https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_great_election_fraud_manufactured_choices_make_a_mockery_of_our_republic
The Great Election Fraud: Manufactured Choices Make a Mockery of Our Republic
“Dictators are not in the business of allowing elections that could remove them from their thrones.”—Gene Sharp, political science professor
The U.S. Supreme Court was right to keep President Trump’s name on the ballot.
The high court’s decree that the power to remove a federal candidate from the ballot under the Constitution’s “insurrectionist ban” rests with Congress, not the states, underscores the fact that in a representative democracy, the citizenry—not the courts, not the corporations, and not the contrived electoral colleges—should be the ones to elect their representatives.
Unfortunately, what is being staged is not an election. It is a mockery of an election.
This year’s presidential election, much like every other election in recent years, is what historian Daniel Boorstin referred to as a “pseudo-event”: manufactured, contrived, confected and devoid of any intrinsic value save the value of being advertised.
For the next eight months, Americans will be dope-fed billions of dollars’ worth of political propaganda aimed at persuading them that 1) their votes count, 2) the future of this nation—nay, our very lives—depends on who we elect as president, and 3) electing the right candidate will fix everything that is wrong with this country.
Incredible, isn’t it, that in a country of more than 330 million people, we are given only two choices for president?
The system is rigged, of course.
Forcing the citizenry to choose between two candidates who are equally unfit for office does not in any way translate to having some say in how the government is run.
Indeed, no matter what names are on the presidential ballot, once you step away from the cult of personality politics, you’ll find that beneath the power suits, they’re all alike.
The candidate who wins the White House has already made a Faustian bargain to keep the police state in power.
We’ve been down this road before.
Barack Obama campaigned on a message of hope, change and transparency, and promised an end to war and surveillance. Yet under Obama, government whistleblowers were routinely prosecuted, U.S. arms sales skyrocketed, police militarization accelerated, and surveillance became widespread.
Donald Trump swore to drain the swamp in Washington DC. Instead of putting an end to the corruption, however, Trump paved the way for lobbyists, corporations, the military industrial complex, and the Deep State to feast on the carcass of the dying American republic.
We’ve been mired in this swamp for decades now.
Joe Biden has been no different. If his job was to keep the Deep State in power, he’s been a resounding success.
Follow the money. It always points the way.
With each new president, we’ve been subjected to more government surveillance, more police abuse, more SWAT team raids, more roadside strip searches, more censorship, more prison time, more egregious laws, more endless wars, more invasive technology, more militarization, more injustice, more corruption, more cronyism, more graft, more lies, and more of everything that has turned the American dream into the American nightmare.
What we’re not getting more of: elected officials who actually represent us.
No matter who wins the presidential election come November, it’s a sure bet that the losers will be the American people if all we’re prepared to do is vote.
After all, there is more to citizenship than the act of casting a ballot for someone who, once elected, will march in lockstep with the dictates of the powers-that-be.
Yet as long as Americans are content to let politicians, war hawks and Corporate America run the country, the police state will prevail.
“Total continuity” is how Chris Hedges refers to the manner in which the government’s agenda remains unchanged no matter who occupies the Executive Branch. “Continuity of government” (COG) is the phrase policy wonks use to refer to the unelected individuals who have been appointed to run the government in the event of a “catastrophe.”
You can also refer to it as a shadow government, or the Deep State, which is comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who actually call the shots behind the scenes.
Whatever term you use, the upshot remains the same: on the national level, we’re up against an immoveable, intractable, entrenched force that is greater than any one politician or party, whose tentacles reach deep into every sector imaginable, from Wall Street, the military and the courts to the technology giants, entertainment, healthcare and the media.
This is no Goliath to be felled by a simple stone.
This is a Leviathan disguised as a political savior.
So, what is the solution to this blatant display of imperial elitism disguising itself as a populist exercise in representative government?
Stop playing the game. Stop supporting the system. Stop defending the insanity. Just stop.
Washington thrives on money, so stop giving them your money. Stop throwing your hard-earned dollars away on politicians and Super PACs who view you as nothing more than a means to an end. There are countless worthy grassroots organizations and nonprofits—groups like The Rutherford Institute—working to address real needs like injustice, poverty, homelessness, etc. Support them and you’ll see change you really can believe in in your own backyard.
