Category Neil Oliver

Jan 8 2023

Neil Oliver Describes a Life of Pretending in a Potemkin Village


Posted originally on the CTH on January 7, 2023 | Sundance

I like Neil Oliver a lot. I like his perspective, his deliberate nature, his refusal to accept the bullshit, and this monologue is one of the reasons why.  I have said it before that in the era of great pretending, the influential people will be those who do not play the game of pretense.  Neil Oliver is one of those people who refuses to play.

In this monologue Oliver uses two of my favorite metaphors to describe modern western civilization.  First, the Potemkin Villages constructed by political elite in their effort to make it seem like the world is something it is not. Second, the great pretending that is needed in order to sell it.

Though the monologue is specific to the current status of our cousin across the pond, the eloquence of the issues could just as easily apply here; indeed, they are almost identical.  WATCH:

[Transcript] – While reading around the subject of Russia and Ukraine this week, I came across the story of the Potemkin villages.

A legend, dismissed as mostly fiction by modern historians, has 18th century Russian statesman Grigory Potemkin building phoney villages along the banks of the Dnipro River just for effect, to create a useful illusion.

His lover, Catherine the Great and her foreign guests, were due to sail down the river on a tour and Potemkin, the story goes, wanted to give them an impressive show of a populous and thriving nation.

As I say, the idea is largely dismissed now – but the term Potemkin village has stuck and is still used today to describe the lengths to which the leaders of a failing, broken country might go in order to create the illusion of success and prosperity when the truth is altogether different.

I read about the idea, and it occurs to me that here in Britain now we are actually living in a Potemkin village – invited by our leaders to populate a phoney façade and pretend … or, God help us, actually believe, as if everything is fine.

But nothing is fine. The fact is, the story they’re telling us about this country of ours is almost entirely a con trick – persuasive only if you don’t look too closely at the flimsy, plasterboard truth of their creation.

When it came to Potemkin villages – real or a myth – it was only outsiders who were to be fooled. They were just passing through, after all.

The crucial difference for us Brits is that the fakery all around us is not supposed to trick the tourists. It’s most important function is to try and convince us, the tax-paying citizens, that all is well, when it most emphatically is not.

Look at this poor old place and wonder at how much fakery has been erected.

And remember, all the time, that we are also taxed right up the wazoo for our continued occupation of the shoddy reality some of us see around us.

There’s so much wrong it’s hard to know where to begin.

Year after year we hemorrhage more and more cash into a National Health Service that isn’t – which is to say it isn’t a national health service.

Free at the point of delivery is all very well, but it means nothing if you can’t get yourself to that point of delivery while you’ve still got a pulse.

Quite simply, the sacred-cow-cum-white-elephant that is, or has been, the NHS, is demonstrably incapable of doing the job intended for it.

Infuriatingly, politicians of every stripe, insist on calling it “our” NHS, as though it were a beloved family member. But it’s not. That use of “our” is simply to deter us from ever criticizing it

Waiting lists grow ever longer. Sick and injured people wait in agony and desperation for ambulances that don’t come – or not for many hours. We are actually told not to bother the NHS, to do all we can to avoid needing the service we pay for.

And so trusting people obey, suffering in silence in their homes, not reporting their health concerns to their GPs – the lumps, the stubborn coughs, the blood. Putting off the call for help that might save their lives – until it’s too late.

But the NHS is only one part – admittedly a hugely expensive part – of this land of make believe.

We are no longer policed by consent. Rather the police force and it is a force now, in lieu of a service, has been bent around political or ideological will. Some protest groups are deemed good – Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, Black Lives Matter and fed tea and biscuits while they block the roads and smash windows, protected from any and all opposing views.

Others espousing opinions that fly in the face of the latest ideological kink or political dikta protests about so-called vaccines, or about lockdown or illegal immigration, often prompt the unleashing of the men on horseback, the riot shields.

Mountains of data reveal that the products marketed as vaccines are no such thing. They don’t stop infection. They don’t stop transmission. They don’t stop an infected person getting sick. They don’t keep an infected person out of hospital. And they don’t stop an infected person dying.

By any measure those products, released under emergency use authorization and demonstrably the cause of countless deaths and injuries, are, at best, a façade, a front, an optical illusion intended to make the masses move in the direction desired by the leaders.

Whatever way you cut it, those products don’t work as advertised and yet still the advertising-slash-propaganda campaigns are up and running – right now, this very minute – pushing needles into as many arms as possible, including those of healthy 6-month-old babies.

Talking heads still trumpet the nonsense that the vaccine roll-out was an unqualified success. Stuffed shirts that stood at the forefront of the pandemic, pushing the medical products, pushing the lockdowns, pushing the face masks, were honoured for their efforts then and remain honoured now, even as the data makes it increasingly plain – to me at least – that what was inflicted upon our population was an unforgivable wrong. Fake knights of the realm for our Potemkin village.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, elected by none of us and therefore a fake PM, has promised to halt the flow of illegal migrants onto British shores. But I say he will do no such thing. In fact, I say he doesn’t even have any intention of stopping that flow. Any and every British government promises to protect our borders. This is now a fake promise with nothing behind it.

Our landscapes are littered with wind turbines and yet millions can barely afford to heat their homes because one way or another, we aren’t allowed access to the most obvious and reliable sources of energy. Drax power station used to burn coal.

Now it burns wood pellets obtained by cutting down ancient forests in Canada that campaigners there say are vital for fighting climate change. By banning coal and burning ancient forests, Drax is considered Green and so, in recent years, has received 6 billion pounds in government subsidies. Drax now emits more greenhouse gases than when it burned coal.

Drax might be held up as the epitome of the fakery of the mis-named Green agenda.

The Green agenda is not about Green, rather it is about Greed. There’s even fake meat, and fake milk, and fake cheese and scores of other fake food products besides. What else would you serve in a Potemkin village, after all, but fake food?

