Civilization

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Ideological Alignment Pushing America Toward Totalitarianism, Experts Warn: Concerns over the nexus of big tech, big media, and big government | The Epoch Times

The American flag blows in the wind after it was lowered to half-staff Friday, Sept. 18, 2020, in Washington, after the Supreme Court announced that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died of metastatic pancreatic cancer at age 87. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

By Peter Svab

The formation of a totalitarian state is just about complete in America as the most powerful public and private sector actors unify behind the idea that actions to stamp out dissent can be justified, according to several experts on modern totalitarian ideologies.

While many have warned about the rise of fascism or socialism in “the land of the free,” the ideas have largely been vague or fragmented, focusing on individual events or actors. Recent events, however, indicate that seemingly unconnected pieces of the oppression puzzle are fitting together to form a comprehensive system, according to Michael Rectenwald, a retired liberal arts professor at New York University.

But many Americans, it appears, have been caught off guard or aren’t even aware of the newly forming regime, as the idea of elected officials, government bureaucrats, large corporations, the establishment academia, think tanks and nonprofits, the legacy media, and even seemingly grassroot movements all working in concert toward some evil purpose seems preposterous. Is a large portion of the country in on a conspiracy?

The reality now emerges that no massive conspiracy was in fact needed—merely an ideological alignment and some informal coordination, Rectenwald argues.

Despite the lack of formal overarching organization, the American socialist regime is indeed totalitarian, as the root of its ideology requires politically motivated coercion, he told The Epoch Times. The power of the regime is not yet absolute but it’s becoming increasingly effective as it erodes the values, checks, and balances against tyranny established by traditional beliefs and enshrined in the American founding.

The effects can be seen throughout society. Americans, regardless of their income, demographics, or social stature are being fired from jobs, getting stripped of access to basic services such as banking and social media, or having their businesses crippled for voicing political opinions and belonging to a designated political underclass. Access to sources of information unsanctioned by the regime is becoming increasingly difficult. Some figures of power and influence are sketching the next step, labelling large segments of society as “extremists” and potential terrorists who need to be “deprogrammed.”

While the onset of the regime appears tied to events of recent years—the presidency of Donald Trump, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) viruspandemic, the Capitol intrusion of Jan. 6—its roots go back decades.

Is It Really Totalitarian?

Totalitarian regimes are commonly understood as constituting a government headed by a dictator that regiments the economy, censors the media, and quells dissent by force. That is not the case in America but it’s also a misunderstanding of how such regimes function, literature on totalitarianism indicates.

To claim power, the regimes don’t initially need to control every aspect of society through government.

Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Workers Party in Nazi Germany, used various means to control the economy, including gaining compliance of industry leaders voluntarily, through intimidation, or through replacing the executives with party loyalists.

Similarly, the regime rearing its head in America relies on corporate executives to implement its agenda voluntarily but also through intimidation by online brigades of activists and journalists who take initiative to launch negative PR campaigns and boycotts to progress their preferred societal structure.

Also, Hitler initially didn’t control the spread of information via government censorship but rather through his brigades of street thugs, the “brown shirts,” who would intimidate and physically prevent his opponents from speaking publicly.

The tactic parallels the often successful efforts to “cancel” and “shut down” public speakers by activists and violent actors, such as Antifa.

Dissenting media in America haven’t been silenced by the government directly as of yet. But they are stymied in other ways.

In the digital age, media largely rely on reaching and growing their audience through social media and web search engines, which are dominated by Facebook and Google. Both companies have in place mechanisms to crack down on dissenting media.

Google gives preference in its search results to sources it deems “authoritative.” Search results indicate the company tends to consider media ideologically close to it to be more authoritative. Such media can then produce hit pieces on their competitors, giving Google justification to slash the “authoritativeness” of the dissenters.

Facebook employs third-party fact checkers who have the discretion to label content as “false” and thus reduce the audience on its platform. Virtually all the fact checkers focused on American content are ideologically aligned with Facebook.

Attempts to set up alternative social media have run into yet more fundamental obstacles, as demonstrated by Parler, whose mobile app was terminated by Google and Apple, while the company was kicked off Amazon’s servers.

To the degree that a totalitarian regime requires a police state, there’s no law in America targeting dissenters explicitly. But there are troubling signs of selective, politically motivated enforcement. Signs go back to the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups or the difference in treatment received by former Trump adviser Lt. Gen Michael Flynn and former FBI deputy Director Andrew McCabe—both allegedly lying to investigators but only one getting prosecuted. The situation may get still worse as the restrictions tied to the CCP virus see broad swaths of ordinary human behavior being considered “illegal,” opening the door to nearly universal political targeting.

“I think the means by which a police state is being set up is the demonization of Trump supporters and the likely use of medical passports to institute the effective equivalent of social credit scores,” Rectenwald said.

While loyalty to the government and to a specific political party plays a major role, it’s the allegiance to the ideological root of totalitarianism that gives it its foot soldiers, literature on the subject indicates.

Totalitarian Ideology

The element “that holds totalitarianism together as a composite of intellectual elements” is the ambition of fundamentally reimagining society—“the intention to create a ‘New Man,’” explained author Richard Shorten in “Modernism and Totalitarianism: Rethinking the Intellectual Sources of Nazism and Stalinism, 1945 to the Present.”

Various ideologies have framed the ambition differently, based on what they posited as the key to the transformation.

Karl Marx, co-author of the Communist Manifesto, viewed the control of the economy as primary, describing socialism as “socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature,” in his Das Kapital.

Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Workers Party in Nazi Germany, viewed race as primary. People would become “socialized”—that is transformed and perfected—by removing Jews and other supposedly “lesser” races from society, he claimed.

The most dominant among the current ideologies stem from the so-called “critical theories,” where the perfected society is defined by “equity,” meaning elimination of differences in outcomes for people in demographic categories deemed historically marginalized. The goal is to be achieved by eliminating the ever-present “white supremacy,” however the ideologues currently define it.

