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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57507.htm

De-dollarization kicks into high gear

The US dollar is essential to US global power projection. But in 2022, the dollar share of reserve currencies slid 10 times faster than the average in the past two decades.

It is now established that the US dollar’s status as a global reserve currency is eroding. When corporate western media begins to attack the multipolar world’s de-dollarization narrative in earnest, you know the panic in Washington has fully set in.

The numbers: the dollar share of global reserves was 73 percent in 2001, 55 percent in 2021, and 47 percent in 2022. The key takeaway is that last year, the dollar share slid 10 times faster than the average in the past two decades.

Now it is no longer far-fetched to project a global dollar share of only 30 percent by the end of 2024, coinciding with the next US presidential election.

The defining moment – the actual trigger leading to the Fall of the Hegemon – was in February 2022, when over $300 billion in Russian foreign reserves were “frozen” by the collective west, and every other country on the planet began fearing for their own dollar stores abroad. There was some comic relief in this absurd move, though: the EU “can’t find” most of it.

Now cue to some current essential developments on the trading front.

Over 70 percent of trade deals between Russia and China now use either the ruble or the yuan, according to Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov.

Russia and India are trading oil in rupees. Less than four weeks ago, Banco Bocom BBM became the first Latin American bank to sign up as a direct participant of the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), which is the Chinese alternative to the western-led financial messaging system, SWIFT.

China’s CNOOC and France’s Total signed their first LNG trade in yuan via the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange.

The deal between Russia and Bangladesh for the construction of the Rooppur nuclear plant will also bypass the US dollar. The first $300 million payment will be in yuan, but Russia will try to switch the next ones to rubles.

Russia and Bolivia’s bilateral trade now accepts settlements in Boliviano. That’s extremely pertinent, considering Rosatom’s drive to be a crucial part of the development of lithium deposits in Bolivia.

Notably, many of those trades involve BRICS countries – and beyond. At least 19 nations have already requested to join BRICS+, the extended version of the 21st century’s major multipolar institution, whose founding members are Brazil, Russia, India, and China, then South Africa. The foreign ministers of the original five will start discussing the modalities of accession for new members in an upcoming June summit in Capetown.

BRICS, as it stands, is already more relevant to the global economy than the G7. The latest IMF figures reveal that the existing five BRICS nations will contribute 32.1 percent to global growth, compared to the G7’s 29.9 percent.

With Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Turkey, Indonesia, and Mexico as possible new members, it is clear that key Global South players are starting to focus on the quintessential multilateral institution capable of smashing Western hegemony.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) are working in total sync as Moscow’s partnership with Riyadh in OPEC+ metastasizes into BRICS+, in parallel to the deepening Russia-Iran strategic partnership.

MbS has willfully steered Saudi Arabia toward Eurasia’s new power trio Russia-Iran-China (RIC), away from the US. The new game in West Asia is the incoming BRIICSS – featuring, remarkably, both Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose historic reconciliation was brokered by yet another BRICS heavyweight, China.

Importantly, the evolving Iran-Saudi rapprochement also implies a much closer relationship between the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) as a whole and the Russia-China strategic partnership.

This will translate into complementary roles – in terms of trade connectivity and payment systems – for the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), linking Russia-Iran-India, and the China-Central-Asia-West Asia Economic Corridor, a key plank of Beijing’s ambitious, multi-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Today, only Brazil, with its President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva caged by the Americans and an erratic foreign policy, runs the risk of being relegated by the BRICS to the status of a secondary player.

Beyond BRIICSS

The de-dollarization train has been propelled to high-speed status by the accumulated effects of Covid-linked supply chain chaos and collective western sanctions on Russia.

The essential point is this: The BRICS have the commodities, and the G7 controls finance. The latter can’t grow commodities, but the former can create currencies – especially when their value is linked to tangibles like gold, oil, minerals, and other natural resources.

Arguably the key swing factor is that pricing for oil and gold is already shifting to Russia, China, and West Asia.

In consequence, demand for dollar-denominated bonds is slowly but surely collapsing. Trillions of US dollars will inevitably start to go back home – shattering the dollar’s purchasing power and its exchange rate.

The fall of a weaponized currency will end up smashing the whole logic behind the US’ global network of 800+ military bases and their operating budgets.

Since mid-March, in Moscow, during the Economic Forum of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CSI) – one of the key inter-government organizations in Eurasia formed after the fall of the USSR – further integration is being actively discussed between the CSI, the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the BRICS.

Eurasian organizations coordinating the counterpunch to the current western-led system, which tramples on international law, was not by accident one of the key themes of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s speech at the UN earlier this week. It is also no accident that four member-states of the CIS – Russia and three Central Asian “stans” – founded the SCO along with China in June 2001.

The Davos/Great Reset globalist combo, for all practical purposes, declared war on oil immediately after the start of Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine. They threatened OPEC+ to isolate Russia – or else, but failed humiliatingly. OPEC+, effectively run by Moscow-Riyadh, now rules the global oil market.

Western elites are in a panic. Especially after Lula’s bombshell on Chinese soil during his visit with Xi Jinping, when he called on the whole Global South to replace the US dollar with their own currencies in international trade.

Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank (ECB), recently told the New York-based Council of Foreign Relations – the heart of the US establishment matrix – that “geopolitical tensions between the US and China could raise inflation by 5 percent and threaten the dominance of the dollar and euro.”

The monolithic spin across western mainstream media is that BRICS economies trading normally with Russia “creates new problems for the rest of the world.” That’s utter nonsense: it only creates problems for the dollar and the euro.

The collective west is reaching Desperation Row – now timed with the astonishing announcement of a Biden-Harris US presidential ticket running again in 2024. This means that the US administration’s neo-con handlers will double down on their plan to unleash an industrial war against both Russia and China by 2025.

The petroyuan cometh

And that brings us back to de-dollarization and what will replace the hegemonic reserve currency of the world. Today, the GCC represents more than 25 percent of global oil exports (Saudi Arabia stands at 17 percent). More than 25 percent of China’s oil imports come from Riyadh. And China, predictably, is the GCC’s top trading partner.

The Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange went into business in March 2018. Any oil producer, from anywhere, can sell in Shanghai in yuan today. This means that the balance of power in the oil markets is already shifting from the US dollar to the yuan.

The catch is that most oil producers prefer not to keep large stashes of yuan; after all, everyone is still used to the petrodollar. Cue to Beijing linking crude futures in Shanghai to converting yuan into gold. And all that without touching China’s massive gold reserves.

This simple process happens via gold exchanges set up in Shanghai and Hong Kong. And not by accident, it lies at the heart of a new currency to bypass the dollar being discussed by the EAEU.

Dumping the dollar already has a mechanism: making full use of the Shanghai Energy Exchange’s future oil contracts in yuan. That’s the preferred path for the end of the petrodollar.

US global power projection is fundamentally based on controlling the global currency. Economic control underlies the Pentagon’s ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ doctrine. Yet now, even military projection is in shambles, with Russia maintaining an unreachable advance on hypersonic missiles and Russia-China-Iran able to deploy an array of carrier-killers.

The Hegemon – clinging to a toxic cocktail of neoliberalism, sanction dementia, and widespread threats – is bleeding from within. De-dollarization is an inevitable response to system collapse. In a Sun Tzu 2.0 environment, it is no wonder the Russia-China strategic partnership exhibits no intention of interrupting the enemy when he is so busy defeating himself.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/04/27/australia-pays-washington-swamp-monsters-for-war-advice/

Australia Pays Washington Swamp Monsters For War Advice

Australia has been paying insiders of the US war machine for consultation on how to run the nation’s military, a massive conflict of interest given that Washington has been grooming Australia for a role in its war agendas against China.

In an article titled “Retired US admirals charging Australian taxpayers thousands of dollars per day as defence consultants,” the ABC reports that according to documents which were provided by the Pentagon to congress last month, “dozens of retired US military figures have been granted approval to work for Australia since 2012.”

For those who don’t speak imperialist, “retired US military figure” generally means “Someone who used to be paid by the US government to advance the interests of the US empire, and is now paid by corporations and/or foreign governments to advance the interests of the US empire.” These corrupt warmongers rotate in and out of the revolving door of the DC swamp, from government to war industry jobs to punditry gigs to influential think tanks and then back again into government, advancing the interests of the US empire the entire time and growing wealthy in the process.

This dynamic allows a permanent constellation of reliable empire managers to continually exert influence around the world in support of the US empire, regardless of who gets voted into or out of office in the performative display of electoral politics. It’s a big part of why US foreign policy remains the same regardless of who’s officially running the elected government in Washington, and it’s a big part of why the media and arms industry which support the US war machine keep playing the same tune as well.

Among the American swamp monsters Australia paid for consulting work is the Obama administration’s spy chief James Clapper, who has an established track record of lying and manipulating to advance the interests of the US empire:

• In 2013 Clapper committed perjury by telling the Senate under oath that the NSA does not knowingly collect data on millions of Americans, only to have that lie exposed by the Edward Snowden leaks a few months later.
• In 2016 Clapper played a foundational role in fomenting public hysteria about Russia with the flimsy ODNI report on alleged Russian election interference, which remains riddled with massive plot holes. He would later go on to repeatedly voice the opinion that Russians are “almost genetically driven” toward nefarious and subversive behavior.
• In 2020 Clapper signed the infamous and now fully discredited letter from former intelligence insiders saying the Hunter Biden laptop story was likely a Russian disinfo op, falsely telling CNN that the story was “textbook Soviet Russian tradecraft at work” and that the emails on the laptop had “no metadata” on them.

