Mark Krebs writes at Master Resource DOE Efficiency Standards: Consumer Time? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
“The Deep State is cancer-like in nature. Like cancer, it must be rooted out before it metastasizes—as it would have if subject to another four years of a Harris (Obama 4.0?) Administration.”
“It’s time to go big. Scrap DOE and part-out whatever missions are worth saving. And whatever missions are deemed worth saving should be saved only with thorough scrutiny of zero-based budgeting.”
Our March 2017 post, DOE’s EERE: Reform Ideas for Secretary Perry, stated that while “a trace of consumer focus still exists,” the department’s heavy bias was towards society-wide electrification under the guise of “Net Zero”.
Whatever trace of consumer focus may be remaining within DOE is not worth salvaging. In fact, eliminating the pipe dream of an all-electric society would likely save US citizens $18 to 29 trillion in capital costs alone. Other analysts have estimated far higher cost inflation, while others conclude that total electrification cannot be accomplished at any cost.
The incoming Administration can and should do far more than just trim back the overgrown greenery; it should serve the legitimate interests of the American citizenry and American prosperity. However. details in our previous recommendations (EERE Reform: Brouillette’s Turn (‘deep decarbonization’ threat still alive)), are worth reviewing by the incoming Trump Administration if for no other reason than to document historical mistakes and avoid them going forward. Regardless, our old recommendations are no longer sufficiently ambitious in terms of best serving the American public and drastically reducing the National Debt’s deadly inflation.
But how should we move forward for “deep reform” versus the meager results from before? After all, the incoming Trump 2.0 Administration much better understands the depth and breadth of the Deep State and its joined-at-the-hip “Uniparty” cohorts. The options range from modest “reform” to scrapping DOE and parting out its truly vital missions to other Federal agencies or private sector competition.
Given we the people hold the House, and lead the Senate, this is a unique opportunity that must be exploited to the full extent feasible. After all, the world has fundamentally changed since DOE was formed to address certain issues: low supplies and scarcity, coupled with cartel behavior by foreign actors. Today we have robust supplies that mainly just need regulatory relief.
Deep State Foe
Clausewitz was all about winning. If Trump is too (he is), rearranging DOE’s “deck chairs” is just a short step across a large chasm. The Deep State cancer would likely just go into a four-year remission only to return with a vengeance with a return of another Democrat Administration down the road someday.
Ultimately, the choice comes down to serving the Deep State/Uniparty or serving the legitimate best interests of “we the people.” There is no “live and let live” middle ground as the present Biden (mis)Administration has abundantly demonstrated in words and deeds. Nor is there sufficient funding for “all electric” or even “all the above” energy policies.
Appliances Just the Thin Edge of the Wedge
We can’t afford the self-indulgence of environmental virtue signaling. We need only to pursue energy policies that objectively and comprehensively focus on economic least-cost planning (and bidding) so we can avoid the looming reality of economic collapse. And yes, there is still room for objective energy efficiency; if it is market-based (as opposed to “big brother” dictates to throw money at an illusionary problem). There is even room for least-cost environmental progress. As RFK Jr. knows, soil regeneration is one of these.
It is imperative that the Trump 2.0 Administration achieve and demonstrate tangible and substantial results for energy consumers as soon as possible. Immediate actions should include clawing back the tragic Inflation Reduction Act, an all-you-can eat funding buffet for a myriad of parasitic “clean energy” zealots. These zealots have already received enough (unwitting taxpayer) IRA funding to plague “we the people” for decades to come.
The most efficient tactic (but not necessarily easiest) would be to simply eliminate DOE departments that oversee such funding. And along with that, repeal equally corrupted legislation that authorized DOE’s regulatory mission creep, such as the obsolete Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 (EPCA) and self-serving, loophole riddled revisions thereof.
In short and in closing, DOE is not worth trying to salvage, because its cancer culture is immune to modest political reforms and intervention. Thus, like a junk car, part out what can be safely and economically salvaged and eliminate the rest. Assuming control of the House and Senate, this is, for the first time, entirely doable; given the will to persevere. So let’s declare victory over the gas lines of the 1970s and move on to overcoming House and Senate resistance for dramatically reducing the economic threatening cholesterol of excessive spending.
In the spirit of the quote above, government needs structuring to safeguard the evidence (data, research) from predetermined policy ends and tunnel vision. One suggestion in this direction was ignored but deserves consideration. Dexter Wright wrote at American Thinker How to Abolish the Department of Energy. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
It has been said by almost every conservative candidate running for office this year that they would like to abolish the Jimmy Carter government legacy, the Department of Energy (DOE). Back in the 1970s when the Department of Energy was created the Carter Administration claimed that 20% of the nation’s energy needs would be supplied by solar energy by the year 2000. Needless to say that didn’t happen. So today we have a Department of Energy that provides energy to no one.
The question is how can we get rid of the DOE? The answer lies in the history of the U.S. Coast Guard. The Coast Guard is made up of the best parts of three different services that no longer exist; the Revenue Cutter Service, the Light House Service, and the Life Saving Service. These services were combined efficiently to create the modern Coast Guard.
Similarly, there are activities that operate within the DOE that are worthy of preserving such as the national laboratories at Los Alamos, NM; Oak Ridge, TN and Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, NM. These National Laboratories perform scientific tasks that are not only vital to national security but also, in some cases, are mandated by arms reductions treaties.
There are also activities within other departments and agencies that focus on science such as the National Weather Service (NWS); but for some reason, the Weather Service is stuck in the Department of Commerce (DOC). Contrary to popular belief we do need the Weather Service because all of the data that is collected and analyzed by NWS is then distributed to the media for their broadcast and dissemination. But it is clear that the NWS does not need to be in the Department of Commerce.
Believe it or not, even the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does scientific work, it just doesn’t use the data that is collected and analyze for policy development. I’m not really sure what it does with the data other than suppress it.
The way to deal a death blow to all of these departments and agencies is to
cull out of these bureaucracies all of the useful scientific parts and place
them in a new department, the Department of Science and Technology.
This new department would eliminate the need for the EPA, the DOC and the DOE. Even agencies like NASA could be included so that there would be cabinet level representation and so that rocket scientists would not be relegated to teaching math to third world nations. Ideally the new Department of Science and Technology would provide unbiased data for policy makers to ignore rather than the biased flawed data that they ignore now.
The scope of reform goes far beyond energy agencies, since the Biden/Harris regime dictated a “whole of government” response, embedding fear of CO2 into the full slate of programs. And thereby, the enormous deficit spending covered by freshly printed money threatens the economic viability of the republic. So the consolidating and downsizing of the whole governmental beast is required. Jeffrey Tucker of Brownstone Institute writes A Plan to Tame Inflation. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Elon Musk summarizes: “The excess government spending is what causes inflation! ALL government spending is taxation. This is a very important concept to appreciate. It is either direct taxation, like income tax, or indirect via inflation due to increasing the money supply.”
Inflation is a wicked beast that cannot be controlled directly. On the campaign trail, Trump spoke often about how it was the throttling of the energy sector that kicked off inflation. That is only partially true in the sense that the soaring price of oil and gas grew the costs of transportation. It was also a symptom rather than a cause. Plus, the price of oil and gas is actually not high right now in real terms.
Yes, the plan of “drill baby drill” is necessary and should happen but it cannot fix the existing problem of inflation much less do much to forestall a second wave. Nor is there a viable fix in the idea of price control, even when it is masked as “anti-gouging” legislation. There is nothing government can do to directly control prices, much less force them from going up given the deep structural problems.
There are ways to mitigate against the problem, or at least minimizing them. You can have a look at how Javier Milei did it in Argentina. He took the problem of massive hyperinflation and converted it to low inflation in a year. His is a case study. The answer is:
♦ End debt creation by dramatic spending cuts;
♦ Curb the actions of the central bank; and
♦ Inspire economic growth through deregulation and agency elimination.
First, the end of debt creation is essential. Every time Congress authorizes more spending than is in the bank, the Treasury has to float debt to make it happen. That is the statutory obligation. What that means is that Congress needs to pass a balanced budget, ideally right away.
That comes down to the commission created by Elon Musk: the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE. It is not an official department. It works as an outside advisory team. That’s excellent. They will likely push for a “Twitter-style” solution of firing 4 in 5 government workers to reduce costs directly.
That’s a start but it is not enough. There also must be sweeping elimination of agencies, each of which can save tens of billions and possibly a trillion or more in total. That needs to happen immediately. It can happen through executive order or through legislation. One way or another, the spending in excess of revenue has to stop.
Second, if the Treasury stops the T-bill tsunami, the Fed will not be called upon to sponge up the excess with money creation. You can look at the charts over the last year and see how the Biden/Harris administration was spending and working with the Fed to promote more economic illusion going into the election. That was the whole point of the rate cuts. That really must come to an end.
The best list comes from an independent overseas observer. David Farrar of New Zealand wrote two posts at his Kiwiblog. Below are excerpts of the highlights, in italics with my bolds and added images. (H/T Jim Rose). His extended discussion with many examples can be accessed at this link 10 Reasons Why Trump Won.
Overview
Before I cover the ten points, I will cover an important point by way of an introduction as it overlays all these reasons and that is that a big reason why Donald Trump won and won convincingly is because of a series of unique skills that Trump brings to the table. For his opponents they are character flaws but to his supporters they are features not bugs:
* His phenomenal resilience in the face of a wall of overwhelming hostility and opposition from the his opponents, media, governing elites (some from his own party). . . Any other candidate would’ve given up.
* His work ethic. Trump thrives on an average of only 4 hours sleep a night and has energy that belies his age. Trump held 80 rallies since the US Labor Day.
* His personal wealth not only helped top up his campaign during fund-raising lulls but he was able to pay millions to a large team of lawyers to defend himself in the various court cases.
* His phenomenal political instincts combine with a great sense of humour. Trump is a genuinely funny guy, but he also responds to events on the fly with the aplomb of the most seasoned pol.
* Much is made of Trump’s aggression, his inartful speaking style and partisan, personal barbs at his opponents. To millions of Americans, sick of being lectured to and abused by governing elites, Trump abrasiveness and forceful personality is seen as essential to getting the job of draining the swamp done. Media and governing elites all over the globe hate Trump for this trait but tens of millions of voters see him as the last hope to actually get things done, break some eggs, crack heads in Washington DC and to stand up to the Putin’s, Xi’s Khamenei’s and Jung Ill’s of this world.
Rather than turning to its bench of seasoned, experienced, media-savvy operatives, the woke DEI obsessed Democrat elites felt the optics of skipping over the sitting Vice President Harris as a woman of colour would be too devastating to the liberal base of the party and so they opted for Kamala in the hopes that their superior war chest and wall to wall favourable media coverage would cover for her manifest deficiencies. The gamble didn’t pay off because her failings couldn’t be hidden. They include:
* She ran an awful campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2019/2020 with faltering debate performances and a grab bag of far left policy positions that became frequent fodder for Trump campaign ads.