While such ideologies commonly prescribe collectivism, calling for national or even international unification behind their agenda, they are elitist and dictatorial in practice as they find mankind never “woke” enough to follow their agenda voluntarily.

In Marx’s prophecies, the revolution was supposed to occur spontaneously. Yet it never did, leading Vladimir Lenin, the first head of the Soviet Union, to conclude that the revolution will need leadership after all.

“The idea is that you have some enlightened party … who understand the problem of the proletariat better than the proletariat does and is going to shepherd them through the revolution that they need to have for the greater good,” explained James Lindsay, author of “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody.”

Elements of this intellectual foundation can be found in ideologies of many current political forces, from neo-nazis and anarcho-communists, through to progressives and to some extent even neoliberals and neoconservatives, Lindsay acknowledged.

“This is why you see so many people today saying that the only possible answers are a full return to classical liberalism or a complete rejection of liberalism entirely as fatally disposed to create progressivism, neoliberalism, etc.,” he said.

That’s not to say these ideologies are openly advocating totalitarianism but rather that they inevitably lead to it.

The roadmap could be summarized as follows:

  1. There’s something fundamentally and intolerably wrong with current reality
  2. There’s a plan to fix it requiring a whole society buy-in
  3. People opposing the plan need to be educated about the plan so they accept it
  4. People who resist the persuasion need to be reeducated, even against their will
  5. People who won’t accept the plan no matter what need to be removed from society.

“I think that’s the general thrust,” Lindsay said. “We can make the world the way we want it to be if we all just get on the same page and same project. It’s a disaster, frankly.”

Points four and five now appear to be in progress.

Former Facebook executive Alex Stamos recently labeled the widespread questioning of the 2020 election results as “violent extremism,” which social media companies should eradicate the same way they countered online recruitment content from the ISIS terrorist group.

The “core issue,” he said, is that “we have given a lot of leeway, both in traditional media and on social media, to people to have a very broad range of political views” and this has led to the emergence of “more and more radical” alternative media like OAN and Newsmax.

Stamos then mused about how to reform Americans who’ve tuned in to the dissenters.

“How do you bring those people back into the mainstream of fact-based reporting and try to get us all back into the same consensus reality?” he asked in a CNN interview.

“And can you? Is that possible?” CNN host Brian Stelter added.

The logic goes as follows: Trump claimed the election was stolen through fraud and other illegalities. That has not been proven in court and is thus false. People who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and managed to break inside and disrupt the electoral vote counting did so because they believed the election was stolen. Therefore, anybody who questions the legitimacy of the election results is an extremist and potentially a terrorist.

With tens of thousands of troops assembled to guard the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) recently told CNNthat all guard members who voted for Trump belong to a “suspect group” that “might want to do something,” alluding to past leaders of other countries who were “killed by their own people.”

Former FBI Director James Comey recently said the Republican party needs to be “burned down or changed.”

“They want a one party state,” commented conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza in a recent podcast. “That is not to say they don’t want an opposition. They want a token opposition. They want Republicans where they get to say what kind of Republican is ok.”

Just as Marx blamed the ills of the world on capitalists and Hitler on Jews, the current regime tends to blame various permutations of “white supremacy.”

“Expel the Republican members of Congress who incited the white supremacist attempted coup,” said Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) in a recent tweet, garnering some 300,000 likes.

She was referring to the Republican lawmakers who raised objections on Jan. 6 to election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Their objections were voted down.

“Can U.S. Spy Agencies Stop White Terror?” Daily Beast’s Jeff Stein asked in a recent headline, concluding that a call for “secret police” to sniff out “extremist” Americans “may well get renewed attention.”

Under the regime, allegations of election fraud—de facto questioning the legitimacy of the leader—have become incitement of terrorism. YouTube (owned by Google), Facebook, and Twitter have either banned content that claims the election was rigged or are furnishing it with warning labels. Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey was recently recorded as saying that banning the president’s account was just the beginning.

The approach closely mirrors that of the Chinese communist regime, which commonly targets dissidents for “subverting” the state or “spreading rumors.”

What’s the Alternative?

If calls for radically reorganizing the world are inherently totalitarian, how is the world to avoid them? The question appears to be its own answer. If totalitarianism inherently requires allegiance to its ideology, it can’t exist in a society with a lack of such allegiance.

The United States was founded on the idea that individual rights are God-given and unalienable. The idea, rooted in traditional beliefs that human morality is of divine origin, stands a bulwark against any attempt to assail people’s rights even for their own good.

“If you’re not a believer in actual God, you can posit a God’s ideal on the matter … We have to posit some arbiter who’s above and beyond our own prejudices and biases in order to ensure these kinds of rights. … Because otherwise you have this infinitely malleable situation in which people with power and coercive potential can eliminate and rationalize the elimination of rights willy-nilly,” Rectenwald said.

Source: The Epoch Times

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Tucker: Democrats using military to send ‘power’ message to America | YouTube

Editor’s Note: The National Guard troops loyal to Biden are still standing by in DC to protect the insurgent Democrats and rogue Republican lawmakers who allowed a fraudulent election to be certified in favor of the Biden Administration who has now assumed power.

U.S. federal courts all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court stood on the sidelines and refused to examine the mountains of evidence or hear a single case based on their merit. Without a political or legal remedy available, the last recourse of a free people is to assemble peacefully in DC and make their voices heard.

But instead of listening to their pleas for justice, the elitists who run DC chose to frame the protest as an “insurrection” and the protesters as “domestic terrorists” instead of admitting their own “treason” against the USA. The mainstream media covered for the elitists with a similar narrative.

The second impeachment of Donald J. Trump proceeds rapidly on grounds so vague and evidence so insufficient to warrant a trial in the U.S. Senate. There is no constitutional authority for impeaching a President who has already left office. The impeachment continues unabated to seal the coup d’tat and delegitimize the true results of the 2020 election (which the elitists, and one-half of the American people, know fully well which candidate actually won). 

