Prosecutorial Indiscretion

While Trump is not above the law, he is not below it either.

by Christopher Roach for American Greatness

What more can be said? The FBI raid on Trump’s Florida home was shocking and his supporters are incensed. But almost everyone, including Trump’s opponents, is uneasy. This is an unprecedented and dangerous weaponization of federal law enforcement powers against a political opponent of the party in power.

Some have defended the FBI’s actions as being court-authorized and really no different from what law enforcement does every day against criminal suspects. But these defenses do not address the colossally bad judgment behind the raid and the prior pattern of double standards and targeted persecution. While Trump is not above the law, he is not below it either. Did no one stand up and say, “Maybe this is too much, and we should think it through?” 

We know from earlier raids on Trump’s lawyers and advisors, FBI abuses of FISA warrants and wiretaps, and the ongoing disinformation campaign regarding “Russiagate,” that good judgment and restraint are in pretty short supply among the ruling party and its apparatchiks. General Mark Milley’s delusional draft resignation letter—which he declined to submit—shows they really do believe all their own B.S. about the sacredness of the system, their preferred policies, and all the rest.

The raid also demonstrates something in Trump’s favor: He is the only real enemy of the system. No one has been rejected and harried by the permanent government as aggressively as he. As he once said, “They are not after me. They’re after you.” His supporters appear to be rallying around him in the wake of this week’s events.

While this is a story about politicized law enforcement, America’s descent into Third World “winner-take-all” politics, and a delusional and self-worshiping managerial class, it is also a story about prosecutorial discretion. While laws are rigid and bound by their language, other considerations, like justice, likelihood of conviction, relative culpability, extenuating circumstances, and treating “like cases alike” all go under the category of prosecutorial discretion. 

At the state and local levels, this is one reason prosecutors are elected; they are supposed to demonstrate good judgment and sensible priorities in exercising prosecutorial discretion. In the federal government, this is the reason the attorney general and the Justice Department are part of the executive branch and subordinate to the elected president. 

Prosecutorial discretion inherently contains the potential for abuse. The wrong kind of prosecutorial discretion would simply decide certain laws do not matter, arrogating to itself the rightful place of the legislature. This is why Ron DeSantis recently suspended my local prosecutor, the Soros-funded leftist Andrew Warren. 

At the federal level, the decision to raid Trump’s home is ultimately one for which Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Joe Biden are responsible. The FBI is part of the Department of Justice. Neither the FBI nor the Department of Justice is “independent,” in spite of certain of their power-hungry leadership’s pretensions to the contrary. The president is ultimately in charge. It is impossible to believe a decision of this magnitude was one made by ordinary field agents.

Regardless of the possible legal basis for this raid—and the basis appears completely pretextual and picayune arising from document retention regulations—the raid exhibits colossally bad judgment and malfeasance. This kind of “political question” is usually reserved for political branches. In other words, one would think the question of Trump’s criminality—or lack thereof—was already resolved by two failed impeachment proceedings. 

In matters like this, more is required than the mechanical application of law. Discretion must be characterized by sensitivity regarding intent and the gravity of the underlying alleged offense. This was the ostensible reason behind the FBI’s decision not to pursue charges against Hillary Clinton for her destruction of documents and maintenance of a private email server in 2016, for example. 

When a high-level elected politician is the subject of an investigation, other considerations also must play a part, including “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” and regard for the “consent of the governed.” Concern for voters and the role of their judgment was part of the Senate’s basis for failing to convict both Bill Clinton and Trump for their supposedly impeachable conduct.

The seeming turn towards authoritarian abuse is rooted in two interrelated developments. The first is the whole concept of #TheResistance—the idea that the permanent bureaucracy somehow can act as a check against the elected president and rightfully did so against Trump. The concept was real poison. For the entirety of Trump’s presidency, career employees in the Department of Justice, Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and elsewhere resisted his orders and made a virtue of it. They denied the legitimacy of his election and never gave him the deference and respect normally due to a president. 