As we speak, they are ramping up the same old fear about Covid – that illness with the threat risk now, to most, of the common cold – the same determination to ignore everything we’ve learned over the last three years.

Actors on stage wear masks wear, and so must we.

While more and more of the population wakes up to the lies, obfuscation, fear-porn and propaganda around the so-called vaccines, around the Green agenda, around gender politics and race politics. The majority of the news media obediently pumps out the same old tosh about “safe and effective” and “climate crisis” and “preferred pronouns” and race baiting.

But the fakery has been swiftly and shoddily constructed, without the foundation of truth. For that reason, this Potemkin village thrown up around us is flimsy and should be easily demolished, if we wish it so. Underneath it all, too quiet for too long, we know the truth of Britain. More of us comprehend every day. That beyond a shadow of a doubt our leaders have tried to hoodwink us into believing things that are simply not true. The ultimate Potemkin village is all lies, no truth.

The eye-wateringly expensive NHS, costs rising years on year, is no longer a health service for all in any way that matters. I say the Green agenda is a fraud, as is the climate crisis that underpins it.

The assertions that little boys can grow up to be women and that little girls can grow up to be men, are lies. That our government means to protect our borders is a fiction.

A parliament in which over-mighty, colluding, indistinguishable political parties, dictate the law to the people whether those people like or not, is a shameful setting aside of the sovereignty of we, the people of this country.

Parliament is not and was never meant to be sovereign. We, the people, are sovereign. This is the foundation stone of Magna Carta, sealed in 1215 and as unshakeably solid now as it was then. Any attempt to reduce the rights, freedoms and liberties enshrined in that Treaty are, by definition, beyond the power of any parliament.

Here’s the thing: our sovereignty as people was sealed by that Treaty of 1215. Parliaments have come and tried to ride roughshod over the people, again and again, and those parliaments have gone.

One of many attempts to repeal Magna Carta was even made in 1969 while the general public were conveniently distracted by the moon landings.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: we see them. We see the fakery they have raised around us. But our rights are real.

Our belief in Britain is real.

Isn’t it time to see past the shaky stage set thrown up around us as a distraction and take shelter instead in true Britain – real Britain? {Transcript]

Dec 11 2022

Neil Oliver, It’s Remarkable How Many New Ways the Elite Have Concocted for Us to Die, Justified by Climate Change…


Posted originally on the CTR on December 10, 2022 | sundance

For his weekly monologue today, U.K pundit Neil Oliver looks at the climate change agenda, energy policy, and the constructs of how the new green agenda manifest to create new ways for people to die.

We aren’t allowed the energy available from a century of gas beneath our feet here in Britain – because it’s not Green. But we’re paying top dollar for nine billion cubic litres – twice as much as last year’s order – of gas fracked out of the ground in the US. WATCH:

[Transcript] -Winter arrived last week – and with it a dose of reality. All that talk about wrapping up warm in the house, putting on an extra jumper, hot water bottles, full-size onesies – it’s dangerous nonsense. It might be fine for a while if you’re a healthy adult – but it’s a tragedy in slow motion for babies, young children, the elderly, the sick.

And it’s only the second week in December. It’s a long time until Spring.

Even if layering up and donning a hat were enough to keep a body going, once cold properly gets a grip of a house, it too starts to die in its own way.

The creep of dampness that takes its own toll on house and health alike. Frozen pipes – followed by burst pipes – and not enough plumbers to go round. People who can’t afford to heat their homes are likely struggling with spiking food bills as well.

All of this in a first world country that was home to the industrial revolution that changed the world for the better and lifted billions out of poverty. Now the grannies saved by locking down the world until its heart stopped beating, are sitting down to die alone of cold and hunger. It’s amazing how inventive the Establishment has proven to be in coming up with ways to invite the elderly to die miserable lonely deaths.

Our so-called leaders tell us all of it is a price worth paying – by which they mean worth paying by us, the little people. All the decisions are being made by those who have no intention whatever of spending so much as five minutes in an unheated home. Turn up the thermostat and fill out the expenses claim – that’s the order of the day for our elected representatives.

All around them are those that can’t afford to heat their own homes but are forced to subsidise the warmth of the sociopaths that put us here with their hubris and eco-vanity.

Regardless of what nonsense they spout about the causes – Putin, climate, whatever – at least know that the misery here now and that lies ahead for millions is entirely the consequence of decades of wilful destruction in the name of saving the world. A Green agenda that absolutely is not green.

Where we are now is entirely the consequence of politicians competing with one another to see which of them can take the title of world’s most psychopathic hypocrite. We aren’t allowed the energy available from a century of gas beneath our feet here in Britain – because it’s not Green.

But we’re paying top dollar for 9 billion cubic litres – twice as much as last year’s order – of gas fracked out of the ground in the US. Now we are dependent on Uncle Sam. Say what you like about Sippy Cup Joe Biden but he’s played a blinder there. Well done, the Big Guy.

I wonder about that sabotage of Nord Stream II, I really do …

A report published by Lancet reminded the world that around five million people die every year on account of climate extremes.

Of those deaths, 4.5 million are caused by cold compared to five hundred thousand attributed to heat. In our time on this planet, an interglacial between ice ages, it is always the cold that is far more of a deadly threat to human life – ten or 20 times as deadly.

And yet still the priests of the new religion of climate fear preach that we must cool the world.

You’ve probably heard that 97 per cent of scientists are agreed that humans are the cause of climate change. It comes from research carried out in 2013.

Do you know how that team obtained that number?

They gathered nearly 12,000 scientific papers dealing with global climate change. They didn’t read the papers – heavens no, that would have been proper research – instead they looked at just the summary paragraphs on the front covers.