As clearly stated in the U.S. Constitution Presidents cannot be impeached after they leave office. So perhaps by impeaching Trump after the fact, the elitists are actually admitting that Trump was and is the duly elected President and must be removed by proceeding with a mock impeachment trial. This would be the irony of ironies!

Source: YouTube

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Tucker: Our only option is to fix what’s causing this | YouTube

Editor’s Note: Here’s another level of censorship by Google/YouTube whereby they decide what’s appropriate for viewers to watch or not, then label it as such (especially political content they choose not to agree with). Welcome to 1984 today!.

Source: YouTube

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Japan expected to dump over 1 MILLION TONS of radioactive Fukushima water into Pacific, fishermen fear ‘catastrophic impact’ | RT.com

The Japanese government is planning to release more than one million tons of contaminated radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean, angering fishermen, local media have reported.

Japan has debated what to do with the rapidly increasing store of radioactive wastewater for years, and now the decision to release it into the ocean could be confirmed by the end of the month.

Currently, Japan houses the water in more than 1,000 tanks, but with 170 additional tons of the radioactive by-product being produced every day, storage space is quickly running out.

It is estimated that all tanks will have reached maximum capacity by the summer of 2022 and Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said on Friday that the decision was one they could “not keep delaying,” Kyodo News reported.

The water is used to cool the Fukushima nuclear reactor core, which went into meltdown after the catastrophic 2011 earthquake and tsunami that struck the plant. 

The government previously considered building more tanks to house the additional water, or attempting to evaporate the water into the atmosphere, but an advisory panel recommended releasing it into the ocean as the most efficient solution. However, the release process is not expected to begin until 2022 and is likely to take 30 years to complete.

The prospect of an ocean release has reignited concerns among local fishermen who fear it could destroy their industry.

“We are terrified that if even one fish is found to have exceeded the [radiation] safety standards after the treated water is released, people’s trust in us will plummet,” Kyodo News quoted a local fisherman as saying. 

Hiroshi Kishi, who heads a confederation of Japanese fishing cooperatives told officials last week that the release could have a “catastrophic impact” on the industry. 

Fishing was completely halted following the 2011 disaster, and despite a recent recovery, fishermen in the region continue to face international trade restrictions. South Korea, which still bans all fish imports from the region, has described the proposal as a “grave threat.” 

The initial meltdown in 2011 forced the evacuation of 150,000 people from within 20km of the plant as well as from outside areas that experienced high levels of fallout. The clean-up process is expected to take many more years to complete.

Source: RT

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Deagel Report Forecast 2025 | Deagel.com

Editor’s Note: There are 179 countries listed with a forecast of economic and population changes from now until 2025. As you’ll notice the USA and British Commonwealth countries are showing the deepest declines in population indicating the possibility of war or disease as the primary factors contributing to the decline.

In 2014 we published a disclaimer about the forecast. In six years the scenario has changed dramatically. This new disclaimer is meant to single out the situation from 2020 onwards. Talking about the United States and the European Union as separated entities no longer makes sense. Both are the Western block, keep printing money and will share the same fate.

After COVID we can draw two major conclusions:

  1. The Western world success model has been built over societies with no resilience that can barely withstand any hardship, even a low intensity one. It was assumed but we got the full confirmation beyond any doubt.
  2. The COVID crisis will be used to extend the life of this dying economic system through the so called Great Reset.

The Great Reset; like the climate change, extinction rebellion, planetary crisis, green revolution, shale oil (…) hoaxes promoted by the system; is another attempt to slow down dramatically the consumption of natural resources and therefore extend the lifetime of the current system. It can be effective for awhile but finally won’t address the bottom-line problem and will only delay the inevitable. The core ruling elites hope to stay in power which is in effect the only thing that really worries them.

The collapse of the Western financial system – and ultimately the Western civilization – has been the major driver in the forecast along with a confluence of crisis with a devastating outcome. As COVID has proven Western societies embracing multiculturalism and extreme liberalism are unable to deal with any real hardship. The Spanish flu one century ago represented the death of 40-50 million people. 

Today the world’s population is four times greater with air travel in full swing which is by definition a super spreader. The death casualties in today’s World would represent 160 to 200 million in relative terms but more likely 300-400 million taking into consideration the air travel factor that did not exist one century ago. So far, COVID death toll is roughly 1 million people. It is quite likely that the economic crisis due to the lockdowns will cause more deaths than the virus worldwide.

The Soviet system was less able to deliver goodies to the people than the Western one. Nevertheless Soviet society was more compact and resilient under an authoritarian regime. That in mind, the collapse of the Soviet system wiped out 10 percent of the population. 

The stark reality of diverse and multicultural Western societies is that a collapse will have a toll of 50 to 80 percent depending on several factors but in general terms the most diverse, multicultural, indebted and wealthy (highest standard of living) will suffer the highest toll. 

The only glue that keeps united such aberrant collage from falling apart is overconsumption with heavy doses of bottomless degeneracy disguised as virtue. Nevertheless the widespread censorship, hate laws and contradictory signals mean that even that glue is not working any more. Not everybody has to die migration can also play a positive role in this.

The formerly known as second and third world nations are an unknown at this point. Their fate will depend upon the decisions they take in the future. 

Western powers are not going to take over them as they did in the past because these countries won’t be able to control their own cities far less likely countries that are far away. 

If they remain tied to the former World Order they will go down along Western powers but won’t experience the brutal decline of the late because they are poorer and not diverse enough but rather quite homogenous, used to dealing with some sort of hardship, but not precisely the one that is coming. If they switch to China they can get a chance to stabilize but will depend upon the management of their resources.

We expected this situation to unfold and actually is unfolding right now with the November election triggering a major bomb if Trump is re-elected. If Biden is elected there will very bad consequences as well. 

There is a lot of bad blood in the Western societies and the protests, demonstrations, rioting and looting are only the first symptoms of what is coming. However a new trend is taking place overshadowing this one.

