It’s been rightly said that “he who holds the gold makes the rules.”
After World War 2, the US had the largest gold reserves in the world, by far. Along with winning the war, this let the US reconstruct the global monetary system around the dollar.
The new system, created at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, tied the currencies of virtually every country in the world to the US dollar through a fixed exchange rate. It also tied the US dollar to gold at a fixed rate of $35 per ounce.
The dollar was said to be “as good as gold.”
The Bretton Woods system made the US dollar the world’s premier reserve currency. It compelled other countries to store dollars for international trade or to exchange them with the US government for gold at the promised price.
However, it was doomed to fail.
Runaway spending on warfare and welfare caused the US government to print more dollars than it could back with gold at the promised price.
By 1967, the number of dollars circulating had drastically increased relative to the amount of gold backing them. This encouraged foreign countries to exchange their dollars for gold, draining the US gold supply at an alarming rate and collapsing the London Gold Pool. At this point, it was clear this system was breaking down.
On Sunday night, August 15, 1971, President Nixon interrupted the scheduled TV programs and made a surprise announcement to the nation—and the world. He announced the unilateral end of the Bretton Woods system and severed the dollar’s last tie to gold.
The end of the dollar’s gold backing had profound geopolitical consequences.
Most critically, it eliminated the main reason foreign countries stored large amounts of US dollars and used the US dollar for international trade. As a result, oil-producing countries began to demand payment in gold instead of rapidly depreciating dollars.
It was clear the US would have to create a new monetary system to stabilize the dollar. So it concocted a new scheme… and chose Saudi Arabia as its accomplice. This agreement came to be known as the “petrodollar system.”
The US handpicked Saudi Arabia because of its vast petroleum reserves and dominant position in the global oil market.
In essence, the petrodollar system was an agreement that the US would guarantee the House of Saud’s survival. In exchange, Saudi Arabia would do three things.
First, it would use its dominant position in OPEC to ensure that all oil transactions would only happen in US dollars.
Second, it would recycle hundreds of billions of US dollars from annual oil revenue into US Treasuries. This lets the US issue more debt and finance previously unimaginable budget deficits.
Third, it would guarantee the price of oil within limits acceptable to the US and prevent another oil embargo.
The petrodollar system gave foreign countries another compelling reason to hold and use the dollar. And it preserved the dollar’s unique status as the world’s top reserve currency.
But… why oil?
Oil is the largest and most strategic commodity market in the world.
As you can see in the chart below, it dwarfs all other major commodity markets combined. The annual production value of the oil market is ten times bigger than the gold market, for example.
Every country needs oil. And if foreign countries need US dollars to buy oil, they have a compelling reason to hold US dollars even if they are not backed by a promise to redeem them in gold.
Think about it… If France wants to buy oil from Saudi Arabia, it must purchase US dollars on the foreign exchange market to pay for the oil first.
This creates a huge artificial market for US dollars and differentiates the US dollar from a purely local currency, like the Mexican peso.
The dollar is just a middleman. It’s used in countless transactions, amounting to trillions of dollars that have nothing to do with US products or services.
Since the oil market is enormous, it acts as a benchmark for international trade. If foreign countries are already using dollars for oil, it’s easier to use the dollar for other international trade.
In addition to nearly all oil sales, the US dollar is used for about 80% of all international transactions.
Ultimately, the petrodollar boosts the US dollar’s purchasing power by enticing foreigners to soak up dollars.
The petrodollar system has helped create a deeper, more liquid market for the dollar and US Treasuries. It has also helped the US keep interest rates lower than they would otherwise be, allowing the US government to finance enormous deficits it otherwise would be unable to.
Multi-trillion deficits would otherwise be impossible without destroying the currency through money printing.
It’s hard to overstate how much the petrodollar system benefits the US. It’s the bedrock of the US financial system and has underpinned the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency since the 1970s.
That’s why the US government protects it so fiercely. It needs the system to survive.
World leaders who have challenged the petrodollar have ended up dead.
Take Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, for example. Each led a large oil-producing country—Iraq and Libya, respectively. And both tried to sell their oil for something other than US dollars before US military interventions led to their deaths.
Of course, there were other reasons the US toppled Saddam and Gaddafi. But protecting the petrodollar was a serious consideration, at the very least.
When countries like Iraq and Libya challenge the petrodollar system, it’s one thing. The US military can dispatch them with ease.
However, it’s a whole other dynamic when China (and Russia) undermine the petrodollar system… which is happening in a big way right now.
China and Russia are the only countries with sophisticated enough nuclear arsenals to go toe-to-toe with the US up to the top of the military escalation ladder.
In other words, the US military can’t attack Russia and China with impunity because they can match each move up to all-out nuclear war—the very top of the military escalation ladder.
For this reason, the US is deterred from entering a direct military conflict with China and Russia—even though they are about to strike a fatal blow to the petrodollar system.
US Sanctions Accelerate Demise of Petrodollar
In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US government launched its most aggressive sanctions campaign ever.
Exceeding even Iran and North Korea, Russia is now the most sanctioned nation in the world.
“This is financial nuclear war and the largest sanctions event in history,” said a former US Treasury Department official.
He said, “Russia went from being part of the global economy to the single largest target of global sanctions and a financial pariah in less than two weeks.”
As part of this, the US government seized the US dollar reserves of the Russian central bank—the accumulated savings of the nation. (Washington did the same to Afghanistan’s dollar reserves after the Taliban took Kabul.)
It was a stunning illustration of the dollar’s political risk. The US government can seize another sovereign country’s dollar reserves at the flip of a switch.
The Wall Street Journal, in an article titled “If Russian Currency Reserves Aren’t Really Money, the World Is in for a Shock,” noted:
“Sanctions have shown that currency reserves accumulated by central banks can be taken away. With China taking note, this may reshape geopolitics, economic management and even the international role of the U.S. dollar.”
The head of the Russian Parliament recently called the US dollar a “candy wrapper” but not the candy itself. In other words, the dollar has the outward appearance of money but is not real money.
It’s important to remember some simple facts.
#1: Russia is the world’s largest energy producer.
#2: China is the world’s largest energy importer.
#3: Russia is China’s largest oil supplier.
And now that the US has banned Russia from the dollar system, there is an urgent need for a credible system capable of handling hundreds of billions worth of oil sales outside the US dollar and financial system.
The Shanghai International Energy Exchange (INE) is that system. The maturation of China’s alternative to the petrodollar is a big reason why the massive amount of energy trade between Russia and China occurs in yuan, not US dollars.
Further, Washington has threatened to sanction China similarly for years.
These threats against China may be a bluff, but if the US government carried them out—as it recently did against Russia—it would be like dropping a financial nuclear bomb on Beijing. Without access to dollars, China would have previously struggled to import oil and engage in international trade. As a result, its economy would come to a grinding halt, an intolerable threat to the stability of the Chinese government.
China would rather not depend on an adversary like this. It’s one of the main reasons it created an alternative to the petrodollar system. The INE allows oil producers to sell their products for yuan (and gold indirectly) while bypassing the US dollar, sanctions, and financial system.
Other countries on Washington’s sanctions list are enthusiastically signing up.
According to Credit Suisse, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela own 40% of the proven oil reserves of OPEC+ members. These countries are under strict US sanctions, which makes accepting US dollars and transacting globally challenging. So it’s no surprise that these sanctioned oil producers are happy to accept yuan as payment and support the petroyuan system.
But it’s not just sanctioned oil producers that benefit from the petroyuan…
Think about it. Any oil-producing country has two choices:
Option #1 – The Petrodollar
The dismal financial situation of the US guarantees the dollar will lose significant purchasing power.
Plus, there’s enormous political risk. Oil producers are exposed to the whims of the US government, which can confiscate their money whenever it wants, as it recently did to Russia.
Option #2 – Shanghai International Energy Exchange
Here, an oil producer can participate in the world’s largest market and try to capture more market share.
It can also easily convert and repatriate its proceeds into physical gold, an international form of money with no political or counterparty risk.