On that basis they grouped them into four piles. 3,896 papers agreed humans were to blame for climate change; 7,930 took no position either way; 78 rejected the idea of it being humanity’s fault and 40 were uncertain altogether.

That initial pass gave a figure of just 32 percent blaming humans for climate change. Obviously, that wasn’t nearly scary enough. So then came the gross and clumsy cheat: the 7,930 papers that took no position on whether humans are to blame were removed from the final analysis.

With them gone, the figure of 32 percent went up to 97 per cent. And the likes of Barack Obama and Al Gore have been quoting it ever since.

If my interpretation is correct, this is the kind of deliberate tampering with evidence that underpins the Net Zero madness that is being pursued by the zealots running our countries, or rather ruining our countries.

In a book published in 1997, physicist Carl Sagan wrote the following:

“We’ve arranged a global civilisation in which most crucial elements – transportation, communications, and all other industries, agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment, and even the key democratic institution of voting – profoundly depend on science and technology.

“We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

In this context, it’s our leaders who either fail to understand science and just parrot whatever propaganda lands in their inbox each day – or they do understand and they’re lying. Either way, it’s the prescription for disaster predicted by Sagan.

Remember a few months back when a few hot days in a row occasioned yet more fear porn about imminent climate catastrophe? Now the temperature is below zero and all we hear is cheery twaddle about clear blue skies and hopes for a white Christmas.

For anyone still concerned, I’m here to tell you the polar bears are doing fine – I’m told numbers are on the up as never before and the ice in Antarctica is getting thicker every day.

And if one more tv presenter waxes lyrical about the joys of one-pot meals and watching telly while wrapped in a duvet …. Where is the outrage on behalf of millions who can’t afford to turn on one radiator in one room? In a country where centuries worth of energy lies beneath our feet.

Putin didn’t order the West to put him in control of the energy required to keep the lights on in Europe. Everyone used to go cap in hand to Russia. Europe’s leaders outsourced energy production so they could crow about cutting emissions at home.

Agenda 2030 – Net Zero – is a second Titanic – and this time the whole world’s being herded aboard like cattle. The passengers on the original Titanic had no way of knowing what lay ahead for them in the North Atlantic.

This time around though, millions of people who could and should know better – who have no excuse now for not knowing – who could and should have realised long ago that they were being lured and lied towards disaster – are actually buying tickets for the ride on Agenda 2030 … a ship of fools. 1,500 people were lost when Titanic went to the bottom. This time it’s the lives of billions.

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it. What lies beneath all the madness that is keeping so many millions of people perpetually on edge … knowing … just knowing that something, somewhere has gone very badly wrong … is an attack on humanity itself. This fact above all others must be understood.

We are described as useless people; we need to accept smaller, colder, hungrier lives; we should swap beef and chicken for beetles and worms.

And if you’re white you’re the product of original sin – bad from birth and owing creation itself an apology just for being here.

Last year in Canada, 10,000 people died by euthanasia – three per cent of all deaths in the country

A disabled veteran and former Paralympian – retired corporal Christine Gauthier, says she was offered euthanasia instead of waiting any longer to have a stairlift fitted in her home. After years of asking, Gauthier was told by a health worker:

“Madam, if you’re really so desperate, we can give you medical assistance in dying now.”

She only wanted a stairlift! Canada’s euthanasia programmed is soon to grow wider. Next year there are plans to offer death to people who are mentally ill – which hardly bodes well for the clinically depressed. Plans are underway to help under-18s die too, if they want to.

Human life is being devalued as easily as our currencies.

Last week there was yet another variation on the theme of stripping us of more of what it has meant to be human and alive. Also lurking under the darkening umbrella of Agenda 2030 is climate lockdown. It’s here already in the form of the 15-minute city.

In Britain the scam-scheme is being rolled out first in Oxford. Everyone will be confined to one of six ghettos inside which they might live out their lives on foot, or perhaps by bike. The Labour/Liberal/Green council responsible says it will go ahead whether people like it or not.

Every resident must register their car with the council, which will use number recognition cameras to monitor their movements around the clock.

Anyone driving out of their designated ghetto more than 100 times a year will be fined. This is about one agenda and one agenda only – keeping people apart … increasing the atomisation of society, the deliberate division of people into smaller and smaller dependent units.

This outrage proposed in Oxford is the tip of an iceberg. Because we humans, we useless people, we hackable animals, are so sub-optimal, so contemptible in the eyes of our self-appointed superiors, we must be watched at all times. It’s not just in Oxford.

In every city there are cameras monitoring everyone’s every move. Forget the nonsense of the 15-minute city, it is simply and plainly the bars of the cage of climate lockdown. Covid ran out of steam and so the next excuse for total control is the weather.

Here in Britain, it starts in Oxford, but the 15-minute-city nonsense is already all over the word. Plans are in place for London, for Paris, for Milan, for Krakow in Poland and in scores more places besides. In Melbourne, Zero Covid zealot Dan Andrews, the premier recently re-elected by those in favor of seeing fellow citizens brutalized in the street by black-clad storm troopers, waxes lyrical about a 20-minute-city.

Don’t bother with the details, remember just one word: lockdown. A word that came from prison parlance is now all around us. The excuse keeps changing … but lockdown remains the same.

What should we do? For a start we can stay awake – and not be distracted by bread and circuses. Ignore the self-pitying of Royal narcissists, for a start, and pay attention instead to better examples by far.

Remember those who stood up AGAINST totalitarians, against those who despised fellow human beings and would take away their rights and their lives.

Last week we lost squadron leader George “Johnny Johnson”, last surviving member of the Dambusters raid.

He was born into relative poverty. He lost his mum when he was three. His dad was less than kind to him, to put it mildly. He was mostly raised by his big sister.

He volunteered for service in the second world war and eventually made his way into 617 squadron, the Dambusters.

He was married and raised three children. After the war he was a teacher, in primary schools and then helping patients at Rampton Psychiatric Hospital. He served as a local councilor.

