The End Of The Age Of Benevolence

Authored by Francis Marion of CanadianGunBlog.com, via Jim Quinn"s Burning Platform blog,

The history of democracy, Marxism and feminism is the history of the snake, which, being hungry for more, stalks its own tail and consumes itself.

Some evenings I sit on the sofa in the family room with my teenage daughter and watch a TV program with her. I leave the choice of the show to her, it matters little to me, and when she finds something she likes she sits next to me, puts her head on my shoulder, and snuggles up for the hour it takes to watch whatever it is she’s chosen.

It’s our time.

Occasionally we’ll sneak in another twenty or thirty minutes to the objection of her mother but I like my time with her so I put up with the raised eyebrows and the, “She’s got school tomorrow,” scoldings. It’s important to me that she knows I love her, that I want to spend time with her and that she feels safe when she is with me. Someday, when she is a grown woman I want her to find a man that will take care of her and protect her like I do. I expect no less from a suitor and neither should she.

There will be women who read this who will object to my stance. They will say, “She doesn’t need a man to feel safe or validated or content,” but I would disagree. When she gets older she’ll need a good man, not just any man, and that’s as true today as much as it was ten years, twenty years, fifty years, one hundred years and even one thousand years ago. And it will become even more so as time goes on.

Indeed, we have reached peak denial in our civilization and whether we like it or not reality is about to make a come back.

The freedom that we have enjoyed in the west and the modern democracies that have sprung forth from our evolving and enlightened philosophies over the past few hundred years are not a given. Granted, they are preferable outcomes given our natural state but politically speaking they are an anomaly in the history of mankind and not the norm.

As such, democracy and the systems, social structures and institutions that have grown up around them are grossly misunderstood by the vast majority of the western world. Most of the people living in the west today have been raised to believe that democracy is a moral system of governance and that it is our gift to the rest of mankind. But democracy is not an inherently moral system nor is it a guarantor of linear, progressive political growth.

At its root democracy is quite simple. It is the exercise of political power by the majority over the minority. It is the power to choose in matters of politics. This, of course, begs the question: to choose what?

Since choices in general (and political ones are no exception) can be either good or bad, in this case, both for the individual and the body politic, then it follows that democracy is neither. It is nothing more than a tool for decision making where the majority holds the power to make decisions that affect everyone, either for better or for worse. Democracy is, therefore, a reflection of the character of the people who exercise it.

Additionally, democracy is also the use of soft force. That is, the minority bends to the will of the majority on political matters and the apparatus of the state is responsible for carrying out its demands. The minority consents, willingly or unwillingly not because violence is present but because, by the state’s presence, it is implied.

More importantly, though, democracy is a luxury that is preceded by benevolence but does not necessarily guarantee its continuance or creation if forgotten.

Societies in a state of internal turmoil, or where competing factions vie for political power, often through the use of overt physical violence, will forgo democracy because the primary component for its exercise, order, is absent.

Democracy in the western world has always followed ‘order’. ‘Order’ is a byproduct of force and, like democracy varies in severity on the scale of good and bad, its moral leanings by and large being dependent on the type of people who impose it from the top down. It can be fatherly and benevolent or it can be violent and oppressive. It is never universally both.

Thus democracy usually occurs where ‘order’ has been established and the apparatus of the state is at least somewhat benevolent.

In a political world ruled by strength, order and benevolence are precursors to suffrage. Without either suffrage would not exist, choices would be limited and brute strength would still be the order of the day.

Whether feminists are willing to admit it or not, brute, physical strength is at the root of all political power, thus feminism came into being because those who held that strength chose to exercise benevolence and reason over strength and subjugation. Their suffrage was dependent first and foremost on the benevolence of those who held political power. And like it or not, those who held political power at the time it was introduced were men.

As time progressed, at least in the West, democracy, and universal suffrage gave way to both physical and intellectual freedom for women. In the West during the twentieth century, its political structure (and the intellectual values it embodied) and the industrial revolution it spawned ushered in a new era for women, giving them choices they had not previously had, by and large, since the beginning of recorded history.

Women were finally free to choose between family, career or both. Rather than playing the role of the weaker, subservient sex women found their place beside men in society as intellectual equals. Physical strength was no longer a factor in the social structure of our civilization. An intellectual meritocracy came to be valued over a system based simply on brute force. This structure was the product of order created from benevolent strength.

But the rise of Marxism and feminism, particularly the rise of third-wave feminism has put ‘order’ at risk.

Without order, an intellectual meritocracy will once again become subservient to strength. It’s a hard pill for women and progressive liberals in general to swallow but it’s a fact.

Marxism and modern feminism work continuously towards a perfect world but ignore reality in the process. They forget an important lesson, born true repeatedly throughout history:

There is no utopia.

The best we can hope for in any civilization is for a society to be built and based on fundamental individual rights and freedoms. If we refuse this then we return to what we were before. This means rule by brute force which means the end of political and legal equality for women and the death of democracy itself.

The irony in the dilemma which the West now faces is that our demise, the continual erosion of a democratic, intellectual meritocracy, is by and large spurred on by the very people that our system was created to protect.

Feminists, both female and male, cry daily for more of the same poison which infects us.

More illegal and unscreened immigration. More tolerance of philosophies which are intolerant themselves. More invitations for an enemy created by a corrupt and immoral government to ignore our borders and live among us.

More cries for moral nihilism, the repression of speech (one of the cornerstones of their own suffrage) and the denial of fundamental biological reality.

More cries for the denial of basic math and the continuance of government-sponsored bread and circuses. More of everything which our civilization cannot sustain. More of everything which rots us from the core.

Subsequently, modern feminists decry the men of their own civilization as misogynists, racists, and intolerant while forgetting it was their own men who recognized that a society built on equal political rights for all was preferable to a society built on spoils taken by the strong.

They forget that it was the men they live among who valued justice over greed and force so much that they shed the old ways and took their place beside their women instead of in front of them. They do all of this while cheering on the invasion of their own countries by foreign men who view them as nothing more than chattel property. In doing so they have unwittingly invited the destruction of their own freedom.

While I sit next to my daughter I wonder what the future will hold for her. I have no desire to see her disenfranchised but the reality is that many of her own kind have chosen a future where reason has been rejected and instead, traded for thirty pieces of silver and whatever makes them feel good. Unfortunately, a world without reason is a world without order which is a world without choice. A world without choice is a world of brute force. And that’s a man’s world.

Ironic.

Benevolence and democracy should have ushered in an era of truth and reason but instead, they ushered in an era of denial and wishful thinking. Thus, democracy’s beginning will also be its end. What came from force will return to it.

For those of you paying attention and who can see the contradictions and the resultant decay, pray. Pray that what comes afterward will once again be benevolent.

The Countries Most (& Least) Satisfied With 'Democracy'

Across the globe, the spread of right- and left-wing populism and authoritarian politics have shaken the very foundations of democracy.

As Statista"s Niall McCarthy notes, a new survey from Pew Research has found that people across the globe are generally unhappy with the functionality of their political systems, though levels of satisfaction with democracy vary hugely between countries.

As can be seen from the following infographic which shows a selection of countries from the survey, people in India have tremendous faith in democracy. 79 percent of those polled said they are satisfied with the way democracy is working in India compared to 11 percent who are dissatisfied. Germany also recorded a high level (73 percent) of satisfaction with democracy.

