a global open society and seeks to abolish national frameworks, is the greatest threat faced by the states of the European Union…. The goals of the network are obvious: to create multi-ethnic, multicultural open societies by accelerating migration, and to dismantle national decision-making, placing it in the hands of the global elite.”

Orbán signed a law giving Hungary more banking freedom than other EU nations. He understands that without this sort of independence his country will eventually be at the mercy of the EU elites. He does not reject cooperating with other European nations. Obviously, international cooperation is essential to solve common problems. But they should cooperate as independent nations, not as vassal states controlled from Brussels.

He thus cooperates on his own terms. Sometimes the results fuel the criticisms against him. For example, he has met with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose reinauguration ceremony he attended in 2018. Erdoğan has also met with Orbán in Budapest to discuss common interests. What Orbán said: “A stable Turkish government and a stable Turkey are a precondition for Hungary not to be endangered in any way due to overland migration.”

Orbán has not gotten everything right. Back in 2014 he proposed an Internet tax, which drew widespread criticism and protest. The idea was scrapped.

Far worse is that like nearly all national leaders, he drank the covid-19(84) kool-aide, importing the same injections as everyone else has done. Teachers and health care workers have been required to get them. Orbán hasn’t supported mandating them by law as Austria has done, though, leaving the matter in the hands of employers as the U.S. has tried to do. Six million Hungarians (out of a population of 9.8 million) have gotten two shots, with 3.3 million receiving the third. A fourth is being introduced. The percentage of those vaxxed in Hungary is significantly less than its neighbors. There is, like elsewhere, a determined opposition characterized in all the now-familiar ways.

Hungary’s next national election is April 3. Orbán has a tough fight on his hands. Donald Trump has endorsed him, for whatever this is worth. Otherwise, the sharks are circling. He faces a front of six opposition parties spanning the conventional spectrum. They have united behind Péter Márki-Zay, probably best characterized as a center-right, pro-EU globalist-by-default. What’s united him with them is such allegations as were made by the NGO Freedom House (an example of Soros’s meddling?) that Hungary is now only “partly free.”

As of this writing, neither Orbán’s Fidesz Party nor the opposition has an advantage according to polls. A referendum on special LGBTQ rights is to be held the same day. Among the questions to be asked voters is whether they support sexual orientation workshops in schools without parental consent and whether they favor promoting “gender reassignment” procedures as options for children. This is typical EU.

Orbán has come out against rights and privileges for homosexuals as we’d expect, and this, too, has brought down on his head the wrath of leftists. He has accused the Bidenistas in the Asylum on the Potomac, bureaucrats in Brussels, and the George Soros network of meddling in Hungary’s internal affairs ahead of the election.

He’s been criticized for “repressing” leftists in universities such as the Soros-founded Central European University which moved to Vienna in retaliation alleging having been “forced out” of Hungary and claiming their academic freedom was violated. I am unsure the education reform Orbán championed was a good idea, but it might be worth noting:as longtime readers know, academic leftists nearly always view any criticisms of their ideas as tantamount to violations of their academic freedoms; or worse (and more dishonestly), they accuse their critics of being racists, fascists, xenophobes, etc., ad nauseam. This leaves me wondering whether there is anything here to take seriously or whether this is the same as we see in American universities where leftists yell bloody murder if anyone tries to hold them accountable.

Why do events transpiring in a relatively small Eastern European nation of 9.8 million matter? Because they demonstrate before the world what actually works, i.e., brings genuine benefits to a people, versus what leaves other nations in the shambles that describes much of the rest of continental Europe (except Switzerland and the handful of other places where globalist elites typically congregate).

They demonstrate — again! — the lengths to which voices of the Regime will go, to demonize anyone exercising real leadership within his nation.

This is as true in the U.S. as it is in Europe.

Hungary now hangs in the balance. Will it remain a small but bright beacon of Christian nationalism, an “illiberal democracy” (Orbán’s phrase) in the heart of liberal-leftist-globalist Europe? Or will its voters allow it to go back down that road, sinking a unique place back into the multicultural mire? They probably ought to keep a very close eye on what happens April 3. If there’s any election the globalists would probably like to steal, it’s this one.

Steven Yates’s new book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock, 2021) is available here and here.

Do you wish me to continue? Please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

The Covid Narrative Is Collapsing, but We’re Not Out of the Woods!

By Steven Yates

February 5, 2022

The official covid-19(84) narrative — that mask-wearing and social distancing are effective, that destructive lockdowns were necessary, that the mRNA injections are safe and effective — is collapsing all across the Northern Hemisphere.

Collapsing here means: losing credibility with critical segments of populations.

Efforts at mandates, governmental or corporate, are being resisted. People including health care workers who were on the front lines in 2020 are quitting their jobs rather than being jabbed because an employer demands it. Not a majority, but enough to make a dent.

As for governments, gradually over the past several months one nation after another has seen mass protests: Australia, New Zealand, Austria, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, the Czech Republic, others. Countries such as Denmark are following the U.K. and ending restrictions. (Sweden never had significant restrictions at all, and did not suffer a proportionately larger number of “cases” of covid.)

Regime Media is trying as hard as it can to ignore all this. What it can’t ignore, it denounces as “misinformation.”

Vaccine mandates are under attack. We’ve seen the convoy of tens of thousands of truckers that converged on Ottawa, the Canadian capitol, at the end of January. They drove Trudeau into hiding. They have the power to shut down the city if the Canadian government doesn’t back off its mandates.

A similar movement has formed on social media in the U.S., and might be ready to roll up into the Bidenistas’ faces on or around the start of March.

Truckers are essential! Without them, goods do not get moved from Point A to Point B! This is universal in the so-called developed world. Truckers are learning how much power they have!

What is becoming clear: to maintain the approved narrative, governments are going to have to go full Nazi! Because the only thing likely to stop this grassroots movement for health freedom is a brutal crackdown!

There are people in the EU I wouldn’t put this past. Parts of China are in lockdown mode, moreover, because of a “zero-covid” policy there. If the Bidenistas tried this, though, with all the talk about whether the country is on its way to “Civil War II,” they’d be asking for this very thing! There are enough fed up people out in the hinterlands!

Rational people are fed up, that is, with measures that make no sense outside the assumption that a globalist technocratic “world order” based on total surveillance and control (and depopulation) is the goal, supported by political / Regime Media disinformation, gaslighting, and as much censorship of dissenting voices as is possible.

Give it a few more months, and the pushback might just work!

I’m predicting that if it does, we’ll not see more actual cases of covid than we would have seen anyway!

We might even figure out what a “case” is. Is it a positive PCR test (with no symptoms of any kind)? Is it actual sickness? Hospitalization? Does anyone know?

But should this happen and covid gradually becomes yesterday’s news, let’s not rest on our laurels under the assumption that this is over!

I agree with Paul Craig Roberts, reviewing the just-published States of Emergency: Keeping the Global Population In Check by Kees Van Der Pijl. Van Der Pijl is a Dutch political scientist specializing in international relations and the power systems behind them. He has authored numerous books.

Roberts:

Van Der Pijl answers the question so many people have of why and how a fake “deadly pandemic” was orchestrated with worldwide participation in the fraud. He shows that the event was long in the making by a global elite consisting of philanthropists such as Bill Gates, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, elite organizations such as the World Economic Forum, tech companies and multi-billionaire owners, Fauci at NIH, CDC, FDA, WHO, pharmaceutical companies and lobbyists, and elite organizations and groups created for the purpose of concentrating power and advancing and protecting the global elites’ rule by using fear to condition the masses to being controlled and deprived of a voice and alternative explanations. I had been thinking along these lines, but lacked Van Der Pijl’s detailed knowledge of the personalities, organizations and groups and the interactions and cooperation between them. He gives us the story. It was an elaborate exercise in massive deception and censorship that was able to discredit the world’s most renowned medical scientists and to elevate pure fiction to fact and public policy.

We owe it to ourselves to read States of Emergency in order to come to terms with the fact that we are ruled by people devoid of integrity to whom truth is an inconvenience and who are concerned solely with their control and power.

We need to read the book also to understand how things really work, how decisions are really made, how careers are made and ended by whether or not you serve the narrative and how well, how regulatory agencies such as FDA, NIH, CDC, WHO are in fact marketing departments for Big Pharma, how politicians’ positions are dictated by the sources of their campaign funds, why universities and the media must function as Ministries of Propaganda for the ruling elites and their narratives, how Fauci and Big Pharma control content in medical journals via grants to medical researchers. Van Der Pijl writes that pharmaceutical industry research grants make the industry the co-author of many articles and that more than half of all The Lancet‘s revenues come from pharmaceutical companies orders of reprints of articles supportive of their products. Van Der Pijl writes “According to the former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, who had 20 years of experience, it is simply no longer possible to believe much of the published clinical research.”

As I noted last week, real medical science has stopped.

It has stopped because what does not serve money and power is simply not pursued, much less published.

Why should anyone expect covid to be any different?

The plandemic was years in the making, and the fight against the powers behind it is not over!

What we must remember:we are dealing with psychopaths, and with organizations which stand to lose billions if the mRNA injections and “boosters” stop rolling out!

In my last piece I mentioned the possibility of governments falling before this is over. If deaths accelerate over the next year or two or three, this will be doubly true—as not just the remaining non injected will be standing firm but the injected, terrified and furious, will turn on the politicians and health bureaucrats they trusted.

The danger is that they won’t be looking at the big picture. They will see their national elites as villains (which they are) but not the super elite power system behind them.

Bringing down a government is far easier, moreover, than putting something viable in its place. The U.S. should have learned this from its disastrous misadventure in Iraq.

When civil strife erupts, GloboCorp’s minions could well be waiting in the wings, with promises (and money!), ready to restore order.

If enough lives have been sufficiently disrupted by unemployment, shortages, rolling blackouts, or worse, they might welcome someone who promises to “fix” things.This is the absolute worst thing the world’s masses could do, but I can see it happening.

What will be installed will be the “new normal” of the technocratic dictatorship that was wanted all along, not the freedom the non injected want.

Hegelian dialectic:crisis à reaction à response!

Moneyed / powered players foment a worldwide crisis using whatever power plays and scare tactics are necessary. The crisis provokes a Do-something! reaction. The moneyed / powered players move in with what they wanted all along!

How do we prevent this?

The only thing to do is what we are doing now, which is to fight the narrative war as hard as we can, wherever we can, going outside the deplatforming and censorship to the extent we can.

But even should we win, we’re not out of the woods!

Psychopaths, remember?

Suppose the globalists figure out that they might lose.

There’s one thing we can be sure of: they won’t simply crawl into the nearest corner and weep!

Consider this creepy warning by “creepy Bill Gates.”

Around the start of last November, he made a statement about “bioterrorism.” He specifically mentioned smallpox—

Wait a minute, Yates! Did you say smallpox? Wasn’t that eradicated?

Yes, supposedly, but the fact that Bill Gates made that statement indicates that it is something GloboCorp might be thinking about.

The very week of Gates’s comment, suspicious vials were found in a Merck lab in Pennsylvania. No one can account for what they were doing there, although we were “assured” that nothing escaped and that public safety was never compromised.