The second development is the January 6 protest and riot. This outburst scared the regime to the core. This is why, nearly two years later, hearings are going on, and people are getting years in prison for little more than trespassing. That the people would not accept a fishy election result and would show up and be angry and protest (and riot, admittedly) is, for the ruling class, a canary in the coal mine. 

Their authority is rooted in “business as usual” and requires that no one ask too many questions about election results, intelligence agency activity, how congressmen get so rich, and the like. For them, the sacred commitment to Our Democracy™ means the opposite, as they are particularly aggrieved at the people’s attempts to change the government by electing people like Donald Trump.

As I noted in an earlier essay, “For the Left, democracy loses all of its luster when it goes against progressivism. When the people engage the system by participating with passion, this is doubly alarming. Participating in politics, like voting, is supposed to be merely decoration, as meaningful as that childish sticker they give out proclaiming, ‘I Voted.’”

The raid on Trump’s home is a very dangerous precedent. Nothing stops a later indictment of him, other than perhaps the massive public backlash to the recent move. I expect that will lead to even greater anger, alarm, and activism among Trump’s supporters.

If the Republicans retake Congress, they should explore impeaching Garland, Wray, and possibly Biden, and abolishing the FBI, and reconstituting it under a respected, strong national figure. At the very least, cashiering all of its senior officials is necessary, as the FBI leadership has shown itself to be completely corrupted by partisanship and completely devoid of respect for the American people. 

All of these suggestions, however, depend upon a controversial assumption: that the system still works, that it will allow free and fair elections, and that we just need to win an election in order to get this done. This may not be possible. The rigged 2020 election, coupled with the recent maneuver against Trump, suggests the deep state is getting more brazen and desperate in its desire to control American politics.  

The harassment of Trump is an assault on the Constitution and the right of the people to choose their president. It is completely without parallel and the product of a demented, anti-democratic managerial system that is addicted to power and completely out of touch with at least half the country. 

We must be prepared for anything in the years ahead, and we must use every ounce of power at our disposal to punish and defang the wrongdoers responsible for this descent into Third World behavior.  

On the Fringe- August 14

 

Important lesson: Don't get addicted to an actor's older roles because you happen to see a few things in them that you're never going to get from a show he or she is on, it'll drive you insane, and is not at all healthy. (just something I've fully realized today when a few of Linda's older movies that I giffed 2 months ago refused to leave me alone for the past 2 days, which oddly enough, was the day after those stupid press photos from CBS was posted for NCIS LA!). (It's amazing what a little loneliness and a smudge of desperation can do to you when you're really missing someone.).

Here's tonight's news:

A Token of the Managerial Age Bewails Trump’s Surge

David Brooks is very worried the FBI’s raid of 
Mar-a-Lago helps Trump.

by Roger Kimball for American Greatness

I was chatting with a politically mature friend today who, in the course of some delighted words about Attorney General Merrick Garland, reminded me that in his famous “evil empire” speech of 1983, Ronald Reagan quoted a few choice lines from the preface of C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters. “The greatest evil,” Lewis wrote, is not now done in any Dickensian “dens of iniquity” or even in “concentration camps and labor camps.” Such brutish moral cesspools, Lewis says, are rather “the final result” of the encompassing evil evoked in his awesome (in the old sense) satire. 

On the contrary, the evil he has in mind is “conceived and ordered . . . in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.” Men, that is to say, like Merrick Garland, a lugubrious embodiment of the “Managerial Age,” the “world of ‘Admin’” that Lewis so abhorred. Here, he suggested, is the home office of Hell, “something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business con­cern.”

The reason, by the way, my friend’s words about Merrick Garland were “delighted” was because of the huge, if inadvertent, boost the attorney general has just given to Donald Trump’s political prospects. 

Monday’s FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach residence, was probably the single biggest boon to his stature among voters since he left office in January 2021, bigger even than the partisan witch hunt over which future CNN hostess, Liz Cheney, has been presiding with such ostentatious zeal.

