By Timur Fomenko, a political analyst

Recently, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen made her first remarks on US economic engagement with China in nearly two years.

She rejected the idea that a war between the US and China is “increasingly inevitable,” that there is “no reason to fear healthy economic competition with any country,” and that “China’s economic growth need not be incompatible with US economic leadership.”

Yellen also said that the primary goal of the US is always to safeguard its “national security” and thus it’s not really out to hamper the rise of China or its economy. But actions speak louder than words, and her comments come on the back of the US attempting to cripple China’s entire semiconductor industry, forcing third-party countries to abide by those restrictions as well, adding numerous Chinese companies to its trade-restrictions entity list, using allegations of forced labour to opportunistically undermine certain Chinese industries and, of course, maintaining broad Trump-era tariffs on Chinese exports to the US.

It might be asked, what form of economic engagement is there to be had? Because the rhetoric, hyperbole and extremity from Washington could not be less conducive to an economic relationship with China, what with terms such as ‘decoupling’ being thrown around, and the existence of an entire US congressional committee purely to produce anti-China legislation. The Biden administration, for that matter, is so sensitive to appearing ‘weak’ on China, that it will capitulate to any popular trend that gains enough political clout, such as calls to ban the popular TikTok app.

The US is so wrapped up on its protectionist, America First doctrine that it cannot be seen to be making concessions. And, looking at Yellen’s choice of words, we see the “catch” – China is only permitted to grow on the condition that it accepts “US economic leadership” – in other terms, the US’ political, economic, and military dominance.

This isn’t about reaching a consensus or agreement between the two parties; it is about Washington unilaterally imposing its demands on Beijing and requiring that it step down from certain ambitions. This is classic Western imperialism when it comes to China. Economic engagement with China and its massive market is great, provided that it is the Americans who are setting the terms and reaping the profits. The idea of the Chinese asserting their own sovereign rights and interests is not an option.

For the purposes of a historical comparison, the British had their own economic ‘engagement’ with China in the 19th century. The Opium Wars were about bringing China to heel and forcibly opening up its market so that the UK could exclusively benefit from it. Today, the US wants to benefit from the Chinese market, but only if the terms are favourable for American companies and capital, and is therefore attempting to force capitulation. This is why so much of US policy concerning China is devoted to try and destroy or contain the bulk of China’s own high-end industries and companies.

For example, the US does not want China to develop its own commercial passenger jets, such as the C919; it wants Beijing to rely eternally on Boeing. It does not want China to develop its own microchip-making capabilities, as this will undermine the US control over the industry. You get the picture. The US had little issue with China dominating low-end cheap manufacturing that makes trivial and unimportant goods such as throwaway plastic hotel combs or nail clippers. That’s the kind of economic engagement Washington wants, where the balance of profits is in its favour, but the burden of consumer and labour exploitation is on the Chinese.

Finally, it might be worth noting that the US does not tolerate any economic competitor, even among allied states. Hence it has shown little remorse for the destruction and deindustrialization of the German economy, or when it crippled Japan with the 1985 Plaza Accord. The only acceptable China to the US is a weak China, that serves no purpose other than to be a cash cow from which all profits, incentive and talent are vacuumed home. China sees this as completely unacceptable, akin to a new ‘Century of Humiliation’ and this is why no ‘economic truce’ is possible if it is predicated on China’s surrender to American terms.

American presidents confess to war crimes, but the International Criminal Court is blind, deaf and mute when it comes to the US.

The Russian president said his country is opposed to the emergence of a unipolar world that revolves around Washington’s interests

Moscow is striving to create a multipolar world rather than one that is centered around the US, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said. In an interview with Rossiya-1 TV channel on Sunday, he argued that Washington was trying to mold the world exclusively to fit its own agenda.

Putin suggested that America’s “satellite states” are also well aware of these “selfish” intentions. However, for the time being, they have chosen to turn a blind eye to this due to “various reasons connected first and foremost with huge dependence in the economic sphere and defense,” the Russian leader said. [Ed. Note: threat of annihilation by biological, financial, even environmental terrorist acts.]

Some of Washington’s allies also see confrontation with Russia as a unifying cause, eclipsing any differences between them and the US, he added.

As an example, Putin cited the US government’s efforts to attract European businesses to American soil, as well as a submarine deal last summer, which saw Canberra abruptly exit a contract with a French manufacturer in favor of a US competitor. That incident was humiliating for Paris, the president said.

Putin emphasized that Moscow “cannot and will not accept behavior like this.”

In the end, such a stance – the fight for a multipolar world, for respect for each and everyone in the international arena, for taking into account everyone’s interests – I don’t have the slightest doubt, will prevail.

Putin also claimed that Western elites will only be satisfied and prepared to “admit us into the so-called family of civilized nations” if Russia disintegrates into several independent states. In such a scenario, he said, the West would “place [the resulting countries] under its control.” He added that the disintegration of Russia in such circumstances would call into question the existence of the Russian people in its current form.