Two entities in the world can legally store variola, the virus that causes smallpox. One is the CDC. The other is the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology (the VECTOR Institute) in Koltsovo, Russia.

The scenario: a genetically engineered variant of variola is released in a heavily trafficked location (e.g., a men’s room) in the international airport of a major city.

A genetically engineered variant would evade whatever protections afforded by the smallpox vax most of us probably got when we were children.

Smallpox has a long incubation period: in most cases ten days to two weeks.

Which means: anew strain could spread everywhere before anyone knew anything was wrong!

Smallpox has a mortality rate of 30 percent, moreover, as opposed to covid’s mortality rate of under 0.5 percent for everyone under 70.

Anyone who thinks we’ve been in a health emergency hasn’t seen anything compared to the panic that would ensue!

But could GloboCorp’s denizens ensure that they would be protected from their own vile creation?

I have no idea, of course.

They have at least two other options.

One is a massive cyber attack able to shut down large portions of the grid, including the Internet, possibly for weeks that could stretch into months. The attack would be blamed on Russia.

We’ve already seen one very suspicious event which could have been a test.

The point is, we’re dependent on the Internet. Were a cyber attack to shut down Internet access, we would find out at once just how dependent!

Imagine your laptop or phone suddenly turned into a paper weight, and you get the idea.

Again, anyone who thought the lockdowns were destructive hasn’t seen anything compared to what being knocked offline for an extended period would do. Even in covid lockdowns you could still follow national and world events, work and get paid remotely, attend online classes, etc.

An objection to this scenario is that the superelite is just as dependent on the Internet as we peasants. Unless they have a “hyper-internet” waiting behind the scenes, a “meta” era technology.

It wouldn’t surprise me any, but we have no real way of knowing.

The other nuclear option—literally!—is fomenting all-out war with Russia: a war for which most Americans have been “prepped” by Regime Media for years now. It would most likely start with a false flag attack in Ukraine.

I don’t think the present-day West could win a conventional war with Russia. I doubt that an army led by a guy who whines about not understanding “white rage” could stand up against a country of strategists whose universities produce scientists (the real thing!) and engineers, not gender studies majors and “systemic racism” obsessives.

Nukes, then?

Read The Road, by Cormac McCarthy!

The point is, as dangerous as the world has probably seemed, if the psychopaths who run GloboCorp sincerely believe they are going to lose not just this battle but that this, their most determined effort to establish conditions for a global control grid, could go down in flames, there is no telling what they might do!

Things could get really ugly, really fast!

Steven Yates’s new book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock, 2021) is available here and here.

Do you wish me to continue? Please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

Steven Yates: Who Am I? and What Do I Stand For?

By Steven Yates

January 28, 2022

“You’re not exactly normal, are you?”
“It’s not exactly a normal world, is it?
—Vicky Vail and Batman, Batman (1989)

Every so often I get a hankering to write something personal. There’s now a reason for this. I have a few more Patrons, and I believe in transparency. New Patrons have a right to know who and what they are supporting. Besides, trying to distill what I’m doing into a single, concise message helps clarify and focus my own thinking and values.

Who Am I?

Although I live in a foreign country (Chile) I am American, born in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. When JFK was assassinated I was six years old. I moved to Atlanta with my parents at age seven.

We were pro-education. One day my mom took me to a public library and checked out a book on the planets. I was hooked on science. In high school I was one of the college-track nerds. The plan was not just college but advanced degrees. No one discussed this. Everyone including me just assumed it. In those days, if you were in the middle class, you could afford college without going into debt. Money would not be an object.

I become a Christian at a summer retreat between ninth and tenth grade, and joined a group of peers who met and studied Scripture twice a week. In the early ‘70s, no one questioned this. We even had a teacher-moderator whose job wasn’t endangered by her direct and open involvement with us. There was far more tolerance then than exists today.

Eventually I left that group. Some were sure “the Rapture” would happen before the end of the 1970s. Others held out for the 1980s.To avoid putting too fine a point on it, this struck me as somewhat batty. I couldn’t get my brain around it. Did Scripture itself not say that no one knows the day or the hour? It would be years before I learned of John Darby and Cyrus Scofield — or ponderous terms like dispensationalism — but my nose told me something was wrong. I trusted my nose then, and still do, falling away to pursue my own inquiries. It wouldn’t be the last time.

How I Ended Up in Philosophy.

I struggled in college. By temperament I was a generalist. So I bounced from major to major: anthropology; then geology. History, at one point.

Or maybe journalism. I knew I wanted to be a writer. The contrast between the science orientation I’d had years before and the Christianity I embraced later made me aware of worldviews and how they shape our thought and lead to different social ideals and values. I’d grown fascinated by claims of phenomena that didn’t fit into prevailing scientific theories such as evolution. My interest in science evolved into curiosity about the criteria for calling a theory true, or verified. The textbooks were too simple.

Then I discovered The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) by historian and philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn and felt immense relief that I wasn’t the first person to stumble across such quandaries.

So there I was, majoring in philosophy, where I discovered more thinkers pondering the nature of science and the idea of different conceptual frameworks.Another who stood out in my mind was Paul Feyerabend, author of the curious tract Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (1975).

While Kuhn had stressed paradigms as fundamental shapers of scientific activity, according to Feyerabend the most important advances had not followed any abstract or universal “scientific method.” Real cutting-edge science was opportunistic, involving psychology of persuasion and oftentimes propagandistic language. Sometimes it held onto theories that seemed refuted by facts as plain as the noses on scientists’ faces. Other times it hastily buried unwanted ideas.

Feyerabend’s point wasn’t that this was wrong. He saw it as necessary for progress, at least the way that term was defined! Science, moreover, always involved assumptions that couldn’t be tested empirically, in a laboratory. The choice was more sociological. A felt need to defy the presumed authority of the Church was a major motivator.

In short, science was not what it seemed — and still seems to many.It was a human, all-too-human enterprise like any other human, all-too-human enterprise. It depended on resources made available to it by those with money and power or influence — and belief (or unbelief)!

I could have become a postmodernist! Sometimes I wipe my brow at the close call I had! I think what saved me came from my earlier commitment to Christianity—which incorporates the idea that truth exists, our minds are capable of discovering it to some degree, and that dominant institutions sometimes get in the way. So although I came to question dominant narratives, I never went down the postmodern rabbit hole.

Politics.

I’d been a Watergate teenager. My father: a staunch Nixonite. His view was that Nixon was hated by the press (true), and that therefore we were safe in thinking he’d done nothing wrong (false, illogical inference). Back then we had no idea of Nixon’s worst act, which was “closing the gold window.”

What I’d figured out: you shouldn’t take authority for granted: political, familial, scientific,or ecclesiastical.

Especially if it demands absolute loyalty and refuses your questions.

I couldn’t have said this in the 1970s, of course, but I positioned myself well to study writers like Feyerabend. And a broad potpourri of others, including Charles Fort, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Robert Anton Wilson, Colin Wilson, R. Buckminster Fuller, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ervin Laszlo, more. I recall reading Beat Generation writers: from Jack Kerouac and Richard Brautigan to Ken Kesey and Stewart Brand. And then another gamut, from “hard”science fiction authors like Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein to horrific fantasists like H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.

A theme seemed to run through this potpourri: a need for openness, for experimentation, for risk-taking. A sense that whatever we know, there are far more unknowns out there. Moreover, methods that work for one set of problems are useless for others; so we should resist one-size-fits-all solutions. We should never succumb to mental/intellectual authoritarianism of any kind. Nor should we fall into mental boxes filled with assumptions we’ve stopped examining.

After getting my doctorate and looking for university work, as a white male I ran headlong into affirmative action. With a single question in mind I dove into a new literature. The question: how it could be just to sacrifice the white men of my generation for sins committed by our ancestors? Both perpetrators and victims of the worst of those sins (chattel slavery) were long in their graves.

Upon looking closer I discovered badly thought-out policies that (1) were not benefitting most African-Americans whose status had begun to improve during the ‘60s and ‘70s but then started to slip, as authors like Charles Murray ably documented; (2) gave far more benefits to left-leaning white women because they were often superb networkers positioning themselves to take advantages; (3) concealed its quandaries behind every manner of rationalizations Thomas Sowell and others documented; (4) thus setting conditions for the political correctness pandemic, the invention of “systemic racism,” and major cleavages in the U.S. today. Back in the early 1990s I began asking if race and gender preferences were ever a good idea.

I’d received a few light scoldings from fellow academics for trying to present papers on some of Feyerabend’s ideas. That was nothing compared to what happened when I published on this. What ensued included personal attacks and even borderline threats.

This only supported a Feyerabendian theme: narratives do not dominate for “rational” reasons. They dominate because of the positioning of their advocates who can weaponize language, and of course because they have money which translates into power. My first book Civil Wrongs (1994) came out of that era. The next year I found myself unemployed. I’d committed a huge heresy, after all, openly criticizing the sacred writ of the academic left. Eventually I obtained fellowships to support specific projects, ghostwrote two books, did some copy writing, wrote obits for a city newspaper for a spell, then earned a master’s in public health education.

This last proved to be most valuable, as it included heavy doses of epidemiology, the science of the origin of diseases, their transmission and propagation through populations, control measures, and study designs. I am conscious now of what was omitted from those studies: the clash between two paradigms of disease and healing: the “germ” theory and the “miasmatic” one. The former led to allopathic medicine and to the idea that only drugs can prevent specific diseases by attacking specific microorganisms. The latter, leading to homeopathic medicine, emphasized health as systemic, spoke of treating entire systems including factors both internal (e.g., nutritional) and external (e.g., environmental toxins) that can strength or weaken one’s immune system.

The former had won out again because of its superior positioning and resources (e.g., Rockefeller money, which had led to the control of nearly all medical education and practice, including journal publication). I’d revisited the systems theory/thinking I’d learned years before from writers such as Laszlo and developed my own take on it — predictably different from that of others.

Consciousness of Globalism.

It had become clear how affirmative action politics in organizations was usually hidden from outsiders. As sociologist Frederick R. Lynch put it all the way back in 1988, “word comes down but does not go out.”

It dawned on me that this might not be an exception.It might be the norm.

I simply awakened one day—I think it was still the mid-1990s — with this thought: the great challenge for those who want free societies is how to control power. Howto place checks on that minority in our midst that is fascinated with power, whose values revolve around obtaining and maintaining power.

A friend handed me Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966). Another directed me to G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature From Jekyll Island (1994). I devoured both. This was before The Matrix!

As the Internet began bringing information into our front rooms, I came across many other references and all manner of evidence that much history of the past century was not what it seemed. Those positioned to know had issued warnings, such as President Eisenhower’s about “the military-industrial complex.”

I learned what a terrible thing it was to be a “conspiracy theorist.” This was balanced by my discovery that the CIA had weaponized that term back in the 1960s, quietly advising mainstream media to use it against criticisms of the lone-gunman view of the JFK assassination. It proved extremely useful, the reason we see it all the time today! What goes through my mind when I see it: this is a line of thought our would-be overlords don’t want pursued. Their shills are paid very well to report what they are told to report. So sit down and shut up, peasant. Believe what we “experts” tell you to believe and stop asking questions!