This is obviously a concern among the beautiful, well-pressed people with white collars and clean fingernails who hate Trump. Employing a ju-ju they recognize but do not understand, Trump has time and again demonstrated an uncanny ability to goad his would-be attackers into contortions of self-immolation. 

Is that happening now? Maybe. My friend thinks so, hence his buoyant mood and affectionate feelings about the attorney general. 

A lot of other people think so, too, though for many the apparently rising fortunes of Donald Trump are not something to celebrate but something to abominate. A good example of the latter was just provided by David Brooks, successfully housebroken faux-conservative columnist for our former paper of record, the New York Times.

In an extraordinary column called “Did the FBI just reelect Donald Trump?,” Brooks eloquently dramatizes the anxiety of those “quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails” C. S. Lewis wrote about. 

There are two currents of sentiment running through Brooks’ column. One is a certain obtuse contempt. The other is an imperfectly concealed fear. 

He leads off with the contempt part. “Why is Donald Trump so powerful?” he asks. “How did he come to dominate one of the two major parties and get himself elected president?” It’s not his looks. Brooks speaks sarcastically of his “hair” and “waistline”—wink, wink— little synecdoches for the “Bad Orange Man” meme we’re supposed to recognize and nod knowingly about. No, says Brooks, the secret to Trump’s power are the stories he tells, above all the story that “America is being ruined by corrupt coastal elites.” Somehow, tens of millions think that Trump is right. How can this be? “According to this narrative,” Brooks continues, 

there is an interlocking network of highly educated Americans who make up what the Trumpians have come to call the Regime: Washington power players, liberal media, big foundations, elite universities, woke corporations. These people are corrupt, condescending and immoral and are looking out only for themselves. They are out to get Trump because Trump is the person who stands up to them. They are not only out to get Trump; they are out to get you.

I know that story. I tell it often myself. And I appreciate its formulation by David Brooks. I wouldn’t change a syllable. It was at the center of what Trump campaigned on in 2016 and 2020. (It will also be at the center of his campaign, should he choose to run in 2024.) The great power of these sentences is that they not only express what Trump believes: they also express a truth that is recognized by those “tens of millions of Americans” Brooks nervously evokes. 

It’s because he is nervous that Brooks wants us to close our eyes before he moves on to the next bit of his column. OK, maybe there is “a core of truth” to Trump’s narrative. But really—close your eyes now, and hum loudly—that narrative “simply assumes, against a lot of evidence, that the leading institutions of society are inherently corrupt, malevolent and partisan and are acting in bad faith.”

Let’s leave out “inherent,” since it’s just an unearned intensifier like “absolute” in the phrase “absolute truth,” deployed by people who want to criticize someone for believing that there is a difference between truth and falsehood. Either X is true or it is not; trying to undercut it by perpending the adjective “absolute” is akin to adding the word “social” to “justice” and then thinking you have improved on the concept of “justice.” Is “social justice” more just than plain old, unmodified justice? 

But I digress. Let’s look around at American institutions, the media, say, or the educational establishment, or Congress, or big business, or the churches, the entertainment industry, or the profession of law. I’d say that “corrupt,” “malevolent,” “partisan,” and “acting in bad faith” sums them up pretty well. 

And here comes a leap. Eyes still closed? Trump’s narrative, Brooks says, “simply assumes that the proof of people’s virtue is that they’re getting attacked by the Regime. Trump’s political career has been kept afloat by elite scorn. The more elites scorn him, the more Republicans love him. The key criterion for leadership in the Republican Party today is having the right enemies.”

And here I thought that the chief criterion for conservative leadership of a Trumpian stamp—let’s leave the Republican Party out if it, shall we?—was “making America great again.” You know, things like nominating hundreds of judges who, like Antonin Scalia, believe that their role is to interpret the law in light of the Constitution, not make the law on the basis of their personal policy preferences. 

