America’s biggest threat – China


Newsmax TV Posted originally on Rumble on February 15, 2023

The Coming War


Armstrong Economics Blog/War Re-Posted Feb 13, 2023 by Martin Armstrong

COMMENT:

Hi Marty,

As it appears the US is marching toward war, what is notable this time, unlike what happened in the run-up to US participation in WW2, was the sense of isolationism in this country. Roosevelt was clearly walking a fine line, knowing there was no stomach for US involvement in Europe. US involvement in WW1 also started out similarly with many in the US, in particular those of Irish descent who opposed helping the British in their battle in Europe. Wilson, another Democrat, also walked the straight and narrow, professing neutrality which history shows was a lie. Later, his 14 points, the forerunner to an imposed peace on Germany, would backfire. The League of Nations would die off.

But today, unlike the prior two world wars, both democrats and republicans appear to embrace an escalation in conflict. And with an old, decrepit mannequin in the WH, it looks like there’s nothing stopping this push toward war. Republicans especially are a total disgrace. They stabbed Trump in the back repeatedly or let him twist in the wind for 4 years and for the first two when they were the majority party…did little to show their one chance to lead. Trump did more for peace than any president since Kennedy. Trump at least tried to engage Xie, met with the North Korean leader and focused more on building up the US domestic economy. He tore up US participation in these climate pacts. He focused on building the wall to stem the flow of illegals crossing the border. Her met with the Mexican president and forced his counterpart to accept an arrangement that kept illegals inside Mexico pending and petitions later to the US government for entry based on their applications.  And for all this, he was the target for a fraud based on collusion to get elected with Russian help. Which turned out to be baseless. Later, he was implicated in the Jan 6 insurrection…courtesy of both parties. Which itself was a total fabrication.

Both Dems and R’s are now marching lockstep toward war. It’s no wonder public opinion toward the government is sinking to all-time lows. In both parties. Both of which will be swept away in the years ahead for betraying this country on so many levels.

MS

REPLY: Hillary, started this whole mess by launching the fake dossier and blaming Putin for interring in the election. She managed to convince 70% of Democrats that Russia was the enemy. RussiaGate, despite being discredited, set in motion this hatred for Russia. Still, 65% of Americans support Ukraine when in fact what they are doing is relying on a border drawn by Kruschev for administrative purposes and demanding that the Donbas is their territory when NEVER for even a single day have Ukrainian people ever been the majority in that region. This is a land grab and nothing more that is engulfing the entire world all because our idiot politicians want to destroy the world economy so they can blame it on war and default on all the debt.

I get hate mail and death threats from Ukrainian Nazis pretty regularly now. This only shows that we are historically on the wrong side. In WWII, we fought against the Nazo movement. This time, we support ethnic cleansing.

Americans fled here to escape the political chaos and warmongering in Europe. So when WWI and WWII took place, the American people saw no reason to go support a political movement that they had fled. Indeed, FDR’ solemn campaign promise was no boys would be sent to fight in a foreign war. That is why he did everything possible to get Japan to attack Pearl Harbor for that was the ONLY way to overcome the anti-war position of Americans. They have done the same to get Russia to act to protect the Donbas from the Ukrainians who began the civil war.

FDR repeated that solemn promise in Boston which was predominantly Irish. They refused to defend Britain openly recalling what the English did to the Irish. That was why FDR needed Japan to attack Pearl Harbor. Today, they needed Russia to launch its special operation which was absolutely legal under the United Nations Rules for he was protecting the Donbas, not seeking to conquer Ukraine.

All of those memories of past wars are long gone. Today, we cheer on war because we think it will be like watching Iraq on CNN after nightly dinner. As they say:

War & Disease – What Comes Next After COVID


Armstrong Economics Blog/Disease Re-Posted Feb 13, 2023 by Martin Armstrong

QUESTION: I found it really interesting how you have used the coinage to ascertain the costs of wars and to confirm the history. You have shown coins that show even the opening of the Colosseum. Are there any that record the plagues in history?