Politicians depend on votes, so stop giving them your vote unless they have a proven track record of listening to their constituents, abiding by their wishes and working hard to earn and keep their trust.
It’s comforting to believe that your vote matters, but presidents are selected, not elected. Despite what is taught in school and the propaganda that is peddled by the media, a presidential election is not a populist election for a representative. Rather, it’s a gathering of shareholders to select the next CEO, a fact reinforced by the nation’s archaic electoral college system. In other words, your vote doesn’t elect a president. Despite the fact that there are 218 million eligible voters in this country (only half of whom actually vote), it is the electoral college, made up of 538 individuals handpicked by the candidates’ respective parties, that actually selects the next president.
The only thing you’re accomplishing by taking part in the “reassurance ritual” of voting is sustaining the illusion that we have a democratic republic.
In actuality, we are suffering from what political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page more accurately term an “economic élite domination” in which the economic elite (lobbyists, corporations, monied special interest groups) dominate and dictate national policy.
No surprise there.
As an in-depth Princeton University study confirms, democracy has been replaced by oligarchy, a system of government in which elected officials represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen.
As such, presidential elections merely serve to maintain the status quo. Once elected president, that person becomes part of the dictatorial continuum that is the American imperial presidency today.
So how do we prevail against the tyrant who says all the right things and does none of them? How do we overcome the despot whose promises fade with the spotlights? How do we conquer the dictator whose benevolence is all for show?
We get organized. We get educated. We get active.
Whether you vote or don’t vote doesn’t really matter. What matters is what else you’re doing to push back against government incompetence, abuse, corruption, graft, fraud and cronyism.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that the only road to reform is through the ballot box.
If you feel led to vote, fine, but if all you do is vote, “we the people” are going to lose.
If you abstain from voting and still do nothing, “we the people” are going to lose.
If you give your proxy to some third-party individual or group to fix what’s wrong with the country and that’s all you do, then “we the people” are going to lose.
If, however, you’re prepared to turn off the television, tune out the talking heads, untether yourself from whatever piece of technology you’re affixed to, wean yourself off the teat of the nanny state, and start flexing those unused civic muscles, then there might be hope for us all.
For starters, know your rights and then put that knowledge into action. What we desperately need is a concerted, collective commitment to the Constitution’s principles of limited government, a system of checks and balances, and a recognition that they—the president, Congress, the courts, the military, the police, the technocrats and plutocrats and bureaucrats—answer to and are accountable to “we the people.”
Second, think nationally but act locally. Understand how your local government is structured. Who serves on your city council and school boards? What recourse does the community have to voice concerns about local problems or disagree with decisions by government officials? Are your locally elected officials accessible and open to what you have to say? Are your police chiefs being appointed from within your community? Who runs your local media? Does your newspaper report on local events? Who are your judges?
Third, don’t stop doing the hard work of holding your government accountable. Don’t let personal politics and party allegiances blind you to government misconduct and power grabs. This will mean holding all three branches of government accountable to the Constitution (i.e., vote them out of office if they abuse their powers). And it will mean making the president play by the rules of the Constitution.
Finally, don’t remain silent in the face of government injustice, corruption, or ineptitude. Speak truth to power.
A healthy, representative government is hard work. It takes a citizenry that is informed about the issues, educated about how the government operates, and willing to make the sacrifices necessary to stay involved. It also takes a citizenry willing to do more than grouse and complain.
We must act—and act responsibly.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, any hope of restoring our freedoms and regaining control over our runaway government must start from the bottom up. And that will mean re-learning step by painful step what it actually means to be a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”
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https://brownstone.org/articles/the-end-of-the-end-of-ideology/
The End of the End of Ideology
In 1960, Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell published a book called The End of Ideology. It argued that it was time to put aside all our ridiculous arguments of the past – socialism, fascism, liberalism, anarchism, technocracy, etc. – and just recognize that elites like him have it all under control. They had already established the building blocks of the administrative state so that real experts could be in charge and rule society with a steady hand.