Also among the American military consultants paid by Australia is a man we just discussed the other day, William Hilarides, who will be telling Australia how to reconfigure its navy because apparently no Australians are available for that job. We now know that according to the released Pentagon documents Canberra has already paid Hilarides almost $2.5 million since 2016 for his consulting work.

This information was originally reported by The Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock and Nate Jones, who last year also broke the remarkable story that a former US navy admiral named Stephen Johnson had actually served as Australia’s deputy navy secretary, a position which needless to say is not normally open to foreigners.

This is just one of the many, many ways that Australia is being interwoven into the US war machine, from our 2023 Defence Strategic Review which further enshrines our position as a US military asset, to our Secretary of Defence Richard Marles saying that the Australian Defence Force is moving “beyond interoperability to interchangeability” with the US military and being suspiciously secretive about who his golfing buddies were in his last trip to the US, to Australian officials angrily dismissing attempts to find out if the US has been bringing nuclear weapons into Australia, to the Australian media pounding Australian consciousness with anti-China hysteria to such an extent that we’re now seeing hate crimes perpetrated against Asian Australians.

I’ve always wondered what it would be like to witness the information environment of Washington’s next military proxy from the inside — what it would be like to be a Ukrainian with an ear to the ground during the lead-up to the 2014 coup or whatever. Well, now I know. Now all Australians with an ear to the ground know.

I’ve been generally dismissive of Australian affairs throughout most of my commentary career despite living here, since my focus is on resisting the disasters that humanity as a whole is headed toward, and Australia has always seemed like a fairly irrelevant player on the world stage because of its impotent subservience to Washington. But it’s becoming clearer and clearer that it is exactly because of Australia’s blind subservience to Washington that Australia is worth paying attention to, since that relationship may well end up giving our nation a front-row seat to World War Three.

Australians are going to have to wake up to what’s being done to us and the abominable agendas our nation is being exploited to advance. We’re being groomed for a military confrontation of unimaginable horror, one which absolutely does not need to take place, all in the name of something as trivial as securing US planetary hegemony. We’ve got to start saying no to this, and we’ve got to start right now.

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https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2023-04-26/tucker-carlsons-firing-reveals-how-afraid-the-media-is-of-independent-journalists/

Tucker Carlson’s firing reveals how afraid the media is of independent journalists 

The TV host paid the price because he tried the impossible: straddling the divide between corporate media and critical journalism

While the left is busy hating on Tucker Carlson, and not without reason, it is missing the bigger picture. Carlson was a genuine aberration in US corporate media. Which is why he is gone – sacked by media “titan” Rupert Murdoch.

Yes, over the years Carlson played on white fears, placing him firmly on the right. But he also gave over his massive corporate platform at Fox News to some of the most critical and thoughtful independent journalists and pundits around – from Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Mate to Jimmy Dore.

Carlson not only brought them into the living rooms of Main Street, but he undoubtedly helped them grow their audiences and influence.

In that way, he exposed ordinary Americans to critical perspectives, especially on US foreign policy, that they had no hope of hearing anywhere else – and most certainly not from so-called “liberal” corporate media outlets like CNN and MSNBC.

And he did so while constantly ridiculing the media’s craven collusion with those in power.

But all that is being ignored. Media analysis of Carlson’s departure has focused so far almost exclusively on his clashes with Fox News management, and a series of disrespectful tweets, that have come to light as a result of the recent Dominion court case, in which Murdoch was forced to settle with a massive payout.

But those clashes cannot be understood outside a wider context in which Carlson was pushing against institutional media constraints at Fox designed to prevent the real work of journalism – holding the powerful to account.

Nord Stream silence

Here is just a taste of some of the highlights of his time with Fox News:

* While the rest of the US media ignored a major investigation by the legendary journalist Seymour Hersh, or deflected attention to a crazed, semi-official conspiracy theory involving a rogue crew on a yacht, Carlson dared present evidence that the US blew up the Nord Stream pipelines – an act of unprecedented industrial and environmental terrorism directed against Europe:

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* Uniquely among corporate journalists, Carlson gave airtime to the testimony of whistleblowers from the OPCW, the UN body monitoring chemical weapons. The testimony confirmed that, under US pressure, the OPCW rigged an investigation into a gas attack in Douma, Syria, to blame President Bashar Assad and retrospectively provide the pretext for illegal US, UK and French air strikes:

* Carlson recently broke with the corporate media consensus by highlighting the substance of the Pentagon leaks, not least that US soldiers are covertly fighting in Ukraine. He went further, berating fellow journalists for colluding with the White House in helping to track down the leaker and cover up the most significant revelations:

* And he gave an open mic to Jimmy Dore to explain that the US is currently waging unprovoked wars against Russia and China: “Your enemy is not China. Your enemy is not Russia. Your enemy is the Military Industrial Complex. … The United States is the world’s terrorist.”

As Dore tweeted after Carlson’s sacking: “No one else in all of corporate news ever brings on anti-war voices, [and] the one that did just got axed. Doesn’t matter that he’s the most watched show in all of news – much like when MSNBC fired Phil Donohue for his anti-Iraq War coverage when he had #1 show on network.”

Loose cannon

Rather than welcome this record, blinkered tribalists on the left preferred instead to accuse Greenwald, Mate and others either of outing themselves as rightwingers by appearing on Carlson’s show, or of providing legitimacy to Fox’s white fearmongering.

It even reached the absurd depths that any retweet of a Carlson clip was denounced because, supposedly, the left was poisoning its own well. We would soon convert ourselves from socialism to national socialism.

But if Carlson’s firing by Murdoch suggests anything, it is that the corporate media had grown increasingly fearful of the extent to which Carlson was becoming a loose cannon, and that the kind of independent journalism he hosted and amplified was gaining traction.

Through a rapid rise in his ratings, Carlson proved that there is an appetite, a big one, for stories that question the consensual narrative imposed by the rest of the corporate media, for stories that actually hold the powerful to account – rather simply claiming to – and for stories that refuse to assume Western meddling around the globe is necessarily a good thing.

If it was only white fearmongering that drew audiences and propelled network news hosts to the top slot, then Sean Hannity would surely be king of the ratings, not Carlson.

The reality, the one Carlson confirms, is that there is an audience ready to listen to critical, independent journalism – when it can be found. The job of the corporate media is precisely to stop viewers hearing dissident views, a rule that Carlson played fast and loose with for too long. Now, it seems, he has paid the price.

Fate sealed

It is interesting to consider too, if we are debating the effect of exposing Fox News audiences to leftwing and dissident perspectives, what impact Greenwald, Mate and others had on Carlson himself.

Those who know him well, such as Greenwald, have argued that he is on political path away from the views he once held. There is certainly evidence for this. And it may be that it was just such evidence that sealed his fate.

Sounding more like Noam Chomsky, Carlson refers in the clip below to the media as a “control apparatus” and admits “I spent most of my life being part of the problem”, including by promoting the 2003 Iraq war.

Carlson: “The media are not here to inform you. Really! Even on the big things that really matter like the economy, wars, Covid… Their job is not to inform you. They are working for the small group of people who actually run the world. They are their servants… and we should treat them with maximum contempt because they have earned it.”

Presumably Murdoch understood that he was very much included in “the small group of people who actually run the world”, a group that should “earn our contempt”.

But beyond speculating about Carlson’s motives, the more significant point – the one we should celebrate and highlight – is that media “consumers” are slowly becoming less passive and more critical of traditional sources of information.

Carlson understood that trend and tried to straddle the divide. He had a foot in both the corporate media camp and the independent camp. Through his sacking, he has proved just how untenable that position is.

One – the corporate media – is there to entertain and distract us, and keep us locked into tribal identities, banging heads against each other in utter futility. The other – independent media – is there to help us think more critically about power and about our responsibilities as citizens.

You can’t serve those two masters – as Tucker Carlson just found out the hard way.

(  Excellent information in Tucker Show videos at article address )

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https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_war_on_free_speech_is_really_a_war_on_the_right_to_criticize_the_government

The War on Free Speech Is Really a War on the Right to Criticize the Government

 “Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet.”— Justice William O. Douglas

Absolutely, there is a war on free speech.

To be more accurate, however, the war on free speech is really a war on the right to criticize the government.

Although the right to speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom, every day in this country, those who dare to speak their truth to the powers-that-be find themselves censored, silenced or fired.

Indeed, those who run the government don’t take kindly to individuals who speak truth to power.

In fact, the government has become increasingly intolerant of speech that challenges its power, reveals its corruption, exposes its lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

This is nothing new, nor is it unique to any particular presidential administration.