Thank you for a free and interesting site.

PV

REPLY: Ancient coins have been used throughout the centuries. Here is a Roman Sestertius of the Roman Port of Ostia. Saint Peter’s Square is the entrance to St Peter’s. Bernini actually copies the idea of the two colonnades from Nero’s coin. Some did not understand the history and claimed that Bernini was symbolizing the embracing maternal arms of the Catholic Church. It was the Port of Ostia which was the entrance to Rome for all the ships around the world. Thus, Bernini used the Port of Ostia to symbolize that this was the entrance for all Christians from around the world.

There was a great plague that infected Rome which was brought from Asia exactly as was the case by invading armies who brought the Black Plague during the 14th century. Emperor Trajan Decius (249-251AD) and his oldest son Herennius Etruscus (251AD) were killed in battle against the invading Goths. His youngest son, Hostilian (251AD) died of the plague.

This coin was issued by Trebonianus Gallus (251-253AD) appealing to Apollo Salutaris who was believed to have been the god of healing. This was the Plague of Cyprian that infected the Roman Empire from about 249 to 262 AD. It takes its name from St. Cyprian, who was the bishop of Carthage. He was a historian who witnessed and described the plague. It is not known precisely what it was. But from the description, it may have been smallpox, measles, and perhaps a viral hemorrhagic fever along the lines of the Ebola virus. What we do know is that this plague weakened Rome during the 3rd century causing a widespread decline in the workforce. That resulted in food shortages for a lack of manpower to produce food for the Roman army itself. This contributed greatly to the collapse of the 3rd century.

The Antonine Plague of 165 to 180AD, was the first known pandemic impacting the Roman Empire. It was most likely contracted by soldiers who were returning from campaigns in the Near East and spread throughout the empire. Historians generally believe the plague was smallpox or possibly measles. In 169 AD, the plague most likely took the life of Roman Emperor Lucius Verus. It appeared, according to ancient sources, during the Roman siege of the Mesopotamian city of Seleucia in the winter of 165–166. According to the Roman historian Cassius Dio at the time, the disease broke out again nine years later in 189 AD. That time he said it caused up to 2,000 deaths per day in the city of Rome. The total death count at the time ranged between 5 and 10 million. About 25T of those who contracted the plague died. This amounted to about 10% of the population.

A third major plague struck during the 6th century. Research has been conducted on skeletons that have survived. It has been confirmed that DNA from Yersinia pestis—the same bacterium responsible for the Black Death—was the cause of the Justinianic plague. This plague also became a pandemic that spread throughout the Mediterranean region and beyond.

What is significant about this plague is that it took place during a Volcanic Winter. There were the great volcanic eruptions that created the extreme weather events of 535–536AD during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I (527-565AD). A mysterious cloud appeared over the Mediterranean basin according to the historian Procopius of Caesarea (Procopius Caesarensis; c. 500-560 AD) who wrote: “The sun gave forth its light without brightness, and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear.” This was a volcanic cloud that blocked the sun. But it was not a volcano in that region. The cloud’s appearance created climate cooling for more than a decade. Crops failed, and there was widespread famine. This also sets in motion a pandemic known as the Plague of Justinian (541-542), which swept through the Eastern Roman Empire killing 5,000 to 10,000 people per day in Constantinople.

War has been the catalyst for disease. Why? The movement of populations from one region to another has historically spread disease. Even when the Europeans visited America, they brought diseases that killed many Indians. Likewise, Europeans who had sex with Indian women brought back to Europe Syphilis which did not previously exist in Europe.  The Black Plague of the 14th century was brought about by the invading Tartars in Crimea. They began catapulting dead bodies into the Italian fort which then panicked and took the disease back to Europe.

The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, the deadliest in history, infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide—about one-third of the planet’s population—and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims, including some 675,000 Americans. Once again, it coincided with World War I.