From the perspective of an oil producer, the choice is a no-brainer.
Even though most people have not realized it yet, we are at the end of the petrodollar system and on the cusp of a new monetary era.
There’s an excellent chance more financial turmoil is coming soon.
No country has successfully challenged the U.S. dollar’s global hegemony—until now. How did this happen and what will it mean?
Foreign critics have long chafed at the “exorbitant privilege” of the U.S. dollar as global reserve currency. The U.S. can issue this currency backed by nothing but the “full faith and credit of the United States.” Foreign governments, needing dollars, not only accept them in trade but buy U.S. securities with them, effectively funding the U.S. government and its foreign wars. But no government has been powerful enough to break that arrangement – until now. How did that happen and what will it mean for the U.S. and global economies?
The Rise and Fall of the PetroDollar
First, some history: The U.S. dollar was adopted as the global reserve currency at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, when the dollar was still backed by gold on global markets. The agreement was that gold and the dollar would be accepted interchangeably as global reserves, the dollars to be redeemable in gold on demand at $35 an ounce. Exchange rates of other currencies were fixed against the dollar.
But that deal was broken after President Lyndon Johnson’s “guns and butter” policy exhausted the U.S. kitty by funding war in Vietnam along with his “Great Society” social programs at home. French President Charles de Gaulle, suspecting the U.S. was running out of money, cashed in a major portion of France’s dollars for gold and threatened to cash in the rest; and other countries followed suit or threatened to.
In 1971, President Richard Nixon ended the convertibility of the dollar to gold internationally (known as “closing the gold window”), in order to avoid draining U.S. gold reserves. The value of the dollar then plummeted relative to other currencies on global exchanges. To prop it up, Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made a deal with Saudi Arabia and the OPEC countries that OPEC would sell oil only in dollars, and that the dollars would be deposited in Wall Street and City of London banks. In return, the U.S. would defend the OPEC countries militarily. Economic researcher William Engdahl also presents evidence of a promise that the price of oil would be quadrupled. An oil crisis triggered by a brief Middle Eastern war did cause the price of oil to quadruple, and the OPEC agreement was finalized in 1974.
The deal held firm until 2000, when Saddam Hussein broke it by selling Iraqi oil in euros. Libyan president Omar Qaddafi followed suit. Both presidents wound up assassinated, and their countries were decimated in war with the United States. Canadian researcher Matthew Ehret observes:
We should not forget that the Sudan-Libya-Egypt alliance under the combined leadership of Mubarak, Qadhafi and Bashir, had moved to establish a new gold-backed financial system outside of the IMF/World Bank to fund large scale development in Africa. Had this program not been undermined by a NATO-led destruction of Libya, the carving up of Sudan and regime change in Egypt, then the world would have seen the emergence of a major regional block of African states shaping their own destinies outside of the rigged game of Anglo-American controlled finance for the first time in history.
The Rise of the PetroRuble
The first challenge by a major power to what became known as the petrodollar has come in 2022. In the month after the Ukraine conflict began, the U.S. and its European allies imposed heavy financial sanctions on Russia in response to the illegal military invasion. The Western measures included freezing nearly half of the Russian central bank’s 640 billion U.S. dollars in financial reserves, expelling several of Russia’s largest banks from the SWIFT global payment system, imposing export controls aimed at limiting Russia’s access to advanced technologies, closing down their airspace and ports to Russian planes and ships, and instituting personal sanctions against senior Russian officials and high-profile tycoons. Worried Russians rushed to withdraw rubles from their banks, and the value of the ruble plunged on global markets just as the U.S. dollar had in the early 1970s.
The trust placed in the U.S. dollar as global reserve currency, backed by “the full faith and credit of the United States,” had finally been fully broken. RussianPresident Vladimir Putin said in a speech on March 16 that the U.S. and EU had defaulted on their obligations, and that freezing Russia’s reserves marks the end of the reliability of so-called first class assets. On March 23, Putin announced that Russia’s natural gas would be sold to “unfriendly countries” only in Russian rubles, rather than the euros or dollars currently used. Forty-eight nations are counted by Russia as “unfriendly,” including the United States, Britain, Ukraine, Switzerland, South Korea, Singapore, Norway, Canada and Japan.
Putin noted that more than half the global population remains “friendly” to Russia. Countries not voting to support the sanctions include two major powers – China and India – along with major oil producer Venezuela, Turkey, and other countries in the “Global South.” “Friendly” countries, said Putin, could now buy from Russia in various currencies.
On March 24, Russian lawmaker Pavel Zavalny said at a news conference that gas could be sold to the West for rubles or gold, and to “friendly” countries for either national currency or bitcoin.
Energy ministers from the G7 nations rejected Putin’s demand, claiming it violated gas contract terms requiring sale in euros or dollars. But on March 28, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia was “not engaged in charity” and won’t supply gas to Europe for free (which it would be doing if sales were in euros or dollars it cannot currently use in trade). Sanctions themselves are a breach of the agreement to honor the currencies on global markets.
Bloomberg reports that on March 30, Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the lower Russian house of parliament, suggested in a Telegram post that Russia may expand the list of commodities for which it demands payment from the West in rubles (or gold) to include grain, oil, metals and more. Russia’s economy is much smaller than that of the U.S. and the European Union, but Russia is a major global supplier of key commodities – including not just oil, natural gas and grains, but timber, fertilizers, nickel, titanium, palladium, coal, nitrogen, and rare earth metals used in the production of computer chips, electric vehicles and airplanes.
On April 2, Russian gas giant Gazprom officially halted all deliveries to Europe via the Yamal-Europe pipeline, a critical artery for European energy supplies.
U.K. professor of economics Richard Werner calls the Russian move a clever one – a replay of what the U.S. did in the 1970s. To get Russian commodities, “unfriendly” countries will have to buy rubles, driving up the value of the ruble on global exchanges just as the need for petrodollars propped up the U.S. dollar after 1974. Indeed, by March 30, the ruble had already risen to where it was a month earlier.
A Page Out of the “American System” Playbook
Russia is following the U.S. not just in hitching its national currency to sales of a critical commodity but in an earlier protocol – what 19th century American leaders called the “American System” of sovereign money and credit. Its three pillars were (a) federal subsidies for internal improvements and to nurture the nation’s fledgling industries, (b) tariffs to protect those industries, and (c) easy credit issued by a national bank.
Michael Hudson, a research professor of economics and author of “Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire” among many other books, notes that the sanctions are forcing Russia to do what it has been reluctant to do itself – cut reliance on imports and develop its own industries and infrastructure. The effect, he says, is equivalent to that of protective tariffs. In an article titled “The American Empire Self-destructs,” Hudson writes of the Russian sanctions (which actually date back to 2014):
Russia had remained too enthralled by free-market ideology to take steps to protect its own agriculture or industry. The United States provided the help that was needed by imposing domestic self-reliance on Russia (via sanctions). When the Baltic states lost the Russian market for cheese and other farm products, Russia quickly created its own cheese and dairy sector – while becoming the world’s leading grain exporter.
Russia is discovering (or is on the verge of discovering) that it does not need U.S. dollars as backing for the ruble’s exchange rate. Its central bank can create the rubles needed to pay domestic wages and finance capital formation. The U.S. confiscations thus may finally lead Russia to end neoliberal monetary philosophy, as Sergei Glaziev has long been advocating in favor of MMT [Modern Monetary Theory]. …
What foreign countries have not done for themselves – replacing the IMF, World Bank and other arms of U.S. diplomacy – American politicians are forcing them to do. Instead of European, Near Eastern and Global South countries breaking away out of their own calculation of their long-term economic interests, America is driving them away, as it has done with Russia and China.