The situation between the three great powers has changed dramatically. The only relevant achievement of the Western powers during the past decade has been the formation of a strategic alliance, both military and economic, between Russia and China. 

Right now the potential partnership between Russia and the European Union (EU) is dead with Russia turning definitively towards China. That was from the beginning the most likely outcome. 

Airbus never tried to establish a real partnership but rather a strategy to fade away the Russian aerospace industry. Actually Russia and China have formed a new alliance to build a long haul airliner. 

Western Europe (not to mention the United States) was never interested in the development of Russia or forming anything other than a master slave relationship with Russia providing raw materials and toeing the line of the West. It was clear then and today is a fact.

Russia has been preparing for a major war since 2008 and China has been increasing her military capabilities for the last 20 years. 

Today China is not a second tier power compared with the United States. Both in military and economic terms China is at the same level and in some specific areas are far ahead. 

In the domain of high-tech 5G has been a success in the commercial realm but the Type 055 destroyer is also another breakthrough with the US gaining a similar capability (DDG 51 Flight IIII) by mid of this decade (more likely by 2030). Nanchang, the lead ship of the Type 055 class, was commissioned amid the pandemic and lockdown in China.

Six years ago the likelihood of a major war was tiny. Since then it has grown steadily and dramatically and today is by far the most likely major event in the 2020s. The ultimate conflict can come from two ways. 

A conventional conflict involving at least two major powers that escalates into an open nuclear war. A second scenario is possible in the 2025-2030 timeframe. A Russian sneak first strike against the United States and its allies with the new S-500, strategic missile defenses, Yasen-M submarines, INF Zircon and Kalibr missiles and some new space asset playing the key role. 

The sneak first strike would involve all Russian missile strategic forces branches (bombers and ground-based missiles) at the different stages of such attack that would be strategic translation of what was seen in Syria in November 2015. 

There was no report that the Russian had such a capability of launching a high precision, multiple, combined arms attack at targets 2,000+ kilometers away. Western intelligence had no clue. 

The irony is that since the end of the Cold War the United States has been maneuvering through NATO to achieve a position to execute a first strike over Russia and now it seems that the first strike may occur but the country finished would be the United States.

Another particularity of the Western system is that its individuals have been brainwashed to the point that the majority accept their moral high ground and technological edge as a given. 

This has given the rise of the supremacy of the emotional arguments over the rational ones which are ignored or deprecated. That mindset can play a key role in the upcoming catastrophic events. At least in the Soviet system the silent majority of the people were aware of the fallacies they were fed up. 

We can see the United States claims about G5 being stolen from them by China or hypersonic technology being stolen by Russia as the evidence that the Western elites are also infected by that hubris. 

Over the next decade it will become obvious that the West is falling behind the Russia-China block and the malaise might grow into desperation. Going to war might seem a quick and easy solution to restore the lost hegemony to finally find them into a France 1940 moment. 

Back then France did not have nuclear weapons to turn a defeat into a victory. The West might try that swap because the unpleasant prospect of not being Mars and Venus but rather a bully and his dirty bitch running away in fear while the rest of the world is laughing at them.

If there is not a dramatic change of course the world is going to witness the first nuclear war. The Western block collapse may come before, during or after the war. It does not matter. A nuclear war is a game with billions of casualties and the collapse plays in the hundreds of millions.

Source: Deagel Report

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If you really think everything is fine in America, think again? | YouTube

Violence returns us to the most primitive of all systems, one in which “might makes right”. There’s no greater threat to civilization. Violence like what is occurring night-by-night in numerous cities across the USA ends “democracy” and begins the fast road to “fascism” run by the mob. Is this the country you’d like to live in? When violence comes to your door, who will protect you then?

Source: YouTube

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Covid-911 – Insurgency | YouTube

Editor’s Note: What’s happening in America today is a clear and present danger to the Constitutional Republic of the United States of America. Wake Up or lose your freedoms forever.

You’re being scammed by enemies of America who occupy powerful positions in government and the media. November 2020 is the way we, the people, can fight back. Know your enemy. Ditch the masks. Rise.

Source: YouTube

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Progressive “Riotocracy” and the Great Liberal Death Wish | The Epoch Times

Suspect In Custody After Driving Into Protest And Shooting One In SeattleBy Harley Price

Across Canada and the United States, the disappointingly small groups of peaceful protesters who have supplicated the authorities to be allowed to return to work have been mocked by their political nannies as reckless and selfish yahoos endangering the lives of the rest of us.

Even immediate family members—some of whom have been known to sleep in the same bed—have been officially shamed and fined for violating the protocols of social distancing while walking in the park or kneeling in the pews.

But that was—as our woke millennials are wont to put it—so yesterday. Today, these corona-villains might consider joining the rioters the next time they feel the need for a little physical or spiritual recreation.

Apparently, marching shoulder to shoulder with your revolutionary comrades, bloodying the faces of Asian, Latino, and black shopkeepers trying to defend their livelihood, or clutching looted big-screen TVs to your bosom—all without wearing nitrile gloves or first dousing the teeming, pathogenic surfaces of stolen merchandise or victims of your violence in disinfectant—is virologically riskless when it’s for the sake of equality and justice.

Did I miss the announcement from doctors Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx that massing in violent mobs has now been determined to foster the herd immunity that their unconstitutional lockdown forestalled? And does this mean that ordinary Canadians and Americans have finally been granted permission to leave their domestic prisons, resurrect their moribund businesses, and resume their foundational civil rights of freedom of assembly and worship?

Of course not. In fact, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio was careful to stipulate that the recent rise in COVID-19 cases likely has nothing to do with the massive nationwide demonstrations (after warning solemnly that back-to-work protests in Republican flyover country were socially irresponsible). Is anyone still sufficiently credulous as to believe that holy science is politically disinterested?