For instance, as part of its campaign to eradicate so-called “disinformation,” the Biden Administration likened those who share “false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information” to terrorists. This government salvo against consumers and spreaders of “mis- dis- and mal-information” widens the net to potentially include anyone who is exposed to ideas that run counter to the official government narrative.

In his first few years in office, President Trump declared the media to be “the enemy of the people,” suggested that protesting should be illegal, and that NFL players who kneel in protest during the national anthem “shouldn’t be in the country.”

Then again, Trump was not alone in his presidential disregard for the rights of the citizenry, especially as it pertains to the right of the people to criticize those in power.

President Obama signed into law anti-protest legislation that makes it easier for the government to criminalize protest activities (10 years in prison for protesting anywhere in the vicinity of a Secret Service agent). The Obama Administration also waged a war on whistleblowers, which The Washington Post described as “the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration,” and “spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records.”

Part of the Patriot Act signed into law by President George W. Bush made it a crime for an American citizen to engage in peaceful, lawful activity on behalf of any group designated by the government as a terrorist organization. Under this provision, even filing an amicus brief on behalf of an organization the government has labeled as terrorist would constitute breaking the law.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the FBI to censor all news and control communications in and out of the country in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt also signed into law the Smith Act, which made it a crime to advocate by way of speech for the overthrow of the U.S. government by force or violence.

President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which made it illegal to criticize the government’s war efforts.

President Abraham Lincoln seized telegraph lines, censored mail and newspaper dispatches, and shut down members of the press who criticized his administration.

In 1798, during the presidency of John Adams, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to “write, print, utter or publish … any false, scandalous, and malicious” statements against the government, Congress or president of the United States.

Clearly, the government has been undermining our free speech rights for quite a while now.

Good, bad or ugly, it’s all free speech unless as defined by the government it falls into one of the following categories: obscenity, fighting words, defamation (including libel and slander), child pornography, perjury, blackmail, incitement to imminent lawless action, true threats, and solicitations to commit crimes.

This idea of “dangerous” speech, on the other hand, is peculiarly authoritarian in nature. What it amounts to is speech that the government fears could challenge its chokehold on power.

The kinds of speech the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation, prosecution and outright elimination include: hate speech, bullying speech, intolerant speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, incendiary speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, right-wing speech, left-wing speech, extremist speech, politically incorrect speech, etc.

Conduct your own experiment into the government’s tolerance of speech that challenges its authority, and see for yourself.

Stand on a street corner—or in a courtroom, at a city council meeting or on a university campus—and recite some of the rhetoric used by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Adams and Thomas Paine without referencing them as the authors.

For that matter, just try reciting the Declaration of Independence, which rejects tyranny, establishes Americans as sovereign beings, recognizes God (not the government) as the Supreme power, portrays the government as evil, and provides a detailed laundry list of abuses that are as relevant today as they were 240-plus years ago.

My guess is that you won’t last long before you get thrown out, shut up, threatened with arrest or at the very least accused of being a radical, a troublemaker, a sovereign citizen, a conspiratorialist or an extremist.

Try suggesting, as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin did, that Americans should not only take up arms but be prepared to shed blood in order to protect their liberties, and you might find yourself placed on a terrorist watch list and vulnerable to being rounded up by government agents.

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms,” declared Jefferson. He also concluded that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Observed Franklin: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!”

Better yet, try suggesting as Thomas Paine, Marquis De Lafayette, John Adams and Patrick Henry did that Americans should, if necessary, defend themselves against the government if it violates their rights, and you will be labeled a domestic extremist.

“It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government,” insisted Paine. “When the government violates the people’s rights,” Lafayette warned, “insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensable of duties.” Adams cautioned, “A settled plan to deprive the people of all the benefits, blessings and ends of the contract, to subvert the fundamentals of the constitution, to deprive them of all share in making and executing laws, will justify a revolution.” And who could forget Patrick Henry with his ultimatum: “Give me liberty or give me death!”

Then again, perhaps you don’t need to test the limits of free speech for yourself.

One such test is playing out before our very eyes on the national stage led by those who seem to believe that only individuals who agree with the government are entitled to the protections of the First Amendment.

To the contrary, James Madison, the father of the Constitution, was very clear about the fact that the First Amendment was established to protect the minority against the majority.

I’ll take that one step further: the First Amendment was intended to protect the citizenry from the government’s tendency to censor, silence and control what people say and think.

Having lost our tolerance for free speech in its most provocative, irritating and offensive forms, the American people have become easy prey for a police state where only government speech is allowed.

You see, the powers-that-be understand that if the government can control speech, it controls thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

This is how freedom rises or falls.

Americans of all stripes would do well to remember that those who question the motives of government provide a necessary counterpoint to those who would blindly follow where politicians choose to lead.

We don’t have to agree with every criticism of the government, but we must defend the rights of all individuals to speak freely without fear of punishment or threat of banishment.

Never forget: what the architects of the police state want are submissive, compliant, cooperative, obedient, meek citizens who don’t talk back, don’t challenge government authority, don’t speak out against government misconduct, and don’t step out of line.

What the First Amendment protects—and a healthy constitutional republic requires—are citizens who routinely exercise their right to speak truth to power.

Tolerance for dissent is vital if we are to survive as a free nation.

While there are all kinds of labels being put on so-called “unacceptable” speech today, the real message being conveyed by those in power is that Americans don’t have a right to express themselves if what they are saying is unpopular, controversial or at odds with what the government determines to be acceptable.

By suppressing free speech, the government is contributing to a growing underclass of Americans who are being told that they can’t take part in American public life unless they “fit in.”

Mind you, it won’t be long before anyone who believes in holding the government accountable to respecting our rights and abiding by the rule of law is labeled an “extremist,” is relegated to an underclass that doesn’t fit in, must be watched all the time, and is rounded up when the government deems it necessary.

It doesn’t matter how much money you make, what politics you subscribe to, or what God you worship: as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are all potential suspects, terrorists and lawbreakers in the eyes of the government.

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https://brownstone.org/articles/tucker-carlson-departure-power-of-big-pharma/

The Tucker Carlson Departure From Fox and the Power of Big Pharma  

Why would Fox News fire its most popular host? On average, one million additional people tuned into Tucker Carlson every night than to the Fox programs before and after his show. He drew four times as many viewers as the 8PM show on CNN, Anderson Cooper 360°. He was the leading draw on Fox’s streaming service, and there is no rising star at the network expected to take his seat. 

It wasn’t a lack of success that pushed out Carlson, so we are left to speculate why Fox fired their lead anchor. It could have been a battle of egos between Carlson and the Murdochs. Carlson may have threatened to run programming that they disfavored regarding the tapes from January 6, the recent settlement with Dominion, or the coverage of Donald Trump. 

Any of these explanations would indicate that ego triumphed over financial sense in the boardroom. Carlson is a revenue driver, and the company’s stock tanked after the announcement on Monday. 

But what if there was a rational economic explanation for his firing? What if the people who own Fox have far more interest in neutering criticism of their other economic holdings than they do in the success of Fox’s television department? 

Last Wednesday, Carlson opened his show with an attack on the pharmaceutical industry’s manipulation of the news media.

“Sometimes you wonder just how filthy and dishonest our news media are,” Carlson started. “Ask yourself, is any news organization you know of so corrupt that it’s willing to hurt you on behalf of its biggest advertisers?”

Carlson then attacked the news media for taking “hundreds of millions of dollars from Big Pharma companies” and promoting “their sketchy products on the air and as they did that, they maligned anyone who was skeptical of those products.” 

Five days later, Carlson was fired. Perhaps, his stardom was not large enough to overcome the issue that he described. 

Beyond MyPillow, Fox News’ largest advertisers include GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Novartis, and BlackRock. ​​

Vanguard is the largest institutional owner of Fox Corporation, holding a 6.9 percent stake in the company. BlackRock owns an additional 4.7 percent. 

Vanguard and BlackRock are the two largest owners of Pfizer. Combined, they own over 15 percent of the company.

Vanguard and BlackRock are the two largest owners of Johnson & Johnson. Combined, they own over 14 percent of the company. 

Vanguard and BlackRock are the second and third largest owners of Moderna. Combined, they own over 13 percent of the company. 

Perhaps, you may be noticing a trend. 

Vanguard and BlackRock’s holdings in Fox amount to less than $750 million. Their investments in Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, and Merck amount to over $225 billion.

When Carlson attacked the pharmaceutical industry, he was attacking the same funds that owned his network. But those investments in Big Pharma were 300 times larger than their equity in Fox. Carlson may have stepped on a landmine, speaking the unspeakable against the intertwined economic interests of the world’s most powerful companies.  

As pharmaceutical companies took over public policy during Covid, they dedicated significantly more money to advertising and marketing than research and development (R&D). 

In 2020, Pfizer spent $12 billion on sales and marketing and $9 billion on R&D. That year, Johnson & Johnson devoted $22 billion to sales and marketing and $12 billion to R&D. 

The industry’s efforts were rewarded. Billions of dollars in advertising resulted in millions of Americans tuning into programming sponsored by Pfizer. The press promoted their products and seldom mentioned Big Pharma’s history of unjust enrichment, fraud, and criminal pleas.