Soon, I realized how useful the ideas of “scientific” materialism and technocracy as modern and contemporary faiths were to globalists who wanted a single worldwide governance structure. The one led to the other. For if materialism were true and there was no Higher Power to answer to, those with money, power, and the capacity to organize and act behind the scenes were free to do as they pleased, to the extent they can get away with it.

Recent history shows they can get away with a lot!

Moving to Chile. Toward the Plan-demic.

I’d taught philosophy again, penned another book, Four Cardinal Errors, about the errors leading to the downfall of America (2011). Not just my corner of academia, but the enterprise generally, was suffering. We were moving inexorably further from Constitutionally limited government, moreover. Wise thought leaders such as Dr. Ron Paul were not being listened to. We were on our way to a major clash of perspectives: between those who wanted power and those who want to be left alone.

For a while, the latter had the Internet in their corner. It had initiated the biggest sea-change in consciousness since the Gutenberg Press. It had created an environment in which anyone could research anything, become his/her own “expert,” post his/her findings online for all to see!

Not all the results were beneficial, of course. Some were utter lunacy. “Sorcha Faal” was around, after all, long before “Q” came to call.

But there was plenty of other material of the highest quality. It often showed that the “experts” (materialists, globalization purveyors, Fauci-types) were either simply wrong or pursuing or in the grip of agendas. They often ignored what didn’t fit their narratives.

In 2008 (seeds planted years before, of course), we experienced the worst financial crisis I’d seen, and then watched as it was “conquered” not with reason and attention to fundamentals but papered over with propaganda and printed money (the worst legacy of the Nixon era).

Frankly, once the Obama years arrived, my then-associates and I wondered how long the U.S. financial system could survive the avalanche of printed money the Federal Reserve system created to prop up a tottering system, most of it going to Wall Street and driving up the stock market to new bubble-heights. We seemed to have learned nothing!

In 2012, I moved to Santiago, Chile, along with others equally convinced that the U.S. was in a cultural, educational, and financial tailspin that could only run its ruinous course. In the wake of the Zimmerman acquittal, shootings such as the one in Ferguson, Mo., and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, political correctness became magnitudes stronger!

None of us yet saw the rise of Donald Trump in the wake of the collapse in credibility of all the official narratives, as for the first time a substantial segment of the public turned away from the political class and chose a businessman who promised, “I can fix this!”

We should have seen the rise of the counterattacks: Russiagate, the emergency of Internet censorship courtesy of the Big Tech leviathans, the construction of media narratives about “white supremacy,” and when those had only limited success: Captain Covid came to call!

Truth. Health. Technology of Abundance.

We’ve come to the present. What do I stand for? Truth, to the extent we can find it and tell it. In an age of worsening censorship and cancellation, these are in jeopardy.

Health? Also in great jeopardy, and on a global scale!

Do I get everything right? Of course not! No one does. Have my views changed over time? Yes. For years I was a Libertarian. Gradually I realized that “the free market” is just another abstraction, or magic elixir, because (1) intelligent people will use markets intelligently while the stupid will use them stupidly; and (2) at least some of the former will use money and markets to gain power, meaning that “the market” (the economic space in which transactions take place) is as vulnerable to abuse as any other human, all-too-human arrangement.

Government remains worse! Having just finished Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s important book on Tony Fauci and his cronies, I am more distrustful than ever of institutions claiming to be devoted to medical science and public health. The plain truth is, real medical science stopped at least four decades ago! It will remain stopped until moneyed interests no longer dictate outcomes and approved narratives.

Money underwrites much present-day industrial civilization. This is a mixed bag. Money is morally neutral, of course. There is nothing inherently immoral in getting rich. Money could be used to do great things. Resources exist to build a world of abundance and prosperity never before seen! Do we answer to a Higher Power? I believe we do. But we live in a fallen world, and prevailing uses of money are bound to reflect this.

Thus money has been used for hideous things! Kennedy’s book shows how the pharma-industrial complex and sociopaths like Fauci and Gates have been the only real beneficiaries of covid-19(84), which could have been stopped in its tracks in a matter of months had real doctors been allowed to apply the cures they had discovered worked. Kennedy presents abundant evidence that the Fauci-directed crowd has always seen common people as lab rats! Allopathic medicine aligns well with a materialist worldview. We need a worldview in which human persons have intrinsic value— whatever their ethnicity, sex, age, nationality, economic standing, or health status.

There is also reason to believe moneyed interests have suppressed technologies able to create systems of abundance, maintaining scarcity because scarcity is profitable. Space limits preclude my being specific here, but I hope to do a future article on this, which has been going on for decades!

But take the time to look into what Nikola Tesla was doing when J.P. Morgan pulled his funding and his laboratory was raided by the feds. No one has the full story, because much of Tesla’s research remains classified. Why? Perhaps because investigations into alternative technologies for powering our homes might open doors to abundance for us peasants while closing them to those who want unlimited corporate profits in a fully centralized world.(I am not referring to solar power!)

Technologies of abundance would free peoples the world over from the serfdom globalists want. (Isn’t it suspicious that the Fauci-Gates axis was obsessed with bringing vaccines to Africa — not systems able to deliver clean water, proper sanitation, nutritious food, and clean energy?)

A sustained look at homeopathic/miasmatic approaches to medicine might contribute to such. These do not work under the assumption that the only keys to health and healing are violent interventions (e.g., vaccines). Rather, they look at systems and recognize that strengthening natural immunity through nutrition, exercise, sufficient sleep, and stress-reduction, in a primary-prevention context, are important to health.

These approaches are disliked in mainstream medicine not because no evidence supports them but because they do not funnel billions into the coffers of the pharma-industrial complex. Sensible primary prevention would make this complex obsolete!

Among our biggest challenges today is disseminating truthful information in an environment where dominant institutions — the WHO, the CDC, etc. — and nearly all major medical and public health schools, are partly or wholly owned subsidiaries of the pharma-industrial complex, and also the major source of advertising revenue in Regime Media. We need that Higher Power! And we need decentralization, a devolution of human power from corrupt centers. We needed these things yesterday!

Steven Yates’s new book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock, 2021) is available here and here.

Do you wish me to continue? Please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

Israeli Scientist Blows Down the Covid House of Cards

By Steven Yates

January 19, 2022

Every so often, something comes my way that gives me hope that sanity just might prevail in this world. The most recent something came yesterday courtesy of my friend Tom Woods (who sends out a daily letter it is worth your while to subscribe to).

He reproduced, in full, a blistering letter from an Israeli immunologist — a real scientist, that is, who goes off real data, not a career federal bureaucrat and fraud like Fauci going off manufactured/cooked “data” protected by corporate media power and censorship.

As I wrote to Tom thanking him for the letter and asking if I could use it, if this doesn’t blow down the covid-19(84) house of cards, then nothing will — short of an actual civilian die-off that will be literally impossible to hide as life insurance companies find themselves overwhelmed with claims and in danger of going under financially.

Tom, you have the floor:

Udi Qimron, head of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Tel Aviv University and a leading Israeli immunologist, has taken the opportunity posed by the collapsing narrative to release this open letter to the authorities (this is a mechanical translation from the original Hebrew).

And now, the letter itself. Keep in mind that Israel has “vaccinated” almost its entire population, and Israeli hospitals are still overflowing with what we are told are covid-19 patients. What I find phenomenal is that anybody is still pretending that these shots are effective at preventing either illness or transmission!

The letter is also extremely timely, as governments all over the world move inexorably towards what can only be described as an Apartheid system, removing the “unvaccinated” from their societies.

If such efforts as this succeed in overturning the narrative, I would not be surprised if some of these governments — you know the ones — are overthrown!

Ministry of Health, it’s time to admit failure

In the end, the truth will always be revealed, and the truth about the coronavirus policy is beginning to be revealed. When the destructive concepts collapse one by one, there is nothing left but to tell the experts who led the management of the pandemic – we told you so.

Two years late, you finally realize that a respiratory virus cannot be defeated and that any such attempt is doomed to fail. You do not admit it, because you have admitted almost no mistake in the last two years, but in retrospect it is clear that you have failed miserably in almost all of your actions, and even the media is already having a hard time covering your shame.

You refused to admit that the infection comes in waves that fade by themselves, despite years of observations and scientific knowledge. You insisted on attributing every decline of a wave solely to your actions, and so through false propaganda “you overcame the plague.” And again you defeated it, and again and again and again.

You refused to admit that mass testing is ineffective, despite your own contingency plans explicitly stating so (“Pandemic Influenza Health System Preparedness Plan, 2007,” p. 26).

You refused to admit that recovery is more protective than a vaccine, despite previous knowledge and observations showing that non-recovered vaccinated people are more likely to be infected than recovered people. You refused to admit that the vaccinated are contagious despite the observations. Based on this, you hoped to achieve herd immunity by vaccination — and you failed in that as well.

You insisted on ignoring the fact that the disease is dozens of times more dangerous for risk groups and older adults, than for young people who are not in risk groups, despite the knowledge that came from China as early as 2020.

You refused to adopt the “Great Barrington Declaration,” signed by more than 60,000 scientists and medical professionals, or other common-sense programs. You chose to ridicule, slander, distort and discredit them. Instead of the right programs and people, you have chosen professionals who lack relevant training for pandemic management (physicists as chief government advisers, veterinarians, security officers, media personnel, and so on).

You have not set up an effective system for reporting side effects from the vaccines and reports on side effects have even been deleted from your Facebook page. Doctors avoid linking side effects to the vaccine, lest you persecute them as you did to some of their colleagues. You have ignored many reports of changes in menstrual intensity and menstrual cycle times. You hid data that allows for objective and proper research (for example, you removed the data on passengers at Ben Gurion Airport). Instead, you chose to publish non-objective articles together with senior Pfizer executives on the effectiveness and safety of vaccines.

Irreversible damage to trust

However, from the heights of your hubris, you have also ignored the fact that in the end the truth will be revealed. And it begins to be revealed. The truth is that you have brought the public’s trust in you to an unprecedented low, and you have eroded your status as a source of authority. The truth is that you have burned hundreds of billions of shekels to no avail – for publishing intimidation, for ineffective tests, for destructive lockdowns and for disrupting the routine of life in the last two years.

You have destroyed the education of our children and their future. You made children feel guilty, scared, smoke, drink, get addicted, drop out, and quarrel, as school principals around the country attest. You have harmed livelihoods, the economy, human rights, mental health and physical health.

You slandered colleagues who did not surrender to you, you turned the people against each other, divided society and polarized the discourse. You branded, without any scientific basis, people who chose not to get vaccinated as enemies of the public and as spreaders of disease. You promote, in an unprecedented way, a draconian policy of discrimination, denial of rights and selection of people, including children, for their medical choice. A selection that lacks any epidemiological justification.

When you compare the destructive policies you are pursuing with the sane policies of some other countries — you can clearly see that the destruction you have caused has only added victims beyond the vulnerable to the virus. The economy you ruined, the unemployed you caused, and the children whose education you destroyed — are the surplus victims as a result of your own actions only.

There is currently no medical emergency, but you have been cultivating such a condition for two years now because of lust for power, budgets and control. The only emergency now is that you still set policies and hold huge budgets for propaganda and consciousness engineering instead of directing them to strengthen the health care system.

This emergency must stop!