It’s things like pursuing policies that make America energy-independent, enforcing immigration laws so successfully that illegal immigration is slowed to a trickle. It’s pursuing economic policies—slashing taxes, sharply reducing regulations that are merely burdensome—that lead to the lowest unemployment rates in decades or in history for minority workers, who also saw real wages rise at their quickest rate ever. It’s defanging “corrupt,” “malevolent,” “partisan” diktats like Title IX rules in colleges and “woke” ideology in the military. It’s insisting that our NATO allies act like allies and pay their agreed-upon fees to support the organization. It’s also making symbolic gestures like moving our Israeli embassy to Jerusalem where it belongs, and formulating the Abraham Accords, a world-historical foreign policy achievement in the Middle East. 

I could go on. But I don’t want to stand in the way of David Brooks’ main point, which is to lament that Trump’s narrative, such as it is, has suddenly been goosed by the FBI, which, acting on a wide-ranging warrant that Merrick Garland personally approved, raided Mar-a-Lago, rummaged through Melania’s personal wardrobe, and carted off some 11 boxes of documents that have been variously described as classified presidential documents (just think of Hillary Clinton’s 30,000 emails, some of Barack Obama’s papers, etc.) and “nuclear secrets.” (One wag wondered whether there was a video of Trump peeing on nuclear codes with Russian prostitutes, but that probably came from Christopher Steele.)

The entire episode has put David Brooks in a bind. On the one hand, he would love to see Donald Trump taken away in handcuffs and indicted. On the other, the FBI’s actions have galvanized conservative, and even Republican, support for Trump. It has also got people thinking that America’s premier law enforcement agency is, well, “corrupt,” “malevolent,” “partisan,” and “acting in bad faith.”

Overnight, support for Trump, already strong, surged. Brooks quoted a reporter for Politico: The FBI’s action “completely handed him a lifeline,” he said. “It put everybody in the wagon for Trump again. It’s just taken the wind out of everybody’s sails.” Imagine that. Organize a “corrupt,” “malevolent,” “partisan,” and “acting in bad faith” raid by the secret police against a political opponent and people don’t like it! What is the world coming to? 

And this is what saddens Brooks. He wants the FBI to pursue Trump. “America absolutely needs to punish those who commit crimes.” Wait while I look for his columns about Hunter Biden, Paul Pelosi, Kevin Clinesmith, Andrew McCabe, Lois Lerner, John Brennan, James Clapper, and other criminals.

Rats, I can’t find those columns. But it doesn’t matter. Late in this column, Brooks comes to the thing he is really scared about. “America absolutely needs to make sure that Trump does not get another term as president,” he wails. 

But what about those “tens of millions of Americans” who support Trump? Like future CNN hostess Liz Cheney, Brooks seems to believe that he gets to decide who can and who cannot be president. I’ve scoured Article II of the Constitution, and I cannot find a single mention of either David Brooks or Liz Cheney. An oversight, perhaps. I did, however, find myself thinking about those “quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails” C. S. Lewis talked about. In a “Managerial Age” dominated by a “world of Admin,” you can get a lot done without raising your voice, especially if you have gruesome, smooth-shaven mannikins like Merrick Garland directing the shock troops. 

The 2024 Election Is Being Rigged Right Now In Plain Sight

The FBI raid on Trump’s home isn’t just about prosecuting the former president for Jan. 6, it’s about fixing the next presidential election.

by John Daniel Davidson for The Federalist

The news cycle this week has been understandably dominated by the FBI’s raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, where armed agents were supposedly looking for classified documents the FBI believes were improperly removed from the White House at the end of Trump’s term, in violation of federal law.

But the FBI raid is just a piece of a much larger story that’s playing out in slow motion and in plain sight: the rigging of the 2024 presidential election.

Much like the 2020 election, which wasn’t stolen so much as rigged months in advance to give Joe Biden an advantage that all but guaranteed his victory, the 2024 election is being rigged to ensure that Trump either cannot run or, if he does run, cannot win.

First, consider the FBI raid. No serious person believes that a documents dispute was the real purpose of the raid. The idea that the FBI would search the home of a former president and potential 2024 GOP candidate over an ongoing (and not uncommon) disagreement over presidential records with the National Archives is absurd on its face.