The rest of us need just to work hard, pay our taxes, and comply. We should be free to study, read, and dream. But, he wrote, the political system is off-limits to revolutionaries, simply because the postwar social managers have proven themselves so competent and ultimately moderate in their judgments. The wise and well-trained get the great lesson of modern history: prudence is more valued than vision. The best utopia for which we can hope is a continuation of what we have now with careful tweaks along the way.
In the six decades that passed, we largely went along with the idea. Sure, we argued about this philosophical point or that in what seemed like intellectual parlor games. The Cold War itself devolved into a neat debate in which the US represented the idea of freedom and the Soviet Union instantiated tyranny. Of course none of this debate really hit home; it was an abstraction about which we read and heard on the nightly news.
When that ended – oh how sad for the elites! – matters became confusing but we trudged onward in any case, increasingly satisfied in our sectarian camps of conservative, liberal, and libertarian. There were institutions, events, and publications that indulged our appetite for belonging and donating. No big emergency called forth permanently deep passions, much less panic about the future.
This parlor game came into grave question on 9/11 when the great struggle hit home but even that receded in our memory over time, as the machinery of centralized bureaucratic control grew and grew, just waiting for its day in the sun. That came four years ago.
Apparently out of nowhere, and only with the seemingly reluctant support of the US president, governments at all levels locked us in our homes, shut the parks and gyms, restricted travel, blocked access to public worship, and urged us all to order our food in and otherwise binge streaming services. And why? They said it was to control a virus that had already been described as a serious flu that only mortally threatened the aged and infirm.
They were trying out an experiment on us as we waited for pharmaceutical companies to create and distribute a magic potion that would protect and heal the population. Audacious doesn’t quite sum up the scheme. Needless to say, it didn’t work except to engorge the rules of the system. Along the way, the scheme created vast carnage in lost liberty, health, and trust in institutions. It turns out that Daniel Bell’s beloved intellectual class and wise bureaucracies didn’t have it all together after all. They made an unprecedented mess of things.
That posed a number of problems from an ideological point of view. The first issue to solve concerns who precisely had put these people in charge of the rest of us. How did they gain the power so flagrantly to shred the Bill of Rights and trample on every freedom we had taken for granted? They claimed it was their right to do so, and continue to claim that in every court filing. They have not and will not apologize for what they did. Worse, they have spelled out plans to do more of the same.
That poses a serious problem. All ideology aside, if the people themselves cannot have some influence over the system of government that rules them – if our job is merely to listen for and follow instructions over which we have no input – we are truly back to a pre-Enlightenment age. In that case, no one’s ideology really matters. We don’t have that fundamental thing that birthed modern civilization in the first place, namely the basic dignity that comes from a regime that recognizes human rights and responds to democratic control.
Worse, the more we closely examine what happened to us, the more it defies conventional ideological categorization. The government on which the “liberals” relied to empower people actually took away their rights and injected them with pharma products on which the largest corporations made vast money. The churches, nonprofits, politicians, and the president once celebrated by “conservatives” went along while “conservative” publications said nothing. The big corporations which had long been defended by “libertarians” closely cooperated with government in the enslavement of the population and the disabling of small business.
This is the fundamental reason why ideology seems so scrambled in our times. In the end, everyone was betrayed by the institutions Professor Bell promised would guide us into the light. Even the schools closed, the very jewel of the progressive crown. As it turns out, the professional managerial class in both public and private sectors – ultimately a minority of the population – cooperated in a vast scheme to transfer wealth and power to themselves at everyone else’s expense.
They were not the “best and brightest” after all but rather the most brutal and sadistic, not to mention pompous and condescending.
As everyone attempts to regroup and reconsider, we have new clarity on why left and right are so incredibly scrambled these days. It’s because all of our expectations were defied and we have been presented with new realities that cry out for explanation and solution.
1. Food and medical freedom both involve what goes into our bodies and both came under massive assault. These causes have traditionally been associated with the left. And yet the leaders of what is now called the left completely ignored these concerns while celebrating the forced masking and inoculation of the population.
2. The right has traditionally been defensive of corporate enterprise but these days most large media, tech, medicine, and food distribution is captured by the state, which rather messes up the clean binary between public and private. Enterprise is no longer free and yet conservatives didn’t speak out in any great degree in defense of the crushed small businesses and even turned a blind eye to canceled religious holidays.