* She came across as scripted and inauthentic with her every public word crafted by her handlers. . . Teleprompters were used in seemingly ‘spontaneous’ town halls, questions and questioners were screened and known in advance and every voter interaction was choreographed, often poorly.
* Her few interviews, almost exclusively on Democrat friendly venues like CNN and The View, went poorly.
* She talked confidently of what she would do as President to solve the big problems like the cost-of-living crisis and the border crisis and when confronted as to why she hadn’t done anything about these pressing voter concerns over the almost 4 prior years as VP, she descended into yet more word salad circular answers.
* Her rallies were the definition of astroturf. Unlike Trump’s huge rallies that were packed to the gunnels with ordinary unscreened voters, Kamala’s rallies were often by invitation and held in locations small enough to create an illusion of a large full crowd. Many had paid attendees who, crisscrossed the country as professional rally attendees.
* The Harris campaign tried to run on joy, “brat summer”, happy vibes and a New Way Forward when she was an integral part of the poorly run Biden Harris Administration.
* Vice Presidential picks are usually not too impactful with the top of the ticket hoping to do no harm with the pick. In this election, Trump’s selection of JD Vance enhanced his candidacy and Harris’ choice of Tim Waltz diminished hers. . .Waltz proved to be almost as bad in interviews as Harris, being stumped a few times. And the mismatch between him and Vance became painfully obvious during the single VP debate that was one of the most one-sided debate victories in favour of Vance of this type of contest in a generation.
The massive printing of money that began with Covid and accelerated with all the Green New Deal spending boondoggles had the predictable effect of driving up inflation. The Biden Administration’s war on traditional energy (cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline, cancelling new oil and gas leases on Federal land and the EV mandates) all had the effect of scaling back the massive domestic energy boom under Trump’s first term causing a rise in energy prices, a process accelerated by the war in Ukraine and the uncertainty in the Middle East. This had the effect of driving up grocery prices in leaps not seen since the high inflation of the ‘70’s and a substantial increase in prices of petrol at the pump. . . increasing numbers of Americans were struggling to make ends meet and suffered a decline in their standard of living.
The American dream of home ownership for the rising generation became a more distant and unreachable goal. For the first time since the formation of the Republic in the 18th century, Gen Z became the first generation of young American adults to face a country less prosperous and with fewer economic opportunities than the previous generation. . . We had a race between an incumbent (Harris) and a challenger who had recently been President in the previous term and the economic juxtaposition proved to be electorally damaging for Harris.
This was a hot button issue that sailed somewhat under the radar for the first two years of Biden Harris until the cumulative numbers of illegal immigrants crossing the border reached a critical mass in cities and towns across America. For many years, the problems of illegal immigration were largely confined to the border states of CA, AZ, NM and TX. Trump worked hard to seal the border with a raft of policies: ending catch and release, the ‘stay in Mexico’ policy for asylum seekers, no benefits for migrants and building sections of a border wall. The net effect was, by the end of his Presidency in 2020, that the US had the lowest number of illegal border incursions in a generation.
Biden ended all that on almost Day 1 of his Presidency reversing a raft of effective Trump Executive Orders essentially throwing open the border. Asylum seekers could enter and then be given a court date years hence and then be released with no repercussions for failing to appear.
The impact of this steady stream of illegals, many being young men of military age, into many more northern cities led to pressure on resources usually only seen in border states, a very visible presence on streets and in places like parks and swimming pools but most significantly, because of zero vetting of unsuitable migrants, a surge in violent crime that saw a string of high profile rapes and murders of innocent usually women at the hands of criminal illegals who had been previously convicted of serious crimes in their home countries. . .The straw that broke the camel’s backs was the reports of violent Venezuelan gangs taking over whole apartment complexes in middle class suburbs like Aurora in Denver Colorado and other cities like LA and Seattle and of organised Chilean gangs of professional thieves robbing wealthy homes in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Trump and Vance hammered these huge negative impacts of illegal immigration relentlessly at every opportunity and the promise of a mass deportation of illegals beginning with the high-profile criminals wreaking havoc across cities and towns across America. At first the Democrats tried to gaslight the electorate that there was no border crisis, then they tried a bait and switch with RINO Republicans on a border bill that was amnesty lite and offered only a minuscule improvement in numbers of illegals.
And then blame Trump and the GOP for not properly securing the border until Harris, finally sensing the electoral damage the open border was causing her party, became all bullish and strong on the border vowing to do as the new President what she never did as Biden’s VP despite being appointed by him as the Border Czar. It was too little too late and Trump’s extreme sounding solution to the problems caused by illegal migrants began to resonate with more and more voters.
The Democrat Party and liberal elites are obsessed with abortion and trans gender rights. Many liberal and never-Trump commentators made much about how pro-choice Democrat candidates in the 2022 mid-terms and subsequent special elections overperformed, and this signaled somehow the overturning of Roe v Wade was the secret sleeper issue that would propel Kamala to victory. The problem was the left, as they often do, over egged the abortion pudding with a drumbeat of inflammatory rhetoric. . . Pro-choice candidates and media would then straight up lie repeatedly about all three of these points: they banged on endlessly about Trumps’ planned abortion ban, they mischaracterized the overturning of Roe v Wade, and they denied that pregnancies were terminated weeks prior to birth or even after birth. Trump drained the venom out of the abortion stinger such that it was not the decisive factor in 2024 that it was in 2022.
The left’s obsession with trans rights was personified by Harris when she bragged that when she was Attorney General of California, she arranged for the State to pay for trans gender surgeries for inmates. As more and more biological men who benefited from male puberty chose to transition and compete in women’s sports and to invade women only spaces like bathrooms, changing rooms and refuges, gradually this became the pointy end of the cultural war between traditional views on sexuality and the progressive left. . . The New York Times just reported that the most potent and effective of all the political ads that the Trump campaign ran was the one where Harris bragged about trans gender surgery for prisoners and illegals with the tag line Harris: They/Them – Trump: You!
The 2024 election gave voters the opportunity to use their silent majority electoral muscle to end what America by an out of touch elite. A vote for Trump was seen as a vote for a return to sanity and normalcy in the cultural wars.
In the run up to the 2020 election and in its aftermath, the Democrats and governing elites were able to augment their overwhelming sympathetic support of the mainstream broadcast media with indirect ability, through the intervention of the FBI and other government agencies, to silence the voices of critics through the major social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, You Tube, Tik Tok and Snapchat. This meant that information that might be politically damaging to the left (such as the release of Hunter Biden’s laptop just prior to the 2020 election and the accusations of fraud in the same election) could be ruthlessly suppressed. The cutting edge of this suppression was Twitter 1.0 because it was the social media space most frequented by the politically active and influential media, celebrity and businesspeople. . . This was election interference at its most effective and sinister because post 2020 election polling showed that, had the truth of the laptop been allowed to disseminate and not be blocked by mainstream and social media, a significant minority of Biden voters might have changed their vote.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter in the summer of 2022, he not only fired the woke compliant left leaning management team but 75% of the whole work force and repositioned Twitter 2.0, renamed “X”, as a more neutral public square on social media. He engaged the services of prominent left leaning journalist Matt Taibbi who he allowed to pour over the files and, in a series of posts called the Twitter Files, revealed the extraordinary efforts undertaken by the Biden campaign then Administration to suppress any information critical of things like the Biden family corruption, Hunter’s laptop and 2020 election fraud as all this was deemed as dis or misinformation. Musk spent time removing the various algorithms that were embedded to screen for ‘misinformation’ and he restored the accounts of high profile Biden critics like Trump and even controversial figures like Alex Jones.
A raft of high profile conservative influencers who were suspended from Twitter were restored then allowed to tweet and post without restriction through the run up to the 2024 campaign. Twitter/X became the favoured platform for numerous releases of information that were restricted or never covered by the other social media platforms and the MSM.
Breaking news of a controversial nature that would either be ignored by legacy media or suppressed by all other platforms can now be done freely on Twitter where, contrary to the naysayers that predicted that Twitter 2.0 would fail, it has increased its reach and viewership even more since becoming a genuine free speech platform. Musk’s decision to liberate Twitter has had a profound impact on the type of dialogue that could be had in the run up to the 2024 election and it became impossible for Harris and the Democrats to silence their critics in the way they were successfully able to during the 2020 election.
There are four areas where Republican efforts more closely matched or even exceeded those of the Democrats whereas in all four, GOP campaigns in 2020 were significantly outspent and outsmarted:
Media spending. Trump was outspent by Clinton by 3:1 in 2016 and by Biden 5:1 in 2020. Whilst Trump closed the gap in 2020 somewhat with free publicity from his controversial statements (something that is called earned media), the volume of Democrat material disseminated to voters was vastly more in 2020. In 2024 this gap was significantly narrowed to the point where, allowing for Trump’s natural publicity seeking antics, it is fair to say there was virtual parity for the first time in many election cycles,
Ballot harvesting. There are legal variations as to the extent of ballot harvesting that can be done depending on relevant state law but regardless of that, in 2020 Republican campaigns engaged in zero ballot harvesting. That changed dramatically in 2024. Both the formal Trump campaign and various offshoots such as Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action and Scott Pressler hired hundreds of young people across most of the swing states to actively chase ballots. This was encouraging low propensity voters to register and vote early in states that allowed it and the chasing of high propensity voters on election day to ensure they voted. Each used sophisticated Apps that fed from real data from state election offices that identify voters yet to cast a vote by party affiliation where allowed. These groups wrung out 10,000’s of votes many of them from people who had either never voted or rarely voted. The most dramatic example of this was Pressler’s efforts just in Pennsylvania where he and his team registered 180,000 Amish! The Amish traditionally don’t vote but regulatory overreach by the Democrat administration in Pennsylvania in seizing and destroying raw milk so upset the Amish that they were propelled into political activism and voted en mass for Trump.
Campus outreach. Charlie Kirk, as a young 30-year-old articulate and knowledgeable debater, had for years visited large university campuses across America but in the run up to 2024, he ramped up his efforts. Often all it involved was setting up a TPUSA tent and advertising that he was there to answer any questions from student voters with a particular emphasis on Harris or non-committed voters. Kirk’s exchanges are legendary and as the swell of support for Trump grew, these events attracted thousands of students each time and Kirk gave away 1,000s of MAGA hats each time at literally hundreds of events over the years. Exit polls show that Trump made huge inroads into the Gen Z vote and won a plurality of Gen Z males, and this result was largely because of Charlie Kirk’s efforts, and this campus outreached was barely matched by the Democrats.