You will find more statistics at Statista

In many other developed countries, however, faith is waning.

In the United Kingdom and Japan, 47 percent of people are not satisfied with how democracy is working in their countries while in the U.S., that rises to 51 percent. France, South Korea and Brazil all recorded dissatisfaction levels of 65 percent or higher... but Greece tops the charts with only 21% of its citizenry "satisfied" with the weay democracy is working.

Amid 2017's Fascist Disinformation Mania, Brandon Smith Fears "Something Larger Afoot"

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

Years ago in 2012, I published a thorough examination of disinformation tactics used by globalist institutions as well as government and political outfits to manipulate the public and undermine legitimate analysts working to expose particular truths of our social and economic conditions.

If you have not read this article, titled Disinformation: How It Works, I highly recommend you do so now. It will act as a solid foundation for what I am about to discuss in this article. Without a basic understanding of how lies are utilized, you will be in no position to grasp the complexities of disinformation trends being implemented today.

Much of what I am about to discuss will probably not become apparent for much of the mainstream and portions of the liberty movement for many years to come. Sadly, the biggest lies are often the hardest to see until time and distance are achieved.

If you want to be able to predict geopolitical and economic trends with any accuracy, you must first accept a couple of hard realities. First and foremost, the majority of cultural shifts and fiscal developments within our system are a product of social engineering by an organized collective of power elites. Second, you must understand that this collective is driven by the ideology of globalism — the pursuit of total centralization of financial and political control into the hands of a select few deemed as "superior" concertmasters or "maestros."

As globalist insider, CFR member and mentor to Bill Clinton, Carroll Quigley, openly admitted in his book Tragedy And Hope:

"The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank ... sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world."

The philosophical basis for the globalist ideology is most clearly summarized in the principles of something called "Fabian Socialism," a system founded in 1884 which promotes the subversive and deliberate manipulation of the masses towards total centralization, collectivism and population control through eugenics. Fabian Socialists prefer to carry out their strategies over a span of decades, turning a population against itself slowly, rather than trying to force changes to a system immediately and outright.  Their symbol is a coat of arms depicting a wolf in sheep"s clothing, or in some cases a turtle (slow and steady wins the race?) with the words "When I strike I strike hard."

Again, it is important to acknowledge that these people are NOT unified by loyalty to any one nation, culture, political party, mainstream religion or ethnic background.

In fact, they will happily sacrifice any country or any group of people if it will get them closer to their goal.

They are not defenders of the free market as the idiots on the extreme left like to claim. In fact, they abhor any business model that is not dominated by a government and a bureaucracy designed to give them an unfair advantage through legislation. Anyone who thinks free markets are the cause of our economic ailments in the past decade has lost sight of the fact that we have not had anything even remotely resembling free markets for more than a century. The corporations leftists and common socialists constantly wail about could not exist without government charter and the legal loopholes surrounding limited liability. So please, socialist warriors, shut up about free markets. You have no idea what you are talking about.

The globalists are also not loyal acolytes of any particular theological tradition (at least not any that are clearly identified). Meaning, they are NOT organized around Judaism or even loyalty to Israel as is the common claim of the clowns that make up what some are now calling the "Alt-Right." Globalists do not care about Jewish people or Jewish beliefs even though some of them are genetically Jewish.

While a minority of globalists are associated with the political extremist faction known as "Zionism," Zionists are just another exploitable group to them, and their greater objective has nothing to do with the elevation of Israel. They will gladly fund Islamic extremist groups, for example, that desire and will willingly carry out the obliteration of Israel or the murder of Jewish people. They also exploit elements of the Israeli government to trigger chaos on the other side of the chess board.

Those who argue that all our ills are engineered by "the jeeeewwws!" or "the tribe" are poorly informed and have chosen an overly simplistic broad-brush explanation for a much more complex enemy they have no ability to fathom. They tend to cite "evidence" that is highly unverified and poorly sourced.  They think the Rothschilds are the root of all globalism when the Rothschilds are just one element of a greater cabal.  Ask them which globalist institutions actually argue for Jewish or Zionist supremacy and they won"t be able to produce evidence of any, unlike the numerous globalist institutions and champions that OPENLY argue for GLOBALISM even at the expense of Jews and the nation of Israel (i.e. Barack Obama"s consistent support of Islamic extremist groups and the Arab Spring).  In fact, ask them for evidence that Jews or Zionists are the core of the globalist agenda and they will copy and paste the same list of perhaps two dozen Council on Foreign Relations members that are Jewish while ignoring the thousands of other members that are not.

They also tend to argue that the fascist movements of the past century were actually "doing battle with the globalist agenda" — i.e. they were the "good guys."  Sorry to break it to the "Alt-Right" crowd, but almost everything they believe is wrong.

I have noticed a disturbing trend within liberty movement and conservative circles; a kind of invasion, if you will. A minority of disinformation agents and useful idiots are operating within liberty outlets to push an ideological revolution oddly similar in tactics to those used by Soros funded groups overtaking the political left. It is my belief that while some globalist created movements are meant to provoke the left to zealotry and cultural Marxism, other globalist created movements are meant to provoke the right to zealotry and a misplaced adoration for fascism.  Divide and conquer is the game here.

As I noted in my last article "Globalists Will Throw Antifa To The Wolves To Further Their Agenda", the left is essentially a lost cause. Any semblance of the so called "classical liberal" that is so commonly linked back to certain American revolutionaries and founding fathers was snuffed out long ago. They don"t exist anymore. Conservatives (not necessarily Republicans) have taken up the mantle of individual liberty and small government. The labels may have changed, but the principles remain the same. Conservatives are the natural enemy of globalists. The ideals of conservative thought and the globalist agenda are mutually exclusive — both cannot exist within the same space at the same time. One of them has to go for the other to function.

So, what are elitists with aspirations of becoming god-kings to do? Well, they could try to attack conservatives directly, but this does not mean our ideals will disappear. The ideals might even spread and flourish in reaction to a crackdown, which is the opposite effect that social engineers desire. Instead, 4th generation warfare is in order. That is to say, conservatives must be bamboozled into embracing actions contrary to their principles.

They must be conned into applauding big government instead of fighting against it. They must be tricked into rationalizing violations of the Constitution instead of exposing said violations as a spreading cancer. They must be cajoled into cheering for even more expensive and ill conceived war efforts that do not serve the interests of Americans. They must be fooled into praising the relationship between corporations and government instead of working to dismantle the government framework that coddles corporations and protects them from free markets.

While globalists cannot destroy conservatism from without, they might be able to use 4th Gen tactics to destroy conservatism from within. Conservatives have to be convinced that conservative values are weaknesses that must be abandoned for the "greater good." At this point, conservatives would no longer be conservative; they become something else entirely.

While the liberty movement in particular has been hyper-focused on the dangers of cultural Marxism and communism, the real danger is the psyop being played within the political right. Both communism and fascism serve globalist interests. It is to their advantage to promote both and to even pit one against the other. The key is to use the left to drive conservatives to desperate measures and then link conservatives to ideals that are counter to their natures until the original ideals are forgotten.

There are some core weakness to the propaganda campaign that gut the narrative completely. The fact that the establishment is grasping at such methods to me seems desperate, but then again, I make a rule never to underestimate people"s laziness or their ignorance. So, lets look at the primary argument popping up in every liberty comment thread and chat board: "Globalists are purely communists, and fascism is a misunderstood and necessary counterpunch."