Glazyev and the Eurasian Reset
Sergei Glazyev, mentioned by Hudson above, is a former adviser to President Vladimir Putin and the Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Commission, the regulatory body of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). He has proposed using tools similar to those of the “American System,” including converting the Central Bank of Russia to a “national bank” issuing Russia’s own currency and credit for internal development. On February 25, Glazyev published an analysis of U.S. sanctions titled “Sanctions and Sovereignty,” in which he stated:
[T]he damage caused by US financial sanctions is inextricably linked to the monetary policy of the Bank of Russia …. Its essence boils down to a tight binding of the ruble issue to export earnings, and the ruble exchange rate to the dollar. In fact, an artificial shortage of money is being created in the economy, and the strict policy of the Central Bank leads to an increase in the cost of lending, which kills business activity and hinders the development of infrastructure in the country.
Glazyev said that if the central bank replaced the loans withdrawn by its Western partners with its own loans, Russian credit capacity would greatly increase, preventing a decline in economic activity without creating inflation.
Russia has agreed to sell oil to India in India’s own sovereign currency, the rupee; to China in yuan; and to Turkey in lira. These national currencies can then be spent on the goods and services sold by those countries. Arguably, every country should be able to trade in global markets in its own sovereign currency; that is what a fiat currency is – a medium of exchange backed by the agreement of the people to accept it at value for their goods and services, backed by the “full faith and credit” of the nation.
But that sort of global barter system would break down just as local barter systems do, if one party to the trade did not want the goods or services of the other party. In that case, some intermediate reserve currency would be necessary to serve as a medium of exchange.
Glazyev and his counterparts are working on that. In a translated interview posted on The Saker, Glazyev stated:
We are currently working on a draft international agreement on the introduction of a new world settlement currency, pegged to the national currencies of the participating countries and to exchange-traded goods that determine real values. We won’t need American and European banks. A new payment system based on modern digital technologies with a blockchain is developing in the world, where banks are losing their importance.
Russia and China have both developed alternatives to the SWIFT messaging system from which certain Russian banks have been blocked. London-based commentator Alexander Mercouris makes the interesting observation that going outside SWIFT means Western banks cannot track Russian and Chinese trades.
It was a long time coming, but finally some key lineaments of the multipolar world’s new foundations are being revealed.
On Friday [March 11], after a videoconference meeting, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and China agreed to design the mechanism for an independent international monetary and financial system. The EAEU consists of Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and Armenia, is establishing free trade deals with other Eurasian nations, and is progressively interconnecting with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
For all practical purposes, the idea comes from Sergei Glazyev, Russia’s foremost independent economist ….
Quite diplomatically, Glazyev attributed the fruition of the idea to “the common challenges and risks associated with the global economic slowdown and restrictive measures against the EAEU states and China.”
Translation: as China is as much a Eurasian power as Russia, they need to coordinate their strategies to bypass the US unipolar system.
The Eurasian system will be based on “a new international currency,” most probably with the yuan as reference, calculated as an index of the national currencies of the participating countries, as well as commodity prices. …
The Eurasian system is bound to become a serious alternative to the US dollar, as the EAEU may attract not only nations that have joined BRI … but also the leading players in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as well as ASEAN. West Asian actors – Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon – will be inevitably interested.
Exorbitant Privilege or Exorbitant Burden?
If that system succeeds, what will the effect be on the U.S. economy? Investment strategist Lynn Alden writes in a detailed analysis titled “The Fraying of the US Global Currency Reserve System” that there will be short-term pain, but, in the long run, it will benefit the U.S. economy. The subject is complicated, but the bottom line is that reserve currency dominance has resulted in the destruction of our manufacturing base and the buildup of a massive federal debt. Sharing the reserve currency load would have the effect that sanctions are having on the Russian economy – nurturing domestic industries as a tariff would, allowing the American manufacturing base to be rebuilt.
Other commentators also say that being the sole global reserve currency is less an exorbitant privilege than an exorbitant burden. Losing that status would not end the importance of the U.S. dollar, which is too heavily embedded in global finance to be dislodged. But it could well mean the end of the petrodollar as sole global reserve currency, and the end of the devastating petroleum wars it has funded to maintain its dominance.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, whose firm oversees investments equivalent to about half of US GDP, has predicted that efforts to punish Russia over its invasion of Ukraine would lead to the unraveling of globalism as decision-makers reconsider their foreign vulnerabilities.
“The Russian invasion of Ukraine has put an end to the globalization we have experienced over the last three decades,” Fink said on Thursday in a letter to investors. “We had already seen connectivity between nations, companies and even people strained by two years of the pandemic. It has left many communities and people feeling isolated and looking inward. I believe this has exacerbated the polarization and extremist behavior we are seeing across society today.”
Western nations responded to the Ukraine crisis by launching an “economic war” against Moscow, including the unprecedented step of barring the Russian central bank from deploying its foreign currency reserves, Fink noted. Capital markets, financial institutions and other businesses have gone beyond the sanctions imposed by their governments, cutting off their Russian ties and operations.
“Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and its subsequent decoupling from the global economy is going to prompt companies and governments worldwide to re-evaluate their dependencies and re-analyze their manufacturing and assembly footprints – something that COVID-19 had already spurred many to start doing,” Fink said. As a result, he added, companies will move more operations to their home countries or to neighboring nations, leading to higher costs and prices.
The Russia-Ukraine conflict has “upended the world order” that has been in place since the Cold War ended and will require BlackRock to adjust to “long-term structural changes,” such as deglobalization and higher inflation, Fink said. He added that central banks will have to either accept increased inflation – even beyond the 40-year high that was set last month in the US – or reduced economic activity and employment.
New York-based BlackRock handles $10 trillion in assets, making it the world’s largest money manager, so Fink’s views are closely watched by investors. In fact, the billionaire wields so much financial clout that his thoughts can be self-fulfilling, to some degree. Among other implications, he said he sees the Ukraine crisis accelerating the development of digital currencies and speeding the shift away from fossil fuels.
“The ramifications of this war are not limited to Eastern Europe,” Fink said. “They are layered on top of a pandemic that has already had profound effects on political, economic and social trends. The impact will reverberate for decades to come in ways we can’t yet predict.”
Although Fink and Russian leaders don’t see eye-to-eye on the Ukraine conflict – the money manager blames Moscow for causing the crisis – they agree that the world order is changing. Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week that sanctions against Moscow mark the end of an era, portending an end to the West’s “global dominance” both politically and economically. Ex-President Dmitry Medvedev echoed those comments this week, saying, “The unipolar world has come to an end.”
Editor’s Note: The Democratic Party is not likely to maintain control over the U.S. House of Representatives after the upcoming 2022 mid-term elections (should honest elections actually be held in the swing states), therefore these radical leftists are eager to distract not only from its incompetence at governing under Biden, but its ineptness in managing the alleged COVID-19 pandemic response, the stupidity of ignoring an invasion of illegals and criminals at the southern border with Mexico, hyperinflation, energy-policy, etc. The Russia-Ukraine conflict, and its postering for world war, gives the Democratic Party a small boost among war mongers and defense contractors, and their war mongering allies in the Republican Party as well.This show is all partisan politics and dangerous media theatrics which may very well be the end-game for civilization and a fast-track for species (human) extinction.
During an ABC interview today, White House Spokesperson Jennifer Psaki gave away the game for the Biden Administration’s intent on exploiting the Russia-Ukraine crisis.
Keep in mind, as the Biden team were getting pummeled for negative economic outcomes, massive inflation, skyrocketing energy costs and gas prices set to double, the White House worked to create an urgent defense by manufacturing the crisis.
While Joe Biden ate his pudding, the people behind the scenes told Zelenskyy and Putin that Ukraine was about to enter NATO {December 2021}. The White House then seeded details through China knowing the intel would get back to Putin. Russia took the bait and intervened.
The collective left (far more western leader beneficiaries on a global scale) now have a quick and strategic pivot point to go from COVID-19 as the excuse for all the economic ills, to Russia. The Russia-Ukraine crisis transfers the cost of the Build Back Better climate change agenda from COVID-19 to Russia/Ukraine. We can now watch COVID just disappear.
The BBB agenda, domestically known as the Green New Deal, intentionally makes energy costs skyrocket. By creating the Ukraine crisis, gas prices specifically are no longer blamed on COVID-19 (the original fraudulent justification). Gas prices are now rising because of Russia and the villainous Vladimir Putin. Climate change policy outcomes are made palatable by blaming Putin.