Defensive lawfare. Trump’s campaign in 2020 ran out of money 3 weeks out from the election for anything other than his huge rallies. Media advertising almost dried up and there was no money to pay lawyers to defend the vote from illegal actions by mostly Democrat election officials at the state and county level. In contrast, in 2024 a vast sum was spent recruiting hundreds of lawyers and hundreds of thousands of poll watchers and these lawyers were judiciously deployed in battleground states and were phenomenally successful. Various incidents cropped up in the weeks leading up to the election and on the day itself from shutting down early voting lines too early, to deliberately malfunctioning machines to barring Republican poll watchers. The lawyers were specific to each states’ election laws and swiftly intervened and the threat of legal action was often enough to get a behaviour change and when legal action made it to court, the well documented evidence was almost always sufficient to have a capricious and incorrect ruling or procedure overturned or aligned with state law. . .Whilst there was undoubtedly fraud in places on November 5th, this time it was far less impactful because of the aggressive defensive lawfare waged by the Trump campaign.
Donald Trump began labeling the mainstream media as fake news pretty early into his 2016 campaign. Since then, he has gone a step further and often called the MSM “the enemy of the people”. It has been known for many decades that the world’s legacy media generally have a liberal left leaning bias. For many years institutions like the big 3 US networks, Canada’s CBC, Britain’s BBC, Australia’s ABC and NZ’s TVNZ and RNZ journalists tried hard to hide their biases and reported the news in a more neutral and professional way.
But as time has gone by and as journalism schools have been churning out more and more ideologically activist and more overtly political graduates, the newsrooms of legacy media globally have become more openly biased and more nakedly partisan. Parties and politicians from the right are subjected to more slanted coverage, more hostile questioning and way more investigative scrutiny whilst favoured candidates and parties on the left increasingly face limited scrutiny, soft ball questions and outright suppression of news stories that might make them look bad.
But when Donald Trump came onto the political stage, he provoked a veritable firestorm of MSM opposition that has intensified and not abated. The MSM have rushed to cover hoax after hoax that initially made Trump look bad (I covered a bunch of these here). The US corporate media peddled the lies that Trump only won in 2016 with the help of Russia, they gleefully published lies of the 51 Democrat friendly intelligence experts who claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation and they lied about the origin of Covid and pilloried and banned people who said the virus originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. All these lies were eventually uncovered and debunked, but the media have continued to peddle any lie that makes Trump look bad. In the current Presidential campaign, this is but a sample of the massive anti-Trump pro-Kamala skewering that has occurred on MSM outlets:
* During the ABC sponsored debate between Trump and Harris, ABC executives agreed in advance to limit certain types of questions to Harris and stayed away from all ‘no-go’ topics as suggested by the Harris campaign. Trump was only asked questions of concern to Democrats and was subjected to attempts at real time fact checking by the moderators whilst ABC agreed in advance to no fact checking of Harris. It was obvious to even the most nonpartisan observer that Trump was debating not just Harris but the moderators as well.
* Harris’ 60 Minutes interview reached a new low of the MSM putting their thumb on the scales when they replaced a long rambling word salad nonsensical answer that Harris gave to a question posed about the administration’s response to the Gaza war with a more simple and rational answer that she gave in another part of the interview. That is extreme journalistic malpractice AND election interference that will have profound repercussions for CBS once Trump changes the partisan makeup on the FCC and FEC.
* The MSM are notorious for amplifying outlier polls that favoured Harris. Perhaps the most egregious example of this was the famous Des Moines Register poll by Ann Seltzer, considered by many as the gold standard of polls. Whilst Seltzer had a prior track record that has been pretty accurate, any polling expert could’ve told you that a poll showing Harris up 3 in Iowa when all other polls had Trump up by 7 to 10% (and the fact that Trump won Iowa by 11% and 8% in 2016 and 2020 and eventually won in 2024 by 13%!) was a dramatic outlier. But in the heat of the campaign with Trump tied in national polls and slightly up in swing state polls, the prospect of a hidden Harris blue wave was too tempting to pass up and so this poll was blasted from legacy media rooftops (and was even given prominence from our esteemed site owner Mr. Farrar perhaps because of his well-publicised disdain for DJT). The pollsters who picked Trump’s eventual result were ignored and even scoffed at. The pushing of outlier polls is a deliberate conservative voter suppression tactic engaged in on a regular basis by the MSM.
People aren’t stupid, they can see this bias and they react accordingly.
What has been the impact of the media’s descent from neutral, a-political, down the middle reporting to slanted, ideologically driven coverage and outright hostility to the GOP candidate for the most powerful office in the world?
* Gradual but accelerating ratings and subscription declines – more on that later.
* Decline in profitability – MSM newspapers like the Washington Post have laid off hundreds and look at the closing of TV3 and layoffs at TVNZ and Stuff in New Zealand.
* Slump in public trust as indicated in polls that show the MSM polling worse than Congress.
* A widespread belief that the MSM are biased against Trump and protecting Kamala has inevitably led to a rise in viewership of alternative media.
Into the void left by the increasing partisan legacy media has stepped a variety of conservative commentators who have been able to rack up substantial views and social media impressions that have come to swamp who views the legacy media. Many of the people I am about to mention have podcasts and shows that they broadcast from their websites, Twitter, Rumble and even mainstream social media platforms that regularly match and exceed even the major network news shows and far exceed equivalent shows on CNN and MSNBC. The biggest players on this list have audiences that vastly outstrip even the biggest MSM shows or podcasts.
Trump became very adept at using new media despite his age. His youngest son Barron, who is an 18-year-old college student in New York, mingles with all the big conservative Gen Z and Millennial influencers from the so-called Manosphere including Theo Von, the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Andrew Schulz and Shawn Ryan. Trump appeared on all their shows each with millions of views and came across as natural and funny to huge audiences of disaffected young males. Of course, the grand poohbah of the Manasphere is former UFC executive Joe Rogan whose centrist Spotify show has the biggest reach of any podcast in the world, each with an average viewing audience of 16 million. Trump’s famous 3-hour unscripted riff with Rogan where Rogan asked whatever questions he wanted (and Trump answered without ducking and diving) garnered across Spotify, You Tube and Twitter almost 100 million views! These appearances helped propel Trump to dominating the under 30 male vote in a way that Harris couldn’t come close.
The net effect of all of this: the Trump hating MSM are losing their grip on the narrative. Whilst they still have some influence, they are increasingly becoming a liberal echo chamber religiously watched mostly by left leaning true believers whilst Independents and right leaning folk are consuming their news from alternative sources that increasingly have a far greater reach then the legacy media. This played a vital role in Trump’s victory and his decisive win will only accelerate this decline unless the MSM return to their roots in reporting unbiased straight news and let go of the politically slanted advocacy that poses for news.
8. The proliferation of global conflicts
Trump is the first President in 40 years to not commence a new war. Reagan invaded Grenada, Bush 1 fought the Gulf War, Clinton attacked the former Yugoslavia, Bush 2 invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama toppled Gaddafi and Biden has sent hundreds of billions to fund Ukraine. Trump withdrew troops from Iraq and laid the plans (that were massively cocked up by Biden) for an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan. Trump negotiated and signed the Abraham Peace Accords ushering unprecedented diplomatic rapprochements between Israel and various Arab nations. Trump defused the escalating nuclear tension with North Korea all while getting NATO countries to pay their fair share of military expenditures.
More significantly is what Putin didn’t do during Trump’s 4 years. Under Obama he invaded Crimea and Georgia and under Biden, he invaded Ukraine. Putin made no territorial incursions under Trump. There was relative stability in the Middle East from 2017 to 2021. There is no way Hamas would’ve attempted their brazen infiltration into southern Israel under Trump and yet their actions under Biden have sparked the most prolonged and bloody conflict in Gaza and such tension and military retaliatory action with Iran as to see the whole region on the brink of war.
Biden’ poor handling of the Ukraine war, for a while, saw the very real threat of US and NATO boots on the ground in an escalation of the war between Ukraine and Russia. And if that isn’t enough, the Chinese also sensed Biden’s weakness and have threatened the sovereignty of Taiwan in a way that Xi never remotely attempted when Trump was in power.
The supreme irony in all this is that in 2016, the Democrats said that Trump would plunge the US into global wars and that his warmongering would lead to an unstable world. The truth was the opposite happened – Trump presided over a period of relative peace and only used US military muscle selectively to quickly destroy the ISIS Caliphate in Syria and Iraq, a task that eluded Obama for 8 years. It is Biden and his weakness as a leader that sees the world on fire and on the brink of something akin to WW3 and it is Trump who was and will be again the candidate for peace. The prospect of America’s sons fighting in the midst of a Slavic conflict thousands of miles from home was a motivation for some voters to hold their nose and vote for the man who sends mean Tweets.
In the two days since Trump was elected, Zelenskyy has called him, Putin has scheduled a call, Hamas is saying it will end the war, Qatar has asked Hamas’ leadership to leave and I’m guessing the Chinese won’t be trying any drills where they encircle the whole island of Taiwan any time soon.
I covered the positive political impact of RFK Jr’s endorsement here. Trump has brought into his inner circle three high profile Democrats: JFK Jr from the closest America gets to a political royal family, Tulsi Gabbard who once was deputy chair of the Democrat National Committee and ran for the Democratic nomination for President in 2020 and Elon Musk who publicly backed and donated to Democrat politicians for years. Each of these people brought key constituencies to Trump’s cause and, perhaps more importantly, they gave permission for centrists and moderate Democrats, disgusted by their own party’s decent into left wing identity politics but turned off by Trump’s bombastic and at times arrogant persona, to vote for Trump.
Joe Rogan (and many others) made the case that voting for Trump is not just about Trump but you’re voting for Tulsi, for RFK Jr and for the thousands of political appointees that will implement the policies that resonate with an actual majority of voters. Trump drove the Cheney’s, Mitt Romney and Adam Kinzinger to support Kamala and in exchange, he got Kennedy, Musk and Gabbard. I think that’s an awesome winning exchange and in the end, so did voters.
I covered this topic more extensively in these two posts. In summary, Trump’s opponents thought they had him on the ropes with all the various indictments when in actual fact, the politically motivated lawfare against Trump worked in his favour. When Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis insisted Trump be arraigned in person at the County Jail in a seedy inner city part of Atlanta, Trump’s defiant mug shot became a viral sensation but, much more significantly, it helped cement Trump’s record level of black male support that helped propel him to victory in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. The footage of thousands of poor blacks lining the streets to the jail to cheer Trump as he exited the arraignment went viral in the African American community.