This assertion falls apart fantastically when historical fact is applied and one realizes that BOTH communism and fascism were movements funded and supported by the very same financial elites. Yes, that"s right, fascism cannot be opposed to globalism, because globalists created fascism to serve their purposes.

To find the most comprehensive evidence compiled on the relationship between the financial elites and the rise of fascism and communism, one of the best sources is the work of Professor Antony Sutton. Here Sutton answers questions on some of these ties, including the elitist funding and technological development of the Nazis as well as the Soviet Union:

Let"s not forget about the Bush family legacy of financial support for the Third Reich - yet some people are attempting to feed a growing argument that the globalists were opposed to Hitler or vice versa...?

Globalist conglomerates like the Rockefeller"s Standard Oil were even exposed during the Nuremberg trials as having funded and aided Nazi technological advancements throughout the war using close relationships to IG Farben. This is made clear in the "Von Knieriem Documents" within the Nuremberg and WWII congressional investigative record, which can be read in full in Elimination Of German Resources For War, starting on page 1302.

This means that the disinfo-argument that "perhaps the elites funded fascism in the beginning but turned against it later" is a no-go. Of course, these revelations were ultimately buried and no one of import was ever prosecuted.

So, to be absolutely clear - Fascist movements are NOT a counterweight to communism, they are controlled opposition to communism.  If you want to join a real opposing movement to cultural marxists and communists, then the only answer is a movement that supports individual liberty and the reduction of government power.  Fascism does not support either.

Beyond general cash flow and technological backing for fascist governments, the globalist ideology is almost identical to fascist models. Mainstream assumptions aside, fascists are not true nationalists, rather, they are ideologues seeking to spread globally — their propaganda base just happens to begin with national pride. As mentioned earlier, globalism is best understood through the lens of Fabian Socialism, and Fabian Socialism is essentially fascism; though fascism tends to add a frontman dictator as a figurehead rather than an open cabal of oligarchs.

Fabian Socialists (globalists) are so fond of fascism that they have in the past presented unabashed defense of the Third Reich. George Bernard Shaw, a celebrity member of the Fabians, is notorious for praising the methods of both the Nazis and Stalin, including the mass murder of undesirables.

The difference between the communist model and the Nazi model? Nazis believed in population control based on genetic origin, while communists believed in population control based on labor potential. Both standards appeal to globalists.

Bottom line - fascists are slaves for globalists, just as communists are slaves for globalists. Both support big government power, both undermine personal freedoms. There is little more than cosmetic differences between them when one knows the true history behind each movement.

The disinformation brigade drumming up the pro-fascist/pro-Hitler dialogue on conservative forums may be part of a funded agenda to demonize liberty movements by false association. Or, it may be an attempt to lure conservatives into thinking the only way to counteract the insanity of the extreme left is to become more like their classic enemy, the fascist. And, perhaps it is simply a gaggle of morons with zero historical reference parroting what they have been hearing in their online echo chambers for years, but now they see an opportunity generated by the fear surrounding the mania of cultural Marxists.

They will seethe in the comments of this article, that is certain. I will be accused of being a "Zionist agent," with zero proof of course. They will froth at the mouth about how "something must be done" about the cultural marxists as if our only other choice is to adopt even more egregious methods.  They will gather a dozen of their friends from their favorite online haunts and "mob up" to flood forums with angry discord to make it appear that there are more of them out there than really exist (much like social justice warriors do), but it is unlikely they will produce any hard evidence countering anything I have presented here. Their opinions might be loud, but they are also irrelevant.

My concern is that there is something larger afoot.

That maybe, just maybe, the conservative right is being tenderized in preparation for radicalization, just as much as the left has been radicalized. For the more extreme the social divide, the more likely chaos and crisis will erupt, and the globalists never let a good crisis go to waste. Zealots, regardless of their claimed moral authority, are almost always wrong in history. Conservatives cannot afford to be wrong in this era. We cannot afford zealotry.  We cannot afford biases and mistakes; the future of individual liberty depends on our ability to remain objective, vigilant and steadfast. Without self examination, we will lose everything.

The Sandcastle: Decline From Democracy To Tyranny Is Inevitable

Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

The decline from democracy to tyranny is both a natural and inevitable one.

That’s not a pleasant thought to have to consider, but it’s a fact, nonetheless. In every case, a democracy will deteriorate as the result of the electorate accepting the loss of freedom in trade for largesse from their government. This process may be fascism, socialism, communism, or a basket of “isms,” but tyranny is the inevitable endgame of democracy. Like the destruction of a sandcastle by the incoming tide, it requires time to transpire, but in time, the democracy, like the sandcastle, will be washed away in its entirety.

Why should this be so? Well, as I commented some years ago,

The concept of government is that the people grant to a small group of individuals the ability to establish and maintain controls over them. The inherent flaw in such a concept is that any government will invariably and continually expand upon its controls, resulting in the ever-diminishing freedom of those who granted them the power.

Unfortunately, there will always be those who wish to rule, and there will always be a majority of voters who are complacent enough and naïve enough to allow their freedoms to be slowly removed. This adverb “slowly” is the key by which the removal of freedoms is achieved.

The old adage of “boiling a frog” is that the frog will jump out of the pot if it’s filled with hot water, but if the water is lukewarm and the temperature is slowly raised, he’ll grow accustomed to the temperature change and will inadvertently allow himself to be boiled.

Let’s have a look at Thomas Jefferson’s assessment of this technique:

Even under the best forms of Government, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

Mister Jefferson was a true visionary. He knew, even as he was penning the Declaration of Independence and portions of the Constitution, that his proclamations, even if they were accepted by his fellow founding fathers, would not last. He recommended repeated revolutions to counter the inevitable tendency by political leaders to continually vie for the removal of the freedoms from their constituents.

Around the same time that Mister Jefferson made the above comment, Alexander Tytler, a Scottish economist and historian, commented on the new American experiment in democracy. He’s credited as saying,

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

So, was each of the above gentlemen throwing a dart at a board, or did they each have some kind of crystal ball? Well, actually, neither. Each was a keen student of history. Each knew that the pattern, by the end of the 18th century, had already repeated itself time and time again. In fact, as early as the fourth century BC, Plato had quoted Socrates as having stated to Adeimantus, 

Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery comes out of the most extreme form of liberty.

Today, much of what was called the “free world” only half a century ago has deteriorated into a combination of residual capitalism, which has been largely and increasingly buried by socialism and fascism. (It should be mentioned that the oft-misinterpreted definition of “fascism” is the joint rule by corporate and state—a condition that’s now manifestly in place in much of the former “free” world.)

Today, many people perceive fascism as a tyrannical condition that’s suddenly imposed by a dictator, but this is rarely the case. Fascism is in fact a logical step. Just as voters succumb over time to the promises of socialism, so a parallel decline occurs as fascism slowly replaces capitalism. Fascism may appear to be capitalism, but it’s the antithesis of a free market. As Vladimir Lenin rightly stated,

Fascism is capitalism in decline.

Comrade Lenin understood the value of fascism for political leaders. Whilst he retained a close relationship with New York and London bankers, and a healthy capitalist market was tapped into for Soviet-era imports, he was aware that his power base depended largely on denying capitalism to his minions.

So, from the above quotations, we may see that there’s been a fairly erudite group of folks out there who have commented on this topic over the last 2,500 years. They agree that democracies, like sandcastles, never last. They generally begin promisingly, but, given enough time, any government will erode democracy as quickly as the political leaders can get away with it, and the progression always ends in tyranny.