In his brief and self-congratulatory press conference Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland said he personally authorized the search on Trump’s home, that the Justice Department “does not take such a decision lightly,” and that it always seeks to use a “less intrusive means as an alternative to a search, and to narrowly scope any search that is undertaken.”

But if that were true, it more or less rules out the theory that the FBI was looking for classified documents. The disagreement between the National Archives and Trump has been ongoing for months, and Trump’s lawyers have been cooperating with the relevant authorities. Raiding Trump’s private residence over that — and in the process triggering a political crisis — makes zero sense.

As some expert observers have pointed out, including my colleague Margot Cleveland, a far more plausible explanation is that the FBI was perhaps on a fishing expedition, looking for evidence that could implicate Trump in the Jan. 6 riot. It’s no secret that Democrats and the Jan. 6 Committee want Garland to charge Trump with “seditious conspiracy” in hopes of making it impossible for Trump to run in 2024. In that case, a documents dispute with the National Archives would be nothing more than a flimsy pretext to get into Trump’s residence and look for incriminating evidence related to Jan. 6.

The raid and its possible role in the schemes of the Jan. 6 Committee, though, are part of a larger effort underway to recreate the conditions of 2020, just in case Trump escapes indictment and does run. This week, Twitter announced it would begin enforcing its Civics Integrity Project for the 2022 midterms: “This means we’ll take action against misleading claims about the voting process, misleading content intended to intimidate or dissuade people from participating in the election, or misleading claims that may undermine public confidence in elections outcomes.”

And what that means, in light of Twitter’s past behavior around election time, is that anyone who questions the voting processes or outcomes, however justifiably and no matter what irregularities are afoot, will be shut down by Twitter.

The targets here are painstakingly clear: Trump voters who believe, rightly, that the 2020 election was riddled with irregularities, last-minute changes to voting rules, and absentee ballot fraud. The best way to understand Twitter’s midterm elections policy, which is itself a preview of its 2024 policy, is that anyone who complains about universal absentee voting, ballot harvesting, remote ballot drop boxes, loose voter ID rules, or any other Democrat-favored policies that are known to make elections less secure will be silenced on Twitter.

Why? Because Democrats plan to run the same play in 2024 they ran in 2020, and their allies in Big Tech don’t want anyone pointing it out.

The irony here is that Twitter itself was perhaps the single greatest source of disinformation in the 2020 election. By quashing the New York Post’s valid and verified Hunter Biden laptop story just weeks before the election, and then locking the Post’s account (along with some people who tried to tweet the Post’s reporting on the laptop, including White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany), Twitter arguably tipped the balance of the election. It brazenly hid a story from its users that, had they seen it, would have been quite damaging to Biden and certainly would have caused some people to change their votes.

In addition to the machinations of Big Tech, nonprofit groups run by Democrat operatives have not stopped their schemes to boost voter turnout in Democrat-heavy areas under the guise of nonpartisan voter registration drives and voter roll update efforts.

As my colleague Victoria Marshall reported this week, a voter-roll management system used by 31 states and the District of Columbia is sharing voter registration data with the Mark Zuckerberg-funded Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), one of two leftist groups that funneled $419 million to local election offices for the purpose of driving up Democrat voter turnout in 2020. 

The system, called the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, is supposedly a convenient tool that simply allows states to update their voter rolls. But its real purpose, according to a recent report by independent research group Verity Vote, is to boost Democrat voter turnout by forwarding state voter roll data, including records from unregistered voters, to CEIR. 

As Marshall reports, “CEIR then develops targeted mailing lists and sends them back to the states to use for voter registration outreach. As part of their agreement with ERIC, states are not allowed to disclose any data they send to nor receive from ERIC, however, ERIC is not under the same constraints and is able to work with CEIR.”

In addition, it seems ERIC doesn’t exist to purge or update voter rolls so much as to inflate them, identifying 17 million new voters in 2020 compared to purging just 3 million from state voter rolls. Despite its failure to clean voter rolls, a majority of states are still using the system, which is run by a left-wing activist named David Becker. The purpose of ERIC by now is clear: It’s not about cleaning voter rolls but identifying and registering likely Democrat voters. And 31 states are using it.