Proudly Flying the Double Standard

The tacit approval by politicians and medical “experts” of the rioters’ flouting of the urgent social-distancing edicts tells you something more generally about our rulers’—to be generous, let’s call it—philosophy of governance. It’s an open secret that for decades the perennially enraged left has been formally exempt from the cinching restrictions that apply only to bourgeois, law-abiding deplorables, and the authorities have always been petrified to acknowledge, let alone repeal, this reeking double standard.

So long as you affirm that you’re “for the poor and downtrodden” you have legal immunity to trash and burn the neighborhoods of the poor and downtrodden. Little old ladies who recite their rosaries in menacing proximity to an abortion clinic are sentenced to lengthy prison terms, but Indigenous and environmental pipeline protesters have official license to occupy and blockade public rail lines and bring national transportation networks to a halt for months. The double standard is the patriotic banner, flown with pride, of the progressive army, which preaches diversity and inclusion while everywhere denouncing and censoring non-conformist opinion and speech, and blighting the careers of the insufficiently zealous.

Naturally, progressives oppose “fascism” (about which they are too young and badly educated to know anything); and to show how much they hate it, they use the violent tactics of the SS.

The torching and demolition of America’s “racist” cities—almost every one presided over by Democratic governors, mayors, municipal councils, and police chiefs (many of whom are black, to compound the irony)—by the oxymoronically named Antifa, Black Lives Matter, believe-the-women-(unless-they-accuse-Democrats) feminists, gay and trans activists, queers for open borders, Indigenous national militants, evangelists of abortion, daughters of Gaea, Trump resisters, and all of the assorted victim groups of the intersectional left, reminds us that “racial injustice” is one of an interchangeable and ever-proliferating set of pretexts under which progressives can parade their moral superiority, while enjoying the smashing and pillaging that never seem to tarnish their lustrous reputations for compassion and probity with the beau monde.

The killing of George Floyd was immediately and universally denounced, his tormentors summarily fired from the police force and charged with second-degree murder or aiding and abetting second-degree murder, and political leaders at every level have agreed to enact police reforms.

Since their demands were preemptively met, there was no plausible reason for the “protesters” to have gone on burning and looting for another three weeks, besides the sheer nihilistic joy of it. Anyone not yet impressed by the exuberant illogic and morally indiscriminate devastation wrought by the rioters need only book an iconoclast’s tour of the hundreds of historical monuments they have defaced across the globe, including the effigy of Gandhi, the statue of Winston Churchill, and the Lincoln Memorial: the original anti-colonialists, anti-fascists, and anti-racists, or so it may seem to the un-woke.

But progressive crusaders have never required a credible casus belli. Since the sixties, the left has marched, demonstrated, occupied, blockaded, rioted, burned, and looted with the noxious predictability of black flies in June, all the while anticipating and responding to the next provocation with Pavlovian reflexivity. At least when the Goths and Vandals broke and pilfered stuff in Rome, they desisted once they’d reached satiety, and they didn’t pretend it was for a higher cause.

Protesting ‘Peacefully’

As of last weekend (the numbers increase daily and have probably doubled by now), thousands of businesses across the United States, most of them minority owned, have been destroyed—many of which, already on life-support from the coronavirus lockdown, will never be resuscitated—undoing the decades of hard work, obliterating the life-savings, and beggaring the future existences of their owners (whose black lives apparently don’t matter in the least).

During the past three weeks, in every American city in which significant “protests” occurred, the number of burglaries, shootings, and homicides has increased by between 150 and 500 percent. In the riots themselves, more than 700 police officers have been injured by projectiles (rocks, bricks, cinder blocks, bottles, or Molotov cocktails, often strategically placed by “peaceful” protesters), deliberately run over by vehicular assassins, slashed with machetes, or felled by gunfire, many of whom will be maimed for life.  In St. Louis, a 77-year-old retired police captain was shot and killed by looters—another immaterial black life—while responding to an alarm at a pawn shop. The same day four other officers were shot by a “protester” aspiring to dispatch an entire police line to the other side of time.

So far, at least two dozen people have died in the riots. Ten of the dead were either innocent bystanders caught in the cross-fire, business owners vainly attempting to protect their livelihoods, onlookers deemed insufficiently enthusiastic, or local residents guilty of “privilege” and “systemic racism” because they owned property or had white skin, all executed—10 times, that is, the number of unarmed victims to die in the custody of Derek Chauvin, not a single one of whose lives will be eulogized in a nationally-televised state funeral, or whose unjust deaths will mobilize worldwide demonstrations, or soul-searching conversations about systemic leftist hate and depredation.

Predictably, at CNN, MSNBC, PBS, the New York Times, Washington Post, and the rest of the mainstream media, the canonical euphemism to describe the riots was “peaceful,” while the “rare” and “incidental” violence was attributed to a few nefarious “outside” groups who tried to “hijack” the movement. (Here the words “outside” and “hijack” can be understood in the sense that crime families from out of state sometimes hijacked Al Capone’s getaway car.)

Some officials have blamed the violence on “white supremacists,” of whose presence not even the race-baiting Southern Poverty Law Center could find evidence. According to historian Stuart Wexler, writing in Haaretz, white supremacists typically infiltrate movements such as Black Lives Matter in order to foment a race war in which they hope to “purify” America through “ethnic cleansing.” Indeed, social media, and all the usual established media echo-chambers, falsely claimed to be in possession of a photograph of Chauvin wearing a “Make Whites Great Again” cap at a Trump rally.

It is, of course, a dogma of racialist orthodoxy that resurgent ghosts from the Jim Crow era maraud daily throughout the streets of contemporary America, whereby white supremacist phantoms continue to haunt the imaginations of the likes of Al Sharpton, Jussie Smollett, and the other Masters of the Racial Revels, though they are almost never seen in the flesh. (Oh, and we mustn’t forget “the Russians,” who, according to Susan Rice, were the main instigators of the arson and vandalism. Rice later admitted that she had no evidence for her preposterous claim, but on this theme, when has evidence ever mattered?)