I don’t need to overstate the political impact of the two assassination attempts, most particularly the July 13th attempt at the rally in Butler, PA. The photo of a bloodied Trump with his raised pumped fist under a huge American flag ranks up there with the shot of Churchill’s VE Day speech to a monstrous crowd in London, the flag raising at Iwo Jima, John Kennedy Jr saluting his Dad JFK at his funeral, the fleeing Vietnamese refugees from the My Lai massacre in 1968 or the lone protestor holding up the tanks on Tiananmen Square. Trump’s pugnacious and defiant response reinforced his image as the ultimate alpha male in the eyes of millions and, whilst not intended nor sought after, became a major electoral plus for him.
Whilst the electoral magnitude of Trump’s victory is not on the same scale as the two Reagan victories in 1980 and 1984 (489 to 49 and 525 to 13) nor the Nixon 1972 49 state sweep, nonetheless it will go down as one of the greatest comebacks in US political history given the unique nature of Trump and his experiences. His defeat in 2020 was shrouded in controversy with allegations (credible IMO) of election fraud that were of a magnitude that, in his mind and in the mind of many supporters, cost him the election. The events of January 6, 2021, came to overshadow and dominate Trump’s prospects with unprecedented levels of negative publicity aimed at Trump as his opponents sought to blame him for the events at the Capitol that day. He faced two impeachments, he was the subject of two Special Counsel enquiries, he was indicted 94 times on politically motivated charges (many of which will now melt away now that he has won and the rest will be reversed or die in appellate courts), the state of New York tried to bankrupt him and seize key properties, he has faced the most unrelenting media opposition of any politician, he faced two assassination attempts that came close to succeeding, frankly any other person would’ve given up. He faced a wall of negative media coverage of his campaign and fawning sycophantic coverage of his opponent, and countless attempts yet again at electoral fraud and he faced down the lot AND WON and won convincingly. It is a feat that may never be equaled in the annals of US political history!
Joel Kotkin explains in his National Post article Western nations cripple their economies with green initiatives while China and others laugh. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Despite massive subsidies and world forums,
green power still only represents one-fifth of global energy
North America, with its vast resources, may be in a position to save the economies of the west. But governments on both sides of the border seem more concerned with green virtue signaling than actually finding a workable approach to carbon emissions that does not undermine our economies and ability to defend ourselves.
The prevailing notion, both in Ottawa and D.C., is that our countries should ignore our resources, and how best to use them, in order to fulfill a messianic vision of massive, rapid emissions reduction.
However, as much this appeals to academics and wealth
pearl-clutchers in cities, it translates into higher prices than normal.
As the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh suggested, it places unfair “burdens” on the working class, one reason for his opposition to the tax. Worse still, the biggest green targets of what climatistas label as “industrial carbon” could devastate those same NDP voters — blue collar workers in mining, like manufacturing, logistics and agriculture.
Canada does not need another way to slow its economy. One recent estimate suggests that the proposed $170 a ton proposal would slice 1.8 per cent from the country’s already anemic GDP and cost upwards of 185,000 net jobs. Even Liberals admit something close to a 1 per cent decline. Some may see these draconian attempts to wipe out fossil fuels as the Lord’s work, but on the ground level it seems closer to class warfare.
Trudeau and his supports insist these policies are critical for saving the planet. Yet, attempts to follow such approaches elsewhere have not ended well. In Europe, most obviously Germany, as well as California, the shift to “renewable energy” has led, as it usually does, to high prices that already are driving German industry off the continent. Although not nearly as well-endowed with energy as North America, the climate lobby in Europe makes sure to throttle anything, such as offshore oil in the UK — in pursuit of green puritanism.
There’s something delusional in many of these initiatives. A key mistake is the common green assertion that fossil fuels are becoming obsolete and should be wiped out for the benefit of fitting a new economy. Yet, in the real world, despite billions in subsidies for “green power,” fossil fuels still represent roughly four fifths of global energy generation, just as it did twenty years ago. This is after expenditures of over one trillion were spent on solar and wind. The West has been reducing per capita emissions for years, but this is utterly subsumed by growth in developing countries, notably China, which not only buys huge amounts of natural gas but continues to open new coal-fired plants at a rapid rate.
North Americans be forewarned that in imposing burdens on themselves, but not competitors, green governments are essentially guaranteeing their own decline. Already in the EU, nearly a million industrial jobs have been lost over the past few years, with investment shifting to countries like China and India, which freely use coal and fossil fuels to keep costs down.
Britain’s path may give the starkest preview of the future Biden and Trudeau have in mind for us. Since 1990 the manufacturing sector’s share of GDP has dropped roughly 50 per cent along with several million jobs. This parallels a two thirds drop in UK energy production, while consumption has fallen by only one third. Three decades ago, a net energy exporter, the UK now increasingly depends on imports from the Middle East and other unstable regions.
The winner here is clearly China, a country that emits more GHG than all developed countries put together. Ironically, carbon reduction policies fit brilliantly into its strategy to use its coal and other fossil fuel energy to power their takeover of the “green economy.” China has placed itself in the catbird’s seat on renewable energy, including utter domination of solar panels and electric vehicles. China already produces twice as many EVs as the US and the EU combined, and seeks to leverage its total domination of the solar-panel industry — its battery capacity is now roughly four times ours. China also exercises effective control of the requisite rare earth minerals and the technologies used to process them.
As the west’s own overpriced EVs sit on lots, China plays us for utter fools as we undermine our own industrial economy. The forced march to EV will be particularly tough on the 125,000 who work in Canada’s car factories. Manufacturing and mining, much of it energy-related, represent, along with real estate, two of the country’s largest industries. Under the current circumstances, they are heading for a spectacular fall. Overall, the EV industry in the U.S. uses 30 per cent less domestic labor than traditional gasoline car manufacturing, and under current circumstances can only hope for some basic assembly work using Chinese components.
These policies will affect every industry and consumer as cars and things like heaters are all forced to electrify. Britain’s shift to EVs is projected to double the demand for electricity by 2040, and its government is already looking to ban the use of home chargers during peak hours. By 2050 in California, state consultants estimate total energy demand will skyrocket, by some estimates rising 60 to 90 per cent. Not surprisingly, the state will face “acute electricity shortages” over the coming decade, according to one recent analysis.
Rising demands for electricity for artificial intelligence seems likely to add to this burden. Microsoft alone is opening a new data centre globally every three days. These power-hungry operations are expected to grow from 4.5 per cent of energy demand to 10 per cent by 2035. Artificial intelligence and data center demand are leading to massive expansions in projected energy use around the world at a time of restricted supply. Google, renowned for its green virtue signaling, has boosted its own emissions by 50 per cent since 2019.
Ultimately, the oligarchs will likely get their juice from sources like decommissioned nuclear energy, while the average family will take the economic hit in order to fulfill the agenda pushed by the likes of Steve Jobs’ widow, Lauren, Michael Bloomberg, the Rockefellers, Jeff Bezos and venture capitalist John Doerr. These, and other oligarchic allies, are waging a sophisticated and well-financed media and institutional campaign to catastrophize the climate issue as a way to ban gas stoves, stop new LNG facilities, and crack down on plastics.
Finally, there is the issue of security, particularly relevant in an age of declining western power. The new green mandates, if adopted, presage yet another force to further reduce the industrial prowess of western countries, while driving more industries to China, India, and other countries who produce their goods with dirtier fuels and develop resources with less environmental care. At the same time, third world countries, for the most part, are not embracing “net zero,” as it is totally infeasible for them and will likely resist western lectures on climate policy.
All of this is occurring as a concert of ugly energy producers — Russia, Iran, and Venezuela — press their advantage on western countries. They stand to benefit from continued de-industrialization as one way to further weaken the military capacity of the west. Taking away North American liquified natural gas from Europe simply makes the continent more dependent on such malefactors as Qatar, a primary backer of terrorists and their supporters, and may lead the west, hat in hand, to beg from even worse regimes, like Russia and Iran.
The good news — while green virtue-signaling may appeal to Trudeau, Biden, and Harris — these policies could be impacted by political realities. Worried about voters in industrial states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, Harris, even as she embraces environmental bromides, has backed away from EV mandates and opposition to fracking, albeit with dubious credibility. Yet, perhaps she realizes, or those around her do, that these policies do not sell well compared to promoting more affordable and reliable energy. Trudeau, if he wants to remain relevant, may similarly need to flip the script if he hopes to forestall an utter political defeat.
Update on ominous overreach by Biden/Harris regime comes from Just the News While the SCOTUS denies request to block EPA power plant rule, challengers vow to continue fight. As explained below, EPA intends to require expensive and impractical CO2 Capture and Storage on all power plants using carbon fuels, thereby forcing shutdowns. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images,
Analysts say that if the rule is implemented, more than 5 million
people could experience blackouts, some lasting for 41 hours.
The Supreme Court ruled against a bid to block the EPA’s power plant rule while legal challenges make their way through the courts, but West Virginia, which is leading the coalition of states challenging the rule, vows the fight isn’t over.
In a brief order, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch said that the applicants “have shown a strong likelihood of success on the merits as to at least some of the challenges to the” EPA’s rule.
However, the justices explained, the stay wasn’t needed because compliance requirements wouldn’t begin until June 2025, which means the applicants wouldn’t “suffer irreparable harm” before the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decides the merits of the case. Injunctive relief, such as sought here, requires clear and convincing proof that the harm be immediate and irreparable.
The lower court is expediting the case, the justices noted, meaning it would be resolved in the court’s current term. Afterward, the case would still have time to return to the Supreme Court, if it’s warranted.
The EPA rule, which was finalized in April, requires that coal-fired power plants be fitted with carbon capture technology controlling 90% of their carbon dioxide emissions by 2039, and new gas-fired power plants will need to do the same starting in 2035, depending on the amount of runtime they have.
Energy analysts Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling revealed that the EPA failed to do a proper analysis of the impacts of the rule, and if implemented, over 5 million people will experience blackouts, some lasting for 41 hours. While the EPA has defended the rule and argues that carbon capture is “well proven,” its own modeling showed it expected only one coal plant and no gas plants to be fitted with the technology as far out as 2055.
Two dozen states led by West Virginia filed a lawsuit against the EPA in May, arguing that the agency exceeded its authority with the rule. Utilities and industry groups also filed legal challenges to the rule. In July, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit denied the parties’ requests to block the rules while the courts considered the challenges, and the court ruled the applicants wouldn’t succeed on the merits of their case.
In court filings, the EPA noted that the lower court ruled the applicants are unlikely to succeed in arguing the agency exceeded its authority, and it stood by the rule and its carbon capture requirements, arguing that the technology has been “adequately demonstrated.”
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said in a
statement on the high court’s ruling that the fight isn’t over.
“This is not the end of this case: we will continue to fight through the merits phase and prove this rule strips the states of important discretion while forcing plants to use technologies that don’t work in the real world,” Morrisey said.