What we must be on guard against as our World Leaders are pushing to war once again, this one will engage the entire world. The likelihood of another major pandemic will be huge. What will it be this time? Normally, we should expect it to be the Black Plague. However, with the genetic manipulation and gain of function these people have been toying with, we cannot rule out that this time will be along the lines of COVID where the vaccines failed to prevent anyone from contracting COVID and actually made most more vulnerable in the future.

Head’s Up, State Dept Operative and USAID Administrator Samantha Power is in Hungary, Seeding Another Color Revolution – Deep State Ukraine 2.0


Posted originally on the CTH on February 12, 2023 | Sundance

Hungary has been in the crosshairs of the Biden/Obama administration ever since Prime Minister Viktor Orban refused to align with the WEF Western Democracies in their quest for regime change in Russia.  As the NATO led western alliance assembled to use Ukraine as a proxy war against Russia, Hungarian Prime Minister Orban would not join.

In early April 2022, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban was overwhelmingly reelected {LINK}, despite the massive efforts against him by the European Union, western and euro-centric multinational globalists.   As a result of the victory, Brussels was furious at the Hungarian people.  Associated Press – […] “Orban — a fierce critic of immigration, LGBTQ rights and “EU bureaucrats” — has garnered the admiration of right-wing nationalists across Europe and North America.” (link)

Within the statements reported from his 2022 victory speech, Prime Minister Orban warned citizens of the NATO and western allied countries about the manipulation of Ukraine and how he views the Zelenskyy regime:  […] “while speaking to supporters on Sunday, Orban singled out Zelenskyy as part of the “overwhelming force” that he said his party had struggled against in the election — “the left at home, the international left, the Brussels bureaucrats, the Soros empire with all its money, the international mainstream media, and in the end, even the Ukrainian president.” (link)

This put Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in the crosshairs of the western alliance, specifically the EU and U.S. bureaucrats who use their power, position and intelligence apparatus to manipulate foreign nations.  A year later and now we see USAID Administrator Samantha Power in Hungary openly discussing her seeding of the NGO’s and political activist systems in order to generate yet another color revolution. {Direct Rumble Link} – WATCH:

USAID in Hungary

Samantha Power, the wife of Cass Sunstein, is well known as the Obama/Biden administration’s advance operative who uses her position in U.S. government to influence activism in targeted nations. Hungary is now her target.

Why is eliminating Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban now the goal of the Biden administration.  Well, a reminder:

♦ Hungary warned citizens of the west about the New World Order, created through Ukraine.

♦ Hungary continued to purchase Russian oil and natural gas.  Zelenskyy and the Western alliance were furious.

♦ Hungary said they would continue energy purchases in Rubles if that is what Russia demanded.

The World Economic Forum and NATO/Western Alliance cannot permit a nation to stand on principles of nationalism.  Allowing a point of contrast that would showcase the weakness of globalism and multiculturalism is something the western control system just cannot permit.

As a result, Samantha Power, the U.S. State Dept (USAID) and the CIA, are collectively running an operation in Hungary, seeding the groundwork for the next color revolution.

They don’t even try to hide this stuff anymore.

Just keep watching….  More will become visible, and our conversation will now have context for what comes next.

[FWIW, I always suspected S Power of being a CIA operative]

Likely A Worthwhile Endeavor – Matt Taibbi Looking for Research Help


Posted originally on the CTH on February 12, 2023 | Sundance 

Independent journalist Matt Taibbi is looking for some additional research assistance [SEE HERE]. Specifically, after going a little deeper on the Twitter Files, Taibbi appears to be recognizing the visibility of the Fourth Branch of Government.  He now needs to package the truth of it, in a way his former tribe will accept.

As a consequence, Taibbi is looking for (1) a reporter or academic with experience researching government contracts, and/or the funding of NGOs or academic research institutions; and (2) an infographics designer, preferably with experience in areas like ecosystem mapping.

Taibbi is a solid and inquisitive research journalist. However, he is still averse to recognizing Chicago Jesus as the originator of the modern issues he is outlining.