As you’ve noticed over the last two days, the global corporate media psyop spell weavers have puked up another “scariant” called “Nu,” and they are now hyperventilating over it, claiming it has over “30 horrifying mutations” and might spread faster than anything in history.
The underlying message, of course, is that everybody should stop resisting and immediately obey the demands of (corrupt) government.
People are panicking as they realize all the vaccines and boosters they already took are now worthless
Part of the message being delivered in this mass media scariant panic is that all the vaccines and boosters that people already took are apparently worthless against this new variant. This means that everybody’s vaccine compliance “vaccine passport” status essentially resets to zero.
The Associated Press is reporting that Israelis are already losing their minds over this new covid scariant and that Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is on the verge of declaring an “emergency situation.” According to the AP, the new variant is being detected in fully vaccinated individuals traveling to Israel. Bennett is already stoking the flames, warning that travel and borders will be locked down while the Israeli military hunts down people who recently traveling from those countries and throws them into covid quarantine camps:
The government later said that all countries in sub-Saharan Africa would be considered “red countries” from which foreign nationals are barred from traveling to Israel. Israelis are prohibited from visiting those countries and those returning from them must undergo a period of isolation.
The Israeli military will work to locate all individuals who have been to red countries within the past week and instruct them to go into isolation while testing is carried out, it said.
With the Australian military now hunting down and forcibly vaccinating indigenous people (Aborigines), the world’s terrorist governments are ramping up their final assault on humanity, and this coordinated “Nu variant” media hysteria campaign is designed to drive to much fear into the minds of world citizens that they will go along with full-blown tyranny and genocide.
Will you comply if the media terrorizes you enough?
As I explain in today’s short Situation Update podcast, this is all a campaign to try to achieve global compliance with government tyranny. The media are all acting as journo-terrorists, pushing mass hysteria to drive people into compliance (and more vaccines). Big Pharma is drooling over the potential new profits from a whole new wave of vaccines, which will of course set off more mutations and lead to yet more variants in 2022 and beyond.
The entire thing is a rigged criminal scam rooted in fraud and evil. This will never end by complying with it. The people of the world must peacefully rise up and stand strong against the fear campaigns, the bioterrorism and government-run genocide.
The reason this “scariant” was just released in a coordinated media fear campaign, of course, is because humanity is waking up and learning to resist covid tyranny. So the globalists are doubling down on their attacks against humanity, defrosting more bioweapons from Fauci’s freezer collection while pounding the psyche of the population with relentless media fear campaigns.
The good news in all this? If you have natural immunity against covid, you’re naturally immune to all the variants, too.
But the oblivious masses who already took the early covid jabs have destroyed much of their immune function, meaning they are now extremely vulnerable to any new real variant that might emerge, assuming they really exist at all.
Notice, too, how convenient the timing is with all this, where the media now has an excuse for why so many vaccinated people are dying and have compromised immune systems. It’s the variant’s fault!
Halloween was once a popular holiday in Passaic. Year after year, my neighborhood’s lawns abounded in mock-terrifying October decorations – witches on broomsticks, carved pumpkins on the porches, fantastic spider webs festooning the shrubbery.
This year, though, there were hardly any Halloween decorations on display. And like so many small signs of the way the “pandemic” – in plain language, the deepening police state – is bulldozing away what used to be ordinary expressions of human community, the change troubles me.
I understand it, of course. After all, why should children look forward to an evening’s romp as a witch or goblin while tales of an omnipresent Black Death – exaggerations so wild they once would have made normal people laugh out loud – have become our daily dogma? And if the children aren’t celebrating, why should the rest of us?
But the sense of disquiet remains, unsettling everything I used to hope I knew about the realities of communal life. I cannot get used to the subtle encroachment of fear into every aspect of our collective existence. I cannot accept the slow poisoning of all the interactions between one human being and another by the relentless tide of COVID19 propaganda.
As I walked around an unadorned neighborhood that should have been full of Halloween symbols in that late October season, I began to rage inwardly at the realization that so many parents genuinely believed they were protecting their children when they deprived them of a public celebration, however innocuous.
Trick-or-treating on Halloween? I could see my neighbors shaking their heads and mentally counting up the possibilities of infection. What would have happened if the kids had knocked on someone’s front door and the person who answered it wasn’t wearing a muzzle? Besides, could anyone be absolutely sure that whoever put candy into the kids’ plastic bags had washed his hands before touching the wrappers? Or what if – horror of horrors – he hadn’t even been “vaccinated”?
On a sunny afternoon a few weeks ago, I found myself unexpectedly surrounded by a large crowd of children just released from school. At first it was reassuring to float in an eddy of untroubled human behavior; such moments have become progressively rarer, and therefore more precious, over the last year and a half.
The kids around me strolled, joked and chattered like schoolchildren everywhere. But wasn’t there something wrong with the picture? So inexorable has been the stealthy advance of the corona coup’s “new normal” – even for someone who has struggled to resist it – that it took me several seconds to realize that these children were masked.
Every last one of them had his or her face hidden behind a black muzzle.
Yes, if I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine that things were still as they should be. But opening them again brought back the nightmare reality: here were what should have been children replaced by caricatures – people without faces, conversations without smiles, eyes unaccompanied by mouths.
And the worst of it was that these kids had clearly become so accustomed to this Kafkaesque state of affairs, so indoctrinated in COVID19 hysteria, that they had kept their muzzles on even after leaving the school building where they were required to wear them. For them, terror was now a way of life. The surreal had become normal.
And not only for them. Consider the political reality of the state I live in. For well over a year now, all-cause mortality figures throughout New Jersey have rarely fallen outside ordinary parameters – in other words, there has not been any conceivable grounds for claiming the existence of a medical emergency.
And yet New Jersey’s governor, Phil Murphy, is still ruling as a virtual dictator, wielding “emergency” powers that were legally supposed to expire on April 9 of 2020 – destroying businesses, confining people with illegal quarantines, threatening to muzzle us all (again) at the first sign of resistance – while the state government whose constitution Murphy has pulped for the last 19 months recently mailed out to the citizens, with what I assume was unconscious irony, leaflets explaining how to “vote” for governor on November 2.
Earnest instructions on how to choose a dictator? For anyone who could think clearly, this was a breathtaking insult to every citizen of New Jersey. But as far as I could see, it stimulated no public reaction. How many people here realize, even now, that they’re living under unconstitutional rule? Even Murphy’s Republican challenger did not raise the issue during the campaign.
The same eerie quiet in the face of unprecedented assaults on freedom is the norm almost everywhere. The United States’ Chief Executive has been fuming like a fascist over the latest species of Untermenschen, the I-decline-to-be-a-guinea-pig-for-Big-Pharma variety.
“The unvaccinated,” sneered President Biden barely two months ago,“overcrowd our hospitals, are overrunning the emergency rooms and intensive care units, leaving no room for someone with a heart attack, or [pancreatitis], or cancer.” (Pluck the word “unvaccinated” out of that incendiary lie and insert “Jews” or “immigrants” or “black people,” and imagine how that would have played out at a White House press conference. Alas, no one tried the experiment.)
And as for people who don’t like being forcibly muzzled, the President had a simple message: “Show some respect!”
Maybe Uncle Joe has forgotten this – along with so many other things – but I can remember when candidate Biden displayed his respect for Americans by promising them that federal vaccine mandates would never happen on his watch. Funny how that sort of “respect” didn’t survive the election.
But liars will be liars, I guess: the same President who assured the public last February that everything would be hunky-dory by Christmas, with “significantly fewer people having to be socially distanced, having to wear a mask,” now boasts of imposing still more restrictions on Americans’ right to breathe.
“One who trades his horse for a promise ends up with tired feet,” Nikita Khrushchev liked to say. By now, every American ought to be walking on crutches.
But one scours the popular press in vain for some trace of indignation at this cavalcade of lies. On the contrary, the COVID propagandists are praising Biden for his “toughness.”