In 2022, the Supreme Court had sided with West Virginia and other states in a challenge to the Obama-era “Clean Power Plan.” Morrisey said that the high court had made clear limits to what the EPA can do, and the Biden administration’s “green new deal agenda” is ignoring those limits.
“This rule is yet another attempt of unelected bureaucrats to push something the law doesn’t allow,” Morrisey said.
Indiana, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming joined the application to the Supreme Court.
Kamala Harris wants to deprive Americans of the right to choose cars and household appliances. When she claims, as she did at a rally last week in Michigan, that “I will never tell you what kind of car you have to drive” she is guilty of two of the Democrats’ most reviled offenses, malinformation (failure to contextualize a statement) and misinformation (lying).
Combating climate by changing infrastructure, consumer goods,
and lifestyle is one of Harris’s core values.
As recently as this year, the Biden-Harris administration continued to issue regulations and battle in court for the right to reduce consumer options for automobiles and home appliances. Harris favors consumers having choices, just so long as those choices are limited to those she pre-approves.
Then Senator Harris co-sponsored the Senate version of Alexandira Ocasio-Cortez’ Green New Deal. Harris believed that mandating priorities and choices to limit emissions was so important that she advocated ending the filibuster to do so. Harris also co-sponsored the Zero Admissions Vehicles Act to require that all cars be EVs, or otherwise zero-emissions, by 2040. When she ran for president in 2019, she issued a plan to phase out new gas-powered cars even sooner – by 2035.
In April 2023, the Biden-Harris administration proposed rules that would ensure that EVs accounted for about 67 percent of all new car sales by 2032 (just eight years from now). After objections from nearly every sector and region of the country, the EPA issued final rules on March 20 of this year that require from 31 percent to 44 percent of new cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks manufactured in 2027 be EVs, with the final percentage to be based on emissions from other vehicles. The EPA rules require that by 2032, EVs account for at least 56 percent of new car sales, and at least another 13 percent be hybrids, leaving not more than 31% as gas powered.
In 2023, EVs accounted for only 7.6 percent of new car sales. That is because, despite subsidies and massive pressure from government and the Left, consumers dislike EVs. EVs have limited range, particularly in the cold. They take a long time to charge, and it is difficult for those who live in apartments to do so. They are costly. EVs maynot even be particularly good for the environment once the electrical grid and generating capacity are expanded to support mandates, and disposal of lithium ion batteries is considered. It also is unlikely the U.S. could have sufficient generating capacity without brownouts, blackouts, and other conservation measures.
EV mandates imperil national security by replacing fossil fuels, in which the U.S. is the world leader, with minerals found in China. China also is the low cost manufacturer of EVs, meaning that EV mandates will send American jobs and profits to China.
Energy expert Mark P. Mills warns that “All the world’s mines, both currently operating and planned, can supply only a small fraction of the… increase in various minerals that will be needed to meet the wildly ambitious EV goals,” while the UN Trade Development Agency advises there will be considerable shortages in lithium, cobalt, and copper if EV requirements are not slowed.
The strong disfavor in which consumers hold EVs is seen in two numbers. As Fortune observed, “no one wants to buy used EVs,” destroying resale value, and second, EVs are the least likely cars to be stolen. Numerous major automobile manufacturers are cutting EV production targets, and earlier this year Hertz announced that it was disposing of a third of its almost new EV fleet. The 2024 Deloitte Global Automotive Consumer Study found that EVs were never very popular among consumers, and familiarity is breeding contempt, with a 9% increase in the popularity of gas powered cars. A Gallup survey in April found that among Democrats who don’t yet own an EV, the percent saying they would never purchase an EV rose 10 points, compared to a year ago.
Harris not only wants to deprive Americans of the opportunity to choose gas-powered cars and most hybrids, but she also supports the Green New Deal’s goal of prohibiting sales of home appliances that do not meet draconian emissions standards. To date, the Biden-Harris administration has sought to take off the market most home dishwashers, heaters, air conditioners, and gas stoves. A federal appeals court struck down the Department of Energy’s action targeting dishwashers.
In May, the House passed the Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act on a bipartisan basis. That bill is intended to restrain the administration from banning home appliances that run on natural gas.
Next time Kamala Harris claims that she won’t tell you what to buy,
just keep in mind that she intends to eliminate most options,
leaving you with a Hobson’s choice of poorly performing alternatives.
White privilege gave us Western civilization, the middle class,
and the nuclear family—you’re welcome! This book is dedicated
to the very fine people that made it all happen.
I just became aware of A.J. Rice from this American Greatness article Rice: Woke initiatives were ‘one uppercut to the face after another’ for Gen Z. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
A J Rice said Gen Z is a generation that struggles with human connection because of the mass social justice movements they grew up with. He made the comments on a recent episode of The Greatness Conversation.
“You had one uppercut to the face after another here for Gen Z where, first, it’s the Me Too movement, males are told to take it down a notch, toxic masculinity,” Rice said on a recent episode of The Greatness Conversation. “You might be a predator, you might be a rapist. And then, and then all of a sudden, George Floyd dies. You’re now a racist. All of your history stinks.”
“And then when that’s all over, they’re going to drop on you that there are 72 genders and Gary and Tim and Bill are coming into the women’s locker room and the girl’s bathroom,” Rice said. “So, you know, if you wonder why Gen Z has a hard time being authentically human.”
Rice joined the podcast to discuss his new book, “The White Privilege Album,” the use of comedy to talk about progressive “wokeness,” and the future of what society looks like for younger generations.
Who’s A. J. Rice? More from American Spectator A.J. Rice’s White Privilege Album Is a Vaccine for the Woke Mind Virus. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Rice exposes what actual white privilege looks like
and why you don’t have it.
You already know this, but we live in deeply stuffy, oppressive times. You can get canceled for saying the wrong thing, not saying the right thing, or even looking at someone in a way they don’t like. Don’t believe me? Go to the gym and glance for more than three seconds at that 20-something girl in the bralette and bike shorts; woe betide you if you’re not in better shape than she is.
One minute you’re on top of the world — the next minute, you’re canceled and your whole world is turned upside down. It would be no small thing to just say forget all this and say and do whatever you want without fear. A younger Mel Brooks or Woody Allen might relish taking the fight to wokeness, but few others around would.
The digital gulag awaits us all, it seems. A hunger for thus imprisoning one’s fellow man is what the woke mind virus instills in its victims.
Into this climate of fear and loathing comes a writer, an entrepreneur, a madcap thinker with the sand to call the entire woke-industrial complex “zombies” and then follow that up with a book that quotes from Blazing Saddles on its opening page.
You remember Blazing Saddles, don’t you? It’s one of the funniest and most controversial movies ever made, a cultural sacrament for Generation X if ever there was one. It uses racism to mock racism, stupidity to rip stupidity, and comedy to take a sledgehammer to anyone who takes themselves too seriously — and in ways and from angles that make it an impossible movie to get produced today.
But back to the book. Its title is — mischievously —The White Privilege Album, and it’s A.J. Rice’s newest exploration of the insanity of our times.
According to Rice, we live in the worst of times, and, well, also the worse of times. Sure, we have all the technology we’ll probably ever need and the whole world’s knowledge at our fingertips at any given moment. You can explore the finest works of art, delve into the achievements of the Maya, study the miraculous founding of America — anything you want.
But millions merely use all this technology and knowledge we’re privileged to have to attack America relentlessly every hour of the day. We pay for public schools through our taxes, and those schools are filled with woke activists masquerading as teachers, indoctrinating our kids with ESG, DEI, and transgenderist trash and telling them that every generation before them was hopelessly racist and evil.
Well, only if they were white. Everyone else gets a free pass even if their ancestors owned slaves, committed genocide, or did other terrible things. Only white people need apply for the re-education camps Hillary Clinton wants, and only white people would be subject to the censorship regime that the entire Democratic Party so openly wants.
There’s your white privilege, Rice says. You’ll be subject to the whims of woke wackos and their digital shock troops. Your leaders will be cast as villains. You’ll be lied to, hoaxed, and perhaps doxxed and canceled. And you’ll like it or they’ll call you a racist and cancel you again.
As Rice documents and exposes in this extremely well-researched and written book, the major movements of our time are based on hoaxes, lies, smears, and bullying. Wokeness incorporates all of that — it’s a hoax against America and Western values, based on lies and half-truths taken out of context, aimed at smearing and undermining our history and culture, and weaponizes organized bullying to intimidate the weak-minded into submission.
Likewise, Joe Biden’s very reason for running for president was, according to him, based on the Trump “very fine people” quote — which was torn out of context and twisted into a hoax in which he is said to have praised neo-Nazis.Spoiler: He didn’t. Biden lied. A lot.
These hoaxes and lies are the foundation of the entire left now, Rice writes. Chapter by chapter, Rice takes on and tears apart the woke NBA, California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Marxist racism, Barack Obama’s stealth wokeness, Ibrahim X. Kendi’s lucrative race-hustling grift, and so much more. Along the way, you will see actual white privilege, in the form of a ne’er-do-well crackhead who suspiciously stays out of jail no matter what while black and brown offenders end up in prison for years on similar offenses. You’ll also learn why Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben were really fired. In fact, you’ll get 12 months of “white privilege” in this amazing book.
But The White Privilege Album isn’t just about mowing down woke zombies. There’s plenty of that, but it’s also about lifting up heroes who deserve it and rebuilding the sense that America is great and good and always has been. A.J. Rice delivers the triumphs amid the seemingly overwhelming evil, through chapter after chapter that you won’t be able to put down.
“Here’s the takeaway,” he said. “I’m abducting their language and using it against them.”
It started with so-called “white privilege,” he said.
“When you hear these terms, ‘white privilege,’ ‘intersectionality,’ or ‘check your privilege,’ or these constructs of white privilege, when you hear the left, do that what they’re really talking about is three things,” he said.
“One, Western civilization, and I mean Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian civilization, which has to go, they want it to go away,” the author said. “That’s why it’s not just about tearing down statues. It’s everything from Columbus to Winston Churchill — it has to go.”
The second thing is the middle class, Rice said. “The left cultural Marxists and economic Marxists have been trying to destroy the middle class for 100 years,” he said.
“They know to do that because they want a peasant class because Marxism has never thrived,” he said. “Not in Venezuela, not North Korea, none of these places when there’s been a healthy middle class — so middle class has to go.”
The third thing is children, he said. “I believe happy people have more children; of course, more children mean more global warming, so the third thing that they have to destroy is the nuclear family,” he said.
“We know they have to destroy it because Black Lives Matter told us that they wanted to destroy it on their website.”
Rice said he is trying to untangle Americans from the labels that the left uses to confuse us.