This is just a sampling of what’s happening right now. The FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence has rightly captured headlines and provoked outrage this week, but understand that the same powerful people, companies, and nonprofits that conspired to rig the 2020 election are right now rigging the 2024 election, using many of the same tactics. They’re doing it because they think they can get away with it — and if Republicans don’t act now to stop them, they certainly will.

What in the World Is Kamala Harris Doing?

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

Naturally, the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s home has taken top billing since it was revealed. The move was unprecedented and represented a weaponization of federal law enforcement against the current administration’s primary political enemy.

Perhaps because of just how bad things look, the Biden administration has sought to keep a “business as usual” facade up. The passage of a Democrat-led bill that dumps hundreds of billions of dollars into “climate change” subsidies and provides funding for 87,000 new IRS agents led their messaging.

Then there was Kamala Harris, whose last couple of public appearances would have any critical thinker asking exactly what she’s doing. Really, what is this supposed to be?

Remember, this is a woman who is now on her third speech writer (that we know of) since she assumed the duties of being vice president. Yet, her speeches sound just as repetitive and incoherent as they always have. What’s that tell you except that the problem is the person at the top? Does she think it makes her sound smart to speak as if her audience is full of five-year-olds? And really, who told her that saying the same words over and over in an unintelligible stream of consciousness is how you communicate with people?

Then there’s the woke aspect to everything Harris says. All her speeches sound like they were written by a freshman gender studies student. Out-of-place mentions of “identity” and “equity” interspersed with preachy language about the unfairness of society make their way into commentaries about things like space exploration because she doesn’t know how to turn it off. She’s so indoctrinated in far-left insanity that it has become a core part of who she is.

Everyone has the same capacity? That’s one of the most absurd things I’ve ever heard a politician say. Clearly, people have varying capacities to succeed at varying things, no matter how much “opportunity” they are given. Not everyone can be an NFL player or a world-class musician. Others might not have the ability to do deep mathematical calculations or have steady enough hands to be a surgeon.

Harris’ ignorant comments expose the gross nature of liberal politics. People are reduced to faceless cogs, with the assumption being that there’s nothing that makes any individual person unique or remarkable. That’s not at all how things work, though, which should be apparent to anyone who takes one step outside of the halls of leftwing academia.

There’s a reason Democrats are desperately searching for an alternative to Harris in 2024, working off the assumption that Joe Biden isn’t physically capable of running again. How embarrassing is it that the current vice president is so terrible at her job that she can’t even be counted on to run for the office she’s supposedly in line for?

And while Biden has the excuse of being senile, Harris’ inability to adapt and her repetition of mistakes points to one thing: She’s just not very smart.

Think the Unthinkable and Accept That is the Better Reference Point

Neil Oliver returns from a vacation to deliver one of his best contemplative monologues to date.  Mr. Oliver rightly says that if you reset your historic reference points, and you begin to recognize that thinking the unthinkable is actually the best reference point for your current state, it is like a key that unlocks the answers.

We are the battered spouses in an abusive relationship with government. Nothing we can do is going to appease the abuser, it is the inherent state of their disposition. WATCH:

[Transcript] – It is hard to think the unthinkable – but there comes a time when there’s nothing else for it. People raised to trust the powers that be – who have assumed, like I once did, that the State, regardless of its political flavour at any given moment, is essentially benevolent and well-meaning – will naturally try and keep that assumption of benevolence in mind when trying to make sense of what is going on around them.

People like us, you and me, raised in the understanding that we are free, that we have inalienable rights, and that the institutions of this country have our best interests at heart, will tend to tie ourselves in knots rather than contemplate the idea those authorities might actually be working against us now. I took that thought of benevolent, well-meaning authority for granted for most of my life, God help me. Not to put too fine a point on it, I was as gullible as the next chump.

A couple of years ago, however, I began to think the unthinkable and with every passing day it becomes more and more obvious to me that we are no longer being treated as individuals entitled to try and make the most of our lives – but as a barn full of battery hens, just another product to be bought and sold – sold down the river.

Let me put it another way: if you have been driving yourself almost demented in an effort to think the best of those in charge – those in senior positions in government, those in charge of the great institutions of State, those running the big corporations – but finding it increasingly impossible to do so … then the solution to the problem might be to turn your point of view through 180 degrees and accept, however unwillingly, that we are … how best to put this … being taken for a ride.

When you find a stranger’s hand on your wallet, in the inside pocket of your jacket … rather than trying to persuade yourself he’s only making sure it doesn’t fall out … it might be more straightforward to draw the conclusion you’re in the process of being robbed.

Once the scales fall from a person’s eyes, the resultant clarity of sight is briefly overwhelming. Or it is like being handed a skeleton key that opens every locked door, or access to a Rosetta Stone that translates every word into a language instantly understood.

Take the energy crisis: If you’ve felt the blood drain from your face at the prospect of bills rising from hundreds to several thousands of pounds while reading about energy companies doubling their profits overnight while being commanded to subsidise so-called renewables that are anything but Green while listening to this politician or that renew their vows to the ruinous fantasies of Net Zero and Agenda 2030 while knowing that the electricity for electric cars comes, in the main and most reliably, from fossil fuels if you can’t make sense of it all and just know that it adds up to a future in which you might have to choose between eating and heating then treat yourself to the gift of understanding that the powers that be fully intend that we should have less heat and less fuel and that in the planned future only the rich will have cars anyway. The plan is not to fix it.

The plan is to break it, and leave it broken. If you struggle to think the best of the world’s richest – vacuous, self-obsessed A-list celebrities among them – endlessly circling the planet on private jets and super yachts, so as to attend get-togethers where they might pontificate to us lowly proles about how we must give up our cars and occasional holiday flights – even meat on the dinner table … if you wonder how they have the unmitigated gall … then isn’t it easier simply to accept that their honestly declared and advertised intention is that their luxurious and pampered lives will continue as before while we are left hungry, cold and mostly unwashed in our unheated homes.

Here’s the thing: if any leader or celeb honestly meant a word of their sermons about CO2 and the rest, then they would obviously lead by example. They would be first of all of us willingly to give up international travel altogether … they would downsize to modest homes warmed by heat pumps. They would eschew all energy but that from the sun and the wind. They would eat, with relish, bugs and plants. They would resort to walking, bicycles and public transport.

If Net Zero and the rest was about the good of the planet – and not about clearing the skies and the beaches of scum like us – don’t you think those sainted politicians and A-listers would be lighting the way for us by their own example? If the way of life they preach to us was worth living, wouldn’t they be living it already? Perhaps you heard Bill Gates say private jets are his guilty pleasure.

And how about food – and more particularly the predicted shortage of it: the suits and CEOs blame it all on Vladimir Putin. But if the countries of the world are truly running out of food, why is our government offering farmers hundreds of thousands of pounds to get out of the industry and sell their land to transnational corporations for use, or disuse unknown? Why aren’t we, as a society, doing what our parents and grandparents did during WWII and digging for victory? Why is the government intent on turning a third of our fertile soil over to re-wilding schemes that make life better only for the beavers? Why aren’t we looking across the North Sea towards the Netherlands where a WEF-infected administration is bullying farmers off their land altogether, forcing them to cull half the national herd.

Those Dutch farmers are among the most productive and knowledgeable in the world, holding in their heads and hands the answers to all manner of questions about how best to produce food, and yet their government is so intent on scaring them out of the business that a teenage boy in a tractor, taking part in a protest to defend ancient rights and traditions, was fired on by police.

Why do you think it matters so much, to the government of the second most productive population of farmers in the world, to gut and fillet that industry? Why? Why have similar protests, in countries all across Europe and the wider world, been largely ignored by the mainstream media – a media that would have crawled on its hands and knees over broken glass just to report on a BLM protester opening a bag of non-binary crisps. Why the silence on the attack on farming?

And while we’re on the subject of farmland ownership, why is computer salesman Bill Gates buying so much farmland in the US – more than a quarter of a million acres in 19 states at the last count, while simultaneously promoting the production and sale of fake meat? And why have so many small planes crashed into massive food processing plants in the US, sparking fires and thereby hobbling the production and distribution of yet more of the very stuff of life? Why is this happening to farmers and farming … all across the hitherto developed world …?

Isn’t the simple obvious answer … the answer that makes most sense and that is staring us in our trusting faces … that power for the power-hungry has always rested most effectively upon control of food and its supply? Why are the powers that be attributing this to a cost-of-living crisis when everyone with two brain cells to rub together can see it’s a cost of lockdown crisis – the inevitable consequence of shutting down the whole country – indeed the whole world – for the best part of two years. Soaring inflation, rising interest rates, disrupted supply chains.

Might they be calling it a cost-of-living crisis as part of their bare-faced attempt to distract us from the fact that while ordinary individuals face a life and death struggle in the coming months, the corporations have celebrated their share of the greatest transfer of wealth in history? Doesn’t that seem more likely? However unthinkable, might it not be more compelling to ask why our government, and governments around the world, have effectively stood by and held the coats of huge corporations while those money magnets pulled almost all of the world’s wealth into their already creaking coffers?

Are our governments more interested in enabling, in aiding and abetting the rich, than in lifting so much as a finger to protect our livelihoods, our ways of life? I’m only asking. What about the money in our pockets? Why is it getting harder and harder to use good old cash, notes and coins? Why are we being nudged further and further away from spending-power we can see and hold, and towards a digital alternative that exists only on the hard drives of the banks that run the world? Why is that do you think?

Rather than dismiss as yet another conspiracy theory the idea of cash being ultimately replaced with transactions based on the exchange of what amount to glorified food stamps that will only be accepted if our social credit score demonstrates that we’ve been obedient girls or boys … how about taking the leap and focussing on the blatantly obvious … that if we are not free to buy whatever and whenever we please, free of the surveillance and snooping of governments and the banks that run them, then we have absolutely no freedom at all.

And while we’re on the subject of money and banks, why not pause to notice something else that is glaringly obvious – which is to say that the currencies of the West are teetering on the abyss, and that one bank after another is revealed, to those who are bothering to watch, as being as close to bankruptcy as its possible to be without actually falling over the edge.

Then there’s the so-called vaccines for Covid – I deliberately say “so-called” because by now it should be clear to all but the wilfully blind that those injections do not work as advertised. You can still contract the virus, still transmit the virus, still get sick and still die. Denmark has dropped their use on under-18s. All across the world, every day, more evidence emerges – however grudgingly, however much the various complicit authorities and Big-Pharma companies might hate to admit it – of countless deaths and injuries caused by those medical procedures.

And yet here in Britain and just about everywhere else, governments continue to try and get those needles into as many arms as possible, even the arms of the smallest and youngest. The ripe stink of corruption is everywhere. I trusted authority for most of my life.

Now I ask myself on a daily basis how I ignored the stench for so long. Across the Atlantic, the Biden Whitehouse sent the FBI to raid the home of former president Donald Trump. Meanwhile Joe Biden and his son Hunter – he of the laptop full of the most appalling and incriminating content – fly together on Airforce 1. No raids planned on the Obamas, nor on the Clintons. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi flew to Taiwan and onwards to China. Her son Paul, an investor in a Chinese tech firm and with seats on the board of companies dealing in lithium, was along for the ride, into that part of the world where three quarters of the world’s lithium batteries are made. Taiwan leads in that technology.

It is hard to think the unthinkable. It’s hard to think that all of it, all the misery, all the suffering of the past and to come might just be about money, greed and power. It is hard to tell yourself you’ve been taken for a fool and taken for a ride. It’s hard, but the view from the other side is worth the effort and the pain. Open your eyes and see. (link)