A few observers remained un-woke enough to accept that the trashing, burning, and looting that were taking place before their eyes had indeed been perpetrated by the protesters. But to say so is impious, and so, as the Yemeni owner of a demolished convenience store reasoned, the violence was “okay” and “understandable” in the context of black grievance. Innumerable small and large business owners have agreed that their pauperization was all worth it, leading one to wonder whether they should now restock their empty shelves so that looters can mount a second campaign of theft for racial equality.

By now, every major corporation, from Nike and Google to Walmart, has pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, in direct donation and advertising, on the corporately responsible principle, one supposes, that if you trash our stores and steal our merchandise, we’ll pay you. All of this seems somewhat beyond mere masochism. What we are witnessing are the psychopathologies of a civilization that has been taught to despise itself, and is entreating its progressive masters for euthanasia.

The New American Riotocratic Republic

And how have the brutal agents of oppression responded? As has so often been the case, the arson and looting by the mob has taken place in plain sight of the police, who assumed the posture of either neutral observers or comrades in arms.

Whenever the constabulary deigned to make arrests, the looters and vandals were ceremonially processed and released within minutes, so as not to be overly inconvenienced in their righteous struggle—policing on the sport fishing model, and a perfect reification of the “Big Rock Candy Mountain” hobo utopia, in which “the jails are made of tin,” so “you can walk right out again as soon as you are in.” In cities that imposed curfews, the violators were allowed to continue with their virtuous burning and looting until they were satisfied, as though to interrupt them were to interrupt a celebrant in mid-consecration of the mass (a sacrilege that the COVID-19 social-distancing police never shrank from).

The ritual “taking of the knee” by police chiefs, rank and file officers, and political leaders across the world is the perfect visual emblem of our rulers’ willing capitulation to extortion and mob rule, and more broadly, of our society’s suicidal complicity with the progressive thugs whose ideological imperative is to annihilate it. The only possible excuse for the congenitally tumescent, parasitical, self-serving, and duplicitous institution of government and its monopoly of force is to preserve the social order without which life is indeed nasty, brutish, and short, and guarantee the equal application of the law, without which might is right, and we may as well all emigrate to Mogadishu.

Like the police, America’s civilian rulers have also surrendered with unbidden zeal. In recognition of the justice of their cause, the mayor of Minneapolis peremptorily abandoned the police precinct to the rioters. Not to be outdone in demonstrations of piety, Mayor de Blasio ordered that streets in every one of the five boroughs be renamed after Black Lives Matter, just four days after Washington D.C.’s Mayor Muriel Bowser renamed Lafayette Park “Black Lives Matter Plaza,” marked by the words BLACK LIVES MATTER in 35-foot yellow capital letters (that color being a nice touch if you regard supine cowardice as a virtue).

It’s remarkable that in the blink of an eye Black Lives Matter has been exalted to the rank of sacrosanctity, as though it were the American chapter of Mother Teresa’s Sisters of Charity. Anyone who criticizes BLM (or its message of black persecution) is immediately censored, shunned, or fired.

Naturally, Black Lives Matters supports the entire panoply of progressive causes: unrestricted abortion, non-binary self-identified gender, transgenderism, “dismantl[ing] patriarchal practice,” the “disrupt[ion of] the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” the establishment of “a queer‐affirming network … with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking,” “dismantle[ing] cisgender privilege,” and opposing “trans-antagonistic violence.” (After all, even today’s Vandals have been to college.) BLM’S official website is a pretty comprehensive manifesto for the overthrow all the moral norms and institutions of Western Civilization; but I guess we’re all revolutionaries now.

The most instructive symbol of the great surrender, however, is Seattle, one of the perennial spiritual capitals of the Big Rock Candy Mountain hobo utopia. Across from another abandoned police station, six city blocks in Seattle’s municipal center have been ceded by the mayor and governor to the rioters as a fully autonomous state: CHOP, as its rulers now call it, the world’s newest sovereign nation. Around the perimeter of the Republic of CHOP, its “government” has posted armed guards to prevent foreigners from getting in (will border walls be next?).

Pre-CHOP residents who don’t share the revolutionary ideals of their new overlords have had no say over the proceedings. CHOP, or what might be called the Protestor Occupied Territories (POT), is thus a land that has been seized from the original indigenous inhabitants and colonized by its occupiers, but one doubts that the left will denounce it as an apartheid state, demand full democratic rights for the occupied peoples, or the right of return.

CHOP also seems to have revived the great Stalinist tradition of propaganda art. Spray-painted on every available surface are inspiring revolutionary messages including “End America” and “Shoplift Your Future Back.” (When the owner of an auto repair shop and his son detained a CHOP citizen shoplifting his future back and trying to burn down the building, he was confronted by a mob of a hundred shoplifting causists who demanded they let the Good Thief go.)

In this “police-free” land of equality and justice, in what Seattle’s mayor has described as a “block party,” violence, break ins, and robberies have become commonplace. If well-intentioned liberal “idealists” are wondering what the New Progressive Order will look like once it’s been established, they ought to schedule their next holiday in CHOP, assuming its overlords will let them in.

And the Great Liberal Death Wish

All of this leaves the remnant of the sane with the insoluble question: Which is more nauseating? The images of protesters beating up septuagenarian female shop-owners, killing and maiming hundreds of innocent bystanders, torching or trashing whole city blocks, and demonstrating their grinding poverty/anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist bona fides by prioritizing top-of-the-line Nike runners and Gucci handbags on their cleptomaniacal wish lists? Or the contrite acquiescence of the soi-disant “power structure” to their rank criminality and lunatic demands?

The morally preening orgies of contrition and expressions of solidarity by our political, cultural, and corporate leaders, exacted to ensure ideological conformity with the same effectiveness as under Mao, have been rather too numerous and fulsome for optimistic conservatives to any longer discount as merely pandering, self-preservationist, or otherwise insincere.