We’re presently at a major historical juncture—a time in which much of the former free world is in the final stages of decay and approaching the tyranny stage.

At this point, the process tends to speed up. We can observe this as we see an increase in the laws being passed to control the population—increased taxation, increased regulation, and increased promises of largesse from the government that they don’t have the funding to deliver.

When any government reaches this stage, it knows only too well that it will not deliver and that, when the lie is exposed, the populace will be hopping mad. Therefore, just before the endgame, any government can be expected to ramp up its police state. The demonstrations by governments that they’re doing so are now seen regularly—raids by SWAT teams in situations where just a small number of authorities could handle the situation just as well. Displays of armed forces in the street, including armoured vehicles, in instances of disruption.

In London, Ferguson, Paris, Boston, etc., the authoritarian displays have become ever-more frequent. All that’s now necessary is a series of events (whether staged or real) to suggest domestic terrorism in several locations at roughly the same time. A state of national emergency may then be declared “for the safety of the people.”

It’s this justification that will assure the success of tyranny. Historically, the majority of people in any county, in any era, choose the illusion of safety over freedom. As John Adams was fond of saying,  

Those who would trade freedom for safety will have neither.

From this point on, it would be wise for anyone who lives in the EU, US, UK, etc. to watch events closely. If a rash of “domestic terrorism” appears suddenly, it could well be the harbinger that the government has reached the tipping point—when tyranny under the guise of “protecting the safety of the people” is inaugurated.

The most essential takeaway here is that, although some may object (even violently), the majority of the people will trade their freedom for the promise of safety.

*  *  *

We’re much closer to the tipping point of tyranny than most people would ever admit. That’s why we just released a PDF guide to show you how to safeguard your freedom. Click here to download it now.

Capitalism - A New Idea

Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

Capitalism, whether praised or derided, is an economic system and ideology based on private ownership of the means of production and operation for profit.

Classical economics recognises capitalism as the most effective means by which an economy can thrive. Certainly, in 1776, Adam Smith made one of the best cases for capitalism in his book, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (known more commonly as The Wealth of Nations). But the term “capitalism” actually was first used to deride the ideology, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in The Communist Manifesto, in 1848.

Of course, whether Mister Marx was correct in his criticisms or not, he lived in an age when capitalism and a free market were essentially one and the same. Today, this is not the case. The capitalist system has been under attack for roughly 100 years, particularly in North America and the EU.

A tenet of capitalism is that, if it’s left alone, it will sort itself out and will serve virtually everyone well. Conversely, every effort to make the free market less free diminishes the very existence of capitalism, making it less able to function.

Today, we’re continually reminded that we live under a capitalist system and that it hasn’t worked. The middle class is disappearing, and the cost of goods has become too high to be affordable. There are far more losers than winners, and the greed of big business is destroying the economy.

This is what we repeatedly hear from left-leaning people and, in fact, they are correct. They then go on to label these troubles as byproducts of capitalism and use this assumption to argue that capitalism should give way to socialism.

In this, however, they are decidedly wrong. These are the byproducts of an increasing level of collectivism and fascism in the economy. In actual fact, few, if any, of these people have ever lived in a capitalist (free-market) society, as it has been legislated out of existence in the former “free” world over the last century.

So, let’s have a look at those primary sore spots that are raised by suggesting that collectivism will correct the “evils” of capitalism.

Prices Are Driven From the Top Down

This is unquestionably the case in the aforementioned countries, however, it is not so under capitalism. Under capitalism, each producer tries to get as much as he can for his product, but, as others are also creating the same product, those with the lowest price are the ones who will succeed. Therefore, the consumers effectively set the prices, based upon what they’re willing to pay.

But in any country where cronyism exists between big business and government, regulations can squeeze out the competition, allowing a monopoly for a given product. The definition of this marriage between business and government is “fascism.” The government makes it increasingly difficult, through regulation, for the small producer to compete with the larger producer (who gives kickbacks to the government).

Capitalism Only Benefits Those at the Top

Capitalism benefits those who produce the most, but it also benefits all others, as they have a free choice to purchase whatever products they wish, at a price they’re prepared to pay. If the producer demands too high a price, consumers instead buy his competitor’s product, putting him out of business. The consumer is therefore in charge of the price of goods. A producer only rises to the top if he produces the most affordable product (as did Henry Ford, 100 years ago, with his Model T. Through the free market, he lowered his price repeatedly and, in so doing, put America on wheels).

Capitalism Impoverishes the Masses

The free market offers more goods to more people at lower prices, which enriches the lives of all consumers, no matter how rich or poor. In so doing, it raises up the masses over time, providing them with more and better goods, education, health care, etc., enabling them to rise out of poverty. By contrast, overregulation and entitlements enslave those same people to poverty.

Capitalism Can Only Work if It’s Heavily Regulated

The whole idea of the free market is that it’s free from interference by others—most importantly, governments. If left alone, the free market will produce the goods the public are most willing to pay for, which results in an ever-self-levelling of products and prices. As soon as regulation enters the picture, the free market is compromised. What exists today is not a free market, as Adam Smith would have recognised it, but a bloated, dysfunctional socialist/fascist/capitalist mongrel of a system. Of course it doesn’t work.

Fascism is capitalism in decay.

—Vladimir Lenin

Quite so. Regulation is a cancer that slowly eats capitalism until it morphs into fascism.

Do not their leaders deprive the rich of their estates and distribute them among the people; at the same time taking care to preserve the larger part for themselves?

—Socrates to Adeimantus

What was true ca. 400 BC in Athens is true today. Fascism (or corporatist cronyism) results in 99% of the population coming under the diktat of the 1%, which is made up of government leaders and corporate leaders, working in concert, to the exclusion of all others. This is, in fact, the opposite of a free market.

The creation of new wealth is the only functional weapon against poverty.

—Doug Casey

New wealth comes from the bottom up - it’s as simple as someone building a better mousetrap, or building the old one more cheaply. In such a market, both the producer and the consumer benefit.

In a fascist system, the wealth gravitates to the top, eventually choking out the middle class and expanding the poorer class, and that’s just what we’re witnessing today. The solution is not to go further in this direction, but rather to try something new… or at least new to anyone living under the fascist system. Although it still retains some capitalist overtones, it is unquestionably not capitalism.

A last word—capitalism does exist today, but it lives in select countries that have not yet given in to overregulation. In those countries, the average person thrives and has opportunities far beyond what’s allowed in the former “free” world. Should the reader conclude that his present country is unlikely to go in the direction of capitalism, he may choose to vote with his feet in order to prosper the way his ancestors did 100 years ago.

*  *  *

Today, Washington’s dangerous fascist policies have pushed the US economy to the tipping point. Years of overregulation, corporate bail outs, manic money printing, and artificially low interest rates, have bloated and warped the economy. Now it’s about to unravel… That’s why New York Times best-selling author Doug Casey and his team just released an urgent video. Click here to access it now.

What Would A U.S. Civil War Look Like?

Authored by GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs" Gregory Copley via OilPrice.com,

Yes, there is a civil war looming in the United States.

But it will not look like the orderly pattern of descent which characterized the conflict of 1861-65. It will appear more like the Yugoslavia break-up, or the Russian and Chinese civil wars of the 20th Century.