​​Upon the release of Pfizer’s 2022 annual report, CEO Albert Bourla stressed the importance of customers’ “positive perception” of the pharmaceutical giant. 

“2022 was a record-breaking year for Pfizer, not only in terms of revenue and earnings per share, which were the highest in our long history,” Bourla noted. “But more importantly, in terms of the percentage of patients who have a positive perception of Pfizer and the work we do.”

Carlson committed the media sin of attacking that positive perception, and it may have caused his firing. Regardless, the facts demonstrate a chilling indication that legacy media remains beholden to Big Pharma, and their programming requires the approval of the figures that they are supposed to hold accountable.

Here is his broadcast five days before he was fired.  ( Video at article address )

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/04/25/new-defence-review-further-enslaves-australia-to-us-war-agendas/

New Defence Review Further Enslaves Australia To US War Agendas

The Australian government has released the declassified version of its highly anticipated 2023 Defence Strategic Review (DSR), and the war propagandists are delighted.

Sydney Morning Herald’s Matthew Knott, most well-known for being told by former prime minister Paul Keating to “do the right thing and drum yourself out of Australian journalism” over his role in Nine Entertainment’s despicable Red Alert war-with-China propaganda series, has a new propaganda piece out titled “Defence review pulls no punches: China the biggest threat we face“.

Here are the first few paragraphs to give you a sense of the squealing glee these swamp monsters are experiencing right now:

Angus Houston and Stephen Smith have delivered a blaring wake-up call to any Australians who think they still live in a sanctuary of safety at the southern edge of the Earth: you’re living in the past.

To those inside and outside the Australian Defence Force who think business-as-usual will cut it in the future: you’re delusional.

Their message to anyone confused about the biggest threat to Australia’s national security is similarly blunt: it is our largest trading partner, China.

Like a pair of doctors delivering confronting news to an ill patient, the two men tasked with reshaping Australia’s military for the 21st century have opted for admirable candour in their defence strategic review.

Rejecting vague language about rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific, the former defence chief and defence minister call out just one nation – China – for threatening Australia’s core interests.

“Like a pair of doctors.” That’s the kind of third-rate propaganda we get in the nation with the most consolidated media ownership in the western world.

The “defence” review focuses not on defending the shores of the continent of Australia, but instead over and over again makes mention of the need to protect the “rules-based order” in Australia’s “region” — the so-called “Indo-Pacific” — which includes China. It is for the most part 110 pages of mental contortions explaining why “defending” the nation of Australia is going to have to look a whole lot like preparing to pick a fight with an Asian nation thousands of kilometers away.

The public DSR actually only mentions China by name eight times, though by Knott’s ecstatic revelry you’d assume that was the only word it contains. In contrast, the document mentions the United States no fewer than 38 times, with the United Kingdom getting two mentions, New Zealand getting only one, and Australia’s neighbors like Papua New Guinea and Indonesia not mentioned by name at all.

“Our Alliance with the United States will remain central to Australia’s security and strategy,” the review reads. “The United States will become even more important in the coming decades. Defence should pursue greater advanced scientific, technological and industrial cooperation in the Alliance, as well as increased United States rotational force posture in Australia, including with submarines.”

The overshadowing presence of the United States in a document that is ostensibly about Australian security interests would be confusing to you if you did not know that Australia has for generations served as a US military and intelligence asset, where our nation’s interests are so subordinated to Washington’s that we’re not even allowed to know if the US is bringing nuclear weapons into our country.

In a foreshadowing of the DSR’s pledge to pursue even greater cooperation with the US, last year Australia’s Secretary of Defence Richard Marles said that the Australian Defence Force is moving “beyond interoperability to interchangeability” with the US military so they can “operate seamlessly together, at speed.” Which is a fancy way of saying that any meaningful separation between the Australian military and the American military has been effectively dissolved.

Marles, who is currently facing scrutiny in Australia for being illicitly secretive about the nature of a free golf trip he went on in his last visit to the United States, has said that the DSR “will underpin our Defence policy for decades to come.”

Even some of the implementation of the DSR’s findings will be overseen by an American, not an Australian. ABC reports that “a major component to determine the future shape of Australia’s naval fleet will be decided later this year in a ‘short, sharp’ review to be led by US Navy Vice Admiral William H Hilarides.”

The review itself has been tainted with severe conflicts of interest with regard to US influence. As Mack Williams noted in Pearls And Irritations earlier this month, the senior advisor and principal author behind the review is a man named Peter Dean, a professor and Director of Foreign Policy and Defence at the United States Studies Centre (USSC) at the University of Sydney. The USSC receives funding from the US government, and Dean’s own CV boasts that he “currently leads two US State Department-funded public diplomacy programs on the US-Australia Alliance.”

So to recap, Australia’s foreign policy is being shaped “for decades to come” by an “independent” strategic review that (A) was authored by someone who is compromised by US funding, (B) is being implemented in part by an American former military official, (C) calls for greater and greater cooperation with the United States across the board, and (D) focuses primarily on targeting a nation that just so happens to be the number one geopolitical rival of the United States.

It is hilarious, then, that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the release of the DSR by proclaiming that “At its core, all of this is making Australia more self-reliant, more prepared and more secure in the years ahead.” It is funnier still that he concluded that same speech with an Anzac Day acknowledgement of Australian troops who who have died in wars “to defend our sovereignty and our freedom.”

It doesn’t get any less self-reliant and sovereign than just handing over your nation’s military to a more powerful nation with a “There ya go mate, use it however you reckon’s fair.” You really could not come up with a more egregious abdication of national sovereignty if you tried. And yet our prime minister babbles about sovereignty and self-reliance while doing exactly that.

Just annex us and make us the 51st state already. At least that way we’d get a pretend vote in America’s fake elections.

....

https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/25/patrick-lawrence-force-marching-the-europeans/

Force-Marching the Europeans

ZURICH—Am I the only American to travel overseas and feel embarrassed by the conduct of the diplomats Washington sends abroad to speak for our republic? It is pretty strange to find yourself, an ordinary citizen, apologizing for the intrusive, cajoling, bullying, badgering and otherwise crude utterances of this or that ambassador in this or that nation. But such is the state of things as the late-phase imperium fields its elbows-out undiplomats—a term I borrow from the Swiss, who suffer one as we speak.

Scott Miller, the Biden regime’s ambassador to Bern for a little more than a year, is indeed a doozy in this line. In his often-demonstrated view, he is in Switzerland to tell the Swiss what to do. At the moment, Miller is all over this nation for not signing on as a participant in Washington’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine—pressuring ministers, denigrating those who question the wisdom of the war, offending the Swiss in speeches and newspaper interviews. It is a one-man assault on Switzerland’s long, long tradition of neutrality, waged in the manner of an imperial proconsul disciplining an errant province. Swiss commentators question why the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, the FDFA, has not expelled this tone-deaf ignoramus. 

We should pay attention to people such as Miller and what they get up to, even if they rarely make headlines in our corporate media. It is now nearly lost to history, but Europeans were effectively force-marched—and occasionally bribed at leadership level—into following the Americans as they instigated and waged Cold War I. This is exactly what the State Department is doing once again. It behooves us to watch this process in real time so the realities of Cold War II are not so easily obscured. 

According to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, in effect since 1961, diplomats are barred from intervening in the internal affairs of host countries. The State Department lately displays as much concern for this U.N.–sponsored accord as it does for international law altogether: Little to none, you find when you watch these men and women at close range. 

I do not know when these breaches of etiquette and indeed law started, but at this point illegal diplomatic interventions into the politics and policies of others are the U.S. Foreign Service’s anti–Convention convention. These coercions are key, let us not miss, to the Biden regime’s concerted campaign to divide the world once again into confrontational blocs and erase all traces of principled neutrality. The Finns have succumbed and just joined NATO. We can put the Swedes in the same file. Now it is the Swiss and their neutrality in international affairs who take the heat. This is the thing about the liberal imperialists: They cannot tolerate deviation from their illiberal orthodoxies. It was George W. Bush who famously told the world “You’re either with us or with the terrorists.” American liberals deployed as diplomats cannot get enough of the thought.  

If you want to talk about the decline of diplomacy into crudely asserted demands that host countries conform to the wishes of other powers, you have to start with Andriy Melnyk, the blunt instrument representing Ukraine in Berlin until mid–2022, when even the Zelensky regime, never short of adolescently offensive behavior, found him too much to take. Melnyk thought nothing of calling German ministers “fucking assholes” if they questioned the wisdom of arming Ukraine, and openly celebrating Stepan Bandera, the Russophobic murderer of Jews, who allied with the Third Reich before and during World War II. 

For sheer vulgarity Melnyk is nonpareil. I miss the guy, honestly. American diplomats effect a more polished veneer, but they are every bit Melnyk’s match if the metric is self-righteous presumption that what Washington wants others to do is what others should do. 

You saw what was coming when Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state, named Richard Grenell ambassador to Berlin in 2018. Among Grenell’s choicer acts was to threaten German companies with sanctions—publicly, we’re talking about—if they participated in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, which, as Seymour Hersh has thoroughly and persuasively reported, and whose reporting has not been substantively contradicted, the Biden regime destroyed in a covert operation last year. By then he had dressed down Angela Merkel for opening the Federal Republic’s door to Syrian refugees in 2015. His broader mission, Grenell declared, was to encourage rightist European leaders: Sebastian Kurz, the right-wing populist serving as Austria’s chancellor during Grenell’s time, was “a rock star” in the American ambassador’s book.