The issue of not accepting the Obama network as the structure that underpins the modern political surveillance state is common, even amid the tribe of walkaways from the progressive system.

Give him time, he’ll find see it.

From his current mission as expressed: […] “For decades, our government at least loosely complied with legislation like the Smith-Mundt Act, which prohibits aiming at the domestic population any official propaganda “intended for foreign audiences.” However, gloves came off in recent years.

In a remarkably short time since the end of the Obama presidency, the U.S. government has funded an elaborate network of NGOs and think-tanks whose researchers call themselves independent “disinformation experts.” They describe their posture as defensive — merely “tracking” or “countering” foreign disinformation — but in truth they aggressively court both the domestic news media and platforms like Twitter, often becoming both the sources for news stories and/or the referring authorities for censorship requests.

The end result has been relentless censorship of, and mountains of (often deceptive) state-sponsored propaganda about, legitimate American political activity. In the Twitter Files we see correspondence from state agencies and state-sponsored research entities describing everything from support of the Free Palestine movement to opposition to vaccine passports as illicit foreign propaganda. Some of this messaging devolves into outright smear campaigns, with efforts to denounce the organic #WalkAway hashtag as a Russian “psychological operation” serving as a particularly lurid example. The Hamilton 68 story (about which more is coming) hints at this dynamic.

The irony is the entire field of “disinformation studies” itself has the features of an inorganic astroturfing operation. Disinformation “labs” cast themselves as independent, objective, politically neutral resources, but in a shocking number of cases, their funding comes at least in part from government agencies like the Department of Defense. Far from being neutral, they often have clear mandates to play up foreign and domestic threats while arguing for digital censorship, de-platforming, and other forms of information control.

Worse, messages from these institutions are parroted more or less automatically by our corporate press, which has decided that instead of a network of independent/adversarial newspapers and TV stations, what the country needs is one giant Voice of America, bleating endlessly about “threats to democracy.” I’ve come to believe a sizable percentage of reporters don’t know that their sources are funded by the government, or that they’re repeating government messaging not just occasionally but all the time. The ones who don’t know this truth need to hear it, and the ones who knew all along need to be exposed. This project is about both of those things, too.

Foreign state media is labeled on platforms like Twitter.

I want to put labels on our own propaganda, and need your help to do it.” 

Matt Taibbi

If he keeps going…. he will see it.

[Understand Modern Fourth Branch of Govt Here]

President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder did not create a weaponized DOJ and FBI; that system was created by President George W Bush and VP Dick Cheney.  Instead, what they did was take the preexisting system and retool it so the weapons only targeted one side of the political continuum.

The intelligence apparatus does not want their public-private partnership, between government and big tech social media, interfered with.  President Obama steps forth in April 2022 to put an exclamation point in place, saying the public-private partnership he created must control the information.  WATCH:

I cannot emphasize strongly enough; how close this collective demand is to a similar construct in Orwell’s 1984 prediction of “The Ministry of Truth.”  Indeed, if you follow the need for government control of information its logical conclusion, these demands by the U.S. deep state architects are identical.

I also hope readers can see this speech for what it is.  THIS is exactly what we were warning about when the shadows were moving feverously in the past several weeks {GO DEEP}.   The catchphrases “disinformation”, “misinformation” and “malinformation” are being cited by President Obama in that speech.   Where did that lingo come from?  THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY {SEE HERE}

At the top of all critical issues we must understand, share and keep focus on, the issue surrounding the free flow of information is the most critical.

Free speech, social media platforming, user bans, censorship, demonetization, financial targeting of Canadian truckers, Elon Musk purchasing Twitter then reveals the Twitter files, our ability to communicate, the culture war, the digital identity issue, heck, even your ability to read this, all of it, surrounds the central component of information.

This is the big war.  Controlling, labeling, emphasizing, downplaying, removing, information; everything else is downstream from this fight.