For 50-odd years, nothing has been done to stop leftist “protesters;” the inescapable conclusion is that the ruling class doesn’t in fact want to stop them. The recent riots should at least have made it clear that the angry left’s heroic struggle against a “repressive authority” amounts to pushing against an open door. In genuinely repressive societies (China under Mao, China under Xi, the former Soviet Union) protesters get shot or dispatched smartly to re-education camps. In post-modernist America, the protesters re-educate their oppressors in the ever-more exquisite points of progressive dogma.

After almost every violent leftist “protest” of late, our political leaders have withdrawn to their own self-sentenced struggle sessions, and emerged from them wearing the nimbus of penitence and progressive enlightenment. The current legislative initiatives to defund the police and re-purpose their budgets to the same welfare programs that have, since the sixties, enslaved blacks a second time to their white Democrat masters, originated from the sober counsel of a screaming, criminal mob.

Many previous progressive desiderata have similarly silted up from the fever swamps of angry demonstrations and were thereafter ratified into law by political leaders, both Democrat and Republican. That’s not “anarchy,” as many on the right have soothingly called it, if anarchy still means unfettered license in the absence of central authority. On the contrary, its progressive theocracy, rule by the same heresy-hunters as have given us campus and media thought police, trigger warnings, censorship of conservative opinion by the Big Tech oligarchy, deplatforming, Maoist shamings and denunciations, and all the other coercive measures by which they punish the slightest deviation from orthodoxy, and in the process repeal the fustian individual liberties and rule of law upon which post-Enlightenment Western democracies were founded.

I said that the recidivist riots of the intersectional left have never required a coherent raison d’etre. But that’s not quite true. Their proudly proclaimed purpose is the shopworn utopian dream of abolishing the corrupt pre-revolutionary moral norms and institutions of the patriarchally oppressed, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Christian-bigoted, and white-privileged Eurocentric civilization they despise, and replacing it with—well, they’ve never deigned to tell us precisely what.

That the feral violence and criminality of the protesting armies never seem to impugn the righteousness of their cause in the media or the ruling class makes it plain that, as a society, we’ve not only accepted the old revolutionary lie that the benignant end justifies the malignant means, but have become oblivious to the fact that not all ends are desirable just because a braying mob says so.

The violence of the George Floyd protesters can hardly be incidental; it’s merely the objective correlative of their core beliefs and aspirations.

Harley Price has taught courses in religion, philosophy, literature, and history at the University of Toronto, U of T’s School of Continuing Studies, and Tyndale University College. He blogs at Priceton.org.

Source: The Epoch Times

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China Orders Prayer Flags Taken Down in Tibet in an Assault on Culture, Faith | Radio Free Asia News

imageChinese authorities in Tibet have ordered the destruction of prayer flags in many parts of the region in one of China’s most direct assaults to date on visible symbols of Tibetan culture and religious belief, sources in the region say.

The campaign, described as a program of “behavioral reform,” began in June in Qinghai’s Golog (in Chinese, Guoluo) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture and in Tengchen (Dingqing) county in the Chamdo municipality of the Tibet Autonomous Region, a local source told RFA this week.

“Government officials and police have summoned the local people to meetings, ordering them to take part in what they called an environmental cleanup drive and movement of behavioral reform,” RFA’s source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“Led by the police, local Tibetans are now taking down prayer flags in their villages and on the hilltops,” where they are traditionally hung in the belief that they will ward off evil and bring good luck, the source said.

Whether old or new, the prayer flags bearing mantras are all being removed from their traditional locations, the source said, adding that even the poles on which the flags were hung are being dismantled.

“This is an act of contempt and utter disregard for local Tibetans’ customs and faith,” the source said, adding that he fears this new campaign will spread and encourage even more restrictions on traditional customs and religious practice.

“Chinese authorities in general have always vowed to eliminate any Tibetan behavior that they say will harm people’s productivity and adversely affect their livelihood,” he said.

“Thus, the authorities have now set out to root out this Tibetan tradition of hanging prayer flags everywhere, directing local officials, the heads of monasteries, and relevant authorities at the district and township level to carry out the order.”

The campaign against flags came as annual review by the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy found that Chinese policies systematically wear away and destroy Tibetans’ national and cultural identity, with a growing use of surveillance and online monitoring to suppress political dissent, and strengthened restrictions on Tibetan children’s right to classroom instruction in their own language.

Throughout the year, Chinese police forces and surveillance teams moved into monasteries and villages  to monitor Tibetan residents for signs of opposition to China’s rule, the Dharamsala, India-based center said, adding, “facial-recognition software and careful monitoring of digital spaces [were] deployed to suppress political protests against the increased clampdowns on civil and political rights.”

Reported by Lhuboom for RFA’s Tibetan Service. Translated by Dorjee Damdul. Written in English by Richard Finney.

Source: RFA News

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Be Courageous And Stand Firm, America— We Do Not Kneel | The Federalist

Kneelers2-CustomJohnny Light, Editor’s Note: We are being encouraged to perform mass rituals in order to manifest and accept the total reset of society and the heralding of a New World Order system. The masks symbolize our compliance, our submission into slavery and the loss of our rights and freedom of speech. ‘I can’t breathe’ is a mantra; an affirmation working on a subconscious level to bring about a disturbing, sinister and awful fate for a large proportion of humanity. For all intents and purposes, it’s a spell; and an extremely detrimental and self sabotaging one. 

We should be chanting ‘I CAN breathe and I WILL breathe for love, truth and justice. As spirit in matter, as the authentic humanity, I declare that those who wish me and my fellow humans harm, will be rendered powerless by our conviction and unity, fade and fall by the wayside. Dropping to bended knee en-masse at this current point in time is also taking part in another huge Masonic ritual.

You are showing compliance with, giving authorization for and pledging allegiance to a New World Order takeover. Symbolism is everything to those who think they are in control and they don’t care if you understand it or not. Black out squares in social media are also part of this ritual magic. The only way to honor unity and make a stand against oppression and prejudice is through love, compassion, unity and grace. You don’t have to relinquish your soul to an invisible and unseen dictatorship to attain freedom and a better world for all. 