Maybe it’s my age (I’m approaching 64), but in these days of political repression and intellectual cowardice, when health “experts” advocate medical Russian roulette and “liberals” endorse totalitarianism, I feel the need to mention aloud some of the subtler changes that have undermined my own life since war was declared on humanity in early 2020.
Mind you, I don’t claim that these are the worst consequences of the police-state methods we’ve been facing. I don’t even mean that they’re the ones I think about most. Next to the 34 million people worldwidewho have been pushed to the edge of starvation by lockdown policies, they seem positively trivial.
But to me they are constant reminders of the tide of madness rising around me, everyday measures of the slow derangement of what we used to call “normal life” – and now can only remember and mourn.
PHYSICAL OBSTRUCTIONS BETWEEN PEOPLE
March and April 2020 witnessed a remarkable flurry of activity throughout my area as banks, drug stores, supermarkets, neighborhood groceries and a host of other retail outfits, large and small, installed barriers to impose some physical distance between customers and cashiers.
Many of those barriers were plastic. A few were plexiglass. But they were all supposed to be temporary; they were there because of what we were told was a medical emergency, not as a permanent means of establishing more separation – and more fear – between people going about their daily lives.
That was a year and a half ago. New Jersey’s unconstitutional “lockdown” ended last summer. Mask “mandates” (also unconstitutional) ended before the beginning of 2021. All the other scare measures promulgated in early 2020 – plastic gloves in stores, constant hand sanitizing, mutual back-turning in elevators – are behind us, at least for the moment.
But those barriers? Every single one of them is still in place. It took mere days to erect them, but now I’m not sure whether I’ll ever see them taken down. What are they for? Clearly they serve no medical purpose.
But as constant reminders of the danger each human being supposedly represents to every other – and as obstacles to any practical sense of solidarity between customers and workers – they’re hard to beat. So there they remain, daily symbols of a cynical war against human community, another successful trick of the freedom-haters.
SHORTAGES
At first I thought this might be a product of my own impatience – but no, general shortages really have been commonplace for the last year and a half. Consider the case of cleaning fluids.
We all remember how the store shelves emptied when the first government-inspired panic had people running to buy antiseptic cleansers for their kitchen floors and counters back in March 2020. But manufacturers have had plenty of time since then to increase production. Yet, in defiance of the ordinary dynamics of supply and demand, the public’s appetite for cleansers still hasn’t generated an abundant supply.
And it’s not just cleaning liquids that are comparatively scarce. Many types of chicken (I’m told) have been difficult to obtain for months at a time. So are paper towels. Mung beans, formerly almost a staple of mine, now can’t be found even in health food stores.
According to press reports, there is a national shortage of cars – for sale and for rent – and of microchips and test kits, among other things. An article in Atlantic, one of the most committed purveyors of COVID propaganda, has even dubbed the situation “the Everything Shortage.”
Unsurprisingly, popular media have attributed all this to the “pandemic” – an explanation so patently absurd that the propagandists have recently begun to recast the question, claiming that what we’re experiencing is actually something called a “supply chain crisis.”
Even if someone had clearly defined that term (and no one has), and even if national distribution systems could actually be brought to a halt by one moderately serious respiratory virus (and they can’t), anyone tempted to believe the new tale would do well to ponder another national “shortage” that has been touted by large retail corporations for nearly a year now, and which seems to be spreading.
I’m referring to claims about a “national coin shortage” I’ve seen for more than six months at several chain stores in Passaic, where placards instruct customers to make their purchases with credit or debit cards instead of cash. According to press reports, the same warnings are showing up in businesses all over the U.S., so there’s nothing eccentric about my own town in this respect.
But what is it all about? Could the United States really be suffering from a “coin shortage”? Has the national mint broken down? Have we run out of nickel or copper? Are all the mint workers on strike?
Well – no, no, and no. In fact, the simple truth is that there isn’t a “coin shortage” at all; instead, according to the usual media suspects, the real trouble is that “the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the U.S. coin supply chain.”
Ah – there’s that convenient “supply chain” again!
But what does it mean this time? Well, if you believe the pundits, it seems that lots of people have been keeping much of their change at home – which is probably true, but also irrelevant, since that practice surely started long before 2020. Leaping over the objection, however, the pundits assure us that this is the reason that your local supermarket won’t take your cash nowadays.
Got that? Too many people are keeping change in their houses; the ostensible solution is to prevent them from using cash altogether at large stores, a practice that can only further increase the number of loose coins sitting “idle” at home. In other words: we “solve” the problem by creating more of it.
I hate to sound paranoid, but given the obvious absurdity of the argument, doesn’t it seem a lot more likely that claims about a “coin shortage” represent an early push toward the elimination of cash? And that the real goal of such measures is to funnel our economic life into digital transactions that – through the broad medium of credit or debit cards – can easily be monitored and, in the not very distant future, controlled by governments who have already proved their contempt for democracy at every step of the corona coup?
I may not be able to prove that this is the real reason for the “national coin shortage” hoopla – but I can certainly see that the stated reason is false. And plenty of credible observers already believe that discouraging cash is a political strategy, not a practical “remedy.”
SNOOPING AND SNITCHING
Informing on one’s neighbor to the thought police is already pretty much the norm on commercial airliners, where passengers are encouraged to report anyone who dares to attempt normal breathing, even while asleep. (“Look! There’s a secret anti-masker dozing in the seat across the aisle!”)
But the snoop-and-snitch craze seems to be spreading. Now, whole school systems are using commercial software to spy on as many as 23 million U.S. children, monitoring their every keystroke and tracking their internet contacts.
According to a recent press report, while some parents object to this Big Brother-ism, others seem to feel that there’s too little surveillance of their kids, not too much. As for school administrators – many of them see nothing wrong with local bureaucrats doubling as thought police because “I’ve always felt that they [the kids] are already being tracked,” as one school principal phlegmatically put it.
Meanwhile, a recent and typical news story described, without comment, how students and/or parents reported a teacher to the authorities for the crime of being “unvaccinated” – and of having occasionally removed her muzzle while reading aloud to the class.
Sad to say, there was nothing unusual about that.
Hollywood snitches have busied themselves in recent months getting actors fired for expressing the wrong thoughts about such things as mandatory muzzling or manipulated elections. And what’s good for celebrities ought to be good for the rest of us, right?
The trend toward the destruction of privacy – which is the death knell for any democratic system of government – is all the more dangerous because it was gaining ground even before coronavirus hysteria created the perfect culture for its expansion.
“Think of our counterinsurgency wars abroad as so many living laboratories for the undermining of a democratic society at home,”wrote Alfred McCoy, the leading U.S. historian of surveillance and its political consequences, as far back as 2009.
McCoy presciently warned that technology used to repress dissent in, say, Iraq:
has proven remarkably effective in building a technological template that could be just a few tweaks away from creating a domestic surveillance state – with omnipresent cameras, deep data-mining, nano-second biometric identification, and drone aircraft patrolling ‘the homeland.’”
I think of those words every time I’m urged to install proof-of-“vaccination” software on my cell phone. Am I really supposed to believe that such a potentially powerful surveillance tool won’t be put to more intrusive uses?
It’s worth remembering that President George W. Bush tried to organize ordinary citizens into a massive, informal spy network as part of the “war on terror” nearly 20 years ago, while the federal government was compiling “electronic dossiers” on millions of Americans – a system that only got bigger under Barack Obama.
With Joe Biden, Obama’s Vice President, at the helm now, there can’t be much question about where we’re heading. Anyone who still believes in privacy is going to have to fight for it.
LYING, LYING EVERYWHERE
I admit there’s nothing new about dishonesty in popular news media. But Marion Renault, writing in The New Republic, may have reached a new low when she recently portrayed the entire state of Alabama as a convocation of lost souls because fewer than 40% of its inhabitants have submitted to COVID19 “vaccines.”
Ms. Renault, who made her descent into that conservative Hades last August, was seeking from the damned an answer to a question that literally brought her to tears: how can we go on feeling compassion for people who don’t want untested, potentially lethal chemicals in their bodies?