He was a warrior, a teacher, and a public servant – in that order. He was a husband and father.

Given a choice between multi-millionaire self-obsessed, self-publicists and self-serving politicians and a selfless man like Squadron Leader George Johnny Johnson, MBE, Distinguished Flying Medal. I know who I’d stand beside.

Here’s the thing: we’re being constantly goaded to see our own species, this human race, as the source of all ills. I say we are not. The technocrats and authoritarians want to treat us like lab rats. It is time we all got up on our hind legs and remembered what we are truly capable of. (LINK)

Dec 4 2022

Neil Oliver, We Need Christmas Now More Than Ever


Posted originally on the CTH on December 3, 2022 | Sundance

For his weekly monologue UK pundit Neil Oliver discusses the insufferable misery of those who try to cancel Christmas.  Mr Oliver shares the importance of the meaning of Christmas in an eloquent and powerful manner.

The message is uplifting and needed, especially at such an uncertain time for so many around the world. We must never forget our Christian roots and how deeply humanity is connected to its history. YOU are the light he speaks of in the final sentence.  WATCH:

[Transcript] – For the second year in a row, the Christmas trees are going up early round my way. More and more households that would, in the world of before, have waited until the second or third week in December before decking the halls … have already gone the whole nine yards with the trees and twinkly lights. We are doing likewise in our house. I won’t lie … I love it. Every bit of it.

I love Christmas … always have and always will. In every conceivable way, Christmas is light in a time of darkness and for many of us, that light has never been more welcome and so can’t come soon enough.

Especially since the festival is once again under attack by the joyless division. In line with what has become a tradition of the season in benighted Britain, yet another bunch of interfering, patronizing preachers of the witless cant of “diversity and inclusivity” have decided it’s their turn to take a pop at Christmas.

Bristol-based Watch This Space – describing themselves as an Inclusion Consultancy … Heaven help us all … have scored some free publicity by calling on organisations to “rethink Christmas” on account of how all those of other faiths feel left out in December. I really don’t think those of other faiths feel left out at all. I am certain the vast majority of those of other faiths are perfectly fine with Christians enjoying Christmas … the same way I have no issue whatever with Diwali and Eid and the rest of the religious festivals that genuinely matter to those of faith … and that it is only those that could … and deliberately would … start a fight in an empty room that want to persuade everyone that Christmas is EX-clusive and only bad news.

For generations every school in Britain has put on a nativity play. The youngest among us are invited to play the parts of Mary and Joseph … the angel … the shepherds, the three wise men. In every school hall is recreated a scene from a village in the Middle East. The people being enacted by children are people of the Middle East. How inclusive and diverse, you might say.

It’s always Christianity that the nouveau bullies target – in the same that all bullies have always done – which is to say “single out the one that won’t hit you back.” The tolerance of Christianity and Christians has been a red rag to a bull – and for years it has been open season on Christmas on the utterly spurious grounds that someone somewhere might be offended by cards, carols and Santa Claus.

But hey – it’s only Jesus – worshipped by two and a half billion Christians as divine, the Son of God – so take up the slings and arrows and do your worst.

That latest call to cancel Christmas came hard on the heels of heresy – spiteful, childish mewling by a junior research fellow of Trinity College in Cambridge university about Jesus having, and I quote, “a trans body”. The sticky-palmed adolescent piffle was then backed up by the Dean of the college, so ensuring more headlines at the expense of followers of the world’s largest religion.

All of this latest mischief-making is just more of the same – which is to say the determination of the empowered elite systematically to remove every last foundation stone of Western civilisation … while simultaneously showing us … reminding us … who they think is boss. Having excited themselves by stripping away, under the egregious wrong of lockdown, so much of what it has meant to be human and alive in this part of the world, the usual suspects are determined to keep going until the job is done. Christianity, and the family, are still standing, and so the attacks must continue.

Lockdown was about draining the joy out of life, every last bit. It was about keeping people apart and alone. It was a relentless campaign of fear by authority figures who felt no fear themselves – because they knew there was nothing TO fear – and so broke all their own rules. Now it’s about bidding farewell to the very stuff of life – warmth in winter, nourishing food. Stop driving to save the world. Stop flying to save the world. How long before they come for the twinkly lights and crackers as well? The powers that be are about nothing less than making life dull and flat for we proles.

The truth is that none of this is to be taken lightly, far less ignored. The relentless erosion of Christmas, and Christianity itself, is essential for those whose mission it is to unmake Britain, and the west. It is nothing less than the deliberate snuffing out of the light of the world.

That anyone would ever seek to silence those who want to celebrate Christmas is beyond sinister in my eyes – because the story at the heart of Christmas is also the story at the heart of humanity and the best of human nature.

It is a simple story about a family – indeed the making of a family by the birth of a baby.

It is about a baby born into the most humble of circumstances, in a barn for animals, dependent upon the kindness of strangers.

Why would anyone of good and honest heart want to take issue with the simplicity of the family, and all that the family has meant and continues to mean? Except of course that the family is the ultimate obstacle for those intent on resetting the world – away from the human and in favour of the machine. Again, and again those who have it in mind to establish centralized, top-down control of populations have targeted the family as the final stumbling block in their path. Always, however, the family has prevailed, because the desire for family life is innately human.

The way things have been in the west for two thousand years is a direct and undeniable consequence of the overarching influence of Christianity. Our ethics, our morality, the laws by which we live, commitment to the sanctity of the individual … all are founded upon the Christianity of our forebears.

In more recent centuries deluded and dangerous people believed they had the wit and the power to set aside Christian ethics and morality and to replace them with their own ideologies. I invite you to consider the worst horrors of the 20th century and notice how well those experiments went. 150 million dead and counting.