You can call this many things, but diplomacy is not among them. I call it a measure of Washington’s loss of interest in dialogue, negotiation, compromise—altogether an understanding of other countries and their interests. It is the diplomacy of no diplomacy, as I have remarked elsewhere. Diplomats are effectively the guardians of trust among nations: Proper statecraft requires they should be competent to talk even to, or most of all, adversaries. But the policy cliques in Washington now prove indifferent to trust, even among allies, in favor of supine obeisance. 

The world darkens in many ways. This collapse of traditional statecraft is a certain marker of our not-so-gradual descent into a barbarism that ought to worry all of us. 

 We come to the case of Ambassador Miller, who arrived in Bern as the Biden regime’s appointee in January 2022.

With increasing alacrity in recent months, he has taken it upon himself to cajole Switzerland to drop its policy of neutrality and begin sending Swiss-made arms to Ukraine while lifting a ban on other nations’ re-export of Swiss matériel to the Kyiv regime. 

It is a fool’s errand on the very face of it. I would say trying to persuade the Swiss to abandon their neutrality is the equivalent of telling Americans to put aside the Declaration of Independence, except that the neutrality principle goes much further back in Swiss history. The Congress of Vienna formally guaranteed neutral status for the Confoederatio Helvetica, the nation’s official name, when it fashioned a new European order in 1815. By then the Swiss had considered themselves neutral in international affairs since sometime in the late Middle Ages. 

But who cares about all that? Who cares that the Swiss pride themselves on what they have accomplished by way of their neutral role in world affairs—not least but not only during and after World War II? Who cares that Switzerland, because it is formally neutral, has represented American interests in Cuba since 1961 and in Iran since the 1979 revolution? Who cares that Geneva is a city that survives, apart from the watches, on its dedication to mediation, the site of too many negotiations to count? 

Not Ambassador Miller. 

Surely under orders from the Blinken State Department, Miller has been boisterously hammering the Swiss in speeches and public forums to lift their longstanding stipulation that countries purchasing Swiss-made arms cannot re-export them, along with its determination that it will not sell weaponry to countries at war. It is in part a measure of the Biden regime’s desperation that the Swiss, whose armaments industry’s exports come to all of $900 million yearly, is suddenly essential to saving Ukraine from defeat. 

The Swiss are nothing like essential. The thought is ridiculous. The larger point, in my view, is far more insidious. It is to eliminate all thought of neutrality among nations in the (undeclared but obvious) name of the Biden regime’s intent to get everyone on side for a nice, long, profitable new Cold War.

On his arrival, Miller was quick to berate Swiss officials who questioned the sense of the sanctions regime the U.S. and the European Union have imposed on Russia. The Swiss government, reluctantly and controversially, went along with the sanctions that followed the outbreak of hostilities last year, but Miller has been pressing Bern not merely to sequester more funds deposited by Russian oligarchs, but to confiscate them so that they can be sent to Kyiv to finance the eventual reconstruction of Ukraine. 

Confiscation of this kind is straight-out illegal—something that matters not at all to the U.S. but matters greatly to Switzerland. When two journalists from Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the big Zurich daily, asked him about this in an interview a few weeks ago, Miller retreated into the cotton-wool language Americans routinely get from public figures. “This requires international dialogue,” Miller replied. “We assume we will find a way.”

In other words: We insist you breach international law, and worry not. We do it all the time.

When the Neue Zürcher Zeitung correspondents pointed out that Swiss President Alain Berset had recently defended Swiss neutrality and called for early negotiations to end the war, Miller replied, “Anyone can call for negotiations.”

Nice. American diplomacy at its best. Or at its typical worst these days. 

It is a matter of record that Miller has imposed himself into ministerial deliberations on the sanctions and arms-sales questions, boasting at one point that senior FDFA officials “know what we expect.”  But it was a remark Miller made during the Neue Zürcher Zeitung interview that has landed Miller in seriously bad odor among the Swiss. “In a way, NATO is a donut,” he said with exquisite insensitivity, “and Switzerland is the hole in the middle.”

I loved the outrage that followed. He has called Switzerland “nothing in the middle of a greasy American confection,” Roger Kōppel, a populist member of the National Council, the lower house of the legislature, exclaimed. “Bern should have reprimanded him immediately.”

It should have but it didn’t. The only constituencies sympathetic to Miller’s obnoxious importunings are sectors of the business community who stand to profit were Switzerland to abandon its neutrality to please the Americans and the political factions allied with them. Miller will stay, but there is no way under the sun that the vast majority of Switzerland’s nine million people would accept so fundamental a change in policy—and, indeed, in national identity. 

This leads me to a larger point. Miller can bang on all he likes about his commitment to democracy, but his conduct since arriving in Bern is measure enough that he doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about Swiss democracy–an impressive direct democracy–when it impedes Washington’s imperial pursuits. Do not tell me you are shocked, please: American diplomats no longer represent Americans abroad. They represent American elites to other nations’ elites. 

Miller is 43 and arrived with his partner without one day’s experience in statecraft. Together they were and may remain major donors to the Democratic Party, giving the appearance that they bought the Bern appointment–a common practice since at least the Reagan years. Scott Miller is an example of the cost of such practices to our institutions in terms of competence. 

The war against neutrality—and effectively sovereignty and self-determination—goes on. Last week Le Temps, the leading Geneva daily, reported that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz accosted Berset during the latter’s visit to Berlin with the demand that the Swiss “take uncomfortable but correct decisions” on neutrality, arms sales, and the Ukraine question. “We hope certain things will get done,” Scholz added with all the subtlety of… Scott Miller. 

Certain things will not get done. The Americans are not going to win this one, no matter how many obsequious Olaf Scholzs prevail on the Swiss in their behalf. Berset wasted no time making this clear in Berlin. 

I loved the response of Benedict Neff, a commentator at Neue Zürcher Zeitung, after Miller’s hole-in-the-donut remark. Diplomats such as Miller “take a considerable risk,” he wrote. “When their public rebukes are too high-handed, they trigger irritated reactions. The undiplomats are therefore useful in prompting critical reflections on one’s policies and giving them a clearer direction.”

This is not as it always turns out with the Europeans—Scholz being proof enough of the point—but it is as it should be, and as one hopes it will come to be.

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/23/chris-hedges-the-united-states-of-paralysis/

 The United States of Paralysis

The longer the corporate state erodes the social bonds that knit us to society and give us a sense of purpose and meaning the more inevitable an authoritarian state and a Christianized fascism becomes. 

Political paralysis is snuffing out what is left of our anemic democracy. 

It is the paralysis of doing nothing while the ruling oligarchs, who have increased their wealth by nearly a third since the pandemic began and by close to 90 percent over the past decade, orchestrate virtual tax boycotts as millions of Americans go into bankruptcy to pay medical bills, mortgages, credit card debt, student debt, car loans and soaring utility bills demanded by a system that has privatized nearly every aspect of our lives. 

It is the paralysis of doing nothing about raising the minimum wage, despite the ravages of inflation, around 600,000 homeless Americans and 33.8 million people living in food insecure homes, including 9.3 million children.

It is the paralysis of ignoring the climate crisis, the greatest existential threat we face, to expand fossil fuel extraction. 

It is the paralysis of pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the permanent war economy rather than repairing the nation’s collapsing roads, rails, bridges, schools, electrical grid and water supply. 

It is the paralysis of refusing to institute universal health care and regulate the for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical industries to fix the worst health care system of any highly industrialized nation, one in which life expectancy is falling and more Americans die from avoidable causes than in peer nations. More than 80 percent of maternal deaths in the U.S. alone are preventable, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It is the paralysis of being unwilling to curb police violence, dismantle the world’s largest prison system, end wholesale government surveillance of the public and reform a dysfunctional court system where nearly everyone, unless they can afford high-priced lawyers, is coerced into accepting onerous plea deals. 

It is the paralysis of standing passively by as the public, armed with arsenals of assault weapons, slaughter each other for crossing into their yard, pulling into their driveway, ringing their doorbell, angering them at work or school, or are so alienated and bitter at being left behind, they gun down groups of innocent people in acts of murderous self-immolation. 

Democracies are not slain by reactionary buffoons like Donald Trump, who was routinely sued for failing to pay workers and contractors and whose fictional television persona was sold to a gullible electorate, or shallow politicians like Joe Biden, whose political career has been devoted to serving corporate donors. These politicians provide a false comfort of individualizing our crises, as if removing this public figure or censoring that group will save us. 

Democracies are slain when a tiny cabal, in our case corporate, seizes control of the economy, culture and the political system and distorts them to exclusively serve its own interests. The institutions that should provide redress to the public become parodies of themselves, atrophy and die. How else to explain legislative bodies that can only unite to pass austerity programs, tax cuts for the billionaire class, bloated police and military budgets and reduce social spending? How else to explain courts that strip workers and citizens of their most basic rights? How else to explain a system of public education where the poor are, at best, taught basic numerical literacy and the rich send their children to private schools and universities with endowments in the billions of dollars?