Steven Yates again. Is there anything to add to that?

Just this. I scroll through feeds from two news aggregators every late morning after my scheduled writing project. I see article after article on how “our democracy” is in danger, how “trust in science” (or in “experts”) has been jeopardized by “conspiracy theorists,” or how we live in a “post-truth world.”

Most are complete rubbish, of course!

How, that is, can the Great Reset be a “conspiracy theory” when I have a readily available paperbound book by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret entitled Covid-19: The Great Reset sitting right here???

Are Regime Media really that collectively stupid, or do they think we are???

You read the above—and if you know about reports from a life insurance CEO that the number of deaths allegedly not just from covid-19(84) is abnormally elevated for last year’s third quarter, you have to realize:

If we really do live in a “post-truth world” because public trust in science and in so-called scientific medicine have all evaporated, the “experts” who have been lying to us all these years and are still lying even as I write have no one but themselves to blame!

The fog is lifting!

Steven Yates’s new book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock, 2021) is available here and here.

Do you wish me to continue? Please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

2022: A Look Ahead

By Steven Yates

January 14, 2022

“The times may have changed, but the nature of evil has not.” —Monsignor Timothy Howard, American Horror Story

Arguably, Campaign 2024 has begun. This is because Regime Media will not leave Trump alone. I doubt he can sneeze without it being reported. Nor will Regime Media leave January 6alone, anymore than it left the Russiagate hoax alone for over two years.

Trump is the presumed GOP nominee in 2024, even if he’s not said definitely that he’s running. His presence is the commanding one in the GOP, though, to the chagrin of Establishment types like Liz Cheney, or never-Trumper pseudo-conservatives who write for The Washington Post.

Surely if he does run he’s a shoo-in for the nomination, and if he doesn’t, his voice will probably determine who gets it. Who that might be, I have no idea. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida would be my choice, but he’s not indicated that he wants the job.

Meanwhile, as we inch our way into 2022 Regime Media will continue posting screeds on how dangerous all this is for “our democracy” (i.e., their oligarchy), not noticing that with their resources,they are the ones widening the divisions threatening to tear the country apart.

Another thing we can be sure of: the narrative wars of which I wrote last week will continue into 2022 and probably intensify.

We just mentioned “our democracy.” Former president Jimmy Carter just weighed in, having penned a widely distributed New York Times op-ed. “Our great nation teeters on the edge of a widening abyss” he wrote, and this could cost us “our precious democracy.”

Just one of countless examples.

Whether the U.S. even is a democracy in any meaningful sense is a matter worth discussing, or so I would think. If going to polling booths to vote to rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic every two and four years is evidence of democracy, than I suppose the U.S. is a democracy.

But if government is supposed to answer to the concerns and choices of voters on issues that sometimes affect them directly, then the U.S. stopped being a democracy eons ago (assuming it ever was).

When, for example, was any vote ever taken on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)? Or its Trumpian successor (supposedly)?

The truth is that the Establishment got its de facto power back on January 20, 2021, having turned the Asylum on the Potomac into an armed fortress.

The oligarchs desperately fear losing it again!

Jan 6 and the response to it — ill-advised as the breach of the Capitol was, and with law fare against over 700 people now proceeding apace — was supposed to put an end to the “populist” insurgency. It did not.

As I’ve observed many times, millions outside the enclaves of power have figured out, at least somewhat, that something is seriously amiss with nearly everything they’ve been told for much of their lives — in school by their elders, especially in universities, and what they hear on CNN or read on Legacy Media newspapers or websites.

They’ve been “red-pilled” even if they’ve never seen The Matrix.

Some are learning “how deep the rabbit hole goes”!

Nearly all of those people supported Trump in both 2016 and 2020.

Not all of them liked him as a person. They weren’t voting for a saint. Some said they were voting for a businessman, not a career politician. They were voting for someone who said he could fix the country.

While there are some specifics we can point to, sadly, he was forced from office after four years of fighting for survival, a lot of work undone. What he wanted to do could not be accomplished in four years, even absent the backstabbers in his own administration.

A recent poll indicates that more than 40 percent of Americans believe Election 2020 was stolen outright, or are unsure, which means they have doubts about the legitimacy of the Biden presidency.

Why?

Even those who know nothing of the hundreds of memory-holed affidavits alleging specific wrongdoing in polling places November 3-4, signed under penalty of perjury,might agree with Tom Treece:

I wondered how could the man responsible for – the greatest economy in my lifetime, the lowest unemployment in a half-century (and lowest black unemployment ever), record stock market highs, stood up to China by imposing tariffs, made America energy independent by turning us into the world’s number one producer of oil and natural gas – lose to one that virtually stayed hidden away in his basement and did no campaigning?

Add to this the fact that the man he’s talking about could fill arenas while the man who “won” probably couldn’t have filled a high school auditorium.

The “Biden victory” makes no sense whatsoever. I suppose I’m one of those people for whom things have to make sense. Maybe it’s a flaw in my character. But keep my name on the list of those who smelled a rat from the get-go and still does, incessant Big Lie gaslighting from Regime Media notwithstanding.

Treece is also bothered by the obvious double-standard: Democrats spent four years casting doubt on Trump’s legitimacy (Russiagate, etc.), looking for ways to impeach him. Naturally they found first one, and then a second.

Now they expect us to grant legitimacy to someone who, in addition to all of the above,destroyed over ten thousand jobs his first two days in office?

Biden — or whoever shoved those papers in front of his demented nose to sign — doesn’t even rise to the level of incompetent!

Add to all this the gaslighting about covid “vaccines” being “safe and effective” even as the fourth “booster” is being rolled out!

These factors taken together add up to a recipe for major civil unrest, if the right leader comes along to focus it.

That leader might not be Trump. Trump world appears to be fracturing. Trump elicited boos when he told his supporters to get the covid-19(84) injections, for one thing—eve though in the next breath he opposed Bidenista “vaccine” mandates.

Trump takes credit for Operation Warp Speed.

To many who see the injections as the core component of a depopulation scheme, that was the worst mistake of his presidency!

He canceled a scheduled speech on January 6. It is unclear why, but he infuriated Steve Bannon and other non-Establishment operatives.

To the base, the continued persecution of Jan-6ers remains a sticking point about which Trump has said little beyond rhetorical pats on the back (“very fine people”). It is clear that sadists like Bidenista attorney general Merrick Garland intend to destroy as many of the lives of these “fine people” as possible.

There are other national divisions capable of blowing up this year.

The Supreme Court could conceivably hand down a decision that voids Roe v. Wade. That will doubtless rouse radical feminists who will spread dystopian Handmaid’s Talevisions of an “authoritarian Christian right” takeover. (This is an example of the emotive power of stories.) They will take to the streets, and likely be supported by Antifa and other violent leftist freelancers.

Let me be clear: abortion kills the unborn — the most vulnerable population on the planet. This is the case against it. You either place a value on human lives, or you don’t.

And if you don’t — if you exclude some category of person from your version of the human moral community — you’re on a slippery slope. History proves this decisively.

The unborn today, Alzheimer’s patients tomorrow (unless they are in the political class!). “Useless eaters” generally.

Especially if hospitals are overwhelmed with the “vaccine”-injured!

Left-liberals will retort: what about black lives mattering?

To my mind, the answer is, Of course black lives matter — but not in the sense of Black Lives Matter. I hope the difference there is not too far over many left-liberals’ heads (assuming any are reading).

I do not know what the prospects are, this year, for a frank conversation about what would actually improve black people’s lives. I don’t think left-liberals want such a conversation, because it will mean confessing their culpability for the disaster that has befallen African-Americans over the past 40 years and counting.

Such a conversation would call for a much more involved piece than this is intended to be, because it would delve into both the economic, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of what it means to live a good life in the world as it is, working according to the laws it works by.

Laws that apply across the board, whatever your race, sex, creed, nationality, etc.

Some of these laws are economic; some are psychological; some are spiritual.

Example of the first: acknowledging that human beings must produce the means of their survival and advancement, and then sustain the right practices in order to keep the advances they’ve made. Among these are respecting basic freedoms, respecting property, maintaining a strong family unit, and adhering to policies based on sound money.

Example of the second: quitting the psych0logy of victimization, from which arises nothing except destructive resentment, and which lies at the root of critical race theory and other hard-left mind abortions to come out of the universities over the past 30 years.

Example of the last: recognizing that it is not enough just to produce and consume without a sense of some transcendent purpose for doing so. Animals do the equivalent. We’re not simply animals. What is our connection to our Creator?

The number of Americans even asking the question is diminishing. Polls show us becoming more, not less, secular. Materialism continues to be our national faith.

Hence America as a whole has done none of these things.

The aggregate poisons of bad economics, inflamed racial resentment, and secularism, have all spread. Some of what destroyed black families and communities is now destroying white families and communities.

I think it likely that Republicans will retake one or both houses of Congress when November gets here, if only because the party out of power in the Executive branch usually wins big in off years. That might stymie the Bidenistas, but then what? November is still eleven months away, though, and they can do a lot of irreversible damage in the meantime.

But I wouldn’t count on a Republican-controlled Congress accomplishing much. When have Republican-controlled Congresses ever accomplished much in the past?

We can also be reasonably sure that the Establishment is going to continue with ‘omicron’ and other scare tactics. The other day, it was “flurona,” some goofy mixture of flu and coronavirus!

Legacy Media will continue blaming the “unvaccinated” for hospitals filling up.

There’s not going to be a “return to normal” in the American mainstream, although many rural communities may be able to return to something like it.

My counsel is still: get out of big cities. Their left-liberal governments are destroying them from within. That’s the best testimony to the destructive power of left-liberalism.

I’d like to be optimistic, that this year could be better than last year … but the only thing likely to make so is us, taking charge of our lives where we can.

Not looking to the GOP, and November; or to 2024.

Last year, around this time, I began penning a series of articles counseling conservatives to prepare to separate from the larger society (it began here): mindset, resilience, skills, securing intentional communities, securing borders, etc.

This isn’t a perfect solution (there aren’t any of those). It is necessary to continue exposing and opposing the Great Reset with all our might, since left to its own devices the super elite behind it — call it the Establishment, GloboCorp, or whatever you want — has the technology to ferret out and destroy any such communities should they become sufficiently viable to become a globally visible, competitive threat to its power.

We conservatives can only count on ourselves and on God (Eph. 6:10-18).

Can we create communities where we are, based on our values? Can we start by nurturing a worldview that places God at its center, that assigns intrinsic value to human life (all human lives), and educates for truth and not political agendas beyond the necessities of self-defense? One that allows genuine leaders, and not mere moneyed elites, to rise to the top? Let us also give a nod to the ancient Stoic philosophers who counseled taking charge of what we can control, and letting go of what we can’t control. Turn off Legacy Media. Homeschool your children. Those are things you can control.

And there’s plenty more to do in every other area we can control.

Steven Yates’s new book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock, 2021) is available here and here.

Do you wish me to continue? Please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

The Real Matrix—Resurrected!

By Steven Yates

December 31, 2021

Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you to the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.

The Matrix (1999)

Happy 2022, readers! Such as it is!