What is being inflicted on us now is the death of a thousand cuts. One thing after another reminding us of who and what we are … where we came from … and why … is being debased, devalued, rewritten or erased by others who think they know better. Our heritage, our history, our culture, our society, our communities, our identities as men and women, as sovereign individuals … all of it is being undone, taken away, memory holed. This is deliberate and must be resisted at all costs.

Friedrich Nietzsche was among the most articulate to lament the death of God in the west:

God is dead and we have killed him – he wrote – who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

And there’s the rub, prophesied by a philosopher 140 years ago … the coming of those idealogues of today – who talk of hacking humans, growing babies outside the body of the woman, of mixing humans with technology – who really do believe the time has come for them to assume the power of gods.

Worst of all of the anti-human behavior is the turning upon children, the exploitation of those most vulnerable and deserving of our protection. I don’t mean to imply this behavior is anything new – rather, it is simply more blatant and shameless. We catch glimpses of the danger – most recently in the ad campaign by fashion house Balenciaga that set tiny children in sexual contexts – and we dismiss such threats at our ultimate peril. From drag queen story time to questionable sex education in classrooms, the normalization of the sexualization of children is well under way. For those in search of a hill to die on, might not the defence of the innocence of children be the one?

The Christmas story is fundamentally about hope. For human beings there can be no greater gift or reason for hope than the birth of a child. There can be no greater imperative than the urge to protect that child, all children … against all threats.

During lockdown, rules were put in place to keep families apart, to separate children from grandparents. They are still pushing their jabs on children. Attempts were even made at that time to cancel Christmas – not that me and mine paid them a blind bit of notice. Faith leaders not worthy of the name complied with diktats that closed churches and so denied needful people access to the comfort and sustenance of holy places when they were most wanted.

I keep mentioning the thousands of people who have written to me during the past two, getting on for three years. In the run up to last Christmas, the emotion of it all was almost overwhelming. My family and I received piles of Christmas cards from families across Britain and around the world. Messages of love, solidarity and determination from people who might otherwise have been strangers to us, but who needed to share Christmas and so shared it with us, the joy of the Christmas message in what might otherwise have been an unremittingly dark time.

Over and over, we were reassured by all those – the majority of the senders in fact – who, like us, had identified a fight between good and evil … between light and dark. We were left in no doubt, by letter after letter, and card after card that the medicine that kept those people well – in every way that really mattered – was their faith in something bigger than themselves, something transcendent.

The central message of Christianity is so simple it can be summed up in a single line:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son … so that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.

Has there ever been a more hopeful message? Believe … or don’t believe … but the Christmas story is undeniably a message of hope and family and love, and about the arrival in the darkness of a bright and warming light. It is worth remembering that the light is always there, even if it is out of sight.

I think about the words that, according to the legend at least, were scratched into the wall of a basement by someone hiding from tyranny during World War II. I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when I do not feel it. I believe in God, even when he is silent.

In the northern latitudes people have sought light in the darkness of winter since a time beyond the reach of memory. Millennia before the coming of Christianity there were fires kindled and lamps kept lit in defiance of the dark and cold. Always the promise, held in human hearts, that with patience and fortitude they would see the return of the sun.

This year the dark and the cold are being deliberately intensified by the stated objectives of our so-called leaders. We are told we must have less light, less warmth. We are told these are among the prices we must pay … to win a war … to save the planet … Now is the time to kindle lights and keep them lit.

Forty years before the birth of Christ, the pagan Roman poet Virgil wrote lines about the birth of a boy, a Saviour, who would grow up to be divine and save the world. Virgil has been seen by some as a prophet predicting the birth of Jesus. He was sensing the rising of the son from beyond the horizon. Virgil’s poem, written around 38 BC, is a message of hope, of the inevitable and imminent coming of light into a darkened world.

Here’s the thing: we need Christmas, and the hope and joy of Christmas, more now than ever.

Light whatever lights you can – even the glow of a single candle can be seen for miles.

[LINK]

Nov 27 2022

Neil Oliver asks “I Wonder What Would Happen If”…


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on November 26, 2022 | Sundance

Jumpin’ ju-ju bones, Neil Oliver is going to that place publicly and loudly, that many of us have contemplated and discussed quietly with hushed tones and knowing nods.

What Oliver outlines in this monologue does not need much discussion amid the audience awaiting its arrival.  After all, he is basically discussing the logical consequence to the current state of political affairs not only in the U.K but also in the United States.  However, that said, it is rather remarkable in the era of government sponsored fear of rebellion, complete with labels of domestic extremism attached, to see Oliver’s voice bravely citing the outcome.

With 87,000 new IRS agents authorized by the regime quietly assembling for their assault, as Oliver notes, “there is nothing to fear if we have each other” and are willing to stand the gap as an ally for our fellow man.  What Oliver is saying is profound, true and could – in the most significant of ways, lead to a new beginning.  Yes, it is talk of a united rebellion, and that’s exactly what we need.  WATCH: 

[Transcript] – People write to me every day to tell me they fear the future. People from all over the world, all ages, all walks of life. I say this: we should not be afraid. If anyone should be afraid it is our government, the whole of parliament, the State and the Establishment. They should be afraid because they are in the wrong – doing wrong things and behaving unforgivably.

You can tell they are afraid by the way they keep doing more and more, faster and faster, to make the people poor, cold and hungry – also demoralised, anxious and fearful about the present, never mind the future. The fear felt by people around the world is the deliberate consequence of the actions of so-called leaders all across the West and beyond.

I say again, we should not be afraid. Those plotting and working against us, against our interests both as individuals and as sovereign states, have no power and no money other than that which we, the people grant them. They are supposed to use that power and money to protect us, to keep us free and to provide opportunities for those hard working, free people to make happy and successful lives for themselves. Instead, they are working night and day to have us welcome a state of being that is nothing less than digital enslavement.