Democracies are slain with false promises and hollow platitudes. Biden told us as a candidate he would raise the minimum wage to $15 and hand out $2,000 stimulus checks. He told us his American Jobs Plan would create “millions of good jobs.” He told us he would strengthen collective bargaining and ensure universal pre-kindergarten, universal paid family and medical leave, and free community college. He promised a publicly funded option for healthcare. He promised not to drill on federal lands and to promote a “green energy revolution and environmental justice.” None of that happened.

But, by now, most people have figured out the game. Why not vote for Trump and his grandiose, fantasy-driven promises? Are they any less real than those peddled by Biden and the Democrats? Why pay homage to a political system that is about betrayal? Why not sever yourself from the rational world that has only brought misery? Why pay fealty to old truths that have become hypocritical banalities? Why not blow the whole thing up?

As research by professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page underscores, our political system has turned the consent of the governed into a cruel joke. “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence,” they write.

The French sociologist Emile Durkheim in his book “On Suicide” called our state of hopelessness and despair, anomie, which he defined as “rulelessness.” Rulelessness means the rules that govern a society and create a sense of organic solidarity no longer function. It means that the rules we are taught — hard work and honesty will assure us a place in society; we live in a meritocracy; we are free; our opinions and votes matter; our government protects our interests — are a lie. Of course, if you are poor, or a person of color, these rules were always a myth, but a majority of the American public was once able to find a secure place in society, which is the bulwark of any democracy, as numerous political theorists going back to Aristotle point out. 

Tens of millions of Americans, cast adrift by deindustrialization, understand that their lives will not improve, nor will the lives of their children. Society, as Durkheim writes, is no longer “sufficiently present” for them. Those cast aside can participate in society, he writes, only through sadness.

The sole route left to affirm yourself, when every other avenue is closed off, is to destroy. Destruction, fueled by a grotesque hypermasculinity, imparts a rush and pleasure, along with feelings of omnipotence, which is sexualized and sadistic. It has a morbid attraction. This lust to destroy, what Sigmund Freud called the death instinct, targets all forms of life, including our own. 

These pathologies of death, diseases of despair, are manifested in the plagues that are sweeping across the county — opioid addiction, morbid obesity, gambling, suicide, sexual sadism, hate groups and mass shootings. My book, “America: The Farewell Tour,” is an exploration of the demons that grip the American psyche.

A web of social and political bonds — friendships and family ties, civic and religious rituals, meaningful work that imparts a sense of place, dignity and hope in the future —  allow us to be engaged in a project larger than the self. These bonds provide psychological protection from impending mortality and the trauma of rejection, isolation and loneliness. We are social animals. We need each other. Strip away these bonds and societies descend into fratricide. 

Capitalism is antithetical to creating and sustaining social bonds. Its core attributes — relationships that are transactional and temporary, prioritizing self-advancement through manipulating and exploiting others and the insatiable lust for profit — eliminates democratic space. The obliteration of all restraints on capitalism, from organized labor to government oversight and regulation, has left us at the mercy of predatory forces that, by nature, exploit human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse.

Trump, devoid of empathy and incapable of remorse, is the personification of our diseased society. He is what those who have been cast adrift are taught by corporate culture they should strive to become. He expresses, often with vulgarity, the inchoate rage of those left behind and is a walking advertisement for the cult of the self. Trump is not a product of the theft of the Podesta emails, the DNC leaks or James Comey. He is not a product of Vladimir Putin or Russian bots. He is a product, like aspiring doppelgängers such as Ron DeSantis, Tom Cotton and Margorie Taylor Greene, of anomie and social decay. 

Individuals are “too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected,” Durkheim writes. “Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs.”

These charlatans and demagogues, who reject the customary restraints of political and civic decorum, ridicule the “polite” elites who sold us out. They offer no workable solution to the crises besetting the country. They dynamite the old social order, which is already rotten, and cry for vengeance against real and phantom enemies as if these acts will magically resurrect a mythical golden age. The more that lost age remains elusive, the more vicious they become.

“Since the bourgeoisie claimed to be the guardian of Western traditions and confounded all moral issues by parading publicly virtues which it not only did not possess in private and business life, but actually held in contempt, it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values, and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest,” Hannah Arendt writes in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” of those who embraced the hate-filled rhetoric of fascism in the Weimar Republic. “What a temptation to flaunt extreme attitudes in the hypocritical twilight of double moral standards, to wear publicly the mask of cruelty if everybody was patently inconsiderate and pretended to be gentle, to parade wickedness in a world, not of wickedness, but meanness!”

Our society is deeply diseased. We must heal these social illnesses. We must mitigate this anomie. We must restore the severed social bonds and integrate the dispossessed back into society. If these social bonds remain ruptured it will guarantee a frightening neofascism. There are very dark forces circling around us. Sooner than we expect, they may have us in their grip.

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https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2023/04/24/the-western-world-has-forsaken-all-of-its-former-values/

The Western World Has Forsaken All of Its Former Values

Let’s be honest and face it. The Western countries are no longer democracies with free speech, a rule of law, and accountable governments. They are tyrannies.

Wherever you look you see free speech stifled. You see law used as a weapon against journalists like Julian Assange and an American president like Donald Trump and his supporters. The Biden regime has put one thousand Americans in prison for attending a rally for Trump by asserting without any evidence that the rally was an insurrection. The Western media is a propaganda ministry. The West’s foreign policy consists of war.

Law professor Jonathan Turley puts it this way:

“After Musk decided to buy Twitter, Hillary Clinton called upon European countries to force social media companies to censor Americans.  The European Union quickly responded by threatening Musk and other executives. Now, UK Technology and Science Secretary Michelle Donelan has announced plans to jail social media executives if they fail to censor so-called “harmful” content on their websites. The government, of course, will determine what is deemed too harmful for citizens to see or hear.” https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/04/no_author/the-tower-for-twitter-uk-minister-calls-for-jailing-social-media-bosses-who-do-not-censor-speech/

Democrats want to imprison Matt Taibbi for examining the Twitter files released by Elon Musk and showing that Twitter was coerced by the US government to censor the truth on many topics. In other words, as I warned would happen, it is already a de facto criminal offense to speak the truth and soon will be de jure. https://jonathanturley.org/2023/04/22/a-is-for-authoritarianism-ranking-democrat-suggests-possible-criminal-charges-against-journalist-matt-tiabbi/

Increasingly, leaders posing as democrats act as dictators. The French president recently ignored the elected parliament and decreed a change in the pension age that the French people opposed. The Canadian president decreed mandated injections of an untested substance in violation of the Nuremberg Laws and punished the truckers for protesting. US presidents Bush an Obama issued unconstitutional decrees by suspending habeas corpus and ordering execution on the basis of suspicion alone without due process. And now we see the British government planning to arrest Elon Musk for permitting free speech on Twitter.

Even crimes are being legalized with cities controlled by Democrats refusing to enforce property crimes if they are committed by blacks.

And only the French protest. Americans come across as sheep. The latest poll, possibly a concocted piece of disinformation as polls often are, finds that most Americans do not want Biden or Trump to run for president. One can understand about Biden whose main achievements are to normalize sexual perversion and to set the US on a course of war with Russia and China. But Trump stood up for the American people against the ruling oligarchy. If it is true that Americans want to abandon the only leader who speaks for them, the American people have acquiesced to tyranny.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/who-worldwide-power-grab-beware-new-international-health-regulation-pandemic-treaty-health-tyranny-never-heard-before-human-history/5816746

WHO’s Worldwide Power Grab: Beware of the New International Health Regulation and Pandemic Treaty, a Health Tyranny Never Heard of Before in Human History

Last call to the world to stop WHO from putting humanity into an Open Prison

Mr. Andrew Bridgen, Member UK Parliament, slams the new WHO International Health Regulation (IHR) and Pandemic Treaty as an unheard-of Power Grab – robbing all 194 WHO, member countries, the entire world, of their sovereignty over national health issues.

The new IHR and the Pandemic Treaty would be transferring the authority to decide what is a pandemic and what deserves the status of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), and literally how any matters of health ought to be treated – a limitless mandate of dictates – to the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO).

The WHO Director General may call an outright prohibition with punishment on using “WHO-banned” medication, even though proven effective. This is precisely what happened during COVID. Medical doctors and pharmacies were not allowed to prescribe, recommend, and sell medication that was effective against COVID, because WHO prohibited to do so.

This WHO power would be expanded as an International Law, or rather as a “rules-based order”, the new tyrannical term chosen by the elite, to circumvent literally any national and international laws.

Both the IHR and the Pandemic Treaty will be voted on by the upcoming World Health Assembly, from 21-30 May 2023. The vote is planned on 24 May 2023. A two-thirds majority is needed by the 194-member delegates to pass.

See this 20-min video of Mr. Andrew Bridgen, UK Member of Parliament, explaining to the UK Parliament why the new WHO IHR and Pandemic Treaty must be voted against.