I have no review of the new Matrix movie, Matrix 4: Resurrection, or whatever it’s called. I’ve yet to see it. Everything I’ve read about it from folks I trust who have seen it suggests steering clear, that it’s a celluloid train wreck trying to cash in on the successes of its predecessors, and that I’d be wasting my time. My time being valuable, I’ve listened. So far. (Truth be known, I never thought that much of the two previous sequels. I caught myself dozing trying to watch Matrix Revolution.)

What I can offer is a retrospective on the original classic, easily one of the half-dozen or so most important films of the past 50 years. I wrote a series that began here: my debut on this site. Given the time that has passed and how the site has changed, it might look a little weird.

If anything, The Matrix is more relevant today than when it first appeared. Just in case anyone was in a cave back then:

At some point civilization fell under the sway of an artificial intelligences, so that human beings are born, live out their lives, and die within “pods.” Their brains are wired into the AI which feeds them steady input: all the details of their lives, loves, etc.,the full trappings of the post-industrial landscape of the late twentieth century.

While thinking they are free, people are slaves, their life energies used to sustain the AI: living batteries!

Morpheus (to Neo): The human body generates more bio-electricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTU’s of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion, the machines had found all the energy they would ever need. There are fields – endless fields – where human beings are no longer born, we are grown. For the longest time I wouldn’t believe it, and then I saw the fields with my own eyes. Watched them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living. And standing there, facing the pure horrifying precision, I came to realize the obviousness of the truth. What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world, built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this [he holds up a copper-top D-cell battery]

The point being: the world the masses believe they experience is not real. It is a simulation, the product of the AI, from which they never awaken.

Morpheus again:

Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?

A gold mine for philosophy classes!

As the film progressed, those who had escaped, led by the intrepid Morpheus, battle Agents and other mechanical denizens sent by the AI to recapture them. Their goal: to destroy the AI and the Matrix, so the human race can once again be free.

What they are up against is what all freedom fighters come up against sooner or later: the fact that not only are they fighting denizens of the enslaving AI,they’re fighting the impulses of their own who do not really want to be free.

Most of the human race, after all, prefers the security and creature-comforts of serfdom to the responsibilities that come with freedom (political, economic, and so forth). Morpheus yet again:

The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

In a poignant moment later, a character named Cypher (interesting name!) is having dinner with Agent Smith and arranging to have himself reinserted into a “pod,” telling Smith, “I want to remember nothing!” And:

I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? [He takes another bite of steak.] Ignorance is bliss!

The “real Matrix”?

The fantasy world of manufactured consent created by corporate media leviathans, now including Big Tech, with their relentless propaganda, cancelations, and censorship efforts. On top of this we have governments and academia, which the majority of people still trust to dispense truth.

Truth about globalization, foreign wars such as the one in Iraq, liberal democracy, race and crime or race and history, right versus left, Russia, Election 2020, and Covid-19.

Perchance extending to much of the past 150 years (if not more!) of science, technology, and political economy.

The billion dollar question: how long have the Regime’s dominant institutions been feeding us lies to keep us under control, so that our cooperative work and life energies sustain the elites the system has enabled to grab power?

By early last decade, the number of people who had figured out that they were being lied to systematically about one or more or all of the above had swollen to populations numbering millions, all over the world.

From the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street. Arab Spring. Wikileaks.

So-called “populism.” Brexit. Donald Trump. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Others.

The growth of belief in “conspiracies.”

Then, as if in unintended confirmation, beginning almost immediately after the Trump upset in 2016, came the pushback.

The Regime awakened in a burst of collective terror to the realization that it was losing control!

Arguably the most visible and influential Regime Media pushback began with this scurrilous, unsourced, evidence-free article (though a search discloses any number of earlier preemptive strikes about “Russian hackers” helping Trump).

The rest is history. I’ve recounted aspects of it in countless articles; so have others, here and elsewhere. No need to repeat….

What is clear to me now, as we enter 2022 following almost two years of plandemic, is that I greatly underestimated the Regime (or the super elite or GloboCorp if you prefer) in my 2011 book Four Cardinal Errors.

Never underestimate cold-blooded psychopaths with billions of dollars at their disposal!

We are now in what I think of as a narrative cold war — a war that could conceivably turn hot and tear the U.S. apart within the next few years.

You could say we are fighting several narrative wars, one for each topic listed above.

I use the word narrative a lot. What does it mean?

Narratives are stories told to us, and which we tell ourselves. It should be clear,most people respond to stories better than they do to any form of logical deduction.

When Jesus wanted to illustrate a point, he spoke in parables. A parable is one kind of narrative, or story.

Stories are invariably emotive. They can be evocative if their intent is to inspire. Or threatening, if intended as mind control. They can encourage you to think about the point being made. Or to relinquish your freedom of thought and submit to authority (e.g., The Science). Do what the voices of the Regime tell you, and you’ll be safe.

Your safety is what counts, right?

However we explain it, our brains are wired to protect us from danger. Except for the handful of us who have created oases of peace and abundance, I believe the default setting for many of us is of the world filled with potential and actual dangers.

The point is, narratives are powerful control factors in cultures, with economic and political activity flowing downstream from dominant narratives.

These function as “prisons for our minds” — if we let them.

What happened 1990s – 2015 was the collapse of most if not all of the dominant narratives the Regime had spent much of the past century carefully constructing.

Globalization was not “making us richer.” It was destroying American workers and threatening the American middle class. If your job could be done from anywhere in the world, it would be. Corporations were moving at breakneck pace to wherever labor was cheapest.

The Regime war machine had started a war in Iraq based on fabrications. The likely impending fate of the world’s most visible political prisoner, Julian Assange, speaks volumes about what the Regime is capable of doing to those who expose its lies and war crimes.

Race/ethnicity: nothing left-liberal Democrats (and a lot of Republicans) did regarding race over the past half-century improved the lives of more than a small handful of African-Americans. Many of the rest are arguably worse off, after welfare-statism made black fathers obsolete.

According to academic elites, people of whatever color with real privileges, the ruination of black America was due to the “legacy of slavery,” “systemic racism,” “white privilege” — anything except the irruinous ideologies and policies.

By the way, how could a self-identified African-American be elected president of the U.S. not once but twice if America really was a “systemically racist” country—?

Huh-uh! Down the memory hole with that!

Regime Media pointedly ignores black-on-white crime. Note the literal disappearance of the Darrell Brooks case (the Waukesha Christmas Parade Massacre, November 21). Brooks, 39, a rabid white-hater, drove his vehicle into the festival parade, killing six and injuring 62, all white. One of the dead was an eight-year-old girl.

There was no mention of the man’s race in the initial reports, which to any thinking person is now a dead giveaway that a perp is black. The case was quickly memory-holed. You can only learn about it on “right-wing” news sights.

Speaking of which….

Do you see any references to groups such as the Proud Boys without the accompanying epithet far-right or some equivalent?

How many times have you seen Antifa referred to as far left? Or referred to at all? I see occasional mentions of “anti-fascists.” Fascism is bad, of course. So anti-fascists must be good.

See how this works?

Moving right along: liberal democracy?

For those who care to dig, the U.S. (and every other Western industrial / post-industrial power) became a plutocratic oligarchy over a century ago!

I could write several more articles on how plutocrat efforts to protect real privilege are now passed off as “shoring up liberal democracy,” while efforts to expose the elites and their agendas are portrayed as “authoritarianism,” “white supremacy,” “neo-fascism,” etc., even “domestic terrorism.”

And then there’s Election 2020. I have to resist screaming every time I see an article about how the Jan-6ers “endangered democracy” or how Trump supporters “weaken democracy” by doubting the legitimacy of the process that gave us “President Biden.”

A narrative is being constructed on how Trumpian Republicans are preparing to steal Election 2024 using new state-level election-security laws and other efforts to block fraudulent voting and digital theft.

I sense fear in many Regime Media op-eds. I probably don’t need to link to examples. They’re everywhere! Just scroll down any mainstream new aggregator such as Yahoo!

Millions of people are now “red-pilled,” and the Regime’s programmers know it.

Hence the blitzkrieg of narrative-control efforts, which I expect will continue on into 2022.

Threats to your health have proven to be a more effective means of control than warnings about, say, terrorists, foreign or domestic.

The plandemic is easily the biggest grab for power since the creation of the Federal Reserve System (that was the biggest coup in U.S. history by the oligarchs of that era).

It beautifully illustrates Hegelian dialectic: crisis-reaction-response. Manufacture a crisis. Issue nonstop hysterical reportage 24/7 as weeks turn into months and months into years, so that the masses react with a collective “Do something!” The Regime moved in with responses wanted all along: economically destructive lockdowns (and the end of the Trump presidency), mandated injections the long-term effects of which will likely be depopulation, as 2021 saw an abnormally high death rate, including injected athletes in the prime of their lives, details also memory-holed.

Morpheus:

Welcome to the Desert of the Real!

This is the Desert of the Real behind the narratives, but the narratives still have us by our throats. Their enforcers are everywhere. Guys like Fauci (“The Science”) are at the top, and the enforcer class extends down to the worker-bees scanning QR-codes in restaurants and theaters.

To see through it all, I suggest forgetting the new movie and giving the originala rewatch. Then think about the fantasy world the Regime has tried to sustain over two decades.

Think about narratives in which George Floyd is up there with Jesus, thousands of leftists blocking highways and burning city blocks protesting his death are “mostly peaceful,” whereas the 600 or so who marched through the Capitol a year ago were “violent insurrectionists” bent on “overturning democracy.”

Or think about how a virus with a mortality rate under .05% for everyone with no comorbidities or not in nursing care has become a reason for starting up a new form of Apartheid against those who refuse an experimental, invasive medical treatment whose makers are indemnified from lawsuits for harm done by their products.

(I haven’t mentioned “economic recoveries” that never existed outside Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and government numbers; or the idea that an economy can be sustained forever on printed money!)

Just a couple days ago as I write this I saw a meme: Morpheus, wearing the familiar dark glasses, was holding up a sign:

If you’re going to see the new Matrix movie and you show a vaccine passport to get in, you missed the point of the first three and took the blue pill.

If you were looking for a review of the new film, that’ll have to do!

Steven Yates’s new book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock, 2021) is available here and here.

Do you wish me to continue? Please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

2021 — The Year In Review

by Steven Yates

December 21, 2021

Is This Year One, Part 1

“O Lord, how long shall I cry, and you will not hear? even cry out to you, “Violence!” and you will not save. Why do you show me iniquity, and cause me to see trouble? for plundering and violence are before me; there is strife, and contention arises. Therefore the law is powerless, and justice never goes forth. For the wicked surround the righteous; therefore perverse judgment proceeds.” —Habakkuk 1:2-4

For me personally, 2021 had more pluses than negatives.

We (my better half and I) finished settling into our new place. We are not in lockdown.

Our place is remote in the sense that you have to know where to look or you’ll never find it. But we are in walking distance from two grocery stores, two outdoors markets, a large health clinic, a mall, and the regional airport.

Our expenses have dropped dramatically since abandoning city life.

We have much to be grateful for, starting with each other. We are healthy;we are safe; and we stay in touch with family (hers, since I am the sole survivor of my immediate family).

My book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory, moreover, finally came out last summer.It is the produce of a three-year labor of love.