Many of the people who contact me ask:

What should we do? How can we fight back?

I think about the answers to those questions all the time. Right now, I wonder what would happen if those who are cold in their homes – millions of people – just turned on their heating and turned off their direct debits and standing orders. What would happen if, when the bills came, we all just agreed to toss them on the fire? All of us together? What would happen, if millions of us, peacefully acting as one just stood together in quiet defiance? I could be wrong, but I don’t think there’s enough cells in the prisons, enough judges to hear the cases. If the system wasn’t already broken – by them – such actions would break it.

What would happen if we all withdrew our money from the banks on the same day? What would happen if we all asked, as we are entitled to, for the cash? The banks don’t have the money to meet all those demands and so presumably they would close their doors. Then what? Would their inability to pay out all that cash be evidence of the fraud that is fiat money? I wonder.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the social contract – that notion by which we surrender power to the state in return for services and safety – is broken beyond repair. They broke it, not us. Successive governments – not just the present bunch of cardboard cut-outs … have, over decades, knowingly and deliberately betrayed every aspect of that contract. It is null and void and we, the blameless party, are no longer bound by its conditions.

We the people – the sovereign people of this country – don’t just hold the power: we ARE the power. We loan some of it – a short-term loan – to governments. And those governments are supposed to serve us, do our bidding. NEVER the other way round. We tell them what to do.

Hundreds of years’ worth of governments has quietly and secretively presided over a financial system that is no more than state-sanctioned fraud. Power to create money out of thin air was put in the hands of an entirely private, unelected, unaccountable business and this power has been abused to make a tiny group unimaginably rich by enslaving all of US with debt. That system is now on the point of collapse. The West is bankrupt, and governments and bankers are scrambling to solve a problem: how to subtract every last shekel from the people while still having a handful of wealthy bankers, and their enablers, left over.

Britain has no functioning border against the rest of the world. Hundreds are arriving in this country every day and night, many ferried across the Channel by agencies paid for by British taxpayers. British people have to wait longer for health and social care and accommodation – to make way for economic migrants with their eyes on a soft touch, who have paid illegal gangs thousands of pounds a head to get here. They send their luggage on ahead and collect it at their hotels. We are at the back of the queue while anyone else, from anywhere else, is looked after hand and foot. And always the loudest calls are not for stopping it, but for more money and faster processing. I wonder if the illegal immigration isn’t just convenient for the State … softening up the citizens for a supposed solution … like digital ID perhaps? And then borders open once and for all. I wonder.

The British people are no longer kept safe by the police force they pay for. Burglaries of properties and assaults on the person are barely investigated, while officers prioritise thought crimes on social media. Uncounted thousands of little girls are abandoned to organised gangs of rapists up and down the country, because the State turned a blind eye to the relentless raping of children rather than ruffle community feathers.

A tenth of the population is on the waiting list for treatment by the NHS. The National Health Service is not keeping the nation healthy. All this about free at the point of delivery is about as much use as a magic spell. You can call a lunch a free lunch – but you’ll still be left hungry if you can’t get into the restaurant. So-called free steaks won’t fill you up if you have to wait so long in the queue you starve to death in the meantime. Free becomes another word for something you’ve heard about but can’t have.

I say again, though – we have nothing to fear. Not if we decide to be unafraid. In many ways, the worst has already happened: we have been shown where we stand, in the eyes of the State – which is beneath their contempt.

I don’t have the answers to all of the questions, but I know this much – even just asking them, airing the thoughts, should make the government, the State, the Establishment – sit up and pay attention.

More and more strikes are happening – rail workers, teachers and university lecturers, nurses next. What about the self-employed who were abandoned for the last two years? They can’t strike. What would happen if they withheld their taxes, all at the same time? I wonder.

But history tells us we should never underestimate the power of the many.

Just over a hundred years ago, during World War I, thousands of workers were pulled into the City of Glasgow to work in the munitions factories. At that time there wasn’t a single council house or flat in the whole of Britain. Private landlords owned 100 percent of homes for rent. They could and did raise rents as often as they wanted. Tenants either paid up or were evicted.

In February 1915, landlords across the city told tenants their rents were going up by as much as 25 percent. This was against a backdrop of the steeply rising cost of living generally, food scarcity and the rest. There was a war to win – remember – and sacrifices were expected from the people if the enemy was to be defeated.

In the case of many homes, the man of the house was away fighting in the war, leaving just women and children.

Into this crisis for poor people stepped Mary Barbour, an ordinary Glasgow woman with two children. She and others realized their only hope lay in sticking together. A mass non-payment campaign got under way. Arrears built up and soon Sheriff’s Officers were turning up to demand back rent or to evict non-payers.

But whenever anyone got wind of an eviction, hundreds of women would descend on the address and block the entrance to the home. A Glasgow MP, Willie Reid, described a typical incident:

“A soldier’s wife in Parkhead, had an eviction notice served on her, with a warning that if she failed to vacate her house by 12 noon the Sheriff’s Officer would call to enforce it. The strike committee got busy. They instructed every mother in the district with a young child to be there for 11 am on D-Day, complete with prams.

“Long before noon the close and street were packed with prams, and every pram had at least one youngster in it. No raiding party could have got near the house. Moreover, the men of Parkhead Forge and other works in the district decided to down tools at 11.30 am and lend a hand if necessary…”

People began to talk about Mary Barbour’s Army. On 17 November, 18 tenants appeared in court for eviction. Tens of thousands of Glasgow people lined the streets outside. In the end, on 25 November 1915, rents were frozen at pre-war levels. The Increase of Rent and Mortgage Interest Act 1915 was passed and some elements of it remained in force as late as 1989.

I wonder what would happen if all of us … opposed to what is going on now … came together like those Glasgow women of 1915 – AND JUST SAID NO.

I wonder.