While President Obama talked about the dangers of misinformation and disinformation, it was only a week prior when the White House officially admitted to creating misinformation, disinformation and malinformation as part of their strategic campaign against Russia in Ukraine.  NBC news gleefully embraced the strategy {SEE HERE}.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has an official agency mission {SEE HERE} to “help the American people understand the scope and scale of Mal, Dis, and Misinformation activities,” and Google/DuckDuckGo/Big Tech have officially aligned with both U.S. government interests promising to target, remove and penalize any entity engaged in Mal, Dis and Misinformation activities.

Putting aside the creation of lies to advance a strategic geopolitical objective, the bigger admission in the U.S. government is that much of the information coming to the American public – from them – is manufactured, false, fabricated and wrong.

Simultaneous to this admission of manufactured lies, the platforms of Big Tech and social media are saying they will target, remove and block any content that contradicts the official government position.  The govt boldly admits they lie, and social media states they will block anyone who refutes those lies.

In the case of Google, the dominating search engine for information over the internet, they state it is an infraction against their policy to espouse a claim “that contradicts official government records.”  Yet, the U.S. government is officially admitting the information they are creating for the government records, is self-admittedly false….. and now in comes DuckDuckGo with the assist.

Not wanting to overinflate the CTH position, but this admitted reality is exactly why we have taken the following position.

…”There is no such thing as “disinformation” or “misinformation”.  There is only information you accept and information you do not accept.  You were not born with a requirement to believe everything you are told; rather, you were born with a brain that allows you to process the information you receive and make independent decisions.”… 

There are only two elements within the public discussion of information, truth and not truth.

In an era filled with “fact-checkers” and institutional guardians at the gates of Big Tech, let me explain exactly why it is important not to accept the speech rules of the guards.

When you accept the terms “disinformation”, “misinformation” or the newest lingo, “malinformation,” you are beginning to categorize truth and lies in various shades.  You are merging black and white, right and wrong, into various shades of grey.

When your mind works in the grey zone, you are, by direct and factual consequence, saying there is a problem.  You are correct; however, this is where people may make a mistake. That problem is supposed to be there.

It is not a solution to the problem to try and remove the grey simply because it takes too much work to separate the white pixels from the black ones.

You were born with a gift, the greatest gift a loving God could provide.  You were born with a brain and set of natural instincts that are tools to do this pixel separation, use them.

If you define the grey work as a problem you cannot solve on your own, you open the door for others to solve that problem for you.  You begin to abdicate the work, and that’s when trouble can enter.  The sliding scale of Pinocchios is one of the most familiar yet goofy outcomes.

Put more clearly, when you accept the terminology “disinformation”, you accept a problem.  The problem is then the tool by which authorities will step in to make judgements.  Speech, in its most consequential form, is then qualified by others to whom you have sub-contracted your thinking.

When you willingly sub-contract information filters to others, you have lost connection with the raw information.   CTH was founded upon the belief that truth has no agenda, nor does it care about you, your feelings, or your opinion of it.  It just sits there, empirically existing as evidence of information in its most pure form.

The search for truth, in all things, is the mission objective of this assembly.  Often, we don’t like the truth; often, the truth is bitter, cold, challenging and even painful to accept.  However, the truth doesn’t care.  Information in its most raw form is ambivalent to your opinion.  If you struggle to accept these things, that’s when you need grey.  The New York Times is not called the “grey lady” accidentally.

Personally, I am an absorber of information – perhaps on a scale that is unusual.  But I do not discount information from any form until I can put context to it and see if the information makes sense given all the variables present.  When something doesn’t feel right, it’s almost always because it isn’t right.

Often, I find myself struggling in the grey and complex.  It is not unusual to spend days researching, digging, clarifying a situation, only to discover the path to finding the truth is in another direction entirely.   Erasing everything and starting over is frustrating, but it is genuinely the only approach that works; and often finding truth is supposed to be difficult, that’s why it is rewarding.

In the digital information age, we are bombarded with information.  It is easy to be overwhelmed and need to find something or someone who has better skills at separating the black grains from the white ones.  All opinions in this quest should be considered; thus, it is important to allow the free flow of information.