That might seem to have little to do with what I do here, but this would be deceptive. Many problems professional philosophers have wrestled for decades involve language in one way or another, and if there is anything more abused and manipulated today than language, I have trouble imagining what it could be. The late, great Ludwig Wittgenstein once observed (in a work called The Tractatus): “In philosophy the question, ‘What do we actually use this word or this proposition for?’ repeatedly leads to valuable insights.”

Orwell understood that those who control the public lexicon control public life.

Consider, then, each of the following words and what they are used for: democracy, fascism, racism, white supremacism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, conspiracy theory, populism. Can you think of more?

Also ask, what is the Weltanschauung or worldview of the person who uses words as linguistic clubs to beat people into submission?The weaponizing of language remains an open field if only because (for obvious reasons)very few academic philosophers will touch the subject.

That brings me to the condition of the Western world outside our immediate surroundings.

Not so good!

I fully understand the prophet Habakkuk’s lament above.

We approach another Christmas and New Year with televisions bleating incessant warnings that are now almost sonic wallpaper, we are so used to them.

Have we learned anything?

Around this time last year I predicted that the rushed “vaccines” we were just starting to hear about would become the big fight of 2021.

I was half-right.

As those were just starting to be rolled out, January 6 happened.

What we should be learning: yes, Virginia, the United States Federal Government keeps political prisoners, and if that’s a verbal club than in my estimation it is deserved.

Also: corporate media “news” lies like a rug!

The most revealing case of media dishonesty was regarding Capitol cop Brian Sickwick. Mainstream outlets reported at length how Sickwick was clubbed over the head with a fire extinguisher by a Trump supporter and died from head trauma.

This turned out to be a complete fabrication! No one struck Sickwick!

He had a stroke, doubtless brought on by the stress of the event, but not caused by any specific person.

Yes, Virginia, corporate media will exploit tragedy for political gain!

I don’t think media talking heads care about truth! They are paid for peddling BS — in the sense philosopher Harry Frankfurt uses the infamous b-word in his slim little classic On Bullshit (2005).

Their business is manufacturing consent, pumping out and maintaining approved narratives.

This ought to be our first big takeaway from 2021 (Year One?).

Assuming we hadn’t learned it in 2017 with Charlottesville, in 2018 with the collapse of the Russiagate hoax, in 2019 with Ukrainegate, or in 2020 which saw hundreds of millions of dollars of damage done by “mostly peaceful protesters.”

What ought to be our second big takeaway from 2021?

Again, assuming we hadn’t gotten the message long before, how about: the complete corruption of science into The Science?

Result: Big Pharma raked in billions while thousands of people died unnecessarily, having been denied effective treatments Big Pharma’s media shills demonized.

The truth: there is very little science being done today that is not part of corporate-governmental technocratic efforts to bring about the technocrat Great Reset.

What should be clear as 2021 comes to an end: the coronavirus did not “evolve in a bat,” and its release was no accident.

The timing of the release —a period of increasing economic volatility, the likelihood of Trump winning re-election in a landslide, and rising “populism” all over the globe—was as perfect as the chemical structure of the coronavirus itself, laden with evidence of the gain-of-function research that designed it to infect humans, especially the elderly.

Why?

A reader suggested a possible reason: Social Security will be broke in a few years. How long it has seems to depend on who you ask. Frankly, I don’t think anyone knows.

We are on our way to a general crash of all the markets that will make 2008 look like a joyride by comparison.

You cannot sustain an economy indefinitely on printed money!

If the gene-therapy injections do their job, though, this might not matter.

The author and researcher who looks to have done the most homework keeping up with studies of the effects of the injections appears to be Mike Whitney (archive here). I don’t know much about Mr. Whitney. He apparently keeps his head down. Has, for as long as I’ve been reading his stuff, which long predates covid-19(84). He wrote on economic issues from a standpoint hard to categorize, probably because he was isolating kernels of truth while the majority of “economists” were shilling for financialization, corporatism, and the military-security machine.

What Whitney relates through his archive: deaths from a variety of causes, the majority heart-related, are abnormally high this year, well above mere chance, in all countries that rushed into mass vaccination programs.

Cancers formerly in remission have returned.

All in the “fully vaccinated.”

People’s natural immune systems are being damaged, leaving them vulnerable to illnesses of all kinds. Your immune system, Whitney noted recently, is not your last line of defense against sickness, it is your only line of defense.

In the future, people will be dropping dead from the flu and even bad colds because their compromised immune systems cannot fight them off!

There were warnings in abundance (one by myself, a year ago) that the “vaccines” were being rolled out too fast, that under normal circumstances it takes years to vet a new vaccine for effectiveness and safety.

Down the memory hole!

I don’t have a death toll I am confident is accurate. VAERS doubtless under reports vaccine injuries and deaths, because it relies on voluntary reports, and too many people don’t even know about it. Whitney documents that injuries from the jabs are greater than all previous vaccines put together for the past 35 years!

This has not stopped governments from passing laws making them mandatory!

Austria is requiring every citizen to be jabbed as of Feb. 1, 2022. The country has already locked down 2 million unvaccinated people.

The situation in Australia is well-known. Australia has become a dictatorship in which the unjabbed are being literally herded into camps! Australia looks for all the world like a social experiment: how far can a people be pushed before they revolt en masse?

While U.S. courts keep throwing up roadblocks against Bidenista efforts, I have to wonder how long this can last. Checks and balances in the U.S. are far too weakened for unrelated reasons.

Most other nations have no checks of significance on centralized corporate-state power at all, beyond a fear of mass revolt if they push people too far.

America’s Second Amendment, much to the chagrin of the super elite and their mass media shills, is still very much in place and functioning as a check on their absolute power.

The survival not of mere millions, not of mere tens of millions, but hundreds of millions or even billions is at stake!

That’s if it’s not already too late! Fortunately, items are starting to appear on how to mitigate illnesses and health problems caused by the jabs.

When a nation such as Austria makes an experimental and unwanted medical procedure legally mandatory, protestors should fill the streets of every major city! Especially as the same mandates are being contemplated in Germany, Italy, Greece, and elsewhere, all places which have already instituted vaccine passports. This is Stage 4 vaccine coercion.

Nation after nation should be the scene of mass revolt, including the U.S. where employers appear to be doing the bulk of the heavy lifting.

How badly do you want to avoid artificially shortening your life?

It’s that simple!

An argument I keep encountering:hundreds of millions of people worldwide have gotten these shots. They aren’t dropping dead. I don’t know anybody who’s died after getting one.

I don’t, either. Not personally, anyway. There are many reports like this one, however. And some more personal, like this, or this.I have a friend whose cousin passed away four months after getting the Moderna shots. He experienced cascading organ failure, dying four months after getting them.

Was it the vaccine? The doctor evaded with, “We’ll know in a few years.”

No common horse sense there.

Someone close to me got the Pfizer jabs (and the “booster”) against my advice. He now complains of chronic tinnitus (a constant “ringing in the ears”) keeping him awake nights.

No one says the injections were designed to kill anyone on the spot.

That’s stupid!

That would cause a mass panic, obviously.

A chart I saw describes the short-term and long-term effects of the shots in three time frames: short-term (within 30 days), medium term (one month to one year), and long term (a year to ten years). The short term effects include blood clots leading to myocarditis, strokes, and heart attacks. These will occur in a miniscule fraction of the population, but are frequent enough to have caused the already-noted uptick in the rates of deaths and injuries. The medium term effects: vaccine-induced organ failure caused by the cumulative effects of the spike protein, autoimmune reactions, antibody-dependent enhancement, and heart problems. These will occur in a slightly larger but still very small percentage of the jabbed. Projected long term effects anticipated: chromosomal damage and a suppressed DNA repair mechanism, severe immunodeficiency and fatal autoimmune disorders, cancers, miscarriages, infertility.

This is a project, not an absolute proof. Defenders of The Science (i.e., the approved narrative) always demand absolute proof and then declare such claims “misinformation” when we can’t supply it. Never mind that real science doesn’t “absolutely prove” anything.

What we can note: as of last August, the jabs had caused over 21,000 deaths and over 2 million injuries in Europe alone!

The jabs are now being forced on small children!

I’m not a scientist (I do have a public health degree!), but there are real scientists who call this whole escapade insanely reckless.

Other scientists concur. Those in power (“authority”) manufactured a “pandemic” based on fear, over something with a very low mortality rate except for those vulnerable populations: the elderly and those with comorbidities, especially respiratory conditions.

Such scientists may or may not be aware of the most probable goal, which Dr. Michael Yeadon, formerly a chief scientist at Pfizer, describes as killing tens of millions of people or far more, over a period of perhaps ten years (possibly more), while traumatized survivors are brought into global totalitarianism under the auspices of what I call GloboCorp: world government accountable only to global corporations.

Enter the quick-response (QR) code, through which everything about you, starting with vaccination status which is encoded that way now for vaccine passport purposes, will be stored digitally in a corporate-owned (possibly Alphabet/Google) centralized database. Scannable with a smartphone, the QR-code will be your global digital ID and passport to a normal life. It will store your birth records and parentage;past and present addresses; school records, university degrees, other certificates;marriage information if any; financial records and transaction history (cash having been abolished and criminalized except perhaps for licensed collectors). Very likely your QR-code will contain a record of where you’ve gone online, which websites you’ve visited, how much time you’ve spent on them, and what activity you engaged in (e.g., comments posted).

Your digital ID will likely include your energy usage or “carbon footprint”; tax returns; health data including prescription drugs and any medical conditions you might have. It will include, obviously, your employment history including any businesses started/owned;your driving record and vehicle ownership history; passport information if any, and travel records, especially international; and any brushes with the law you might have had.

Businesses will doubtless have other uses for the QR-code (where we live, physical menus have disappeared from restaurants, for example). Their digital IDs will contain their licenses to operate and dates granted, founder and ownership information and physical address records, inventory information, purchase history and other transaction records, employee records, customer list, any complaints received, tax records, etc.

All super-convenient. This will be the digital ID’s primary selling point. All information in one place, in one QR-code.

It will be a world of total surveillance and incentive-based control with a credit system not unlike that already in use in much of China, being furthered by Big Tech here at home. Have a good credit score? You might be allowed to travel; your kids, to attend a good college. Be a dissident, and systemic punishments will reduce your options to the point where conceivably you could be denied not just work and travel but the ultimately capacity to obtain food legally.

In this world, you will have no privacy, own nothing, and be happy.

That’s if you cooperate.

Am I delusional for thinking such a world possible? The other day I was attacked on a Facebook comment thread (edited only to subtract redundancies; no link, to save the person embarrassment and possible harassment that could backfire):

good god you’re a fucking fool…America is more so now a nation of idiots who all believe they are the smartest and somehow in the know – and know more than everybody – including yourself. When global dictatorship happens I’ll be the first to tell you I was wrong, bruh! … I’ve … had it with these abject morons bandying about their conspiracy theories. There is no “seeking truth” from any of these clowns. It’s all thinly constructed conspiracies and anecdotal tales…. you are a laughable fool – a cursory look at your “news” feed flabbergasts the mind that you are so gullible. Smh

How do you answer a screed like that? You don’t. You wash off the mud and walk away, which I did, after tattooing a note-to-self inside my eyelids on the folly of engaging such people on Facebook.