Unbiased readers might notice that the word “compassion” drops rather oddly from a woman who repeatedly hurls fact-free anathemas at the “unvaccinated,” of which this one is typical:
By delaying or refusing to get vaccinated against Covid-19, a majority of Alabamians have offered up their bodies to host the virus, spread its disease, and incubate its next, potentially more dangerous variant.”
(Whew! I suppose we should be grateful she hasn’t recommended burning at the stake for such dangerous heretics.)
But what is most striking about her hate piece – the work of an avowed unbeliever – is the fire and brimstone of its sermonizing, which repeatedly reaches its most fervently pious pitch as its logic passeth all understanding:
On its own, Covid-19 vaccination is a shield against individuals’ risk of being hospitalized or dying should they make contact with the virus. But millions of individual doses can coalesce into a congregation of immunity that could push SARS-CoV-2 to the margins. “We are protected not so much by our own skin, but by what is beyond it,” writes the essayist Eula Biss. Immunity, she adds, “is a common trust as much as it is a private account.” Vaccination’s most powerful protection is amassed, not allocated. It is an ideal. And it is achieved only when enough individuals decide it’s worth contributing to. “We give up a little freedom to all be safer,” Craig Klugman, a professor of bioethics at DePaul University, told me. The very roots of the word “immunity” reflect this hopeful collectivism: In Latin, munis means a burden, duty, or obligation.
That final sentence, with its abortive Latin exegesis, is an especially blatant howler: it’s true that munis means a “burden” or “duty,” but im-munity means freedom from such a burden, so that the word actually expresses the exact opposite of the “hopeful collectivism” Ms. Renault claims to find in it.
But getting things upside down isn’t the worst of her sins. In keeping with the most sinister tendencies of crisis propaganda, she manipulates language to give an emotional boost to a piece of dangerously irrational incitement. Look again at the sanctimonious rhetoric she deploys to gloss over the fact that the drugs in question don’t hamper transmission of the virus:
“[M]illions of individual doses can coalesce into a congregation of immunity that could push SARS-CoV-2 to the margins…Vaccination’s most powerful protection…is an ideal.”
“Congregation of immunity”? “Push to the margins”? An “ideal”? If Ms. Renault could claim that COVID19 vaccines protect the public by stopping the spread of a particular pathogen, she would say so – in plain words. But she knows the drugs do no such thing.
So, instead, we get tendentious pieties about “congregations” (cue the religious music) being energized to force a deadly adversary over the sideline (go, saints, go!), a religious rhetoric that blurs medical realities in the frisson of forging a new Church Militant. (At another point, Ms. Renault actually goes so far as to describe “herd immunity” – which she wrongly assumes can only result from “vaccination” – as “sanctity.”)
Ms. Renault’s crusading metaphor paves the way for the paragraph’s ultimate lie: “We give up a little freedom to all be safer” – a sentiment that can only shed its totalitarian essence in the context of holy war, where individual sacrifices are rewarded with collective salvation.
Nor does Ms. Renault shrink from still darker ramifications of her holy war analogy. “It’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks,” she approvingly quotes from Alabama Governor Kay Ivey. (Ms. Renault calls such bigotry “righteous anger.”) She even finds a“bioethicist at New York University” who insists that “vaccine refusal should be punishable by law.”
First the non-guinea pigs are aliens (not “regular folks”); then they’re literally criminals. Anyone familiar with the logic of holy war can easily imagine the next step. Ms. Renault’s article poses as empirical journalism, but it is really a specimen of jihadist incitement in which the infidels to be eradicated are not Christians or Jews or atheists, but Americans who still value the Bill of Rights.
I’ve singled out this piece not only for its soggy prose – in this respect, it’s no worse than dozens of other COVID diatribes – but to underline the fact that the propagandists’ holy war against anyone who resists coronavirus hysteria is so far advanced that its manifestations seldom even attract notice, let alone public comment.
If Ms. Renault had called down similar anathemas on Muslim immigrants, the entire liberal media would be in a frenzy of righteous indignation. But she can (and does) excoriate people whose actions are protected by the Nuremberg Code as heretics and public enemies – infidels, in a word, whose right even to be pitied (and, by implication, to live) may freely be called into question.
And such is our overexposure to this sort of scurrility that no one even seems to notice it.
TOTALITARIANISM GOING MAINSTREAM
There have always been people who pine for dictatorship, but before the corona coup such people pullulated mostly at the margins of civilized society. Now they are ubiquitous, expounding their hatred for freedom from liberal media platforms all over the country. At first they attacked people who didn’t cover their faces when illegally ordered to do so.
It didn’t matter that no scientific evidence supported their position, just as it doesn’t matter now that post facto research shows that all the mandatory muzzling didn’t save any lives. The unobstructed human face was a symbol of liberty – so it had to be purged.
The same totalitarian rage soon focused on doctors who tried to care for their COVID19 patients. To take a single example: Dr. Peter McCullough, a physician with impeccable credentials and an impressive list of academic publications, has testified repeatedly about the excellent results of treatments that, he believes, could have prevented 85 percent of COVID19 deaths worldwide.
He was expunged from social media for his trouble.
But on a single day, I read three separate articles lionizing a Michigan doctor who boasted of refusing to give his critically ill COVID patients the treatments they begged him for, instead blaming them for not having submitted to the “vaccines.”
Since when is a doctor who lets his patients die and blames them for their own illness a hero – while another doctor, who is actually saving lives, is rewarded with enforced oblivion? This would have been unthinkable before the corona coup infected the public consciousness. Now it’s hardly worth mentioning.
The totalitarians’ most recent targets are “the unvaccinated.” Along with the exploded myth of “asymptomatic transmission,” the fact-freemantra that COVID19 vaccines are “safe and effective,” and that only moral monsters would dream of refusing them, is perhaps the most palpable single fraud of the whole corona coup.
For one thing, the two professional groups with the most experience of COVID19 – health care professionals and nursing home employees – have consistently been among the most reluctant to be injected with these experimental drugs. For another, the evidence for “vaccination” simply doesn’t add up.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have refused to monitor COVID19 infections in “fully vaccinated” people since May 1 – thus avoiding the exposure of unwelcome facts about the drugs and their effects – but the evidence we have doesn’t demonstrate any significant advantage for the “vaccinated.”
And why would we expect it to, given the figures touted by the propagandists themselves? They once told us that about 345,000 Americans died from COVID19 in all of 2020 – when the “vaccines” were not available to the public. But now they insist that in the first ten months of 2021, while nearly 60% of the U.S. population submitted to the experimental drug regime, a significantly larger number (393,000) succumbed to the same illness.
Yes, the propagandists’ numbers are unreliable to begin with (I’ve stressed that myself in prior articles) – but why can’t they even keep their story straight? They can’t simultaneously hype the Delta-variant-is-killing-us-all fear porn and insist that COVID19 “vaccination” means the end of the outbreak.
Besides, if the totalitarians actually cared about public health, they would be paying at least intermittent attention to the real world that people like me actually inhabit. In fact, they’re too busy poisoning that world to worry about the consequences.
The CDC already admits that “over 81,000 drug overdose deaths occurred in the U.S. in the 12-month period ending in May 2020” – the “highest number ever recorded by the CDC.”
And while the U.S. is notoriously laggard in reporting suicide figures, there are already grim adumbrations from other countries about what we can expect. Japan recorded more suicides in a single month – October 2020 – than the official count of COVID19 deaths for the entire calendar year.
For children in Italy, Spain and China, lockdowns have triggered serious increases in the rates of depression and anxiety.
Remember: none of this has been caused by a respiratory virus. It has all been the work of the totalitarians who, while robbing us of a decent human life, are using “vaccines” as an excuse to dehumanize all those who still believe in freedom – and to complete the regimentation and enslavement of all the rest.