3. Both sides of the good guys here – the people who took seriously the best values of the old left and right – agree on the rights of individuals and businesses to go their own way against the corporatist hegemon. These groups are finally finding each other in defiance of the censorship regime and discovering more in common than they knew.
4. Meanwhile, the leadership of old left, right, and libertarian orgs are solidly on the side of the hegemon and pretending as if there is nothing really going on of any import, which is why the establishment in all camps cares nothing about vaccine mandates, the attacks on the Amish, censorship, medical capture, or the Great Reset generally.
5. This further feeds into what is called “populism” but is better described as an authentic freedom movement against the ruling class agenda on all sides. Covid controls peeled back the curtain and now many see what had previously been mostly invisible. This is not only in the US but all over the world. It is showing up in farmers’ protests, new political parties in parliamentary systems, and new media that is threatening the old for influence over a new generation.
What is striking today is how the freedom movement has been enlivened by oppression of various sectors that the central managers had long promised to guard and protect. In particular, this movement concerns education, food, and medicine, again that which is most impactful on our thinking, our sustenance, and our health.
The rise of public schooling beginning in the late 19th century was codified as the norm in the early 20th century, the same time the medical schools came under centralized control and food regulation became a cause célèbre of the progressive elite. Money and finance became centrally controlled at the same time, again with a public-private partnership that promised better results thanks to scientific management.
Think of that: government and corporate control of education, medicine, food, and money/finance are all discredited in light of the last four years, revealed as little more than schemes to crush alternative pathways that might otherwise be chosen by people themselves. The stakes here are very high. We are talking about a century of precedent now called into question among a huge swath of people from a variety of different ideological perspectives.
Looking back, Daniel Bell’s “end of ideology” seems more like an attempt to draw closed a green velvet curtain that was hiding something terrible, namely that we were gradually giving up citizen control of our societies to an elite that pretended to possess wisdom, judgment, and prudence to the point that the rest of us could do no better than to outsource our penchant for exercising freedom and democracy to them. Pull back that curtain and we find ignorance, institutional interest, fraud, graft, and a shocking lack of empathy.
That gang is now discredited. And yet they remain in control. That is the essential problem we face today. It is a problem that vexes all the lower orders of society all across the world as they work to find ways peacefully to unseat the elites from their ill-used power. In this struggle, it is not Daniel Bell who is our prophet but C. Wright Mills and Murray Rothbard, who despite their divergent ideological perspectives agreed on one thing: it is unjust and unworkable that a small elite should rule the world without the consent of the governed.
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http://endoftheamericandream.com/alarm-bells-for-the-u-s-food-supply/
Alarm Bells For The U.S. Food Supply
How much more are you spending on food each month compared to two or three years ago? In recent years, our leaders have been flooding the system with money at the same time that global supplies of food have been getting tighter and tighter. On the other side of the world, hundreds of millions of people do not have enough food to eat on a regular basis and children are literally dropping dead from starvation. Here in the United States, nobody is dropping dead from starvation, but demand at food banks is absolutely exploding as U.S. households struggle to deal with how oppressively expensive groceries have become. Unfortunately, things are about to get even worse.
Right now, the largest fire in the entire history of Texas continues to rage out of control…
The biggest inferno in Texas history is being fueled by winds and high temperatures as it rages Sunday, threatening to incinerate more buildings, cattle and livelihoods across the Texas Panhandle while residents sift through ashes of what used to be homes.
Critical fire weather conditions were expected to continue Sunday in the area, with strengthening winds gusting to 50 mph and dry conditions combining to set the stage for rapid wildfire spread, the National Weather Service warned.
The Smokehouse Creek Fire has been burning for nearly a week and has torched more than 1 million acres in Texas alone, making it the largest fire on record in the state – and it is only 15% contained.
Most news reports that I have seen say that it is “thousands”…
The largest wildfire in Texas history has devastated the state’s agriculture, blazing through more than 1 million acres of land in the Panhandle, killing thousands of livestock, destroying crops and gutting infrastructure.