But this is the mass mindset of the CNN watcher who trusts The Science, trusts authority, and sees himself as an enforcer of “rationality.” It scares me, because the more of these people there are, the less those with real power have to do to keep the sheeple in line. I’m reminded why I wrote a series of articles early in the year advocating that conservatives prepare to separate instead of try to “take America back.” I see no peaceful means of doing so. My call includes those who may not be consistently conservative in my sense but whose basic research and ability to think logically informs them of the many things about coronavirus and covid-19(84)that do not even begin to add up unless you make the assumption that people in very high places do not wish the bulk of us well (to say the least)!

I do heartily wish and pray my conclusions (and those of the numerous authors I’ve cited) turn out to be wrong, or delusional! I really do!

But I wouldn’t bet my life on it!

There is nothing to do but distribute the information we have and then wait and see (and pray and perhaps read Habakkuk).

One thing is for sure: 2022 is going to be a year of revelations, as the struggle between those who want to live free lives and those who want power continues, and the narrative cold war escalates.

Great Reset? Or a real Great Awakening (not in QAnon’s sense, since that, too, was manifestly just one more deception)? Based on personal freedoms, Scriptural values, and community autonomy; not materialism and technocratic enslavement.

It is up to you, America. U.K. Europe. Australia. Etc.

Decide.

Merry Christmas! Happy New Year! Deo vindice!

Steven Yates’s new book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock) is available here and here.

Do you wish me to continue? Please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

Charlottesville: Lessons in Leftist Sadism and Media Dishonesty

by Steven Yates

December 10, 2021

Book Review: Charlottesville Untold: Inside Unite the Right, by Anne Wilson Smith. Columbia, SC: Shotwell Publishing, 2021.

This is a book I was anxious to read. The author is the daughter of respected Southern historian Clyde N. Wilson, the leading authority on John C. Calhoun. I had a boots-on-the-ground source for information on what really happened on August 12, 2017 (relayed here and here). I became even more convinced that CNN (for example) is a lie factory.

The year 2017 was a turning point. The unholy globalist-leftist alliance having lost the presidency in 2016, its denizens wanted revenge. Antifa and Black Lives Matter became increasingly violent. Corporate mass media invariably blamed race-related mayhem on “fascists,” “white supremacists,” “white nationalists,” “Nazis.” I knew of just one case where such a description might have been veridical: Dylann Roof shooting nine black people in North Charleston, S.C., which prompted a new wave of cancellations of Southern culture when a photograph surfaced of Roof posing with a Confederate flag. Black-on-white violence, which has always far exceeded white-on-black violence, continued to go unreported except on alternative sites that are now up against Big Tech censorship.

With that as background, Anne Wilson Smith’s book is a welcome treatment of Unite the Right, and what happened that day. It is the only thing I’ve seen that even attempts fair-mindedness. Critics will say she is sympathetic to Jason Kessler, et al. Of course she’s sympathetic! Has anyone else given them half a chance? Wilson Smith pointedly asks:

Why did a thousand or more people travel from all over the country to attend Unite the Right in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017? Do you really know? Have you heard anyone who was there that day explain it in their own words? If you learned everything you know about the rally from the mainstream news, the answer is almost certainly “no.”

What do you make of the fact that few who were in attendance that day have ever been given a chance to tell their side of the story? Why was the media so disinterested in explaining all perspectives on what happened that day? Perhaps it was because they had already decided what they wanted the public to believe was the truth, and they didn’t want to create any sympathy for those they had cast as the “villain” in their story (pp. 58-59).

That is, Anne Wilson Smith interviewed people who were there — unlike CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times, or other “legacy” media.

It’s useful to keep in mind that the Unite the Right rally was legal. Kessler had a permit, and in saner times would have been protected under a First Amendment which in our era of censorship, wokery, and lawfare, is practically a dead letter.

Charlottesville Untold tells of the events that led up to Aug 12, the event itself, and the aftermath leading up to the infamous lawfare case Sines v. Kessler, recently decided for the plaintiffs for $26 million.

The dual purpose of the rally was to protest efforts to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee which had stood in what was then called Lee Park since 1924, and to present a united front against Cultural Leftist cancellation not just of Southern heritage but American history itself.

Kessler’s ire was aroused both by moves against the Lee statue and the open anti-white animus of the city’s vice mayor, Wes Bellamy. Kessler, a recent graduate of the University of Virginia (2009) who had become a professional writer, exposed Bellamy’s anti white racism arguing that Bellamy had irresponsibly used his position as “a bully pulpit to attack White culture and history” (p. 5).

The confrontation escalated, with Bellamy having the backing of Charlottesville’s mayor, Michael Signer. Kessler soon drew fire from local leftists leading to public altercations and a misdemeanor assault charge which he contended was self-defense.

Leftists then began harassing Kessler and his allies in public, putting up “know-your-nazi” fliers aimed at encouraging businesses to deny them service — a now-familiar tactic. Kessler refused to back down. Instead he conceived of Unite the Right, officially announced at a tense city council meeting on June 5, 2017.

He obtained his permit for a rally in support of free speech and the Lee monument to be held Saturday, August 12, from 12 – 5 pm, for an estimated 400 people. He had to distance himself from a Klan rally to be held the month before. What happened then should have opened eyes to what was to come, as roughly 50 people found themselves surrounded by a crowd of 1,500 to 2,000 leftists filling the streets, blocking parking lot exits, throwing objects and damaging vehicles.

The Klan rally proved to be a golden opportunity for the dishonest media to gather photographs and later “confuse” them with those taken at Unite the Right.

In arranging the slate of speakers, Kessler later admitted he didn’t choose his “allies” as carefully as he might have— he expressed regret at getting mixed up with Richard Spencer (credited with coining the term Alt-Right). Be that as it may, Kessler’s ideas about what the rally was to accomplish were clear. He wanted…

… to destigmatize pro-White advocacy… To make sure our free speech rights are upheld… I want people to come out and support these monuments… This is an historic opportunity where you will not be alone. You will be greeted by hundreds, if not more, of your brothers and sisters and we are going to make news around the world…. This is an opportunity to reach out to the average conservative who knows that White people are under attack. Perhaps they’re even as far as being a Confederate heritage supporter but they don’t feel like they can stand up for their own interests…. (p. 57)

I’ve not mentioned what happened the night before, because either my sources were not there or did not share that information. The plan was to gather — privately (unlike Unite the Right, invites were on a private message board) — at the Thomas Jefferson statue on the University of Virginia campus. Why there? To show that it wasn’t just Confederate heritage the Cultural Left was threatening. It was U.S. history itself.

The word reached Antifa.

While corporate media regaled viewers with menacing-appearing images of torch-bearing marchers, Anne Wilson Smith uses first-hand sources to validate that the march was peaceful until Antifa showed up. They began with verbal taunts. Fistfights ensued, followed by pepper-spray attacks apparently from both sides (there is no doubt that some marchers had come prepared).

Law enforcement was standing down. This was not lost on Antifa. Christopher Cantwell, podcaster and marcher, pepper-sprayed an Antifa member and was arrested four days later. No one from Antifa that I know of has ever been arrested for reckless endangerment or criminal assault in Charlottesville. When police responded, it was too late. Marchers were fleeing and their leftist attackers already dispersing into the dark.

Wilson Smith tells us that the chant uttered by the torch-bearers was, “You will not replace us,” audible in the live stream. It is unclear how this became “Jews will not replace us” especially in the hands of mainstream media. Kessler contended later that no such message was ever planned.

What actually happened the next morning?

A mixture of people converged on Charlottesville, some “very fine people” as Trump would call them, and others not so fine. Government agencies were there as well; the Virginia State Police were there. One observer reported a police helicopter circling low over the park early that morning. Rally goers already there might have felt more secure thinking there would be a police presence. They were in for a rude awakening. Antifa was waiting, police again stood down, and things quickly went off the rails.

Wilson Smith allows numerous observers to speak for themselves about what unfolded. Peaceful rally-attendees were harassed, assaulted in some instances, and basically had to fight their way through a hostile crowd. Antifa was clearly there to hurt “fascists” if they could, making no distinction between sexes, or between young and old. A man known only as Jim (several of Wilson Smith’s sources used pseudonyms out of fear of job loss or other retaliation) described what happened to a group of older “history buffs”:

“there was no police cover…. I realized there was going to be a fight…. We were getting attacked from the sides.” Counter-protesters [i.e., Antifa] were throwing punches. Some women got hit. The elderly history buffs were pepper-sprayed by a young man who seemed to be targeting them deliberately…. We were trying to get to the park. We assumed there would be safety there. (p. 95)

A man calling himself Gene stated:

“We got attacked about a block and a half before we got to Lee Park. They had all these big TV trucks parked on one side, so the road was one lane wide. We were easy targets for Antifa.” The Antifa were throwing bags of feces and urine, and glass bottles full of nails and screws. They were spraying people in the eyes with pepper-spray. “It was an all-out assault before we ever got to Lee Park. The police just stood there and watched while we were under attack.” (p. 97).

Chris, a League of the South member, remembered:

When I got there, there were at least 200 communists in a human wall facing us and I was on the front lines. So the first thing they did was begin to throw bottles of urine at us. And also … balloons full of pepper spray that had urine in them and all kinds of concoctions of deadly things, probably even diseases, and one of them hit me in the face, in my helmet, and the flag, my flag got soaked in it…. (p. 96).

This is just a sampling, and further confirming the reports I relied on. Even one of the leftists later acknowledged:

“As we got closer to noon, the Antifascist block was successful in drawing away the most heavily shielded contingent of Nazis. They were successful in drawing them away from the park and making them more vulnerable. As that happened, many people were in the line of fire of projectiles, of pepper spray, of tear gas. A lot of people were hurt and beaten on both sides. I can’t speak from being on the ground but from what I observed from my street, it was mostly Nazis that were getting beaten at that point” (p. 109).

What should be clear is that Antifa came well prepared! They were going to stop a legal and Constitutional rally by any means necessary!

The Charlottesville Police allowed the rallygoers and leftists to fight! This would continue until, and after, the rally was called off. This was done when it became clear that otherwise the violence would escalate until people started getting killed! At 11:28 am, Wilson Smith writes, Virginia’s (disastrous!) then-governor, Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat (of course!), authorized a state of emergency via text message. At 11:31, attendees who had made it that far heard the intercom announcement:

“This has been declared an unlawful assembly. If you do not disperse immediately, you will be arrested.” (p. 110)

The question became, Disperse where? The park was barricaded except at one end, so there was nowhere to go except through a narrow exit — straight into the path of Antifa. By this time, Black Lives Matter had showed up. As had other leftist groups. The fights worsened, although rallygoers were the ones arrested and, in a couple of cases, given jail sentences! Others got separated, ended up in small groups or on their own, and it may be God’s Providence that no one was killed!

After all, to say that what some Antifa people were doing was life-threatening doesn’t begin to cover it! Several of Wilson Smith’s sources reported that several lunatics had converted aerosol spray cans into primitive flamethrowers!

Outfits like CNN reported none of this! I watched CNN for a couple of hours (all I could tolerate!) each evening for several evenings following August 12.