Alfred McCoy’s warning about the coming surveillance state, issued more than a decade ago, rings truer now than ever, particularly his suggestion that by 2020, “our America may be unrecognizable – or rather recognizable only as the stuff of dystopian science fiction”:
In a future America, enhanced retinal recognition could be married to omnipresent security cameras as a part of the increasingly routine monitoring of public space…. If that day comes, our cities will be Argus-eyed with countless thousands of digital cameras scanning the faces of passengers at airports, pedestrians on city streets, drivers on highways, ATM customers, mall shoppers, and visitors to any federal facility. One day, hyper-speed software will be able to match those millions upon millions of facial or retinal scans to photos of suspect subversives inside a biometric database…sending anti-subversion SWAT teams scrambling for an arrest or an armed assault.
McCoy wrote all that without even knowing that the corona coup would accelerate the process he feared. Today, a year and a half into the coup, I am living in the first phase of that “future America” – and the experience is bleak.
And it’s personal. I began this essay by remarking on the loss of interest in the Halloween holiday. That’s a small detail in itself. But multiplied by the loss of dozens of holidays and celebrations, by the repeated splintering of family and friends, by the deprivation of embraces or kisses or even friendly handshakes, by the routine covering of our faces, by every instance of fear where there should be comfort, of cruelty where there should be sympathy – multiplied, finally, by the dozens of small insults our spirits must absorb every single day we live in this totalitarian hysteria, even a detail like Halloween trick-or-treating can feel like the difference between sanity and madness.
And if you think the madmen behind this coup intend to spare our children, you’ve got the picture exactly backwards. Children are their primary targets.
As I write this, New York City’s mayor is giving out $100 bribes to any parent willing to have a 5-to-11-year-old son or daughter injected with chemicals whose safety the government specifically refuses to ensure.
Meanwhile, the thousands of babies believed to have been born with congenital syphilis in the US in 2021, and the even larger number expected for 2022 – babies whose suffering and death are entirely preventable – can expect little or no help: the government refuses to appropriate more than a small fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars it is pouring into COVID19 “vaccine” propaganda for medical outreach programs that could save real children from a genuinely deadly disease.
But nothing can stand in the way of the “vaccines” – not even death. Due to staffing shortages “caused by the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate,” 26 fire stations in New York City alone were shut down on October 30.
The next day, a fire in Brooklyn killed a 7-year-old boy. No one in liberal media seemed to mind.
That same day – Halloween – I was invited by my apartment building’s management to participate in “an in-building trick-or-treat event” for children whose parents were too afraid to take them into the street. The last line of the flyer advertising the “event” cautioned, “Masks must be worn when greeting the children and handing out candy.”
Poor kids, I thought.
First, they terrify your parents into keeping you indoors on a night you should be enjoying yourselves outside. Then they see to it that wherever you’re allowed to go, you’ll be met by masks – not playful Halloween masks, but terrifyingly real symbols of the mortal danger the propagandists want you to see in every human being from now on, as you learn to be the frightened slaves of a police state that uses you as pawns in its quest for social atomization and absolute control.
I really wanted to give those victimized children whatever taste of fun it was still in my power to give. But I couldn’t, wouldn’t do that at the price of being an accomplice in their enslavement. Maybe I couldn’t stop the coup. But I could refuse to collaborate.
So I spent Halloween alone in my apartment, mourning for a world in which simple acts of humanity are criminal, and where nothing is safe from the rising tide of oppression that only turns more poisonous as we become desensitized to it.
About the Author: Michael Lesher is an author, poet and lawyer whose legal work is mostly dedicated to issues connected with domestic abuse and child sexual abuse. His latest nonfiction book is Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities (McFarland & Co., 2014); his first collection of poetry, Surfaces, was published by The High Window in 2019. A memoir of his discovery of Orthodox Judaism as an adult – Turning Back: The Personal Journey of a “Born-Again” Jew – was published in September 2020 by Lincoln Square Books.
As we exit the pandemic, expect to hear much more about The Great Reset and building back better. Far from resulting in a low-carbon dream life, though, it’s a cartoonish fantasy that will hand the global elite even more power.
‘The Great Reset’ is a term that has been bandied about quite readily by most Western neo-liberal politicians. So often, in fact, and without proper explanation, that it strikes the prudent observer as a kind of paid advertisement.
But what is it exactly? The term rose to prominence at the 50th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in June 2020. It was initially launched by the Prince of Wales, before being absorbed into the philosophy of the sartorially dystopian sci-fi villain Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the WEF.
The Great Reset refers to a plan to rebuild the world’s infrastructure ‘in a sustainable way’ following the economic ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic and to establish a global treaty to prevent future pandemics, or as it is described more formally, to “build a more robust international health architecture that will protect future generations.” If you ever hear people talking about “building back better,” they are referring to The Great Reset.
Probably the most disturbing part of The Great Reset is how much it strongly resembles business-as-usual, only with EXTRA globalism. Most of the plan’s outlines include a further weakening of national boundaries and individual national autonomy, in favour of a more ‘universal governance.’ As usual, it is the rapidly vanishing Western middle class which must shoulder this burden, as their freedoms are further curtailed to meet the quotas of corporate-media-fuelled activism.
Regardless, many world leaders, no doubt charmed into acquiescence by Schwab’s commandingly sinister Blofeld-esque wardrobe, agreed to the Great Reset, including Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Mark Rutte, Pedro Sánchez, Erna Solberg and Volodymyr Zelensky. According to John Kerry, Joe Biden’s administration is on board, too.
But the general agreement of the Western leaders is absolutely typical of any agenda which is espoused by NATO, the UN, or the WEF. If an emotionally charged, politically vague and ultimately ineffectual edict or bill is proposed by one of these entities – each resembling a shabby, globe-trotting team of insurance salesmen – our effete politicians line up to show the most fervent compliance.
As a rule, it seems their solutions to specific environmental or scientific problems mysteriously become entwined with LGBTQ+ rights, workplace equity, open borders initiatives and other unrelated social justice causes. It’s as though any goals they have are somehow unilaterally from the same source, or entail the same solution, regardless of causality or consequence. Therefore, a united response to a global pandemic mysteriously also equals trans rights activism.
In their own words, “No single government or multilateral agency can address this (pandemic) threat alone. Together, we must be better prepared to predict, prevent, detect, assess and effectively respond to pandemics in a highly co-ordinated fashion.”
There are many other sweeping sentiments expressed by Schwab and his acolytes which can seem either trite or threatening. Consider“the gulf between what markets value and what people value will close” and “we want more attention paid to scientific experts. No one can “self-isolate” from climate change so we all need to “act in advance and in solidarity.” There is much talk of the pursuit of “fairer and equitable outcomes.”
International treaties always tend to be about concentrating power. It’s one of those rules of life, for realists, as there is no escaping power dynamics in human affairs. Real problems don’t often have feel-good solutions. Often, they require ‘solutions that sound mean’, that don’t sound good on a corporate goals bulletin. Initiatives like The Great Reset all entail the gradual loss of the autonomy of individual nations, as their decision-making power is transferred to an international, disembodied rule-maker.
It has been, without a doubt, a globalist fantasy for a long time, but the key question is: do they realise what they are doing or not?
As far as their amazing coordinated pandemic response goes, this appears to be nothing more than forced world-wide vaccinations for EVERYBODY. According to Klaus Schwab himself: “As long as not everybody is vaccinated, nobody will be safe.” To which the attendant neo-liberal world leaders nodded in re-affirming unison, repeating in unison their mantra: “Global public good.”
Schwab, despite appearing like an immortal brothel-keeper at Kublai Khan’s Xanadu, is really cut from the same cloth as your typical EU technocrat. His ideas are not creative, they are quite staid and pedestrian, and research of his career shows they have been unchanged since the 1970s. He has consistently been preaching the very same thing, like a broken record.
Schwab believes we can achieve environmental solutions without altering capitalism in the slightest, by creating treaties of “mutual accountability and shared responsibility, transparency and co-operation within the international system.” His idea involves ‘ethical capitalism’ – where the excesses of capitalism will somehow be held at bay by ‘ethical stakeholders,’ to whom the corporations will be held accountable, while (conveniently) the elites and systems already in place will continue as they are. This is the master plan of the World Economic Forum, largely unchanged for 40 years.