“Let me just say, we are not a multicultural country,” he said.
“We are a multi-ethnic country, and the middle class and Western civilization in the nuclear family are colorblind,” he said.
“They’re not white, black, or anything else, and if you want to come here and you do it legally, you can come here and participate in this great experiment,” Rice said.
“As long as the cultural Marxists don’t destroy it.”
Chris Morrison reports on the flap over Climate Crisis™ media tactics in his Daily Sceptic article Climate Activists Frustrated by IPCC’s Refusal to Link Extreme Weather With Carbon Emissions. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Last June, the state-reliant BBC reported that human-caused climate change had made U.S. and Mexico heatwaves “35 times more likely”. Nothing out of the ordinary here in mainstream media with everyone from climate comedy turn ‘Jim’ Dale to UN chief Antonio ‘Boiling’ Guterres making these types of bizarre attributions. But for those who closely follow climate science and the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “such headlines can be difficult to make sense of”, observes the distinguished science writer Roger Pielke. In a hard-hitting attack on the pseudo-scientific industry of weather attribution, he states:
“neither the IPCC nor the underlying scientific literature comes anywhere close to making such strong and“ certain claims of attribution”.
Pielke argues that the extreme position of attributing individual bad weather events is “roughly aligned” with the far Left. “Climate science is not, or at least should not serve as a proxy for political tribes,” he cautions. But of course it is. The Net Zero fantasy is a collectivist national and supra-national agenda that increasingly relies on demonising bad weather. With global temperatures rising at most only 0.1°C a decade, laughter can only be general and side-splitting when IPCC boss Jim Skea claims that British summers will be 6°C hotter in less than 50 years. Two extended temperature pauses since 2000 have not helped the cause of global boiling. In addition there are increasing doubts about the reliability of temperature recordings by many meteorological organisations that seem unable to properly account for massive urban heat corruptions.
The big problem for ‘far Left’ climate extremists is that event attribution is a form, in Pielke’s words, of “tactical science”. Such science serves legal and political ends and is not always subject to peer review. As the BBC and other media outlets can attest, the work is “generally promoted via press release”. It has been developed in response to the failure of the IPCC to detect and attribute most types of extreme weather including drought, flooding, storms and wildfires to human involvement, notes Pielke. Worse, the IPCC can find little sign of human involvement going forward to 2100.
Scientists cannot answer directly whether particular events are
caused by climate change since extremes occur naturally.
Meanwhile the IPCC is somewhat dismissive about weather attribution, or as Pielke terms it, “weather attribution alchemy”. It notes: “The usefulness or applicability of available extreme event attribution methods for assessing climate-related risks remains subject to debate.” The IPCC is a biased body full of climate alarmists, but its inability to attribute single events to humans is obviously highly irritating and somewhat inconvenient for activists and their media counterparts.
Dr. Friederike Otto speaking with reporter at Oxford.
Dr. Friederike Otto runs World Weather Attribution (WWA) out of Imperial College London and is a frequent presence on the BBC. WWA is behind many of the immediate attributions of bad weather to human causes and its motives are clear. As Dr. Otto has noted: “Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind.” Otto is clear that the main function of such studies, part-funded by Net Zero-supporting billionaires and heavily pushed by aligned mainstream media, is to support lawsuits against fossil fuel companies. She explains this strategy in detail in the interview, ‘From Extreme Event Attribution to Climate Litigation‘.
The inability of the IPCC to attribute bad weather to humans has been viewed by climate advocates as “politically problematic”, continues Pielke. He notes the work of climate activists Elizabeth Lloyd and Naomi Oreskes who are worried that the lack of attribution “conveys the impression that we just do not know, which feeds into uncertainty, doubt or incompleteness, and the general tendency of humans to discount threats that are not imminent”.
Perish the thought that there should be uncertainty, doubt
or incompleteness in the settled world of climate science.
It is of course different from all other branches of science in that all its opinions are right and consequently there is no need for the unhelpful process of constant inquiry and experiment. It need hardly be added that no doubt exists at the BBC, where former Radio 4 Today Editor Sarah Sands wrote the foreword to a WWA guide for journalists. Recalling when the late Nigel Lawson suggested there had been no increase in extreme weather, Sands noted: “I wish we had this guide for journalists to help us mount a more effective challenge to his claim.” These days, Sands enthused, attribution studies have given us “significant insight into the horsemen of the climate apocalypse”.
For her part, Otto is keen to crack down on the heretics. She was at the forefront of the recent notorious retraction of a paper in a Springer Nature journal that stated there was no evidence that the climate was breaking down. Written by four Italian scientists and led by Professor Gianluca Alimonti, they argued that a climate emergency was not supported by the data. Otto, who had previously worked in the Oxford School of Geography for 10 years, claimed the scientists were not writing in good faith. “If the journal cares about science they should withdraw it loudly and publicly saying it should never have been published,” she demanded.
A recent scientific study has confirmed that natural and climate-related disasters are declining during the 21st century. Getty Images/iStcokphoto
Benny Peiser makes the case in his NY Post article Despite climate-change hysterics, weather disasters have decreased. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
A recent scientific study has confirmed what climate realists have been highlighting for some time: Natural and climate-related disasters have been declining rather than increasing during the 21st century.
In a paper published this year in one of the world’s leading journals on environmental hazards, Italian scientists Gianluca Alimonti and Luigi Mariani analyzed the number and temporal trends of natural disasters reported since 1900.
A 2015 study by 22 scientists from around the world found that cold kills over 17 times more people than heat. Thus the planet’s recent modest warming has been saving millions of lives.
Based on the best available data, the two scientists concluded the 21st century has seen “a decreasing trend [of natural disasters] to 2022” which is “characterized by a significant decline in number of events.”
The researchers emphasized that their conclusion “sits in marked contradiction to earlier analyses by UN bodies which predict an increasing number of natural disasters and impacts in concert with global warming.”
“Our analyses strongly refute this assertion,” they wrote.
For years, international agencies such as the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Meteorological Organization and the International Red Cross have claimed that climate-related disasters are escalating.
Floods lead a near doubling of disaster events from 1980 to 1999 compared to 2000 to 2019, according to a report by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.
“Weather disasters are striking the world four to five times more often and causing seven times more damage than in the 1970s,” the WMO reported in 2021.
Disaster and weather officials affiliated with the UN claim this dramatic rise is due to global warming: The changing climate, they say, is making weather disasters stronger and more frequent.
Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States.
The increased frequency of heat waves, droughts, flooding, winter storms, hurricanes, wildfires and other extreme weather events prove the negative impact of a warming world, according to various UN agencies and nongovernmental organizations.
Yet, as the actual data used by these organizations reveals, the last 20 years have in fact seen a significant decline in such events.
It turns out that climate alarmists have based their claims on a highly misleading comparison of disaster data of the late 20th and the early 21st centuries.
By their tally, the period from 1980 to 2000 saw about 4,200 natural disasters —with the number increasing sharply, to more than 8,000, during the first 20 years of this century.
This conclusion, however, is fatally flawed: It fails to take into account the huge increase in the global reporting of disasters engendered by the invention and rapid global dissemination of new communication technologies since the 1980s.
The arrival of the internet and other new communication tools has undoubtedly accelerated the reporting of disasters from all corners of the world — events that were significantly underreported in earlier decades.
As well, the number of people killed by natural and climate-related disasters has fallen steadily over the past 120 years — from 500,000 deaths per decade in the early 20th century down to less than 50,000 per decade in the last ten years.
And, contrary to claims by NGOs and government officials, climate-related disaster losses have also declined as a percentage of global GDP during the last 30 years — from about 0.25% of GDP in 1990 to less than 0.20% in 2023.
The study by Alimonti and Mariani vindicates what we at the Global Warming Policy Foundation have been pointing out for a long time: Climate-related disasters are not on the rise, despite warming temperatures.
International agencies and the news media have hyped climate disasters for far too long, while ignoring the factual downward trend.
”First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win,” as the saying goes. UN agencies and NGOs have been misleading the public for years. It’s past time for the truth to win out.
Benny Peiser is the director of the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation.
See also
Our Weather Extremes Are Customary in History
Figure27: Annual count of EF3 and above tornadoes in the US, 1950–2021. Source: Source: NOAA/NCEI.106, 107
Dr. Lars Schernikau is an energy economist explaining why CO2 pricing (also falsely called “carbon pricing”) is a terrible idea fit only for discarding. His blog article is The Dilemma of Pricing CO2. Excerpts below in italics with my bolds and added images.
1.Understanding CO₂ pricing
2.Economic and environmental impact
3.Global economic impact
4.Alternative solutions
5.Conclusion
6.Additional comments and notes
7.References
As an energy economist I am confronted daily with questions about the “energy transition” away from conventional fuels. As we know, the discussion about the “energy transition” stems from concerns about climatic changes.
The source of climatic changes is a widely discussed issue, with numerous policies and measures proposed to mitigate its impact. One such measure is the current and future pricing of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. The logic followed is that if human CO₂ emissions are reduced, future global temperatures will be measurably lower, extreme weather events will be reduced, and sea-levels will rise less or stop rising all together.
Although intended to reduce greenhouse gases, this approach has sparked considerable debate. In this blog post I discuss the controversial topic of CO₂ pricing, examining its economic and environmental ramifications.
However, this article is not about the causes of climatic changes, nor is it about the negative or positive effects of a warming planet and higher atmospheric CO₂ concentrations. It is also not about the scientifically undisputed fact that we don’t know how much warming CO₂ causes (a list of recent academic research on CO₂’s climate sensitivity can be found at the end of this blog).
Nor do I unpack the undisputed and IPCC confirmed fact that each additional ton of CO₂ in the atmosphere has less warming effect than the previous ton as the climate sensitivity of CO₂ is a logarithmic function irrespective of us not knowing what that climate sensitivity is. I also don’t discuss the NASA satellite confirmed greening of the world over the past decades partially driven by higher atmopheric CO₂ concentrations (see sources inc Chen et al. 2024).
Instead, this blog post is about the environmental and economic “sense”, or lack thereof, of pricing CO₂ emissions as currently practiced in most OECD countries and increasingly seen in developing nations. It is about the “none-sense” of measuring practically all human activity with a “CO₂ footprint”, often mistakenly called “carbon footprint”, and having nearly every organization set claims for current or future “Net-Zero” (Figure 1).
CO₂ pricing aims to internalize the external costs of CO₂ emissions, thereby encouraging businesses and individuals to reduce their “carbon footprint”. The concept is straightforward: by assigning a cost to CO₂ emissions, it becomes financially advantageous to emit less CO₂.
However, this simplistic view overlooks
significant complexities and unintended consequences.