When thinking about that time, I am reminded of real leaders. I’ve been talking again this week about Ernest Shackleton who, when all seemed lost – his ship sunk beneath the Antarctic ice and with nothing but flimsy tents, three little boats, and 28 men trapped on the pack ice and depending on him for life itself he said,

“Well … now we’ll go home.”

Our so-called leaders tell us our lives must be filled with hardship while they warm themselves in centrally heated homes paid for with our taxes … and look forward to Christmas parties and food and drink and decorations paid for by all of us. That is not leadership. That is an abusive relationship.

Shackleton put himself through every hardship he expected his men to endure. He did it first and for longest. What he asked of them, he did too. He said they should leave behind on the ice anything that would not help keep them alive.

Some saying he walked to a hole in that ice and dropped in his gold watch and cigarette case, to the bottom of the ocean. He led from the front, every step of the way and over nearly a thousand miles of the cruelest sea on earth. And in the end, he got every man home.

They called him The Boss.

He cared not a jot for the comforts of home. Back home once more he wrote:

“We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had suffered, starved and triumphed, groveled down and grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole.”

He was a leader who saw that it was shared endeavor and shared striving that made all else possible.

Our leaders? … our leaders would pick our pockets for any gold watches and valuables before climbing aboard their private jets and flying home, leaving us behind on the melting ice.

I say we owe them nothing – not our loyalty and not our obedience. If we continue to comply, we build our own prison around ourselves, for their benefit.

They have promised us the earth while stealing it from us – raping and pillaging its resources only for their own enrichment. I say again, there is nothing to fear if we have each other.

Here’s the thing: if we set a course for ourselves and back each other every step of the way, we will cross this ocean of darkness together, all the way to where we want to be. [Transcript End]

Nov 20 2022

Oliver’s Gist – “A Betrayal Too Far”, Perhaps Time for Citizens to Secede from Government


Posted originally on the conservative tree house November 19, 2022 | Sundance

Neil Oliver has a thoughtful monologue this week that pertains to the specifics of the British political landscape; however, in the era where global government is identical in just about every shore, the points could just as easily pertain to America.

U.K. citizens face the same problem of non-representative government -ruling by dictate and fiat- as we do in the United States. I would suggest the reason, and indeed the similarity we find in various nations, has more to do with multinational corporations now giving instructions to government leaders than anything else.

The disconnect between what one would call “best interests” and actual “policy via government,” has less to do with the decisions and more to do with the instructions.  As Oliver accurately notes, the outcome is a system of government that has no connection to the needs of the actual citizens they are supposed to serve.  WATCH:

(Transcript) – I keep waiting for the betrayal too far – that action by the State against Britain that finally pushes every last citizen of the country that used to be Britain into the grim realization that those illegitimates are out to get us.

The Green Agenda that guarantees the impoverishment of the peoples of the West by pursuing the lie that wind and solar can take the place of gas, oil and coal? The Green Agenda that pushes the palpable nonsense those of us with petrol and diesel cars today are meant to have electric cars tomorrow – when all the evidence makes plain that you and I are meant to be going nowhere while our self-appointed masters go anywhere and everywhere?

The Green Agenda that invites us to think that Net Zero and the rest are about anything more than stealing our rights and freedoms while further enriching the already rich?

The delegates for COP27 flying in private jets to luxury accommodation in Egypt, where they sat down to meals of 100 pound a time cuts of prime Aberdeen Angus beef, foie gras – which is the liver of force-fed geese – salmon and sea bass and cream sauces – while pausing between burps to lecture us proles about carbon emissions and the need to eat bugs and genetically modified grass?

Those delegates discussing plans to eviscerate the farming industry – to cut farming around the world by anything up to a half in a time of food insecurity for millions?

The blindingly obvious realization that these schemes are nothing to do with saving the planet but merely the means to bankrupt the farmers and drive them off the land so it may be acquired by trans-national corporations?

The realization that governments and physicians together oversaw the most disastrous medical intervention in history – that by setting aside “First do no harm” and “informed consent” and opting instead for ruinous lockdowns and coercion they took a bad situation and made it much worse?

The revelation that those so-called vaccines were never even tested to see if they would stop transmission of Covid – which they absolutely do not do – thereby revealing that all the government and media driven propaganda demanding submission to the needle to save granny was a blatant lie?

The revelation that those medical products do not – do not stop a person contracting any virus?

The realization, quite simply expressed, that those that medical products making billions for big pharma do not work as advertised?

Would it be the soaring numbers of people dying from causes unrelated to Covid, the people dying or suffering life altering consequences in the aftermath of submitting to the jabs, released only under the terms of emergency use authorization?

The number of otherwise healthy people – young people included – dropping dead or being found dead in their beds? Would it be the fact it’s still all but forbidden to ask if the so-called vaccines have anything to do with those excess deaths?

Or the realization that all the currencies in the world – the pound, the dollar, the euro – are now nothing more than Ponzi schemes – fraudulent confidence tricks doomed ultimately to collapse, and soon, and that ought to have put their operators in jail long ago?

The news from the US that another Ponzi scheme – called FTX – a crypto currency exchange owned and operated by a 30-year-old wunderkind – has crashed, taking billions of dollars into oblivion?

Tens of billions of US dollars were sent by the Biden administration to Ukraine. Ukraine invested some of that in FTX. Then, FTX donated 40 million dollars to the democrat campaign in the midterms. At what point does it become legitimate to ask if this was profiteering or money laundering?

Now the collapse of FTX could potentially be seized upon by Biden’s administration as the excuse they were waiting for to pass legislation to take control of crypto currencies? Killing two birds with one stone, anyone?

What about the knowledge that college dropout computer software salesman Bill Gates has acquired more than a quarter of a million acres of farmland in the US for purposes unknown?