This universal authority over world health issues would rest solely in the hands of a non- medical doctor, nor health scientist, Bill Gates-implanted WHO General Director, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who was previously a Board member of GAVI, the Vaccination Alliance and close partner of WHOs. GAVI is a creation of and funded by Bill Gates.

WHO is registered as a UN agency, which it is not really. WHO was created in 1948 at the behest of David Rockefeller (1915 – 2017), a known eugenist and globalist, to control the world population’s “health” – and death.

WHO has full immunity from criminal prosecution, and its senior employees have diplomatic and tax-free status in Switzerland.

WHO is more than 80% funded by private sources, mostly from the pharmaceuticals industry, the Gates Foundation, and other private sponsors. WHO is clearly working for the interests of its donors, mostly the pharmaceuticals and Bill Gates, also an eugenist – not for the people.

We have seen how badly – or better, criminally – WHO has handled COVID since the beginning of 2020, with worldwide lockdowns, social distancing, tremendous fear-mongering, destroying economies, people’s livelihoods, and causing death, not by COVID but by fear-induced diseases, depression and misery, for a disease which at the worst is very similar to the annual flu. And for a virus that to this date has NEVER been isolated.

And later, in December 2020, by imposing and coercing every government in the world to force its people to get injected with what they called a vaccine, a gene-modifying trial vaxx of the mRNA-type, never tested before. People were threatened and lost their jobs, were banned from public places – and much worse – if they would not submit to the untested, dangerous and even deadly vaxxes.

According to WHO’s orders, COVID hit the entire world, all its 194 member states at once, thus, justifying declaring on 16 March 2020 general lockdowns around the globe. This is an absolute impossibility. Even if a virus would exist – let me repeat, the COVID “virus” was NEVER isolated – a virus does not hit the entire globe at the same time.

As of March 16, 2020, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health (JHSPH) reports 179,165 confirmed “COVID cases” in 155 countries, with 7,081 deaths. The JHSPH is largely financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. These figures, even if they were true, would be far from justifying a global lockdown.

Already on 30 January 2020 WHO declared COVID a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).

Coincidentally, The World Economic Forum (WEF), infamous Davos meeting took place from 21-24 January 2020. WHO’s DG Tedros, Gates, the world’s power brokers and power structure, Big Pharma, Big Finance, most UN and other international organization were present at the 2020 WEF, when the pandemic decision, with global lockdowns, mask-wearing and all the social humiliating measures and dictates were decided.

These “decisions” were following a desk top dry-run called Event 201, simulating a “corona” virus, where also all the international, financial and pharma key players were present, on 18 October 2019 in NYC, barely three months before the infamous and unreal “outbreak” took place.

The powers behind the WEF put WHO in charge of committing this colossal, never-before witnessed crime on humanity, a “corona” virus, later called by WHO’s DG Tedros COVID-19.

This background on WHO’s COVID crime on humanity is just a forerunner to what may follow if the new International Health Regulation (IHR) and the intimately related Pandemic Treaty were to pass the World Health Assembly’s vote on 24 May 2023. It would take a two-thirds majority to be ratified.

If accepted, the new IHR and Pandemic Treaty would become law to be enforced by each and every country by WHO in 2024.

If approved, the members of WHO would just have passed a ”rule” eliminating a key human right, peoples right to decide over their bodies.

There is not much time to lobby against this “rule-based order”. Do whatever you can to have your government vote against this tyrannical power grab  — which would put humanity into a worldwide open air Health Prison.

If the new IHR and Pandemic Treaty are approved, We, the People, must take the necessary action and massively, in an organized and peaceful fashion, but relentlessly and decisively requesting our governments to Exit WHO, with immediate effect.

....

https://brownstone.org/articles/clean-vs-dirty-a-way-to-understand-everything/

Clean vs. Dirty: A Way to Understand Everything

The other day, I listened to as much National Public Radio as I could stand and one point stood out to me. The experience was anodyne. The topics were nothing that mattered. It felt like a gentle ooze of news that always came to the proper conclusion at the end of the well-produced bit. 

By proper, I hope you know what I mean. It confirmed the listeners’ biases. And everyone knows who they are: wealthy, mostly white professionals in urban centers with high-end salaries to match their educational credentials. Probably 90 percent Biden voters last time and next time, not because he is a great president but rather because he inherits the anti-deplorable mantle of his predecessor nominee. 

NPR was raising money on that particular day, which they do despite the taxpayer subsidies. If you give money, you can get an NPR umbrella or be given a bit of nature trail to adopt or perhaps acquire a coffee mug for your desk to proclaim your loyalties to your co-workers or just reinforce your opinions while eating your breakfast of Whole Foods granola and soy milk. 

The experience happened even as I’m reading, with great joy, Fear of a Microbial Planet by Steve Templeton. The book is about the ubiquity of germs, trillions of them everywhere. They can be a threat but they are mostly our friends. 

Exposure, his thesis goes, is the path to health. Without it we will die. And yet, over the last three years, avoiding exposure has been the main goal of policy and culture throughout the world. “Stop the spread” or “Slow the spread” or “Socially distance” or “Stay home, stay safe” have been entrenched as slogans to govern our lives. 

The phrases still have gravitas. It has been a maniacal fixation on a single pathogen to the exclusion of trillions of others that are truly everywhere in us and around us. It is like going back before the invention of the microscope when we didn’t know that every surface of everything is covered in creepy crawling things. We further indulge the completely unscientific fantasy that by doing some hopping-around dance to avoid others, plus covering our face and getting a shot, would keep us forever clean, meaning free of the bad pathogen.

Dr. Templeton’s view is that this is a potential disaster for human health. And he explains the point with great erudition and examples from all of history. He picks up on the extraordinarily keen insight of Dr. Sunetra Gupta, who has traced longer life expectancy in the 20th century to more exposure to a greater heterogeneity of pathogens as a result of transportation and migration. We don’t just need to learn to live with Covid. We need to live with them all and orient social and political organization around the reality of their ubiquity. 

Now, what precisely is the connection between NPR’s sanitized “news” and the thesis of the Templeton book? It suddenly dawned on me. It is possible to understand nearly everything going on today – the Covid response, the political tribalism, the censorship, the failure of the major media to talk about anything that matters, the cultural and class divides, even migration trends – as a grand effort by those people who perceive themselves to be clean to stay away from people they regard as dirty. 

And not just people but ideas and thoughts too. This goes way beyond some reemergence of Puritanism, though this is a species. The desire for purification extends to the whole of the physical and intellectual world. It’s the reason for the cancellations, the purges, the demographic upheavals, the loss of liberties, and the threat to democratic norms. It covers everything. 

Let me see if I can persuade you. 

The attacks on Elon Musk’s curbing of censorship on Twitter have been relentless. One might suppose that once he revealed that Twitter was operating as a censor for the Deep State, there would be outrage and a renewed celebration of free speech. The opposite has happened. As Musk opened the place up more and more, and non-conventional opinions started gaining traction, we saw panic ensue. 

Sure enough, now we see all the usual suspects quitting the platform in a huff. More likely, individuals at these organizations are creating fake accounts so they can keep up with the news. Otherwise, they preserve their fan accounts on Zuckerberg and Gates’s platforms.

Why might they be doing this? They do not want their organizations to inhabit (or be seen to inhabit) the same space with dirty opinions that they don’t like. They believe their own platforms will do their best to avoid being infected by them. They would rather hide out in their country-club social spaces in which everyone is woke and everyone knows what to say and what not to say. At least the algorithms are skewed in their favor. 

The line they use is that they want to be around those who are “house trained” but consider what that means. They don’t want pet waste on their carpet, thus comparing ideas with which they disagree with a nasty pathogen. They are seeking to stay clean. 

In this case and in every case, they are glad for the government to operate as the clean-up crew. It’s dirty ideas and people who hold them they oppose. They don’t want to have friends who articulate them or live in communities where such people live. 

They put out yard signs as signals to neighbors about where they stand. The issue in its particulars doesn’t matter (BLM, Support Ukraine, Water Is Life [huh?]). All that matters is the signaling system: Team Clean instead of Team Dirty. We all know what those slogans are and what they really mean and for whom they are displayed. 

The coronavirus panic played right into this. Stay home and get the dirty people to bring you groceries, leaving them on the doorstep to air out before you pick them up. If there is a pathogen on the loose, better that they get it than us. To be sure, the people on the front line are heroes so long as we can cheer them from our windows. 

This is why when it came to the vaccine, the nurses had to get them too despite having natural immunity. Vaccines were seen as an extra bar of soap to make sure that the dirty people whom we might encounter are extra free of the bad germ itself. Everyone had to get them. Those who refused, what can they say? At least we know who they are. 

The virus too was a metaphor for an infected country, a land soiled by a bad president. Of course there was an outbreak. That’s why we had to lock down and wreck everything including our kids’ education. Anything to rid the country of the pestilence of Trump. And can we really be surprised that it was South Dakota that never locked down? It’s a dirty red state and they do dirty things like ride motorcycles, shoot animals with guns, and raise cows. 

For the clean people, it was hardly a surprise that Georgia, Florida, and Texas opened first, since they were already intellectually infected by right-wing thought. And they were also places where vaccine uptake was low. 