Our entire existence is based on drawing from nature (“renewable” or not), so the “Net-Zero” discussion ignores a fundamental requirement for our survival. I agree that it should be our aim to reduce the environmental footprint as much as possible but only if our lives, health, and wealth don’t deteriorate as a result.
Now, I am sure, some readers and many “activists” may disagree, which I respect but, at a global level, find unrealistic. However, I would assume that most agree that no-one’s life ought to be harmed or shortened for the sake of reducing the environmental impact made. Otherwise, there is little room for a conversation.
BloombergNEFs “New Energy Outlook” from May 2024 should possibly be called “CO₂ Outlook”, as there is little to be found about energy and its economics but rather all about CO₂ emissions and the so called “Net-Zero” (Figure 1), which is in line with media, government, and educational focus on primarily carbon dioxide emissions.
One of the primary criticisms of CO₂ pricing is that it addresses only one environmental externality while ignoring others. This narrow focus can lead to economic distortions, as it fails to account for the full spectrum of environmental and social impacts. For instance, while CO₂ pricing might reduce emissions, it can also drive-up energy costs, disproportionately affecting lower-income populations and hindering economic development in lesser developed countries.
It is by now undisputed amongst energy economists that, large-scale “Net-Zero” intermittent and unpredictable wind and solar power generation increases the total or “full” cost of electricity, primarily because of their low energy density, intermittency, inherent net energy and raw material inefficiency, mounting integration costs for power grids, and the need for a drastic overbuild installation system plus an overbuild backup/storage system because of their intermittency.
CO₂ pricing can also result in environmental trade-offs. For example, the shift towards “renewable” energy sources like wind and solar, incentivized by CO₂ pricing, has its own set of environmental impacts, including land use, resource extraction, energy footprint, and energy storage challenges.
When BloombergNEF (Figure 1) displays
how clean power and electrification
will directly reduce CO₂ emissions to zero,
then they are clearly mistaken.
My native country Germany provides a notable example of the complexities involved in transitioning to “renewable” energy. The country has invested heavily in wind and solar power, leading to the highest electricity costs among larger nations. Germany’s installed wind and solar capacity is now twice the total peak power demand. This variable “renewable” wind and solar power capacity now produces about a third of the country’s electricity and contributes about 6% to Germany’s primary energy supply (Figure 2).
Sources: Schernikau based on Fraunhofer, Agora, AG Energiebilanzen. See also www.unpopular-truth.com/graphs.
Higher energy costs, obviously and undisputedly, hurt less affluent people and stifles the development of poorer nations (Figure 3). Thus, a move to more expensive wind and solar energy has “human externalities”. The less fortunate will be “starved of” energy as they wouldn’t be able to afford it, leading to literal reduction in life expectancy.
Source: Eschenbach 2017; Figure 38 in Book “The Unpopular Truth… about Electricity and the Future of Energy”
CO₂ pricing typically focuses only on emissions during operation,
neglecting significant environmental and economic costs
incurred during other stages or by the entire system.
For instance, the production of solar panels involves substantial energy and raw material inputs. Today there is not one single solar panel that is produced without coal. Similarly, the manufacturing and transportation processes of wind turbines and electric vehicles are energy-intensive and environmentally impactful. These stages are rarely accounted for in CO₂ pricing schemes, leading to a distorted view of their true environmental footprint. Also not accounted for are:
a) the required overbuild,
b) short and long duration energy storage,
c) backup facilities, or
d) larger network integration and transmission infrastructure.
Source: Schernikau, adapted from Figure 39 in Book “The Unpopular Truth… about Electricity and the Future of Energy“
Figure 4 illustrates how virtually all CO₂ pricing or taxation happens only at the stage of “operation” or combustion. How else could a “Net-Zero” label be assigned to a solar panel produced from coal and minerals extracted in Africa with diesel-run equipment, transported to China on a vessel powered by fuel-oil, and processed with heat and electricity from coal- or gas-fired power partially using forced labour? All this energy-intensive activity and not a single kilogram of CO₂ is taxed (see my recent article on this subject here) The same applies to wind turbines, hydro power, biofuel, or electric vehicles.
It turns out, CO₂ tax is basically just a means to redistribute wealth, with the collecting agency (government) deciding where the funds go. Yes, a CO₂ tax does incentivize industry to reduce CO₂ emissions at their taxed operations only, but this comes at a cost to economies, the environment, and often people. . . Any economist will confirm that pricing one externality but not others leads to economic distortions and, many would say, worse environmental impacts.
Distortion, in this case, is just another word for unintended consequences to the environment, our economies, and the people. Pricing CO₂ only during combustion but failing to price methane, raw material and recycling, inefficiency, or embodied energy, or energy shortages, or land requirement, or greening from CO₂… will cause undesirable outcomes. The world will be worse off economically and environmentally.
Protest if you must, but let me offer a simple example. The leaders of the Western world seem to have united around abandoning coal immediately, because it is the highest CO₂ emitter during combustion (UN 2019). Instead, demanding reliable and affordable energy, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Germany, and so many more nations have embraced liquified natural gas (LNG) as a “bridge” fuel to replace coal. This “switch” is taking place despite questions about LNG’s impact on the environment, including the “climate”. This policy, supported by almost all large consultancies, indirectly caused blackouts affecting over 150 million people in Bangladesh in October 2022 (Reuters and Bloomberg).
So, the world is embarking on an expensive venture
to replace as much coal as possible with
more expensive liquified natural gas LNG.
On top of that, wind and solar are given preference. For example, the IEA recently confirmed that 2024 sparks the first year where investments in solar outstrip the combined investments in all other power generation technologies. As a result, energy costs go up, dependencies increase, lights go off, and, as per the UN’s IPCC, the “climate gets worse.”
Now imagine what would happen if we would truly take into account all environmental and human impacts, both negative and positive, along the entire value chain of energy production, transportation, processing, generation, consumption, and disposal… we would all be surprised! You would look at fossil fuels and certainly nuclear through different eyes. Instead we should simply incentivize resource and energy efficiency which will truly make a positive difference!
From Schernikau et al. 2022.
No matter what your view on climate change is, pricing CO₂ is harmful… why?
Answer: … because pricing one externality but not others leads to economic and environmental distortions…causing human suffering.
That is why, even considering the entire value chain, I do not support any CO₂ pricing.. That is why I fight for environmental and economic justice so we can, by avoiding energy starvation and resulting poverty, make a truly positive difference not only for ourselves but also for future generations to come.. . We need INvestment in, not DIvestment from 80% of our energy supply to rationalize our energy systems and to allow people and the planet to flourish.
I strongly support increasing adaptation efforts, which have already been successful in drastically reducing the death rate and GDP adjusted financial damage from natural disasters during the past
100 years (OurWorldInData, Pielke 2022, Economist).
Matthias Desmet previously alerted us to the appearance of mass formation supporting totalitarian Covid controls. Now he writes a warning concerning popular rejection of the elite propaganda machine. His Brownstone article is The Propaganda Model Has Limits. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images. H/T Tyer Durden.
Normally, I let my pen rest during the summer months, but for some things, you set aside your habits. What has been happening in the context of the US presidential elections over the past few weeks is, to say the least, remarkable. We are witnessing a social system that – to use a term from complex dynamic systems theory – is heading toward a catastrophe.
And the essence of the tipping point we are approaching is this:
the propaganda model is beginning to fail.
It started a few weeks ago like this: Trump, the presidential candidate who must not win, is up against Biden, the presidential candidate who must win. After the first debate, it was immediately clear: Trump will win against Biden. The big problem: Biden and Jill are about the only ones who don’t realize this.
The media then turned against Biden. That, in itself, is a revolution. They had praised President Biden to the skies for four years, turning a blind eye to the fact that the man either seemed hardly aware of what he was saying or was giving speeches that could only be described as having the characteristics of a fascist’s discourse.
In any case, the media’s love for Biden was suddenly over when it became clear that he could not possibly win the election, even not with a little help from the media. If you want to know how that ‘little help’ worked in 2020, look at one of the most important interviews of the past year, where Mike Benz – former director of the cyber portfolio of the US government – explains to Tucker Carlson in detail how information flows on the internet were manipulated during the 2020 elections (and the Covid crisis).
After the first debate, the media realized that even they could not help Biden win the election. They changed their approach. Biden was quickly stripped of his saintly status. The Veil of Appearances was pulled away, and he suddenly stood naked and vulnerable in the eye of the mainstream – a man in the autumn of his life, mentally confused, addicted to power, and arrogant. Some journalists even started attributing traits of the Great Narcissistic Monster Trump to him.
Then things took another turn, a turn so predictable that one is astonished that it actually happened. An overaged teenager calmly climbed onto a roof with a sniper rifle, under the watchful eyes of the security services, and nearly shot Trump in the head. The security services, which initially did not respond for minutes when people tried to draw attention to the overaged teenager with an assault rifle, suddenly reacted decisively: they shot the overaged teenager dead seconds after the assassination attempt.
What happened there? There are many reasons to have reservations about Trump, but one thing we cannot help but say: if Trump becomes president, the war in Ukraine will be over. Anyone who does not attribute any weight to that should subject themselves to a conscience examination. And no, Trump will not have to give half of Europe to Putin for that. My cautious estimate, for what it’s worth: It will suffice for NATO to stop and partially reverse its eastward expansion, for Russia to retain access to the Black Sea via Crimea (something everyone with historical awareness knows that denying would mean the death blow to Russia as a great power and thus a direct declaration of war), and for the population of the Russian-speaking part of Ukraine to choose in a referendum whether to belong to Russia or Ukraine.
So, I repeat my point: with Trump, the provocation of Russia stops, and the war in Ukraine ends. Presidents who threaten to end wars are sometimes shot at by lone gunmen. And those lone gunmen are, in turn, shot dead. And the archives about that remarkable act of lone gunmen sometimes remain sealed for a remarkably long time, much longer than they usually do.
The news reaction was predictable. We are used to the media. Some journalists even suggested that Trump had been shot with a paintball, others thought the most accurate way to report was that someone ‘wounded Trump on the ear.’
In any case, after the assassination attempt, the situation became even more dire for the mainstream: the presidential candidate who must not win is now even more popular, and his victory in a race with Biden is almost inevitable.
Then the next chapter begins. Biden suddenly changes his mind: he has come to his senses and drops out of the race. He announces this – of all things – in a letter with a signature that, even for his shaky condition, looked quite clumsy. Then he stayed out of the public eye for a few days. We are curious about what exactly happened there.
But the media are compliant again. Biden has now been sanctified again. Just like Kamala Harris, of course. They are already mentioning polls showing she will beat Trump. With a little help from the media, of course. Curious how this will continue, but I would be surprised if the rest of the campaign will be a walk in the park. Trump is not safe after the first attempt, that’s for sure. And to Kamala Harris, I say this: when totalitarian systems go into a chaotic phase, they become monsters that devour their own children.