The agriculture industry, a big driver of the state’s economy, was already facing pressures from prolonged and widespread drought that forced ranchers to manage smaller herds, contributing to a decrease in beef production nationally. The series of wildfires in the Panhandle this week is another blow as many ranchers tried to rebuild their herds and operations during the cooler months of the year.
What will the final death toll be?
According to Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, there are more than 10 million head of livestock in the region…
State Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller told The New York Times that the Panhandle is home to roughly 85% of Texas’s cattle herds.
The region supports over 10 million head of livestock. Most of the cattle are kept in feedlots and dairy farms as farmers and ranchers attempt to shield their herds from the wildfires, Miller said.
“There are millions of cattle out there, with some towns comprising more cattle than people,” Miller told The Wall Street Journal.
At this point, the size of the U.S. cattle herd is the smallest since 1951, and the size of the Canadian cattle herd is the smallest in 30 years…
Canada is the next nation to report a multi-decade low cattle herd.
At the beginning of the year, the USDA reported the lowest total U.S. head since 1951 at a little more than 87 million.
Now, Statistics Canada is reporting the Canadian cattle herd is at its lowest level in more than 30 years, totaling just 11 million cattle and calves on farms.
And even without the tragedy in Texas, we were already being warned that the U.S. cattle herd would get even smaller this year because we are looking at the “smallest beef calf crop since 1948”…
But that supply of feeder cattle will likely tighten during the rest of this year. The smallest beef calf crop since 1948, brought on by drought and high feed prices and the contraction of the beef cow herd, along with a significant decrease in replacement beef heifers, means that there won’t be as many cattle to put in feedlots to replace those going out.
Beef is now considered to be a “luxury meat”, and prices are only going to go higher throughout the remainder of 2024.
So if you enjoy beef, I would stock up now.
Of course it isn’t just beef that is going to become more expensive.
All over the western world, “green policies” are making things extremely challenging for farmers and ranchers.
During a recent appearance on Fox News, one industry insider warned that more U.S. farmers are going out of business “every day”…
While nationwide organizations like the FFA are going strong and statewide affairs like the annual Pennsylvania Farm Show and Iowa State Fair continue to draw exhibitors and guests alike, beneath the surface are troubling signs, two guests on “The Ingraham Angle” warned this week.
Globalist “green” policies as well as inflation and rising costs have led to thinner herds, and in some instances, foreclosure or shuttering of farms altogether, bringing with them a potential domestic food crisis, they said.
“Farmers are going out of business every day,” said John Boyd Jr., founder of the Black Farmers of America.
We have already seen farmers engage in wild protests all over Europe, and it is probably just a matter of time before we see similar protests here in the United States.
But even if government control freaks left our farmers alone, they would still have to deal with weather patterns that have gone completely nuts.
For example, this weekend an absolutely massive blizzard dumped up to 12 feet of snow on some parts of California, and wind gusts in some areas actually reached 190 miles per hour…
Hundreds of miles of California highways remained shut down Sunday as a powerful blizzard pounded parts of the Golden State and Mountain West with snow totals that could reach 12 feet amid howling winds with gusts that hit 190 mph − well above the 157 mph threshold for a Category 5 hurricane.
National Weather Service meteorologist William Churchill warned of “life-threatening concern” for residents near Lake Tahoe, calling the storm, now in its third day, an “extreme blizzard.” Areas of Nevada, Utah and Colorado were also affected.
“Moderate to heavy snow has persisted overnight across the northern Sierra Nevada,” the National Weather Service in Sacramento said in a social media post Sunday. “Wind gusts … are continuing to result in blizzard conditions.”
As I sit here, I am having a hard time even imagining what a blizzard with 190 mph winds would look like.
I cannot remember anything like this ever happening before.
But the truth is that weird storms like this will be the new normal.
Weather patterns all over the globe are breaking records, and that is making it really difficult for farmers and ranchers to do their jobs.
We have entered a time when a confluence of factors is creating a “perfect storm” for global food production, and global hunger has been steadily on the rise since 2015.
Sadly, the outlook for the years ahead is exceedingly bleak. The amount of food that will be produced won’t even be close to what is needed to feed everyone on the planet, and so there will be a mad scramble for whatever is available.
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