It will appear as an evolving chaos.

And the next US civil war, though it yet may be arrested to a degree by the formal hand of centralized gov-ernment, will destabilize many other nation-states, including the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

It may, in other words, be short-lived simply because the uprising will probably not be based upon the decisions of constituent states (which, in the US Civil War, created a break-away confederacy), acting within their own perception of a legal process. It is more probable that the 21st Century event would contage as a gradual breakdown of law and order.

The outcome, to a degree dependent on how rapidly order is restored, would likely be the end, or constraint, of the present view of democracy in the US. It would see a massive dislocation of the economy and currency. It would, then, become a global-level issue.

Humans mock what they see as an impulse toward species suicide among the beautiful lemming clan of Lemmus lemmus. In fact, these tiny creatures have a societal survival pattern which seems more consistent than that of their human detractors. The pattern of human history shows that civilizations usually end through internal illness rather than at the hand of external powers.

It is significant that the gathering crisis in the United States was not precipitated by the November 7, 2016, election of Pres. Donald Trump, and neither was the growing polarization of the United Kingdom’s society caused by the Brexit vote of 2016.

In both instances, the election of Mr Trump and the decision by UK voters for Britain to exit the European Union were late reactions — perhaps too late — by the regional populations of both countries to what they perceived as the destruction of their nation-states by “urban super-oligarchies”.

The last-ditch reactions by those who voted in the US for Donald Trump and those who voted in the UK for Brexit were against an urban-based globalism which has been building for some seven decades, with the deliberate or accidental intent of destroying nations and nationalism. It is now crystallizing into this: urban globalism sees nations and nationalism as the enemy, and vice-versa.

The battle lines have been drawn.

The urban globalists — the conscious and unconscious — have thrown their resources behind efforts to avert a return to nationalism, particularly in the US and UK, but also in Europe, Canada, Australia, and the like.

Urban globalists control most of the means of communications [is this new “means of production”; the 21st Century marxian dialectic?] and therefore control “information” and the perception of events.

“Nationalists”, then, are operating instinctively, and in darkness.

There is little doubt that the US, despite the evidence that economic recovery is at hand, could spiral into a self-destructive descent of dysfunction, dystopia, and anomie. The path toward a “second civil war” has significant parallels with the causes of the first US Civil War (1861-65). Both events — the 19th Century event and a possible 21st Century one — saw the polarization of a fundamentally urban, abstract society against a fundamentally regional, traditional society.

In some respects, it is a conflict between people with long memories (even if those memories are flawed and selective) and people to whom memories and history are irrelevant. Equally, it is a conflict between identity and materialism, with the abstract social groups (the urban populations) the most preoccupied with short-term material gain.

I have covered the US for 50 years, and my earliest view of it was, a half century ago, that its populations would inevitably polarize into protective islands of self-interest, surrounded by seas of unthinking locusts. What is ironic is that the present islands of wealth and power — the cities — have come to represent short-term materialism, as cities have throughout history.

But what is interesting is that, despite the global attention on the political/geographic polarizations occurring in the US and other parts of the Western world, there has been a reversion in other parts of the world to a sense of Westphalian or pre-Westphalian nationalism. The fact that “the West” may have ring-fenced Iran, Russia, and so on, with sanctions and other forms of isolation may well be what ensures their endur-ing status.

They have avoided the contagion of globalism.

Russia, indeed, recovered from the Soviet form of globalism in 1991.

An urban globalist “victory” over Trump and Brexit would trigger that meltdown toward a form of civil societal collapse - civil war in some form or other - as the regions disavow the diktats of the cities. That would, in turn, bring about the global economic uncertainty which could impact the PRC and then the en-tire world.

But such a conflict - physical or political - could, equally, lead to a victory for nationalism over globalism, and to the protection of currencies and values. We have seen this cycle repeated for millennia.

It is the eternal battle.

There Is No "Political Center" In Modern America

Authored by Gaius Publius via Down With Tyranny blog,

An entirely false but constantly sold view of the American electorate

In an April 2016 piece, in the middle of the Democratic primary, I wrote this about modern independent voters and the upcoming general election:

If you look at the swell of new voters in both parties, the increase is for the "change" candidate, not the one promising to retain and refresh the status-quo. The presidential candidate who wins this election will be the one who best appeals to the new "radical independent"...

Today"s independents aren"t "moderates" who want conventional, faux-centrist policies and less "gridlock." Political partisans want less gridlock around issues of disagreement, because it advances individual party agendas and careers in addition to those issues. But in the main and with a few important exceptions — women"s health and rights, racial justice, gun violence — both parties have agreed and cooperated on broad policy goals.

Leaders of both parties, for example, broadly believe in the current military style of policing. Both believe in a justice system that coerces defendants into plea bargains, guilty or innocent. Both believe in the "importance of Wall Street to the economy" and that big financial institutions should be defended, not broken up. Both parties have offered and enacted a long and strong diet of lower taxes, spending austerity, war and more war. We"ve had these policies, delivered in a fully bipartisan way, for decades....

Today"s independents, in contrast, are done with that.

This led to a prediction that "to win, Clinton must win Sanders independents. If she fails, she is likely to lose. The problem for Clinton is, how to do that."

And indeed, Clinton did lose.

There"s more to say, obviously, about why Clinton lost. But it"s certainly true that, if 2016 were not a "change year" election, Clinton would have won by a mile. For example, if Clinton were running for a second term in 2012 instead of Obama, she"d have had no problem beating the Republican. It"s only in a "change year" election — 2008, for example — that a status quo candidate has trouble against a "change" candidate; and indeed, Clinton was defeated by that year"s "change" candidate, Barack Obama.

In 2016, instead of sailing to victory Clinton was nosed out in a squeaker. Even if that win was stolen it could only have been stolen if it were close. To use a football analogy, the refs can"t throw the game to your opponent if you"re winning by four touchdowns. In a hostile stadium with hostile refs, best not be barely ahead with two minutes to go.

In the Center of Nowhere

Confirmation of part of this analysis — that Clinton"s attempt to win by wooing "centrist" voters sloshing undecidely between the parties was an error — comes from a 2016 book, Democracy for Realists, by political scientists Larry Bartels and Christopher Achen. As Eric Levitz writes in a recent New York Magazine article,

"The notion that there is an easily identifiable, median political ideology in America derives from the "spatial model" [i.e., linear] of the electorate, which first gained prominence in the middle of the 20th century."

This "spacial model" of the electorate should be familiar to every American, since it"s sold by every mainstream media outlet. This model posits a single line of policy choices — arrayed in just two dimensions from "left" to "right" — with voters arrayed somewhere along it as well. Thus there are "left" policy choices, "right" policy choices, and voters in a kind of bell-shaped curve arrayed along it as well. "Left" voters prefer "left" policies, "right" voters prefer "right" policies, with the vast majority of voters somewhere in the middle.

Bartels and Achen, as quoted by Levitz, describe the linear analogy this way (my emphasis):

[T]he political “space” consists of a single ideological dimension on which feasible policies are arrayed from left to right. Each voter is represented by an ideal point along this dimension reflecting the policy she prefers to all others. Each party is represented by a platform reflecting the policy it will enact if elected. Voters are assumed to maximize their ideological satisfaction with the election outcome by voting for the parties closest to them on the ideological dimension, Parties are assumed to maximize their expected payoff from office-holding by choosing the platforms most likely to get them elected.