No one so much as mentioned Antifa!

There was plenty about “white supremacy,”with video and images now confusing the Unite the Right rally with that Klan event. The purpose was to portray all rally goers as “violent white nationalists” who started the violence.

No one who was there, or who had sources who were, could come away still believing corporate media is honest, or is not protecting the Cultural Left agenda.

There isn’t the slightest evidence anyone in Unite the Right conspired to provoke violence, although they surely discussed ways of protecting themselves, and retaliating if attacked, perhaps in ways that those predisposed toward hostility chose to interpret as “conspiring to instigate violence” as was alleged in Sines v. Kessler.

It is true that Heather Heyer, 32, lost her life when James Alex Fields drove his car into a crowd of leftists a couple of hours later. Several others were injured. I won’t say that the leftists brought this on themselves. For had the Charlottesville Police done their jobs from the outset, Heyer would probably still be alive.

Arguably the Charlottesville Police Department bears the lion’s share of the blame for the injuries, and for Heather Heyer’s death!

I recall the video of the Dodge Challenger backing up at a high rate of speed (0:27-0:33). Since backing up any vehicle straight at that speed for that distance is not easy to do, I wondered if that was a professional driver behind the wheel. I toyed briefly with the idea that there was no ‘James Alex Fields,’ that he was another media fabrication. There was an arrest, however, and a trial, andthen a life sentence, all matters of public record, as were other details about Fields’s life that came to light, so I relinquished the idea.

I did not relinquish my curiosity about how someone (Brennan Gilmore) working in a branch of the governor’s office partly funded by George Soros just happened to be in that exact spot at that exact time to film the most-watched video.

It also seems odd to me that Fields either has not attempted to make public statements via the media, or not been allowed to. Even Dylann Roof was able to do that.

All we have is from someone identified as Jim, jailed that day caught trying to break into his own car having dropped his keys at some point. Referring to James Fields:

“He looked to me like a preppy kid who got a DUI or something”… [Jim] watched as police officers took a statement from Fields, and had him sign some things. They were telling him, “Admit what you did.” Jim’s observation was that Fields seemed “shocked.” His face was red. Was it from shame? From terror? He looked as though he had been crying. Though the arrestees had been instructed not to speak to each other, Jim offered, “Good luck, Brother” as they escorted Fields away. Fields did not reply. (p. 131)

Two police officers were killed in a helicopter crash that same afternoon. Although the crash was due to mechanical problems unrelated to the rally, the deaths were reported as more “proof” that this had been a “deadly event.”

Because corporate media already had an approved narrative about “white supremacism,” the Unite the Right event backfired badly all the way around!

Virginia’s (disastrous!) Governor Terry McAuliffe got this ball rolling that evening:

“I have a message to all the White Supremacists and the Nazis who came into Charlottesville today. Our message is plain and simple. Go home. You are not wanted in this great commonwealth…. You came here today to hurt people, and you did hurt people… But my message is clear. We are stronger than you. You have made our commonwealth stronger. You will not succeed… There is no place for you here. There is no place for you in America.” (p. 149)

This could have come from the mouth of an Antifa member (assuming any are that articulate). Consider the message behind the words: certain people, because of their ideas, no longer have a Constitutional right to assemble in public and speak!

Thus began a process involving demonizing, doxing, and the sadistic financial and personal destruction of Unite the Right participants that continues to this day.

Rally attendees — especially their leadership — continue receiving blame for the violence. Dishonest media still reports that Heather Heyer was killedat a “white supremacist rally” even though the rally had been declared “an unlawful assembly” and called off over two hours before.

Wilson Smith cites two attendees:

“Everything people saw in the mainstream media was not only false, it was the opposite of the truth.” He also notes that the talking heads were complaining about “hate speech” and attributing horrible motives to Unite the Right attendees, despite the fact that nobody who was associated with Unite the Right was ever allowed to speak.

… “It was like the media created a parallel universe where they made up this crisis that did not happen. It was divorced from reality…. They were saying the right wing was rioting. Obviously, the left wing was a mob and out of control.” (p. 163)

These, again, are just samplings.

Kessler’s efforts to set the record straight met with failure. A press conference he called the next day was surrounded by a volatile mob. His voice was drowned out by chants of things like, “Nazis go home! Nazis go home!” Kessler found himself up against a media blitzkrieg; even Fox News refused him airtime as “too toxic” (p. 152).

Kessler was learning what it meant to be a real dissident in “woke” America. A real dissident today recognizes that white people are under attack and that nearly everything corporate mass media states about race and heritage areagenda-driven lies. If you persist, mass media’s allies in Big Tech will cancel your accounts. Kessler and others needing to raise money to fight lawsuits found themselves canceled from PayPal, GoFundMe, and other crowdfunding sites, after losing their Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Others lost jobs or were destroyed by doxing, the sadistic practice of posting information about a person which may include home as well as work addresses and phone numbers. This opens the person to job loss, harassment offline as well as online, and physical danger. Andrew Dodson, an electrical engineer pursing clean-energy technology, was doxed because he’d been a rally goer. Having lost his career, he committed suicide the following March (p. 215).

It is safe to say that by 2020,the Dissident Right was nearly destroyed.And the lie factory was humming! According to corporate media, massive riots resulting in entire city blocks destroyed and hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of damage done were “mostly peaceful protests.” “Jan 6-ers,” on the other hand, most of whom merely walked into and through the Capitol, with a couple of people having broken a couple of windowsor pushed a security guard out of their way, became “rioters” and “insurrectionists.” These were just a few hundred out of a crowd of tens of thousands in Washington that day protesting the most questionable election in U.S. history. No police cars were torched, nor buildings burned. No one was killed — except Ashli Babbitt, shot in cold blood by a Capitol cop. She was demonized instead of lionized as was Heather Heyer. A different cop, it turned out, died of pre-existing conditions was described in corporate media as having been attacked and beaten by “rioters.”

These people literally cannot tell the truth about anything!

The “insurrection against democracy” prompted an assemblage of 75,000 troops to protect the inauguration of Joe Biden against the army of “white supremacists” Democrats, the corrupt FBI, and corporate mass media had conjured out of thin air.

There is much more worth discussing in Charlottesville Untold precluded by space limits. Wilson Smith cites the Heaphy Report, commissioned by the City of Charlottesville which paid $350,000, done by Tim Heaphy of the law firm Hunton & Williams, 200 pages long, released December 1, 2017. This report reviews thousands of communiqués, presents numerous interviewsfrom all sides, and criticizes not “white supremacism” but the Charlottesville Police Department and the Virginia State Police for their lack of leadership and the results of what may or may not have been a purposeful stand-down order from somewhere in the upper echelons. In any event, Charlottesville Police Chief Al Thomas was compelled to resign on December 18.

Wilson Smith, citing a key passage in this important report:

Neither agency deployed available field forces or other units to protect public safety at the locations where violence took place. Command staff prepared to declare an unlawful assembly and disperse the crowd…. This represents a failure of one of government’s core functions—the protection of fundamental rights. Law enforcement also failed to maintain order and protect citizens from harm, injury, and death. (pp. 319-20).

Could it be that a violent confrontation was wanted all along? Two witnesses claim to have overheard:

“Let them fight. It will make it easier to declare an unlawful assembly.” (p. 320).

Enrique Tarrio, of Proud Boys:

“[The police] failed miserably at their duty of protecting the public…. What they should have done—I’ve been to a million of these things—the street should’ve been barricaded and the cops in the middle. It’s not f****** rocket science.” (p. 327)

This may be the one thing where Right and Left might have agreed! A Black Lives Matter interviewee stated:

“I’ve been protesting in this movement for six years, and the police always form barricades between hostile groups. Today was the first time I didn’t see that happen. And that’s a fact…. [Police] always stand in between hostile groups. But they didn’t do that here today. Why? They wanted us to fight each other. They wanted that.” (p. 333)

In that light, consider Sines v. Kessler. This lawfare suit was the intended coup-de-grace against the Dissident Right.

The utter lopsidedness in terms of actual power relations ought to be evidentto anyone with functioning brain cells.

One of the most powerful law firms in New York City, backed by the Soros-funded Integrity First For America, set about taking down a group of people two of whom could not afford attorneys, and so were representing themselves (Richard Spencer and Christopher Cantwell).

The New York firm was Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP, which takes up afloor of the Empire State Building. What they set out to establish was that the Unite the Righters had “conspired” to commit acts of violence that day. The plaintiffsalleged injuries and long-term mental trauma following the Dodge Challenger incident.

Spearheading the allegations was senior partner Roberta “Robbie” Kaplan, who has worked with superelite entities such as Goldman-Sachs and on Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid.

Sines v. Kessler was a civil suit, moreover, meaning that the plaintiffs win if they can establish their case with a “preponderance of the evidence” as opposed to “beyond a reasonable doubt” as in criminal cases.

Kaplan’s intent, in her own words:

“We absolutely can and will bankrupt these groups. And then we will chase these people around for the rest of their lives. So if they try to buy a new home, we will put a lien on the home. If they get a new job, we will garnish their wages. The reason to do that is because we want to create a deterrence impact. So we send a message to other people that if you try to do something like this, the same thing will happen to you. And it already has been a deterrence.” (p. 303)

Thisis the essence of lawfare, which weaponizes the legal system to destroy those it targets. Welcome to Woke America 2021. As Sines v. Kessler went to trial, the approved narrative of who caused the Charlottesville violence was simply presupposed. It was never argued for. When Cantwell tried to draw attention to the massive Antifa presence, Judge Norman K. Moon shut him down.

Naturally, it was a slam-dunk for the plaintiffs. The defendants had no chance whatsoever.

No one thinks it possible to extract $26 million from these Enemies of the Woke America. But Kaplan’s sadistic effort might make it impossible for them to ever again pursue normal lives— in the U.S., anyway. Another purpose of lawfare is to create an ambience of intimidation and fear-based self-censorship to silence future political dissent. The ploy has been largely successful. Kessler’s efforts at a subsequent eventlargely fizzled in the face of mass protests and further social media censorship.

For those who have jobs and families, free speech in Woke America has become a luxury they can’t afford!

This is where we are at, as 2021draws to a close. The empowered Cultural Left has no belief in a First Amendment, or Constitutional government. It is an Orwellian phenomenon that would set up a thought-controlled police state, with corporate media and Big Tech helping every step of the way. Orwell would gasp if he saw how the Cultural Left has achieved the kind of society he warned us about in 1984 without an actual Big Brother or Ministry of Truth.

You don’t have to have a special interest in Southern history, or even in what happened in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017, to find Charlottesville Untold important, not to mention finding Anne Wilson Smith’s exhaustive documentation quite impressive.

You only have to see her book as highlighting one steppingstone of Western civilization’s descent toward global totalitarianism, since GloboCorp will be the ultimate beneficiary of the destruction of American Constitutionalism, history, and heritage by the Cultural Left; and by the lawfare-controlled demolition of those who dissent. Though this was not her subject, I imagine Anne Wilson Smith realizes this.

Istrongly recommend Charlottesville Untold: Inside Unite the Right, therefore. Don’t read it before going to bed. It’ll definitely cost you that night’s sleep.

Steven Yates’s new book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock) is available here and here.

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E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com