I am not necessarily a speech absolutist.  There is some language that needs to be constrained if we are to participate in a respectful society, with grandma’s rules and knowing the audience.  The CTH has guidelines for comments for this exact reason.  However, those constraints need to be based on a set of inherent values.   When it comes to information it is important to draw a distinction from speech.

There needs to be an open venue for all information. Unfortunately, when we begin to apply labels or categorization to information, there’s an opportunity for information to be manipulated – even weaponized.  Saul Alinsky spent decades pondering the best techniques to weaponize information and speech.  Alinsky’s intentions, in the endeavor to change society by changing how language and information was used, were not good. He devoted his completed rulebook book to Lucifer.

Be careful about anyone saying we need to label or categorize information in order to control or remove speech from the discussion.

You were not born with a requirement to believe everything you are told; rather, you were born with a God-given brain that allows you to process the information you receive and make independent decisions.

Unfortunately, the collectively aligned group of U.S. Govt, the Intelligence Community and now Big Tech, are saying they will put every roadblock they can muster in your way as you attempt to navigate through the misinformation they control.

Team Obama built the system, and now Team Obama are defending the system.

This also happened in April, 2022, the day before Obama’s speech….

….These are NOT coincidences.

A Newbie in Congress from My District


Armstrong Economics Blog/Politics Re-Posted Feb 12, 2023 by Martin Armstrong

I have a new local representative in Congress – Anna Paulina Luna. She is a newbie and has a fire in her belly for our constitutional rights. She is smart and served in the U.S. Air Force. During the 2023 Speaker of the House election, she voted against Kevin McCarthy on the first 11 ballots, instead nominating Representative Jim Jordan and later Representative Byron Donalds. That took courage, for McCarthy is really part of the true Uni-Party inside Capital Hill – them against us. Here is her interrogation of the unconstitutional activity of censoring Americans. She will be someone to keep an eye on in the years ahead.

Neil Oliver Outlines the Weaponry of Words, as Used to Shut Down Truth and Hide Perversion and Corruption


Posted originally on the CTH on February 11, 2023 | Sundance

Given the recent events at GBNews, I was very interested to see and hear the Neil Oliver monologue this week, to see if the issues of censorship, control and weaponized cultural Marxism would be part of his focus.

In his unique way, Oliver does approach the subject, by targeting the larger social Marxist effort to control speech and language.  Oliver talks about how accurate words are diminished by those who overplay them in order to achieve political gains.  Additionally, how the politically correct (culturally Marxist) intents of the progressive movement, intentionally downplay very real and dangerous outcomes by ignoring events that should be described by the words they overuse.

Oliver also applies the process to the attacks against his own speech.  As Oliver notes, he is now labeled as a “far right-wing racist and antisemite”.  Stay with this and you can see how the overarching dynamic of the past several weeks in U.K. politics is being deconstructed by Oliver’s application of common sense. WATCH:

[Transcript] – The slow creep of ugliness into the language of public debate is impossible to ignore. It is a truly sad state of affairs, a degradation of the quality of discourse, that should finally give us pause, make us stop and take a long hard look at the reality presently being forced upon us.

But the fact is we have grown accustomed to the knee-jerk application of lazy slurs and the smearing of reputations, to the casual abuse of those around us with some of the vilest accusations imaginable.

Racist, sexist, misogynist, transphobe, anti-Semite – the list of tags is long. But just as the ceaseless printing of money has utterly devalued our currencies, so the machine-gun spraying of labels, powerful labels once reserved for specific behaviours, deliberate crimes with malice aforethought, has rendered once lethally effective words all but meaningless.

Even more worrying, the overuse and misuse of words distracts from real crime, real abuse, and real discrimination. Real crimes of racism, committed against people black, white and brown, for racism, neither knows nor respects any colour bar are lost in the haze whipped up by the ceaseless misuse of “racist” in relation to anything and everything.

‘Sexist’ and ‘misogynist’ are likewise bandied about with wild abandon, used almost without exception now for the purposes of silencing unwanted voices, frightening the fainthearted back into their boxes.