[T]his framework is sufficient to derive a striking and substantively important prediction: both parties will adopt identical platforms corresponding to the median of the distribution of voters’ ideal points.

In other words, if it is assumed that most voters are on the "left," the party to the "right" will drift that way. If it is assumed most voters are on the "right," the "left" party will similarly move. And if voters are in the "center," both parties will tend to move there with them.

What Bartels and Achen discovered was something that should have been obvious from the start — that this is just not the case. What they discovered is that there is no political "center" in modern America.

As Levitz writes:

A 2014 study from Berkeley political scientists David Broockman and Douglas Ahler surveyed voters on 13 policy issues — offering them seven different positions to choose from on each, ranging from extremely liberal to extremely conservative. On only two of those issues — gay rights and the environment — was the centrist position the most common one. On marijuana, the most popular policy was full legalization; on immigration, the most widely favored proposal was “the immediate roundup and deportation of all undocumented immigrants and an outright moratorium on all immigration until the border is proven secure”; and on taxes, the most popular option was to increase the rate on income above $250,000 by more than 5 percent. Meanwhile, establishing a maximum annual income of $1 million (by taxing all income above that at 100 percent) was the third most common choice, boasting four times more support than the national Republican Party’s platform on taxation.

When pundits implore Democrats not to abandon the center, they do not typically mean that the party should embrace legal weed, much higher taxes on the rich, and mass deportation. More often, such pundits call on Team Blue to embrace a combination of moderate fiscal conservatism, a cosmopolitan attitude toward globalization, and moderate social liberalism — in short, to become the party of Michael Bloomberg (minus, perhaps, the enthusiasm for nanny-state public-health regulations). The former New York mayor is routinely referred to as a centrist in the mainstream press, despite the fact that his policy commitments — support for Social Security cuts, Wall Street deregulation, mass immigration, and marriage equality — when taken together, put him at the fringes of American public opinion[.]

Note that this analysis is multi-dimensional. Even a two-dimensional representation couldn"t do it justice.

Why Do Democrats Pursue Non-Existent "Centrist" Voters?

If there are no voters in the political "center," a strategy based on winning them is likely to fail. So why pursue them? Perhaps because voters aren"t what the Democratic Party - or either American political party these days - is pursuing. Perhaps it"s because what both parties are actually pursuing - is money.

Levitz seems to agree. In his article he quotes David Broockman, the study"s co-author, as saying this in an interview:

When we say moderate what we really mean is what corporations want …

Within both parties there is this tension between what the politicians who get more corporate money and tend to be part of the establishment want — that’s what we tend to call moderate — versus what the Tea Party and more liberal members want.

From this we can easily draw three conclusions:

• The only "center" in modern American politics consists of policies the people who finance elections want to see enacted.


• The mainstream media and both political parties regularly labels these policies "centrist."


• The way to be called "moderate" by the mainstream press is to advocate for "centrist" policies.

And yet, one can easily predict a series of "change year" elections stretching far into the future in which "centrist" candidates will fail again and again, since America"s economic problems show no signs of being fixed anytime soon.

This is not because the means of fixing those problems don"t exist, though, and aren"t readily at hand. Levitz closes by saying:

On most of these [economic] issues, effective policy responses aren’t unknown — they’re just considered politically untenable. We know how to reduce inequality and eradicate poverty: you redistribute pre-tax income from the rich to the poor. When America expanded the welfare state, its poverty rate went down; when it scaled back the safety net, the opposite occurred. Nordic social democracies devote more resources to propping up the living standards of their most vulnerable citizens than most other countries, and their poverty rates are among the lowest in the world, as a result.

We know how to reduce student debt: You have the government directly subsidize the cost of higher education. And we know to reduce medical costs while achieving universal coverage — you let the state cap reimbursement rates, and subsidize the medical costs of the sick and the poor until everyone can afford basic medical care, (as they do in virtually every other developed nation on Earth). And while we can’t be certain about exactly what it will take to avert ecological catastrophe, we know that the more rapidly we transition our energy infrastructure toward renewable fuels, the better our odds will be.

It just means that voters" desire to see them fixed will go unfulfilled by any party running a "status quo" candidate.

Radical Independents Are Here to Stay

The day of the "radical independent" is here. Yet by not selling themselves as proponents of economic reform in addition to reform on the numerous "rights" or "identity" issues, the Democratic Party is abandoning the demographic it needs to start winning elections again.

Has anything changed recently with the introduction of the Democrat"s "Better Deal" campaign? Richard Eskow convincingly argues no. It may be time to admit that the reason we have Republicans in power — in a majority of states as well as the federal government — owes less to Vladimir Putin than it does to mainstream Democrats themselves.

Americans have not much ability to "fix" Vladimir Putin. Do American have the ability to "fix" the Democratic Party, to cure it of its need to pursue money instead of voters? Perhaps, but not if the Party doesn"t want to be fixed.

Ending the Golden Age of Nothingness

Sir Isaac Newton once famously said, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Well, Ike knew a thing or two; for it is indubitable that he would never have had the necessary foundation of knowledge to whip up the law of universal gravitation without the works of Euclid or Copernicus before him. If not for Bach - and his father"s strict hand - perhaps Beethoven would have been a bricklayer. Without Langton and Magna Carta, the Founding Fathers never write the Constitution.

Those giants of Western Civilization were once of a sort that served mankind with wisdom, guiding their antecedents to look towards a future of beauty, freedom, and existential meaning. One Golden Age developed after another as great men were inspired to outdo the other or even to reach for the heavens in art, architecture, music, and literature.

Lately, though, it seems we"ve decided to perch instead on postmodern beings who, while great in technological stature, are cultural ogres. 

When we peer through the looking glass today, all we see, both immediately surrounding and far afield, is a desolation of ugliness and mediocrity:

• Soulless architecture that betokens our standing as utilitarian drones.


• Popular music sung (or mumbled, rather) in the gutter-mouthed patois of degenerate gang members.


• Pointless films - often written by committee and informed by focus groups - that wallow for two banal hours in quick-cut action scenes without dramatic tension; one-dimensional characters as performed by two-dimensional celebrities in third-rate productions.


• An educational system that replaces the canon of Dante, Donne, and Mallory with The Red Wheelbarrow.

Modern art affirms nothing except for mindless consumerism and appealing to our basest instincts. For all our advanced tools and broad access to them, mankind should be practically minting new artistic genius. Yet nothing today can top the achievements of those of ages gone by.

So why then does Nature no longer, to paraphrase Forster, "throw out a god" to stand out as divine amongst the "thin-hammed mediocrities", than when there were billions fewer in the world?

Because when it comes to art, profit motive suborns beauty and invites the average.

This wasteland came about when the best and most talented minds - those who could have been the next Shakespeare or Michelangelo - departed the land of the arts in favor of a life serving as cogs in a corrupted, increasingly statist machine that separates individuality and spits out utility.

When potentially great creators go where the money is, the fields of cultural endeavor are left to be tended by fools.

Soon after the best and brightest left for semi-lucrative STEM careers, the lands became fallow and our current Cultural Dark Age is the result; this abandonment has left the arts securely in the hands of green-haired Gender Studies majors and Nietzsche"s Last Man in skinny jeans.

Each passing generation then subsists off this degraded fare which nourishes neither the intellect nor the soul. Eventually, there will be no one left who can remember tasting anything better and thus the negative feedback loop is in full motion.