Or the daily and nightly arrival, by dinghies, of tens of thousands of young men, on Britain’s southern shore, where they are ferried to hotels for free accommodation, free money, free food and access to all the GP and dental appointments you can’t get, all of it at the taxpayers’ expense?

The knowledge that their arrival is aided and abetted by Serco – a company whose outgoing chief executive is Rupert Soames, grandson of Winston Churchill, the wartime leader made immortal by his vow to defend the beaches? The irony.

Or the fact that Serco has the contract for finding accommodation for those migrants – that profits hugely by offering millions a time to hoteliers to sack their staff and turn their properties into hostels for those young men, always young men?

The realisation, in my eyes anyway, is that the British born and raised here have been put at the back of the queue for everything their taxes pay for – so that all of those benefits can be extended to new arrivals?

The realisation that the powers that be are intent on breaking the morale and spirit of the British, transforming us into a compliant, dependent, unquestioning herd ready to accept whatever indignity might be foisted upon us next?

The threat of nuclear war – dear God, the existential threat we all grew up fearing in the last third of the 20th century – the climax we are being invited to accept as somehow inevitable. The very existence of every man woman and child apparently hanging in the balance amidst all the politics as the fighting drags on, month after month?

And then … and then … as if all of that wasn’t enough … look at the politics here. Last week came the financial statement from Hunt – the chancellor no one wanted except the markets that make our country’s decisions for us.

I listened to as much of his rubbish as I could before I felt the gorge rise in my throat. Surely, I thought, this litany of contempt, nudge unit grooming, obfuscation and downright patronising piffle would awaken the slumbering, sleep walking masses to the now undeniable, unmissable fact that those occupying the great offices of State are working around the clock to break Britain and the British.

No help for the workers. No help for pubs and restaurants. No help and only more hurt for small businesses of all sorts. No help for those who generate the modest profits upon which everything in our society depends.

Those who received no furlough – not a cent – are to reach into empty pockets and pay for those that did. This is the equivalent of throwing a dinner party, inviting some to enjoy all they can eat, and then insisting that those who watched from outside the restaurant, hungry while they pressed their noses against the glass, should now help foot the bill for food they didn’t eat. This all on its own is a graceless, egregious scandal.

So called Bounce Back loans are being reclaimed from the bank accounts of those that received them. But furlough … no … that money went out and won’t be coming back … and the same self-employed the government hates are being ordered to pick up the tab.

Listen to some of what Hunt said, if you have the stomach for it:  “We also protect the vulnerable because to be British is to be compassionate and this is a compassionate government.”

He goes on: “The Bank of England, which has done an outstanding job since its independence, now has my wholehearted support in its mission to defeat inflation and I today confirm we will not change its remit.”

And then try swallowing this vomit-inducing cant from Hunt:  “Finally, Mr Speaker, I have talked a lot today about British values – of compassion, hard work, dignity, fairness.

There is no more British value than our commitment to protect and honour those who built the country we live in.

But the British people are tough, inventive and resourceful.

We have risen to bigger challenges before.

We aren’t immune to these headwinds but with this plan for stability, growth and public services, we will face into the storm.”

How that man has the gall to pronounce such disingenuous platitudes in public, at such a time, when millions are on their knees, is beyond me. Him and his parliamentary colleagues are the people who put us here – with policies they kept pushing long after anyone with half a brain could see the disaster coming.

The Conservative Party has become what the Labour Party has been for generations – the enemy of those who would work all the hours to make something of themselves – something that might raise up their children and set them on the same aspirational road.

Governments of every stripe hate and loathe the self-employed, the entrepreneurs, because by definition those sovereign individuals do not need the State. What those people need is for the State to get out of their way – and this latest iteration of the State refuses to do that. On the contrary, they seek only to break the middling classes and have them ask for help instead.

What will it take, I ask, before the rest of this country awakens to the realization that we are being had, being played, taken for fools? What will it take before those citizens see that we have put ourselves at the mercy of a criminal enterprise shaped only to rob us blind, hobble all ambition and see to it that we are cowed and submissive with our hands held out for a few shekels from our self-proclaimed lords and masters.

Here’s the thing: all of it stops when we say it stops.

It doesn’t require every one of us – just enough of us – simply to realize that no cavalry is coming, no help is at hand.

It is up to us to see these charlatans for what they are, to disregard them – red, blue and every color in between – to turn our backs on them, and work together to make something else, something decent, something that is ours.

(End Transcript)

Nov 6 2022

Neil Oliver Responds to the Request for COVID Amnesty, “You want WHAT”?


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on November 5, 2022 | Sundance 

One of the most stubborn voices of unapologetic reason and pushback over the past two years amid COVID madness has been U.K political pundit Mr Neil Oliver.

Specifically, because Oliver and CTH are aligned in a common brotherhood within the rebel alliance movement; and specifically, because Oliver outlined in weekly granular details all of the affronts to reason, liberty and general commonsense throughout the pandemic madness; I was waiting to see/hear how Oliver would respond to the latest request for “pandemic amnesty” from the Branch Covidians.  His 15-minute reply to the totalitarians beating a hasty retreat is awesome.

Oliver walks through some of the more egregious examples of totalitarianism and dictatorial fiat from two years of the public-private partnership, and then outlines why it is beyond comprehension that Covidians would even fathom to request “amnesty” after their two-years terroristic campaign and shredding of individual rights at the altar of the Covidian religion.  Well worth watching:

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First, the pandemic madness needs to stop.  Then the perpetrators need to admit the totality of their brutal conduct.  Then an apology.  Then there needs to be visible and public requests for forgiveness. Then there needs to be a reckoning, which includes the need for consequential punishment.  After the punishment as a deterrent, there needs to be a global vow never to repeat the behaviors.

Any talk of possible amnesty comes long after those sequential issues are resolved.  But considering, well, hell, they haven’t even stopped the madness yet, they have some nerve asking for amnesty.