In the fall of 2021, the New York Times proved that red states that Trump won had lower vaccination rates: they are hopelessly blechy already. Look at the sheer number of evangelical churches, and AM radio stations, in those places where icky people gather to sing stupid songs about God. 

The clean vs. dirty symbolism explains the whole of the vaccine push and even the mandates, since getting the shot was nothing but a gesture of tribal loyalties. This is why it didn’t matter when it turned out that the vaccine protected neither against infection nor spread. Who cares, since the vaccine does what it is supposed to do: separating us from them?

For a while, the clean ruling classes in New York and Boston even sealed off their cities to dirty people by forbidding them from going to movies, libraries, restaurants, bars, and museums. What a blessed world it became for the sanitized among us that they could navigate their favorite institutions in absence of the untouchables! This was to them how life should be. 

No need to elaborate on the wild fashion for sanitizer and plexiglass. The meaning of those are obvious. Everyone needs to douse themselves as a precaution, especially when others are watching. And as customers we don’t want to be anywhere near the face of the merchant class. And for two years and more, every surface needed spraying with disinfectant after any human contact.

Then there is the sudden fetishistic longing for “contactless” menus, checkouts, and everything else in this corrupt and sinful world. Somehow it has become an ideal never to touch anything or anybody, as if we long to be followers of the Prophet Mani and evolve into Pure People of the Spirit. After all, only dirty people would pick up a menu or handle cash, because god only knows whom else has held it.

Remember the jars for clean vs. dirty pens at the hotel check in that still requires signatures? No need to elaborate on that one. It’s all part of the ethos of the untouchables, or the Dalit or Harijan in the old caste system. To inhabit a “contactless” world recreates the same thing under a different label.

Reflect on the masking practices for a moment. Why is it ok to take off your mask when seated but the server had to wear one when standing? Because the seated are already proving their cleanliness because they are paying customers and being served and hence well-to-do. It’s the servers who have to work for a living who are in doubt. And then if you got up to go to the restroom, of course you had to mask up because you might accidentally have a brush with a cook, cleaner, or server. 

When the inflation started, one might have supposed that the people who shop at Whole Foods would have shifted en masse to Aldi or WalMart. But this prediction misunderstands the whole point of shopping at Whole Foods for a certain class. The point is that we don’t want to be around dirty people who buy dirty food. No need for the clean to buy in bulk to alleviate the inflation squeeze. Rather, the higher cost of groceries is worth it to stay apart from soiled, unvaccinated patrons, otherwise we could get infected. 

Plus, to have the resources to spend 50 percent more on clean food bought by other clean people works to give off the all-important signal. All the better that the owner of Whole Foods was a huge supporter of lockdowns as a way to beat the competition. 

Notice the way we talk about energy too: clean vs. dirty. Oil and gas, with their fumes and methods of processing, are contrary to the ethos of highly sanitized people. Electric cars make less noise so they are surely better, never mind that coal is also a fossil fuel and that batteries are a massive environmental hazard in disposal and even use more energy overall. Facts don’t matter. Only symbolism and clean-class identity carry the day. 

To be sure, it’s not always obvious who is and who isn’t clean enough for social interaction. That’s why we need constant surveillance of ideas since views on matters like religion, politics, and even issues like trans rights are proxies to demarcate the difference between us and them. Surveillance makes the invisible visible and that enables the construction of whole systems to punish the unclean and reward the cleanly compliant. 

All of this came to light with the pandemic of course since having a virus on the loose perfectly illustrates the core point that Anthony Fauci made in his August 2020 article in Cell. The emergence of migration thousands of years ago, and the building of cities over hundreds of years, mixed up the populations too much and created terrible epidemics of cholera and malaria. The solution was obvious to him: get rid of sports events, crowded urban conditions, pet ownership (blech), and mass population movements. Lockdowns were just the first step toward “rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence.”

We’ve all been startled that there hasn’t been more of a shift in mainstream media coverage despite the obvious failure of conventional “Covid science,” the revelations of endless scandals of the Bidens and pharma, and even the plummeting profits of major media venues. Even when BuzzFeed News goes belly up, places like CNN, the New York Times, and Vanity Fair continue on their merry way as if nothing were happening. 

The reason is simple. The clean people are convinced they are right. They have no doubt about it. And they simply will not soil themselves with bogus ideas like objective journalism or unbiased coverage of actual news. That would be the equivalent of wallowing in mud, wrecking all that they have worked for their whole lives and the whole agenda of their profession, which is to purge their institutions of infectious ideological disease. 

This is also why the basics of cell biology that previous generations learned in the 9th grade seemed lost on these people. The idea that you would allow yourself to be exposed to germs in order to protect against more severe outcomes strikes at the very heart of their manichean worldview. The point is to stay away, not mix it up. Their germophobia applies not only to the microbial kingdom but to society and the world of ideas as well. The notion of sanitization is a worldview that admits not natural immunity via infection, since that would only mean that you have the bad thing inside of you.

The science be damned. It was long ago trumped by the cultural predisposition to live in a germ-free world: purged curricula, purged cultures, and purged politics. Of course the spread needed to be slowed and stopped. Of course the curve needed to be flattened. Of course there should be social distancing instead of random milling around. The elites need to minimize exposure to everything in a time when the masses are so obviously unwashed. 

When the Great Barrington Declaration proposed focused protection based on age, while letting everyone else go about life as normal, that was nothing but a scandal. Anyone can and will get old, whereas they wanted class distinctions based on social and political rank in order to more closely approximate clean and unclean, which is their real ideal. 

This is also, by the way, why protests against racism in the summer of 2020 got a pass: people gathering for the right cause are more likely to be among the ideologically clean. And today, this demarcation is all around us, both physically and intellectually. Salmon: farmed is dirty and wild is clean, so it is far more expensive. And with work: from home is clean, while going into the office is dirty. 

What can we make of all of this? Dr. Templeton in his book tells the fascinating story of two cities in Finland, one on the poor Soviet side and one on the Western side. After the end of the Cold War, researchers were able to compare health between the two cities, one dirty and one clean. 

Although the two populations shared a similar ancestry and climate, there were some stark differences. The border between these two regions marks one of the steepest gradients in standard of living in the world, even steeper than the border between the United States and Mexico. Finland had become modernized as other countries in Europe after World War II, while isolated Karelia had remained impoverished under communism and stuck in the 1940s (and arguably wasn’t in the 1940s during the 1940s). 

The researchers in the Karelia Allergy Study noticed some striking differences in the data they collected and analyzed. In Finnish Karelia, asthma and allergies were over four times more prevalent compared to Russian Karelia. Positive skin prick tests, which measure rapid swelling and allergic inflammation in response to common allergens injected under the skin, were also much higher in Finnish people. 

Differences in children were even more striking, with a 5.5-fold increase in asthma and eczema diagnoses in Finland, and a 14-fold increase in hay fever. Russian children with allergies, as well as their mothers, also had much lower soluble IgE levels, indicating a significant decrease in the antibody isotype that rapidly induces allergic inflammation.

Autoimmune diseases like type-1 diabetes were also 5-6 times higher in the Finnish population when compared to their Russian neighbors. Not surprisingly, the microbial environments of people living in Russian Karelia were markedly different from that of Finnish Karelia. Russian Karelians drank untreated and unfiltered water that exposed their guts to orders of magnitude more microbes than their Finnish counterparts. Household dust samples from both locations revealed that Russian house dust contained more Firmicutes and Actinobacteria species with a coincident 20-fold increase in the gram-positive cell wall component muramic acid and a 7-fold increase in animal-associated bacterial species. In contrast, Gram-negative species, mainly Proteobacteria, were predominant in Finnish household dust. 

Clearly the Russians lived in a much more diverse and abundant microbial ecosystem than the Finns, and these environmental differences were associated with decreased allergies and asthma.

So the dirty people were healthier people in particular ways. Fascinating, right? It’s only the beginning of what you will discover in this book. If I were to summarize, Templeton proves that there is no such thing as clean in the way that term is popularly understood, and every attempt to bring it about carries with it grave risks to human health. A naive immune system is a killer. This thesis could also be a metaphor concerning the attempts to clean up the public mind too: the more we censor, the more stupid we become. The more we cancel, the less fully human and safe are our lives. 

The clean vs. dirty distinction was once an indicator of class, perhaps a desiderata of germaphobic pathology, even a harmless eccentricity. But in 2020, the obsession became extreme, an aesthetic priority that overrode all morality and truth. It then became a fundamental threat to liberty, self-government, and human rights.Today this demarcation has invaded the whole of our lives, and it threatens to create a horrifying caste system consisting of those who enjoy rights and privileges vs those who do not and serve (at a distance) the elites. 

We need to see it clearly in order to stop it from happening. Freedom is rooted in an ethical presumption of equal rights, a cultural respect for the dignity of all human persons, a political deference to government by the people, and an economic experience of class mobility and meritocracy. Replacing those presumptions with a simplified, crude, aesthetic, and unscientific lurch into a neo-feudalism not only takes us back to pre-modern times; it overthrows basic postulates of what we call civilization itself.