It will only worsen until conservatives realize that those who pump the imagery of art into the minds of the young wield infinitely more power than any engineer or writer of computer code could ever dream. That is why the left won the propaganda wars of the past few generations so completely. The cycle only breaks when the political right starts grooming their children to Make Culture Great Again.

One is constantly reading well-meaning advice in the columns and comments sections of alternative media stressing that parents should continue to nudge their children towards the hard sciences, because that"s the sector where they can procure the best livelihoods.

This is sound on the surface, especially for young adults whose gifts are geared for such work. But if you do push them towards those disciplines, make sure they are on the path to self-employment or starting their own companies. Because even in the STEM fields, conservatives hold little power.

Those kids will eventually be forced to toil for the leftists of Silicon Valley who grew up immersed in, and proudly adhere to, subversive culture.  Or the budding scientist must supplicate to those in Washington who dispense the science grants. Kiss advancement goodbye if you hold the wrong opinions.

They"ll be employed by a corsortium of elitists whose ultimate goals are not only antithetical to tradition and morality, but will hasten its extinction.

These are the oligarchs whose philosophical ends are to bring about the Singularity, to silence dissent, or level humanity under one-world governance where cultural greatness, or even humble simplicity, will be made impossible. Better that your kid become a blue-collar laborer or even a NEET with a free mind than to be servants to a wicked system.

But for those of you with children of a creative bent, consider home-schooling them (or enrolling them in carefully-selected private schools) so you can bypass an educational system that is actively airbrushing Western Man"s achievements out of the history books; a system that has perverted the traditional liberal arts beyond recognition and almost out of remembrance.

Once a sufficient number are again steeped in what is the best of mankind, they will be back on the shoulders of proper giants.

They will then write the great novels, paint the sublime portraits, and direct the spiritually fortifying films that can make the fields of culture fertile once more. In so doing, the mediocrities will be banished to their romper rooms where they can frame each other"s finger paintings in deserved obscurity.

By reclaiming education and the arts from the left, we can end our current Golden Age of Nothingness and maybe even repair capitalism in the process.

A new Renaissance - moored to beauty, truth, and ethics - will ennoble the Man of the West, restoring him back to a balanced, fuller humanity. It will be as a torch to burn off the fraud and moral hazard that has attached itself like a leech to our increasingly globalist going concerns. Where virtue exists in abundance, such shady and mercenary practices are reviled.

Economic patriotism and handshake deals will be back in vogue. Instead of capitalism making utility of man, man will make utility of capitalism as originally conceived.

Lord Feverstone of Dystopia USA

YouTube's New ADL Thought Police Punish Conservatives While Giving Far-Left Extremists A Pass

YouTube recently teamed up with the ultra-liberal Anti Defamation League (ADL) for their "Trusted Flaggers Program" to determine what people should and shouldn"t be allowed to watch, as we continue the march towards a nanny state supported by the technocratic left.

Originally organized to combat anti-Semitism, the ADL - with it"s Soros-linked National director who last worked in the Obama admin, now spouts hyperbolic propaganda against conservatives - while failing to apply the same nebulous standards to the left. For example, their recent push to lump all Trump supporters in with white supremacists, while insulating progressives from far-left organizations such as the anti-Semitic black nationalist hate group New Black Panthers, and the increasingly violent Antifa.

Of late, the ADL has published hit-pieces on several conservatives, including Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, Gavin McInnes, and Lucian Wintrich - offering little to no evidence of any actual wrongdoing aside from milquetoast "thought crimes" deemed beyond the pale by their mollycoddled staff. Shouldn"t liberal bigots Linda Sarsour, Luke Kuhn, the New Black Panthers, and the horse-stabbers of Antifa receive the same treatment for their actual advocacy and participation in violence towards those they disagree with?

And now, the liberal propagandist group has been given free reign to censor content on YouTube - such as politically incorrect University of Toronto professor Jordan B. Peterson, who found himself locked out of his YouTube account yesterday with no explanation (Peterson has since regained access).

To that end, Far Left Watch is out with a another report on more selective Orwellian bias from the ADL... 

reprinted with permission

----

On Tuesday, August 1st, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) issued a press release announcing that they have become a “select contributing member of YouTube’s Trusted Flagger program, created in 2012 to enable organizations to notify the platform of content that violates their community guidelines.” It goes on to say:

“The fight against terrorist use of online resources and cyberhate has become one of the most daunting challenges in modern history,” said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, ADL CEO. “Google has been a leader in this area from the beginning. The reality is extremists and terrorists continue to migrate to and exploit various other social media platforms. We hope that those platforms can learn from and emulate what YouTube is doing to proactively identify and remove extremist content.”

What criteria does the ADL use to define “extremism”? Their Center On Extremism (COE) provides this overview of their efforts but does not discuss the process that they use to distinguish “extremism” or “hate” from protected speech:

ADL’s Center on Extremism is the agency’s research and investigative arm, and a clearinghouse of valuable, up-to-the minute information about extremism of all types—from white supremacists to Islamic extremists.

This announcement is especially concerning considering their recent profile on the Alt-Lite and Alt-Right that lumped in several popular mainstream conservatives with actual neo-nazis and white supremacists.  As a response, many prominent conservative personalities took to Twitter and YouTube to criticize the ADL’s hypocrisy and point out how they broadly apply terms like “extremist”, “racist”, “bigot”, etc. to people who simply advocate for conservative political positions. So far, much of the focus has been on the people and organizations that the ADL has labeled as extremists. I want to instead highlight a few violent far left organization that they have not reported on.

Redneck Revolt

We recently reported on the far left militia group, Redneck Revolt. They are a self described “above ground militant formation” founded in June of 2016 that claims to have 30+ vetted branches nationwide. Since their inception, Redneck Revolt has been very busy recruiting at gun shows and community events, advocating for class war, contributing to the far left anarchist website It’s Going Down, and conducting armed anti-Trump demonstrations. But what’s most alarming are the resources they provide on their website. They promote several PDFs that endorse “armed struggle” and even offer a 36 page “Mini-Manual Of The Urban Guerrilla” (bottom right of resource page) which pictures left-wing militants using RPGs and outlines tactics for guerrilla warfare including sections on “sabotage”, “kidnapping”, “executions”, “armed propaganda”, and “terrorism”.

Has Redneck Revolt been labeled an extremist organization by the ADL? Has a lengthy profile on their members been circulated through legacy media? Should they worry their YouTube content will be removed as part of YouTube’s Trusted Flagger program? Well, according to the ADL, the answer is no.

Red Guards Austin

Red Guards Austin is an autonomous Marxist-Leninist-Maoist collective based in Austin, TX. Their website contains multiple reports on their confrontational and often armed demonstrations:

They also openly advocate for violent revolution against capitalism:

“we must seriously take up the task not only of self-defense on the personal and community level, but we must also struggle to unite all genuine antifascists behind the necessity of revolution.  Revolution means the long fight for communism and nothing less.”

I’ll ask the same questions. Has this organization been labeled an extremist hate group by the ADL? Has a lengthy profile on their members been circulated through legacy media? Should they worry their YouTube content will be removed as part of YouTube’s Trusted Flagger program? The answer again is a resounding no.