The result? A green technocracy, one assumes, with a WEF-mandated ‘ethical stakeholder’ apparatus, a worldwide spiderweb organisation ruling by the threatened fears of pandemic and carbon doom. No section of society would be exempt from edicts of ‘the new treaty.’
The Great Reset website appears to be little more than an advertisement for modern pod-living. It seems to style itself as a low-carbon dream-life (without loss of modern convenience) to effeminate hipsters. One can see slovenly-looking neo-liberal youths, frequent references to LGBTQ+ values, and an overall urgency about carbon footprints.
There is a hint of Adbusters about the website, creator of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Despite the fact that the WEF and Davos and all associated entities are entirely elite institutions, the website styles itself on grassroots urban activism. There is much cringeworthy symbology in its white papers, such as a green and rainbow flag-combination with fey slogans like ‘we salute you, zoom queen!’
Schwab refers to the aim of The Great Reset as “the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” with the first being powered by water and steam, the second introducing mass production, and the third electronic automation. The fourth will blur the lines between “physical, digital and biological spheres.”
In this grab-bag of magical advances, he lists, “fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage and quantum computing.”
This sounds like cartoonish optimism, as many of these technologies are anything but clean and don’t seem to de facto relate to side-stepping out of industrialism or anything else. On top of that, fewer than 9% of companies use the machine learning, robotics, touch screens and other advanced technologies listed as somehow ‘changing everything.’ Stakeholder capitalism, as a concept, does not explain itself as foolproof, and will no doubt be freely interpreted by the likes of Silicon Valley or supply chain conglomerates.
The jewel in the crown of Great Reset optimism has to be the belief that the advent of AI will alter everything positively, again without specifics, to somehow create a low-carbon new world.
It appears at best to be all be smoke and mirrors, a childish corporate fantasy manufactured by isolated bean counters. At worst, it is an intentional power-grab by unaccountable international agencies and hidden oligarchs.
Either way, it is a fake utopia at the price of privacy and autonomy, sold to us by used-car salesmen who think they are princes.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has taken strict precautions in its preparations to mark its 100th anniversary. Beijing is heavily guarded. Knife stores are required to ask for ID and report customers’ information to the police. Restaurants in restricted areas have been forced to close their doors. The CCP is arresting people going to Beijing and blocking any social media account that might not show enough self-censorship.The CCP might look strong on the outside, but in reality, it is extremely nervous. Despite decades of tight control and brainwashing, the Chinese people are well aware that the communist system is against human nature and will not last long.
Since its takeover of China, the CCP has killed an estimated 80 million Chinese people. During its existence, it has never stopped its campaigns to purge different groups, every time picking a new group to target. Its primary targets have been those who represented the best of the Chinese people and their culture.
In the 1950s, the CCP took property from landowners, confiscated private businesses from business owners, and killed millions whom they called “capitalists.” Many of its victims were the most well educated and the most successful in Chinese society—often those who imparted the best of Chinese culture, handed down to them through a long family history.
The Chinese people have a long tradition of being loyal to their family and their spouses. When CCP officials reached the cities, they divorced their wives and married city girls. The Chinese also had a long history of respecting and supporting those who lived in temples. But the Party forced monks to marry.
All communist countries have experienced famine—it’s an inevitable result of the communist system. In China, the Great Famine from 1958 to 1962 is estimated to have killed around 40 million people. In thousands of cases, people were driven to insanity and turned to cannibalism.
There is one such story that is widely known. A father and his two children, a boy and a girl, were the only ones left in their farmhouse. One day, the father drove his daughter out of the house. When the girl came back, her brother had disappeared. There was a layer of white foam floating in the wok, and a bone had been discarded by the stove. A few days later, the father added water to the wok, then asked his daughter to come over. The girl was so scared that she hid behind the door, crying and begging: “Da, don’t eat me. I will tend the grass and keep the fire for you. If you eat me, no one will work for you.”
China has a history of 5,000 years of civilization. For most of that time, China was the envy of surrounding countries. The people were civilized and led stylish lives. Even kings from other countries chose to stay and even die in China. Communism, however, has brought famine, poverty, and an endless war against the Chinese people.
The Chinese have a tradition of being extremely respectful toward the elderly, showing respect to their parents, grandparents, and teachers. “One day my teacher, life-long my father,” as the old saying goes—he who teaches me for one day is my father for life.
However, in the 1960s during the Cultural Revolution, teenagers were encouraged by communist officials to beat their parents and teachers. In Beijing alone, more than a thousand teachers were beaten to death by their students. As a young man, Bo Xilai—the future mayor of the super city Chongqing who would go on to visit the United States as a high-ranking official—stomped on his father’s chest, breaking several of his ribs. This kind of act was unheard of during 5,000 years of Chinese history.
The CCP used teenagers to search civilians’ homes and destroy antiques, artwork, and traditional objects they found, as well as public artwork, temples, and so on—anything that could remind people of traditional Chinese culture.
The Chinese culture was always believed to be divinely inspired. But communist ideology is against humanity and against human nature. Anything that represents traditional culture and principles is an obstacle to enforcing its ideology.
After using teenagers to destroy traditional objects and overthrow political opponents, the CCP sent those same teenagers to the remote countryside to get “educated.” Doing so prevented a potential revolution and demands from them for employment. These young people faced many years of pain and hopelessness.
The CCP also shut down universities and sent intellectuals to the countryside to do farm work for “reeducation.” Many musicians had their hands ruined by hard labor. Countless writers, artists, professors, engineers, scientists, leading experts, and cultural elites—the people who traditionally carry a country’s knowledge, skills, and cultural spirit—committed suicide.
Worst of all, when the CCP came to power, it outlawed religion, dismissing it as an “opium of the people.” It uses atheism to destroy people’s belief in God, taking away people’s belief in moral standards.
The most severe religious persecution campaign by the CCP targets Falun Gong practitioners. In terms of the persecution’s scale and severity, it is unprecedented, targeting 100 million practitioners of the spiritual discipline, as well as their families and friends. Falun Gong teaches traditional meditation, which has been a core part of Chinese tradition since ancient times, and the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
To carry out the persecution—which is now entering its 23rd year—CCP leader Jiang Zemin promoted anyone who supported this persecution, forcing people to oppose truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. In promoting people who opposed goodness, the Party placed those who were most capable of committing evil in the top positions in Chinese society.
The forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners—whereby healthy individuals are killed for their organs to be sold for profit—has been supported and carried out by the military, police, courts, hospitals, and prison system. As a result, the entire country has become morally bankrupt.
Once the CCP began to profit from killing Falun Gong practitioners for their organs, it could not stop its business of killing for profit. It has continued this practice in Xinjiang Province.
The destruction of Chinese traditions, the damage to the moral standard, and the persecution of people of faith have been the Party’s biggest crimes.
The CCP has killed more people in China than the number who died in the two world wars combined. Beyond killing, it has made every effort to destroy the spirit, culture, and dignity of the Chinese people. Fully aware that it’s the enemy of the people, the Party has always been in an existential crisis.
This is why when top Party leaders speak at anniversary events, they always try to make a strong appeal and appear like they represent the Chinese people. Actually, the CCP has taken the Chinese people hostage, for fear that they will rise up and overthrow it.
After watching the film “THRIVE II: This Is What It Takes” twice and taking copious notes throughout, Happy and I have concluded that this is one of the most profound and important documentaries for ushering in a truly sustainable future for life on Earth.
Besides claiming individual sovereignty as the context for taking back ones power from external authority, an enlightened and technologically advanced civilization based on connected resonance with the unified field is not only possible, but absolutely essential for continuing the diversity and health of all life on Earth.
Kudos to Foster and Kimberly Gamble for having the courage and foresight to bring these discoveries to light and sharing them with the rest of us. This film is a must watch for every conscious human being.
Liberty International News 