Bow down to no one but your true self, that which is Source; we are fractal sparks of the one true, divine consciousness. Show allegiance only to love. Break the spell; see things for what they really are. Hold strong to your integrity, your power and your mastery. Now is the time to make the choice. Slavery or empowerment? Fear or love? We can either kneel alone and surrender our power to these dark external forces or we can rise together as one and surrender to the power of love and unity already residing within each of us! 

Will you stand united against the elite establishment, the real common enemy, or stumble and fall, as they continue their tyrannical ‘divide and conquer’ tactics? Choose wisely for your choice will affect you and your descendants for a very long time to come!

By Joshua Lawson

Those who live in the far north in author George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels live by one principle: “We do not kneel.” They call themselves the “Free Folk.”

That used to be a label that was proudly worn by all Americans. But a still-too-unquestioned movement pushing guilt-by-associated-skin-tone has begun to undo one of this nation’s bedrock ideals.

The kneeling phenomenon demanded by the radical left in the wake of George Floyd’s death—and embraced by those guilted into submission—creates a two-tiered social stratification of “kneelers” and “those who refuse to bend the knee” that’s wholly un-American.

Mobs resulting from years of citizens saturated in “critical race theory” and grievance studies have pressured far too many into believing they bear guilt for the past sins of others. Now they kneel in fealty to that false reality or are exiled from society.

Unfortunately, it’s also moved beyond just kneeling.

A crowd in Webster, Massachusetts, recently forced Police Chief Michael Shaw to lie face-down on the ground for eight minutes. In Cary, North Carolina, a group of Caucasians washed the feet of black organizers to “ask for forgiveness.” Not to be outdone by the latest woke trends, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took a knee at a massive anti-racism protest at Parliament Hill in Ottawa.

Worse, kneeling—either figuratively or literally—doesn’t even satisfy the mob.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said all the “right” things to the radical leftists holding Guilt Court but was still heckled out of a public square for refusing to defund the police department. The truth is, even mobs tire of the readily subservient and easily obedient.

‘We Will Never Serve Your Gods’

Deep down, we know kneeling in submission to the whims of mobs or tyrants is wrong. Both our ancient stories and our modern myths reflect this truth.

Instead of bowing to the altar of collective guilt, our exemplars should be Hanania, Mishael, and Azaria—though most know them by their Babylonian names: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

When Neo-Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II commanded all his officials to bow down before an immense golden idol, the three men refused. They knew the prescribed penalty, one that was far worse than mere social ostracization or bullying. Failure to bow meant incineration in a vast furnace.

Yet they also knew that to prostrate oneself before something other than God was wrong. And so, they did not bow. They did not kneel. They stood firm for what they knew to be right. Ultimately, though they were cast into the superheated flames, they were saved by their faith. We know who the heroes were in that episode, and it wasn’t Nebuchadnezzar or the henchmen that followed through on his tyrannical orders.

The One Who Stands

Fast-forward more than 2,500 years, and we witness a similar scene. This time, the proving ground isn’t in Babylon, but Germany. Instead of our reality, it’s our world as depicted in “The Avengers.”

“Kneel before me,” orders Loki, the god of mischief. “Is not this simpler?” he asks as the crowd of innocents complies meekly. “You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel.”

Everyone in the plaza kneels. All but one. “Not to men like you,” comes the defiant response from the solitary holdout. He’s an elderly German, one who has witnessed the tyranny that follows a population that kneels to the pressure of a mob.

“There are no men like me,” responds Loki.

The elder stares at Loki, “There are alwaysmen like you.”

It’s one of the most powerful lines uttered in the first 12 years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And it should have special resonance today.

We don’t applaud the people kneeling in suppression. We feel sorry for them. Loki is the villain, not the hero. The elderly German who resists Loki shows true courage, and he’s saved by the literal personification of America’s values.

While this is an example from the silver screen, it would not resonate if we didn’t know it to be true. The bravery of the elderly German wouldn’t place a lump in the throats of grown men the world over if they weren’t inspired; if they didn’t hope that there was at least a chance they could show that same level of courage if they had to.

Well, we need that courage now.

Showing the Way Out

One of the more frightening realities of the “kneel sessions” is that they represent the semi-successful takeover of an entire cultural narrative, which has now been thrust upon a temporarily cowed majority.

We must show people frightened by the collective guilt mob that, as Jordan Peterson once explained, “It is not virtuous to be victimized by a bully, even if that bully is oneself.”

Americans in a position to defy this nonsense must show their intimidated neighbors that peaceful resistance to the collective guilt mob is possible. Courageous men and women must rise and say, in one voice, “I empathize with all those who suffer, but I will not be bullied into accepting the sins of others. I bow to no earthy figures.” If that happens, then we will win.

Alexis de Tocqueville saw the potential for faltering democracies to create weak citizens who bow to social pressure. “There is,” he noted, “a great difference between doing what you do not approve or pretending to approve what you do; the one is done by a weak man, but the other belongs only to the habits of a valet.” Americans should reject both choices. Giving in will not abate the mob, it will only embolden them.

Tocqueville’s warning on what can happen under a soft despotism is eerily prescient:

It does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; … it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Since this nation’s inception nearly 234 years ago, hundreds of thousands of brave Americans have died to ensure we will never have to kneel—not to a movement, not to a cause, not to those who seek power over our minds and souls.

We don’t have nobility in this country, nor do we condone one segment of the population coercing or bullying another segment into silence or emotional servitude.

We did not kneel to British tyranny. We did not kneel to Nazi fascists. We did not kneel to ruthless, Japanese imperialists. And though it took generations to muster the required resolve, we did not kneel to the Soviet Union’s quest for global domination.

If we are worthy of our Declaration, our Constitution, our flag, and our highest ideals, we will not bow to a movement that has quickly become intellectually dishonest and morally bankrupt.

Americans do not kneel. We stand.

Source: The Federalist