Real contempt for the female sex, made manifest, for example, in the coordinated, wholesale rape of underage, white, working-class female children in towns up and down the country abandoned to their fates by authority in its every guise, police, councils, judiciary, government, and entirely overlooked, blind eyes and deaf ears turned. The words that might rightly have been used to describe what was going on were made absent. Instead, all that greeted the news of all that evil and misery was state-sanctioned silence.

Victims of the horror and those who knew about it and sought to raise the alarm and seek justice were shouted down. Those few actually brave enough to point fingers at the guilty were themselves labelled racists. That’s the reality of where we end up when words are overused or misused. Paradoxically, real crime is left to thrive. “Racist” and “misogynist” are words with actual and precise meanings … their use should sound alarm bells to alert us to real horror, real abuse … like that going on for decades in Rotherham, Telford, Oldham and scores of other towns.

That abuse of young girls has not stopped, either and won’t stop while those who could and should be doing something about it find apathy and lack of meaningful concern and action less damaging to their career advancement and political ambition. More and more we live in a society in which keeping the head down or looking the other way feels, to many, like the only option when to speak out, far less to do something, risks being carpet-bombed with the usual verbal abuse.

Real misogyny is at the root too of the blatant and gratuitous misuse of “transphobe” as well. Men speaking up in support of women fighting to preserve the vital sanctity of women-only spaces – toilets and changing rooms, prisons, refuges and the rest – do not receive the full force of the transphobe label.

In another example of misogyny, that insult, along with its even uglier twin TERF is applied most aggressively towards women.

Transphobe – a word properly descriptive of aversion to and hatred of trans people is therefore deliberately misused … and ceaselessly and relentlessly … not to make easier the lives of trans people but to shame, bully and dismiss women voicing concerns that only a handful of years ago would have been regarded as unquestionable common sense.

All of this means real racists and misogynists can go about their brutal business almost unchallenged, while the once powerful and meaningful words, dread words, are pepper sprayed into the faces of anyone and everyone seeking to ask questions of authority, to draw attention to dangerous societal misalignments and to raise the alarm about overreach and mission creep.

Verbal weaponry for use in emergency has been willfully and carelessly repurposed for one thing and one thing only, which is the silencing of debate.

Most important to notice is the certainty that none of this is accidental … nor is it the product of a natural evolution of human behaviour. On the contrary, this choreographed and whipped up name-calling … and let’s face it, name-calling is what it truly is … deploying the oh-so effective tactics of the school playground that none of us apparently outgrow … has been deliberately orchestrated and massively ramped up during these past two or three years of unprecedented change.

It has been done on purpose and the name-calling has been led and driven by government, by nudge units and the rest of the little wizards tasked with the psychological manipulation and perversion of society.

It really got going with “anti-vaxxer”, “covidiot”, “covid-denier” and “granny-killer” that became the round-the-clock stock in trade not just of government ministers but most effectively from the mouths of familiar TV journalists and other media figures.

As with “racist”, “misogynist” and “transphobe” the panoply of pandemic epithets were the childishly effective bludgeon used to try and knock any and all dissent or downright disobedience on the head.

As well as about silencing and controlling, it has been about division. Lockdowns and social distancing kept us physically apart, but even more sinister now is the way we are being set at each other’s throats, fracturing and damaging the very fabric of society.

Again, the ceaseless overuse … of terms like anti-vaxxer … rendered them utterly meaningless. People who had taken the products pushed as vaccines … and been harmed by them and then left in want of recognition, help and compensation … were routinely dismissed as anti-vaxxers, an allegation requiring exquisitely complex mental gymnastics in search of any sense whatsoever.

Anyone questioning the claims as to the safety and effectiveness of those medical products is still automatically defamed as a “covidiot” or a “granny-killer”, or a “covid-denier”.

And yet even though reams of peer-reviewed literature are out there now making plain the reality of harm and risk from taking those products, still the c-words are bandied about.