It is unclear what criteria the ADL uses to define “extremism” but considering that they include the numbers “11”, “12”, “13”, and “14”, as well as “Pepe the frog memes” in their Online Hate Symbols Database the bar appears to be incredibly low. So why are the violent far left organizations outlined in this article not mentioned by the ADL? Perhaps we should ask them. Please share this article via Twitter, Facebook, etc. and tag the ADL. Maybe they can offer some clarification.

If you have any tips on far left activities please submit them here.

Proximity Is Destiny In America's Pay-To-Play Democracy

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Privilege is unearned proximity to power in all its manifestations.

My friend G.F.B. recently coined an insightful maxim: Proximity Is Destiny. The power of this concept lies in its unification of physical proximity and abstract proximity.

We all understand physical proximity can be consequential. As the Titanic settled lower in the ice-cold Atlantic, those close enough to the lifeboats to secure a seat (mostly the first and second class passengers) lived and those who were not died.

College graduates seek internships at the most successful companies because they know the connections they make by working within the headquarters might lead to a job offer: physical proximity to movers and shakers (and those with the power to hire) is destiny.

But proximity to abstract manifestations of power is even more consequential in an economy/society in which wealth and power are predominantly abstract. For example, getting an internship in the Federal Reserve doesn"t mean you can obtain proximity to the Fed"s money/credit spigot as a result of your physical proximity to the building or staff: the really powerful proximity--being close to the Fed"s money/credit spigot--is entirely abstract.

Abstract proximity is structural, and often invisible. We can"t discern an individual"s proximity to money/ credit/ privileged-information spigots by their physical locale or appearance, though we may infer their income/wealth from various status signifiers.

But signifiers don"t tell us much about abstract proximity. Two individuals may own the same status signifiers, but one earned them the hard way, and the other had the advantage of proximity to insider information.

Privilege is much in the news recently, and I wrote a short book exploring the nature of privilege: Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege. The point of the book is this: privilege requires a centralized power hierarchy, as only a centralized power hierarchy can impose or nurture privilege, often through informal power structures.

Privilege is unearned proximity to power in all its manifestations: in our world of abstract structures of power, privilege often appears informal, masking its structural nature.

This informality enables a useful (to the privileged) confusion of privilege and merit. Two individuals may appear to enjoy similar status--both own homes in upscale neighborhoods, drive luxury vehicles, vacation in exotic locales, own second homes, belong to churches, temples, clubs, charitable organizations, etc. well-stocked with wealthy, influential people, etc., but the sources of their status are very different.

One was handed all this by family connections and inherited wealth, while the other worked his/her way up from humble beginnings. The individual who managed to work his/her way up the social-mobility ladder needed proximity to opportunity, and might have been helped by mentors and plain old luck, but privilege played a relatively modest role in the journey, as millions of other people with similar social status had roughly similar proximity to opportunity.

This inherent difficulty in differentiating privilege from merit allows the privileged Elites to claim their advantageous position is all due to merit: I worked harder than the other guy, etc., when in fact it was proximity to abstract privilege and power that lofted them to the top of the pyramid.

The Power Elites always have need for hard-working, smart, honest strivers to serve their enterprises and institutions, and so they recruit non-privileged strivers to their inner circles: prep schools, elite universities, prestigious organizations, the "right" church, temple, etc., internships in higher management, scholarships, foreign postings that serve to quickly advance careers, and so on.

This proximity is very close to what they offer their own offspring. But there"s a difference, of course; their offspring can be dull-witted and lazy, and they will still get access to all these advantages.

And there is another unstated difference: the merely merit-based striver will not be invited to private gatherings, nor encouraged to find a mate in the Elite class.

Proximity is destiny, and it"s proximity to abstract but very real structures of privilege, power and capital that count.

As I detailed yesterday, proximity to the flow of cheap credit creates fortunes, fortunes that aren"t earned via merit, innovation, genius or the creation of new goods and services; proximity to cheap credit is the core dynamic of rentier skims based on the acquisition of income-producing assets.

With sufficient income and capital, you also gain proximity to the machinery of governance--our pay-to-play "democracy" in which influence can be bought to benefit the few at the expense of the many.

Proximity is destiny. To understand this, we must first illuminate the abstract structures that enable proximity to the abstract but oh-so-real levers of privilege, power, wealth and influence.

UCLA Releases 'Resistance' Handbook; Defines Trumpism As "White Supremacy, Misogyny, Xenophobia..."

There is little doubt that America"s bastions of higher indoctrination (a.k.a. "Universities") have become nothing more than training grounds for future generations of social justice warriors.  The war for America"s college campuses has become so heated that liberal administrators, the same people who used to pride themselves on challenging their students to step outside their comfort zone and open themselves up to dissenting opinions, have taken to shutting down free speech when it doesn"t perfectly align with their "enlightened" world view.

That said, the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at the University of California Los Angeles, a publicly funded institution mind you, seems to be stepping things up a notch with their recently released "Resistance" handbook for America"s snowflakes.  Among other things, the handbook specifically defines "Trumpism" as a movement that "consolidates power through white supremacy, misogyny, nationalism, xenophobia, corporatism, and militarism."

"This resource guide outlines the first steps the UCLA Abolitionist Planning Group has taken to understand Trumpism as a moment in United States politics. Building on long-standing exclusions, Trumpism consolidates power through white supremacy, misogyny, nationalism, xenophobia, corporatism, and militarism. Committed to a philosophy of abolitionism, the Abolitionist Planning Group seeks to understand how urban planning, as discipline and professional practice, can analyze and address the systematic oppressions expanded and institutionalized by the new administration."

The organization calls on urban planners to abide by 4 simple rules:

1.  “Refuse to design, plan, or build systems that divide and oppress communities, including the proposed wall between the US and Mexico."

2.  "Declare [your] spaces ‘sanctuaries’ to undocumented immigrants, while planning sanctuaries for all victims of injustice.”

3.  “Commit to abolishing mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex, while expanding ‘abolition’ to all systems that promote racial and social exclusion." 

4.  "Reflect critically and historically on the political economy of planning to understand and resist our complicity in systems of racial capitalism and patriarchy.”

But, as the Daily Caller points out, the organization"s goals go well beyond setting up snowflake-inspired urban centers.  They"re also extremely triggered by bathroom bills and will not stop until Facebook appoints a poor, minority woman as it"s CEO...because anything less is simply racist and sexist.

UCLA insists that the Trump administration’s “harmful and divisive rhetoric” “is fueling an open war of bigotry and hate towards nonwhite populations, mainly targeting people from Latin American and Muslim-majority countries.” The school cites President Donald Trump’s wall, executive order on immigration, and mass deportations as examples of such a war.

The institute proceeds to bash “corporate feminism,” which it sees comprising Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg and TV/magazine writer Neil Scovell’s book “Lean In.” Instead, UCLA advocates “collective social action,” which it implies supports minority and poor women.

“[Bathroom bills] seek to limit the public mobility of transgender individuals and institutionalize efforts to exclude trans, gender non-conforming, or genderqueer individuals from public view,” says UCLA in another section of the pamphlet.

Elsewhere, the institute describes its conception of “the Sanctuary City,” a city which, moving beyond protection for illegal immigrants, also provides a guarantee of federal employment, a living wage, unionization of day and domestic laborers, and protection against climate change.

“We call on our fellow students, planners, and city dwellers to build this new Sanctuary City with us,” said  the institute. “We can begin by calling hateful ideologies by their proper names and working to delegitimize and eliminate them.”

American tax dollars hard at work...

The full Resistance guide can be read here: