Something Rotten in Denmark?

Who sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea, near the Danish island of Bornholm?

by Michael Wilkerson for American Greatness

The United States and Europe, along with Ukraine, insist it was Russia, while Russia and others point the finger straight back at the United States. The answer is not as obvious as first appears. 

As a starting point, it is helpful to consider who wins, and who loses, with the long-term incapacitation of these 110 billion cubic meters (bcm) of combined annual capacity gas pipelines from Russia to Germany. Who benefits from cutting off a key source of Russian state revenue as well as a key source of energy supply to Western Europe? 

Russia’s motivations for self-sabotage are less than clear. Russia loses not only a substantial portion of its revenue, desperately needed to support the costly war in Ukraine and maintain its stagnating economy, but most of its negotiating leverage with the West. Russia’s ability to cut off or restart the flow of gas was its most important hole card at the poker table with Germany and the European Union. Indeed, at the end of August 2022, Russia suspended all deliveries of gas though Nord Stream 1 due to “maintenance requirements” in order to pressurize the situation. While Nord Stream 2 was not yet certified by the EU and was delivering no gas, it was completed and pressurized, and could have been brought online once a negotiated settlement to the war was reached. 

Russia can divert some gas to China, but not that much due to existing pipeline capacity constraints. Russia exports a mere 16 bcm of gas to China, with another 10 bcm of capacity under development but not available for at least the next two years. In contrast, Russia shipped three times that amount (48 bcm) to Germany alone before the invasion of Ukraine. 

On October 2, 2022, less than a week after the sabotage, Russia suspended gas shipments to Italy due to “transport problems in Austria,” ratcheting up the leverage. Last year, Italy imported 95 percent of its gas, of which Russia comprised 45 percent, equivalent to 26 bcm. Russia appears to be more than willing to sacrifice short-term revenue for the long-term strategic game it’s playing. But to intentionally destroy something it already controlled appears to make little sense even in a Machiavellian construct of the devious minds within the Kremlin. 

The regional territorial conflict initiated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has just escalated dramatically into something with global implications. While it seems terrible even to contemplate the possibility, the United States appears to have both motive and the most to gain from the situation. 

The economic interests to the United States of supplanting Russia as the primary gas supplier to European energy markets are obvious. The geo-political interests of a weakened Russia similarly align. The United States has long been opposed to development of Nord Stream 2 on grounds that it would increase Germany’s dependence on Russia and diminish U.S. influence. German ministers roundly mocked President Donald Trump when he warned at the 2018 UN General Assembly of the grave energy security risks that Russia posed to Germany, and by implication the entire EU. None are laughing now. 

In February 2022, Joe Biden promised to “end” Nord Stream 2 if Russia invaded Ukraine. In June 2022, the New York Times reported that “The C.I.A. had warned European governments of potential attacks on pipelines,” alerts which may have been repeated in the weeks prior to the sabotage. Most tellingly, less than a week following the attacks, Secretary of State Antony Blinken (perhaps inadvertently) laid out the case for the benefit of the situation to the United States, while denying Russian President Putin’s accusations of U.S. involvement.

Blinken stated that the situation creates, “a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove [Europe’s] dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs.” He further declared that the United States stood to benefit from the shifting landscape, noting, “we’ve significantly increased our production as well as making available to Europe liquefied natural gas. And we’re now the leading supplier of LNG to Europe to help compensate for any gas or oil that it’s losing as a result of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.” 

A secondary question is, who has the expertise and technology to pull this off undetected? The size of the explosions and the technical challenges of the attack, including the ability to quietly slip in and out of patrolled waters, appear to rule out a number of potential suspects or “persons of interest,” including Ukraine, environmental extremists, or a hidden cabal of powerful anarchists or WEF globalists. However, China, Russia, or the United States, along with some other nations certainly have the know-how, including advanced submarine technology. 

Needless to say, I have no idea who is actually responsible. Perhaps it really was Russia, and Putin is playing a complicated and counterintuitive game that defies both logic and common sense. Perhaps we will learn the answer as the investigations continue. Or perhaps it will remain hidden, like so many other disturbing recent events, behind a veil of deception and secrecy. In any case, something is rotten in Denmark, and the stench emitting from the dark quarters of state sponsored covert warfare is reeking to the heavens.

X22, And we Know, and more- Oct 4

 

Feels nice to finally have a slow day where I don't feel so overwhelmed by news coming at me all at once. :). Here's tonight's news:

Biden, Putin, and Risk

Biden’s war may yet turn out to be 

as ill-advised as was Wilson’s war.

by Daniel Oliver for American Greatness

The war in Ukraine has become, or always was, Biden vs. Putin. But there is a key difference in the players. Biden is old and fading. He’s senile. He may serve out his term. But, if we’re honest, we have to admit he may not. He could either retire, encouraged by his wife, or be removed by the cabinet pursuant to the 25th Amendment to the Constitution. He then can watch television and ruminate on a lifetime in politics. 

Putin’s fate is different. He is, or seems, healthy—or, anyway, healthier than Biden. He rides horses bareback—at least when there’s a photographer handy. He can’t afford to lose the war in Ukraine. If he does, or if it seems he is about to lose, he is likely to be demoted to prisoner. Or corpse. For him, the stakes are existential—a word that has lost its meaning in the United States because of its incessant application to climate change. In Soviet Russia—’scuse me, modern post-Soviet Russia—existential still has real meaning. 

All of that is obvious and was even before the war in Ukraine began. But the United States and NATO joined the war effort anyway. 

Now we are told Russia is losing, prompting the question: What comes next?

Joe Biden is the 21st century’s Woodrow Wilson. Burton Pines wrote in his 2013 book, America’s Greatest Blunder: The Fateful Decision to Enter World War One, that there was no reason for the United States to have joined the three-year-old war in Europe. Nevertheless, the United States sent two million doughboys to Europe and broke the battlefield stalemate. That won the war, but it allowed Britain and France to impose devastating conditions on Germany, which incited German cries for revenge.

If America had not joined the war, wrote Pines, the combatants, exhausted from years of savage fighting, would have had to negotiate an end with neither side getting all it wanted. A compromise would have meant no winners, no losers, no Treaty of Versailles, no reparations, no German demands for revenge. And: no Hitler, no World War II, and no Cold War.

The lesson: going to war can be a mistake. 

But to a failed president like Biden, war must have seemed like a gift. A big war could take the citizen-voters’ minds off rampant crime; defunded police; sky-high inflation; massive government debt; the effective elimination of the southern border; hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants (as well as crime, disease, and fentanyl) flooding into the country; and siccing the Justice Department on “terrorist” parents of school children. Hardly a record for winning friends. 

 But just “going” to war isn’t enough. You have to keep fighting. So now Biden is asking for more money for Ukraine—the United States has already provided more than $54 billion—and of course, if Ukraine actually wins, the United States will probably wind up footing most of the bill for rebuilding the country, estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars. (Why the United States? Two words: Willy Sutton.)

And what will count as victory for Ukraine? Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is now engaging in mission creep: he wants to recapture Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014.

But now winter is approaching. The climate alarmists who populate the Biden Administration and worry incessantly and foolishly about global warming may not be aware that in winter . . . it gets cold. But people in Europe know that. Old people in Europe, really old people, may remember the final years of World War II and the next year, when it was . . . deathly cold in Europe. People who say history doesn’t repeat itself but only rhymes may be in for a cold surprise. 

The sabotage of the Nord Stream Pipeline could be bad news for people who can afford to buy Russian gas, but also for those who cannot, because if there’s no gas, the price of wood in Europe will go up. It takes at least three cords of wood to heat an average house for a winter (there are lots of variables). But will Europeans be able to find adequate supplies of wood? Have you ever tried to carry three cords of wood? Wood! Talk about turning the clock back.

The Biden Administration will continue to find ways to keep the war on the front page—and all this to support a country most Americans couldn’t find on a map. And which was known by those who could find it to be utterly corrupt. And which paid Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, obscene sums of money.

Will Russia win or lose? Who knows? Russia is thought to have hundreds of tactical nuclear weapons ready for use, and knows it is really fighting the United States and NATO, not just their very junior partner, Ukraine.

If Russia loses, the Bidenistas will be triumphant and tell us that it was worth the struggle. Maybe. But what if we have to fight another war right after this one? Will we have sufficient hardware? One estimate is that the United States could run out of its best precision-guided missiles “about a week” into a war with China. 

But if even the United States and NATO beat Putin, will it have been worth the risk?

Even if the world doesn’t end in a nuclear holocaust brought about by Biden’s war, it won’t mean there was no risk.

Just because you jump out of a fifth story window and land . . . in a hay wagon that happens to be passing underneath doesn’t mean it was a good idea to jump out that window.

Just because Putin may not, in the end, opt for Armageddon, doesn’t mean tempting him almost to the breaking point was a good policy decision. 

So, yes: The United States, Europe, NATO may win. But we can’t be sure. 

The worst may be yet to come. And Biden’s war may yet turn out to be as ill-advised as was Wilson’s war. 

Some Helpful Ideas For Biden’s Impeachment

We must get to the bottom of his semi-fascist-y behavior. 

For democracy! 

posted by David Harsanyi at The Federalist

Over at MSNBC, Steve Benen contends that Republicans, poised to take back the House next year, keep promising to impeach Joe Biden but “haven’t quite worked out” why. As a big fan of impeachments and congressional investigations, I may have some helpful ideas.

In his conduct while president of the United States, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. has shown a habitual contempt for the rule of law, on numerous occasions willfully violating his constitutional oath by corrupting and manipulating the power of the executive branch.

Take the eviction moratorium. The Supreme Court explicitly ruled that the plan “exceeded … existing statutory authority.” Biden even conceded that the “bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster.” And yet, knowing all this, the president decreed it so, openly ignoring the Constitution, admitting to cynically exploiting the slow pace of judicial branch rulings “to keep this going for a month, at least — I hope longer.”

Biden again knowingly subverted the will of Congress when he transferred loan payments for millions of affluent students to taxpayers in hopes of affecting the 2022 midterms. The president does not possess the statutory power to “forgive” or “cancel” loans. Just ask congressional leaders like Nancy Pelosi, who correctly noted that “[p]eople think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness — he does not.” He did it anyway. Unilaterally. The president used the emergency powers found in the HEROES Act, passed after 9/11 to help U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, to justify his decree. We know that Biden cynically exploited the bill, because, by his own recent admission on “60 Minutes,” he concedes there is no emergency.

Let’s hope that Republicans don’t limit themselves to a presidential impeachment, either. There might be numerous reasons to investigate Attorney General Merrick Garland, but none deserves more scrutiny than his role in chilling dissent by intimidating parents who opposed critical race theory and Covid mask mandates.

In October 2021 the National School Boards Association sent a letter to the Biden administration requesting the FBI investigate school board protests, offering a handful of alleged acts of criminality as justification to treat millions of parents as potential “domestic terrorism” threats. The letter uses this phrase (twice) to provide the administration with the justification to trigger a PATRIOT Act investigation. Then again, all of it was coordinated. We learned later, through a FOIA request, that Education Secretary Miguel Cardona had likely solicited and helped with the verbiage of the letter. Garland, who regularly ignores violence and threats directed at conservatives, acquiesced and directed the FBI and U.S. attorneys’ offices to investigate parents.

The NSBA later apologized. The Biden administration, which regularly libels millions of political opponents as would-be violent extremists, never did.

Not every investigation leads to impeachment, sadly. But that doesn’t mean the GOP shouldn’t scrutinize whether the president benefited financially from his brother’s and son Hunter’s leveraging of the family name and the United States government to extract millions from Chinese and Ukrainian energy concerns—for which there is plenty of circumstantial evidence. We already know Biden lied about the extent of his knowledge regarding Hunter’s “work.” And, in a functioning democracy, it is imperative we know everything about the president’s finances.

While they’re at it, it would also be nice if we could learn more about the chaotic and inept Afghanistan pullout that left 13 service members dead and thousands of Americans stranded in theocratistan. Did Biden dismiss intelligence reports warning about a swift collapse of our Afghan allies for political considerations? Why did the administration mislead the public about the number of citizens and green-card holders who were stranded? We have yet to hear a coherent explanation for why the administration handed a list of allied names to the Taliban. Nor do we know the story behind that face-saving drone strike that ended up killing 10 innocent Afghans, seven of them children. Let’s find out.

Maybe they could also get to the bottom of the FBI’s role in limiting speech on social media platforms during the 2020 election. The White House, after all, has proven to be quite comfortable attempting to dictate speech. In July 2021, the White House admitted it was “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” The White House not-so-subtly threatened social media platforms to suppress certain political opinions and stories. Under what constitutional power does the president get to dictate what should be considered mis- or dis-information? And under what power does Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas get to create an Orwellian “Disinformation Governance Board?” How pervasive is the law enforcement agency’s contact with media companies?

If you, like me, believe in the unencumbered free-association rights of everyone, including tech companies, you must be really curious why these corporations, which drop tens of millions every year in lobbying for favorable regulations, allow the state to dictate speech codes. Then again, all of this sounds semi-fascist-y. I’m unsure how impeachment plays in the polls. But, for the survival of democracy, we need to get to the bottom of all of it.

The United Nations Claims to "Own the Science" of Climate Change, Works With Google to Censor Dissent

Joe Cunningham reporting for RedState 

The United Nations, as an organization, has put forward some of the most comprehensive pro-climate-change through its commission and funding of research. They routinely sound the alarm on the threat of climate change, despite the fact that the doomsday predictions rarely hold up.

The latest major hurricane, Ian, was incredibly unpredictable and created a once-in-1000-year event on Florida’s west coast. Prior to landfall, the usual suspects in the Democratic Party and the media were talking about climate change and its impact on the storm – despite the fact that there is really no straightforward evidence that climate change made it any worse.

At the same time, of course, the White House was busy claiming that the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act would be putting a stop to events like this.

But, while American politics can stifle the march toward frankly idiotic policies to “stop” climate change, the United Nations has no such political intrigues. They, as an organization, are 100 percent on board with putting a stop to it (as though humanity has that kind of power) and are teaming up with Big Tech to make sure that anything to the contrary is kept from the mainstream.

I’m not making that up, either. They’re admitting as much.

The most powerful information search tool on the Internet is teaming up with a global organization to censor any contrary speech on the climate change issue. The narrative must be upheld, and dissent silenced.

This isn’t new information. The UN announced this back in April, and everyone just nodded and went right along with it. For a couple of years now, Google and YouTube have been actively shutting down ads and videos that buck the “scientific consensus” on climate change. Of course, we’re no strangers to their unjustified shutdowns of conservative outlets and information. It’s all in the name of combatting “misinformation.”

There is a Reliable Sources interview with Weather Channel founder John Coleman that always bears mentioning in this conversation. It opens with Brian Stelter insulting Coleman, calling him a climate “denier,” only to be corrected and schooled by Coleman.

Coleman best articulates what makes so many skeptics of the Cult of Climate Change so angry – the idea that this scientific “consensus” on climate change is bought and paid for by the government and these pro-climate-change global organizations. It’s not an organic scientific discovery.

But we are going to be forced to endure this. Forced to endure more of this private sector censorship, forced to listen to politicians try and create new policies that aren’t feasible and do nothing to actually fix any problems (but do make our lives more expensive).

NEW: Teacher Canned After Libs of TikTok Exposed His 'Grooming' Videos Admits Plan to 'Burn Down the System'

Jennifer Van Laar reporting for RedState 

An Oklahoma middle school teacher who resigned from his job in April 2022 after Libs of TikTok exposed his extremely questionable postings is now teaching in another school district – and opened up to an undercover Project Veritas reporter about his anarchist beliefs, his desire to indoctrinate his students, and his plan to “burn down the system” in a video just released by PV.

In the Project Veritas video, Tyler Wrynn described the posting that got him into trouble while teaching in Owasso:

“So, I have a rather large TikTok following. I’m an authority figure. So, I [publish] a Christmas message of, ‘Hey, if your parents don’t love and support you for who you are this Christmas, f**k them. I’m your parent now. I love you. Drink some water. I’m proud of you.’”

The only thing wrong with that message, he says, is that he used the word “f**k.”

Wrynn is now teaching at Will Rogers Middle School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, just about 11 miles away from his prior school, and has a new TikTok vibe to go with the new job – it’s not quite so edgy, at least on the surface. But when you click through his Linktree to the student resources, it’s a repository for links to his secret curriculum, including a “BLM cheat sheet” and a page of petitions for activism. Of course, they’re all radical progressive petitions.

Since Owasso allowed him to resign instead of firing him, there was nothing on his record that would have alerted other school districts to the controversy. He explains:

They were super — they didn’t want to stand up to the parents….

But they definitely didn’t f**k me over. Like, nothing went on my record. I could resign instead, so it didn’t, like, tarnish my teaching experience.

In this new video, Wrynn demonstrates how much he’s thought about his plan, and the things that can derail it.

“The only thing that’s a problem here [in Oklahoma] is that House Bill 1775 or something. I can get my license revoked for it, for being too woke…Trust me, I want to burn down the entire system.”

“Eventually, you want to remove Christianity — or religion [as a whole] — from progressive thought, because religion is inherently hierarchical.”

Wrynn then admits that he “broadcast [his agenda] too much last semester,” and agrees when the PV reporter says, “There’s ways to introduce ideas without broadcasting it, you know.”

When Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe called Wrynn to ask him about his comments, he denied speaking about religion in the classroom.

 “If I speak about religion in the classroom I can get it [teaching license] revoked, yes. But I don’t.”

Watch the entire Project Veritas video below.

Another Dem-Friendly Poll Shifts Dramatically Towards the GOP as a Possible Red-Wave Reappears

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

I’m running out of ways to say “I told you so,” but another piece of empirical evidence released on Monday points in that direction.

Back in August, in the midst of all the “Democrats are surging” talk, Monmouth put out a poll showing Democrats up seven points. Their latest iteration? Republicans are now leading by two points. When adjusted for registered voters, the swing is D+3 to R+2.

Who could have possibly foreseen this?!

To put things into a broader context, here’s what the overall polling situation looks like over the last two weeks with a little added commentary by yours truly.

This is why you don’t ignore the fundamentals to latch onto low-turnout special elections in areas that favor Democrats (namely, higher educated suburbs). History tells us that parties in power get shellacked in their first mid-term of a new presidency. Primary turnout, which has been a dead-on predictor the last four cycles, has also heavily favored the GOP, even after Dobbs was released and supposedly became a big issue.

Further, summer polling in general is just trash. You can go back multiple cycles and find that the polling industry consistently overestimates Democrat support during the summer months. For example, in 2014, a wave year for Republicans, the GOP didn’t take the generic ballot lead until October.

Add in the fact that polls have consistently overstated Democrat support up to Election Day as well, if to a slightly smaller degree than summer polling, and you have all the makings of a possible red wave. A month ago, those in the smart set were insisting that was off the table, with the GOP possibly only gaining the House by a few seats. Now, it’s beginning to look more likely than not.

Again, this is why you don’t ignore the fundamentals and electoral history to cling to D+8 polls and special elections in Washington before the leaves even start to change. Anyone who did that was setting themselves up for disappointment, and they can’t say that we didn’t try to warn them.

If Facebook, Twitter, And Google Hide Information For The World’s Rulers, Elections Are A Scam

In the name of ‘saving democracy,’ the global ruling class is making sure nobody’s votes count but theirs.

Joy Pullman reporting for The Federalist

In a September interview that went viral on social media Sunday, a United Nations operative admitted the U.S. government-funded organization “partnered with Google” to rig the results returned on the world’s dominant search engine for the phrase “climate change.”

This follows multiple casual disclosures that, yes, politics control the information on monopoly tech platforms. In fact, government officials all the way up to the White House routinely use Big Tech to control what citizens are allowed to say to each other online, as an ongoing lawsuit from several U.S. attorneys general recently divulged.

The Biden White House is fighting further disclosures about high-level federal officials’ involvement in this government-pressured censorship regime, including Anthony Fauci and the White House press secretary. The companies involved include Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, the court documents say.

Earlier this year, a clip of Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg — who threw hundreds of millions of dollars obtained from his communications monopoly company into helping Democrat activists embed inside government election offices in 2020 — also went viral. It showed him telling podcaster Joe Rogan that the FBI also controls the information Facebook allows people to share. The FBI’s meddling affected the 2020 presidential election outcome.

In other words, it’s not just Communist China where the citizenry’s access to knowledge is controlled by government officials. It’s now a global phenomenon. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the other Big Tech companies are global monopolies headquartered within the United States whose information monopolies affect elections globally. Again, they admit to limiting and amplifying election-affecting information at the behest of U.S. officials. (No wonder China won’t allow Google or Facebook inside its Great Firewall.)

In countries that pretend to be self-governing “democracies” such as the United States, government officials controlling what information is allowed to spread on platforms that government policies help keep dominant is blatant election meddling. It’s controlling elections by controlling the information voters get.

Google controls a reported 81 percent of internet searches and, with Facebook, influences perhaps three-quarters of all internet traffic (very recent information about this appears not readily at the top of even DuckDuckGo results). Twitter is much smaller traffic-wise but still very influential, as it has a disproportionate effect on the swamp class. If these entities black out certain topics — and we know they do because they say so publicly! — they could easily swing elections, or almost anything else they wanted, really.

Just think about it: How would you find out about important happenings without the internet? Even if we start with personal matters: What if Facebook decided to manipulate your feed just to see how it affects your emotions? Oh, it still does that with teenage girls on Instagram?

For political news, how would you get that without using the internet now — would you read a local newspaper? To the extent those exist and report reliable information, which is almost not at all, so-called local newspapers are now Big Tech derivatives themselves, as reporters largely get their information via email and searches, and access to their work is influenced by search engines.

Would you get your information via email? Email providers also censor based on politics. Maybe via phone or text? Well, how many people can you talk to or text at one time? Not enough to get really good coverage of national information important to, say, selecting a president. How many good national political reporters can you get on speakerphone?

The Zuckerberg and UN official’s recent limited hangouts are also certainly just the iceberg tip. The FBI and other government agencies don’t need to tell Facebook to ban regime-damaging information if the outlets that social media companies don’t choke refuse to cover it.

A recent example is the FBI’s out-of-control raid on a pro-life activist dad over a misdemeanor charge that local police dismissed. That raid wasn’t covered by the leftist media that Big Tech’s compromised fact-checkers rate in ways that allow them to spread information faster and farther than conservative outlets.

This situation allows government officials to choose what information gets out about their activities. That effectively ends genuine public accountability. Voters can’t vote to stop things they don’t know are happening, or to make things happen they haven’t heard are on offer from a candidate. If a dad gets raided because FBI bigwigs don’t like his politics, and Big Tech’s favored media companies don’t report on it, how would anyone know? If no one knows, no one can hold bad actors accountable.

That means if no one except the victims knows, it’s not only going to keep happening, it’s going to get worse. That’s how corruption works.

U.S. intelligence agencies in particular have paid precisely zero penalties for using their powers to openly meddle in U.S. elections. The most recent operation they conducted that we know about is the Russia collusion hoax manufactured to keep voters from electing Donald Trump, or, failing that, to make the Electoral College majority of voters’ choice of Trump meaningless.

Because officials such as Bill Barr and John Durham, as well as Republicans or anyone else in Congress, have failed to penalize the FBI and Department of Justice’s election interference operations, they’re increasing. RedState, Tucker Carlson, and Steve Bannon say several dozen Trump associates and supporters have been recently raided or subpoenaed by the FBI.

The FBI is also meddling in state elections by investigating candidates based on their political positions. It raided a former president’s home on laughable charges similar to those the FBI director dismissed for that president’s election opponent.

Also, of course, the FBI and DOJ are hunting down political opponents of Democrats on largely trespassing charges and making sure they’re given maximum punishment, all clearly based on political prejudice, not justice. This is the same FBI that has been proven to hide behind false “national security” claims and to lie to judges and grand juries to authorize spying and raids of Democrats’ political opponents, with no consequences to speak of yet. Fellow government agents are performing similar political prosecutions, such as using courts to harass and eat away at the substance of Trump associates such as Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, and the newly announced New York state prosecution of Trump’s family and business.

Federal agencies conduct warrantless mass surveillance on Americans. The Biden administration has formally declared that disagreement with its policies can comprise “domestic terrorism,” giving federal agencies even more license to harass Americans for their speech and ideas under the accountability shield of “national security.” Given the prosecutions we’ve all watched for years now of Trump and any associates using what are later proven to be distorted and fabricated quotes and allegations, does any of us think we’d survive if this Eye of Sauron were turned on us, as it is routinely even on apolitical folks such as small-time farmers?

Of course not — and that is part of the point. This is the kind of compliance-inducing terror projected onto citizens, not in self-governing societies, but in police states. Covid-tide proved the conditions are nearly in place for dispensing with the regime’s cover story that we live in an entirely self-governing society.

For during those years, Americans were fed lie after lie after misrepresentation after conspiracy after coverup, with strong effects on the election. Just like with the FBI, almost no one has yet been held to account for it. So the information control operations are getting bigger and bolder. We’re even being told about them as an exercise in discouraging what remains of the opposition.

Elections are a sham if government officials choose what we can know about things like their use of public offices and whether we can openly debate what comprises a legitimate public emergency and how to respond. Those who wish to operate in darkness do not do so from altruistic motives, no matter what story they spin about their activities. Will any entity effectively stand up to our mafia government and thereby prove we are not already living in a soft-authoritarian police state?