And again, as with the rest of the name-calling, it’s all about silencing dissenting voices and seizing and maintaining control of narratives.

The ugliness and attempted bullying is everywhere. Perhaps the granddaddy of them all right now – the Swiss Army knife of insults – is right wing. Everyone and everything standing in defiance of the narratives about Covid, the war in Ukraine, the so-called climate crisis, 15-minute cities, is instantly and automatically right wing.

Real old-fashioned right-wingers must be revolving like revolutionaries in their graves at the butchery of a term that was once upon a time actually descriptive of a political position. Fearing the loss of cultural and community cohesion in the face of mass immigration is automatically right-wing, as well as racist, of course. Brexit is right-wing. Love of country is right wing. Gardening is right-wing, and also racist, and so too the English countryside and being good at maths.

After a lifetime of skirting around politics … avoiding the whole sordid business like something left behind on the pavement by a passing canine … I got out of bed one morning a couple of years ago to find I was right-wing too, apparently.

Not just old fashioned, stick in the mud middle of the road right-wing, mind you … but frothing at the mouth, swivel-eyed, ultra-far-right, right-wing.

I achieved this feat by … not moving at all in any direction. I have stayed where I have always been – which is to say in the land of those cynical of politics and politicians of all stripes and therefore politically homeless for a lifetime – while some sort of undetected shifting of the tectonic plates moved the old world out from under my feet and off into the distance never to return.

Articles about me in the newspapers used to describe me as “long-haired” and “Scottish”. Nowadays I’m mostly known to the MSM as right-wing conspiracy theorist Neil Oliver. It’s laughable, but there we are.

I said Right Wing was the granddaddy or at least the catch-all. But of course, that would be to overlook the many megaton explosive power of the a-word … which is ‘antisemite’. Arguably as ubiquitous as racist “antisemite” has an edge of lethal sharpness.

To be labelled antisemitic is to be allegedly guilty of one of the oldest and ugliest sins of all.

Last week a piece in the Guardian raised the spectre of antisemitism, political journalist Peter Walker nudging it as close to me as he dared after I spoke on this channel about the erosion of the thousand-year-old British constitution by one Parliament after another.

It was quite a leap, I can opine that much – but then you’d expect some convoluted reasoning from a Social Justice obsessed newspaper.

It was also imaginative dot-connecting to invite readers to infer anti-semitism in a monologue about the British constitution.

But there you go – it appears antisemitism nowadays, like sexism, misogyny, transphobia and far-right politics, is in the eye of the beholder.

Here’s the thing: as I said at the top … ugliness … unspeakable ugliness … has slithered into our public discourse like sewage from a burst pipe. It has been no accident … rather a deliberate campaign based upon application of the oldest and most childish tactic in the book … that of baseless name-calling … to shore up the defences around official narratives that are collapsing like sandcastles in the face of an incoming tide.

In the process – once important and precisely descriptive words have been utterly compromised until they mean everything and also nothing. After all, if everyone is a right-wing misogynist antisemite, then no one is.

Just as they tried to distract us, from the erosion of our liberties, right under our noses, by fear porn and nudge units … their lockdowns, face masks, forever war and climate crisis … so we are losing sight of real crimes of violence against women, abuse and discrimination on the grounds of race and the persecution of ancient faith and culture.

The truth is that we are over this now. We have had a gut full. We have seen the attempted manipulation, the wordplay and the rest … and we are not fooled for a moment. Words matter at the deepest level of our relationships with one another. Our language is what makes us human and makes possible our society and civilisation. We must reclaim the words like everything else and keep talking sense to one another.

And at the end of the day, if we must be back in the playground again, there’s this: Sticks and stones may break our bones, but names will never hurt us.

[Transcript Link]

#TwitterFiles Accountability: Former Twitter Execs Face Congress. Plus, Rogan’s “Anti-Semitism” | SYSTEM UPDATE #37


Glenn Greenwald Posted originally on: Feb 8, 7:00 pm EST