Case in Point 1: Orbán: The West Sees Immigration As A “Way Of Getting Rid Of The Ethnic Homogeneity That Is The Basis Of The Nation-State”
From Zerohedge: In Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s speech at Tusványos in Romania, he focuses on the intractable differences developing between the East and West of Europe, with immigration one of the key divisions. He not only rejects the Western view on immigration, but sees it as an agenda with a very specific ideology behind it, which is designed to erode the nation-state entirely.
“But Westerners, quite differently, believe that nation-states no longer exist. They therefore deny that there is a common culture and a public morality based on (the nation-state). There is no public morality, if you watched the Olympic opening yesterday, you saw it. So, they also think differently about migration. They believe that migration is not a threat or a problem, but in fact a way of getting rid of the ethnic homogeneity that is the basis of a nation. This is the essence of the progressive liberal international concept. That is why the absurdity does not occur to them, or they do not see it as absurd,” he said.
This dramatic ideological cleavage is not a “secret,” according to Orbán. He said that the documents and policy papers coming out of the EU show that the “clear aim is to transcend the nation.”
“But the point is that the powers, the sovereignty, should be transferred from the nation-states to Brussels. This is the logic behind all major measures. In their minds, the nation is a historical, or transitional, formation of the 18th and 19th centuries — as it came, so it may go. They are already in a post-national state in the Western half of Europe. It’s not just a politically different situation, but what I’m trying to talk about here is that it’s a new mental space.”
And finally, the last element of reality is that this post-national situation that we see in the West has a serious, I would say dramatic, political consequence that is shaking democracy. Societies are increasingly resistant to migration, gender, war and globalism. And this creates the political problem of elites and the people, elitism and populism. This is a dominant phenomenon in Western politics today…This means that the elites condemn the people for drifting to the right. The feelings and ideas of the people are labeled xenophobia, homophobia and nationalism. The people, meanwhile, in response, accuse the elite of not caring about what is important to them, but of sinking into some kind of mindless globalism.
Case in Point 2: UK Prime Minister Calls For Crackdown On Angry Brits – Violent Migrants Get A Pass
From Zerohedge: Beyond the obvious Cloward-Piven agenda in play throughout most of Europe and the US, open border policies accomplish much more than simply erasing western culture with third-world migrants. The introduction of violent peoples from violent countries and ideologies is a perfect way to generate public hostility and getting them to react in anger. When a government refuses to represent the interests of actual citizens that are under attack by foreign elements the only avenue left to that populace is self defense.
Establishment elites understand very well that their malicious activities are going to generate a vengeful response. Their first measure is to shame the public with accusations of “extremism” when the public fights back. When that doesn’t work, the next measure is to use popular riots as an excuse to impose authoritarian controls “in the name of safety.”
UK police and political authorities specifically avoid keeping a record of the migrant status of most perpetrators, making it difficult to directly prove who is responsible for the crime spike. Correlation is not necessarily causation, but there were no other dramatic changes to UK society during that time period that would account for the crime spike. The only thing that changed was the type of migrants the UK government was accepting and the amount of people they were allowing in.
Remove the migrants and watch crime numbers plummet; it’s that simple.
The UK public knows it and those in power choose to ignore it.
This has led to predictable conflict.
Keep in mind, leftist protests and riots have been ongoing in the UK for the past year in the name of Gaza, among other causes. The law enforcement response to these situations has been minimal. It is clear that there is a grotesque double standard when it comes to conservative or nationalist protests – If you aren’t on Team Progressive, then you aren’t allowed a redress of grievances. The left is allowed to riot, conservatives are not even allowed to take to the streets. This is what happened after January 6th in the US and it’s happening right now in the UK.
If the goal is a dystopian nightmare state then the UK is well on its way. The public has made clear that they will no longer be abused. The question is, who will blink first – The populace under threat of Orwellian surveillance and lockdowns, or the establishment fearing that the civil unrest they so hoped to trigger might grow out of their control.
James Rickards posted Four Unblievable Narratives at his blog Daily Reckoning. Excepts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Everyday Americans and investors in particular are confronted with “narratives” daily. Many include hidden agendas that are politically, ideologically or financially driven. The key for investors is to see the narrative for what it is, avoid the mass psychosis, position yourself for reality and succeed in the end.
Following are four reigning narratives.
In each case, I sketch these narratives (and what the media wants you to believe),
then contrast that sketch with reality supported by hard data.
The pandemic narrative was straightforward: It was caused by a virus of natural origin that passed from animals to humans through exotic game, such as bats and pangolins, that were sold in a wet market in Wuhan, China. It spread quickly and was highly fatal.
The solution was to isolate individuals through lockdowns, social distancing, school closures and masks. Eventually a vaccine became available that would “stop the spread.” Over time, the virus mutated into less dangerous forms, immunity from the vaccine increased and the restrictions were relaxed.
The heroes were Anthony Fauci, who led the lockdown response, and Joe Biden, who forced mass vaccination programs on everyday Americans. The economic costs were worth it. Today, all is well.
The virus was created by Communist Chinese scientist Shi Zhengli, known as the “Bat Woman of Wuhan.” It leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. China immediately banned academic papers pointing to their culpability and created the “wet market” myth.
The Wuhan gain-of-function research that created the virus was funded by Anthony Fauci using a cutout called EcoHealth Alliance. Once the virus leaked, Fauci spent more time covering up his involvement than helping Americans cope with the disease.
Fauci closed schools and workplaces and destroyed the economy all for no good reason. The pandemic policy response was the greatest, most dangerous and costliest hoax in human history.
Since the beginning of the Russian Special Military Operation in Ukraine in February 2022, the narrative has been that Russia began the war as part of a wider ambition to recapture all of Eastern Europe and the Baltic states.
It was essential that the U.S. and NATO allies support Ukraine with as much money and materiel as needed to defeat Russian ambitions. The West was considered to be fighting for democracy and freedom in Ukraine.
The unrelenting financial and weapons support combined with the impact of sanctions and Russian incompetence would lead to an ultimate Ukrainian victory.
Russian dissatisfaction with Putin would lead to a popular uprising that would overthrow him and make Russia a more democratic country friendly to the U.S.
Russia didn’t provoke the war. It was provoked by the U.S. in 2008 with George W. Bush’s Bucharest Declaration that Ukraine should join NATO. The provocation continued through a U.S./U.K.-sponsored coup d’etat in 2014 that overthrew a duly elected president and replaced him with a U.S. puppet regime.
The U.S. and NATO then lied to the Russians in the course of negotiating the Minsk agreements in 2014 and 2015, which German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted the West had no intention of honoring.
The idea that the U.S. is fighting for democracy in Ukraine is a farce. President Zelenskyy declared martial law, suspended elections and imprisoned his political opponents. Zelenskyy’s elected term expired in May 2024, so he now rules as an unelected dictator propped up by a corrupt military.
Meanwhile, U.S. and NATO financial sanctions on Russia due to the war in Ukraine have failed miserably. Russian growth now exceeds U.S. growth. Russia is growing at 5.4% (annualized) while U.S. growth in the most recent quarter was only 1.4%. Unemployment in Russia is only 2.7% while the unemployment rate in the U.S. is 4.1%. The most recent growth forecasts for 2024 from the IMF show Russia growing at 3.2% and the U.S. growing only 2.7%.
The war isn’t over but Russia will clearly win. The remnants of Ukraine will be a landlocked rump state with no productive economy.
Climate change advocates have a straightforward narrative. Carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) are both greenhouse gasses that trap heat within the atmosphere. CO2 and CH4 are created by emissions from the burning of “fossil fuels.”
This climate change caused by fossil fuels will have highly deleterious effects on human life and civilization. All types of natural disasters will result. The solution is to lower the global temperature or at least slow the increase.
This can be done by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy generation including wind and solar. With enough time, effort and money global warming can be curtailed.
The climate alarmists have been wrong for 40 years and they’re wrong now. Ice caps are expanding in many places, and no nations are underwater. Climate change is real, but it’s a natural phenomenon that arises slowly and lasts for centuries. These phenomena include solar cycles, volcanic eruptions and ocean currents.
It has nothing to do with CO2, automobiles or the use of natural gas and coal to generate electricity. In fact, the best evidence is not that CO2 causes warming, but that warming causes the release of CO2. The alarmists have the cause and effect exactly backward.
Climate alarmists are an ideological cult driven by a desire to destroy U.S. independence and the U.S. economy in pursuit of neo-Marxist dreams. The U.S. has more than enough energy, technology and ability to create an optimal carbon-based future while remaining open to other solutions.
Perhaps no narrative is more ubiquitous and persistently touted than the idea that the U.S. economy has dodged a global recession and high inflation at the same time. The economy has come in for a “soft landing” and is headed for a future of strong growth, low unemployment, low inflation and higher stock prices.
This is all due to the brilliant finesse of monetary policy by the Federal Reserve and the Biden administration’s generous fiscal policies.
This narrative is promoted by Wall Street and the White House operating almost in lockstep. Wall Street wants to sell you stocks and has to keep the soft landing narrative alive. The White House wants to win the election in November and has to sell Americans on the idea that the economy is strong and the future is bright.
The two are joined by the mainstream media that has a strong pro-Biden tilt. The result is a trifecta of banks, government and the media all telling you that all is well.
The U.S. is likely in a recession today or, if not, soon will enter recession. Here’s the data to support the reality: The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta GDP Nowcast projects Q2 growth at 1.5% annualized, down from an estimate of 4.2% growth as recently as May 14.
The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.1% in the June employment report. Headline job creation was 206,000 jobs, but if the more reliable alternate household survey is used, the economy actually lost 408,000 jobs in May.
Most job creation is in part-time jobs and almost all new jobs are going to illegal aliens. Real wages are stagnant. Meanwhile, if workers not in the workforce were counted as unemployed, the actual unemployment rate today would be about 8.0%, consistent with recession levels.
Oil prices have also trended down over the last couple of months, a sign both of reduced consumer demand and a slowing economy. Consumer savings are also largely depleted and credit cards are maxed out.
It can be difficult to refute narratives. Every propagandist and master of the Big Lie from Joseph Goebbels to Alex Soros has admitted that repetition is the key to making citizens believe the lie.
Narratives find willing amplification and repetition in the mainstream media. They’re also made effective by mixing lies with truth.
The best set of tools to identify a false narrative includes education, a skeptical attitude and close attention to hard data.
My role is to subject narratives to critical scrutiny, develop my own data sources and apply independent analysis without ideological filters or political bias.
I’m confident this will help you acquire “narrative resistance” and position you to profit when reality reasserts itself.
Science Matters 