Commenting on his decision earlier this week to suspend Russia’s participation in the New START Treaty – the last remaining nuclear accord between Moscow and Washington – Putin argued that the move was required to safeguard Russia’s security as well as its “strategic stability.”

According to the Russian president, he opted for this course of action in light of a more aggressive NATO, which “has announced as its prime goal” Russia’s strategic defeat.

via RT

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

For over a decade there has been an open globalist obsession with the Chinese governmental model – A love affair, if you will. Many top proponents of global centralization including Henry Kissinger and George Soros have praised China in the past and hinted that the communist country is burgeoning into a major player within the New World Order. Soros expressed this exact sentiment way back in 2009, around the time that China began courting the IMF and issuing trillions in Yuan based treasury debt in order to join their global currency initiative.

Several years later, China was inducted into the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights basket. The CCP now avidly supports the creation of a new global currency system with the IMF in control.

This is a reality I have been writing about for many years: China does NOT stand in opposition to global centralization under the control of western oligarchs. All they want is a prominent seat at the table when the “Great Reset” kicks off and total centralization begins. But the above information only suggests an economic relationship between China and the globalists. Does the alliance go even further than that?

Recently, Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum gave an interview to the Chinese government controlled CGTN at the APEC Summit. In that interview, Schwab praises China as a role model for many other nations. This might shock some people considering China’s economy is faltering, with their global exports plunging in 2022 and their housing market in shambles. This decline is in large part due to global stagflation, but also due to their insane “zero covid” policy which has kept the nation under pandemic lockdown for years.

Remember all those covid cultists who were cheering for China last year? Remember when they claimed that China was a perfect example on why lockdowns are necessary and proof that they work? Yeah, those people were morons.

China’s economy is now in freefall with their manufacturing base under extreme stress from the mandates. Furthermore, it would appear that the Chinese populace is finally fed up with the draconian conditions and are rising up in revolt.

The Chinese government sent hazmat clad troops to put down the rebellion while stomping protesters into the ground. Take note and remember this video when you hear about Apple’s hostility to Elon Musk’s free speech policies on Twitter – Apple loves authoritarianism, as do all globalist run corporations.

China continues to terrorize the citizenry with secret police visits to vocal dissenters and fleets of drones hovering above city streets monitoring foot traffic and blaring propaganda messages. Some drones even spray unknown chemicals across entire city blocks. In the meantime, China has fully implemented digital vaccine passports systems tied to public venues and retail stores. You cannot function in a major Chinese city without an up-to-date vaccine passport or a negative covid test taken every couple of weeks.

All of these events and conditions are often treated as disconnected or coincidentally associated. No one is asking the right questions. The big question being WHY? Why is the Chinese government sabotaging its own economy with lockdowns and oppressing the population to the point of open revolt (a rarity among the normally subservient Chinese people). Why keep the lockdowns going when it is clear to the rest of the world that the pandemic is over and that the lockdowns and masks never worked to begin with?

I would ask CCP officials a simple question that many of us in America also asked our own government a over a year ago: If the vaccines work, why enforce mandates and lockdowns? If it’s because the vaccines don’t work, then why try to force the population to take the jab? Beyond that, if the masks and lockdowns work, then why is China facing yet another supposed covid infection wave?

Obviously the CCP does not care about the well being of the average Chinese citizen. There is no logic to anything they are doing, just as there was no logic to anything Biden, Fauci and the CDC were doing in the US. The difference is, Americans were able to force the globalists in the US to abandon their mandate agenda, likely because we are heavily armed and they realized too many of us were non-compliant. In China, there is no civilian militia equivalent.

The country was a dystopia before, now it is something different – It is an experiment in technocratic tyranny that is being taken to the extreme. China is willing to starve, arrest, beat and even kill people who they claim they are trying to protect from the virus.

It is no mistake that nearly every policy China is implementing is a direct copy of policies suggested by the WEF and institutions like the Imperial College of London back in 2020 at the start of the outbreak. The globalists argued that “we are not going back to normal” and that the public would have to sacrifice many of our freedoms in order to stop the pandemic. In reality, none of their policies were effective in stopping the spread, but they were very effective at suppressing the populace. And in the case of China, nothing did ever go back to normal.

The unspoken rationale, in my view, connects directly back to China’s long term relationship to the globalists and their desire to be a part of the New World Order, also referred to as the “multipolar world order”, the 4th Industrial Revolution, the Great Reset and a dozen other names. If you want to know the real globalist vision for the future, take a look at China today and then multiply the pain and suffering another hundred fold. China is a beta test.

Perhaps it’s a test to see what level of tyranny people are willing to endure. Maybe a test of the functionality of different surveillance systems and control mechanisms. Maybe a practice run for the inevitable riots and rebellion that would occur in numerous countries and the best way to deal with them. Globalists like Klaus Schwab are not only interest in China as an economic role model, he sees China as a societal role model for much of the west, with some tweaks here and there.

The problem for the establishment is that if there are visible examples of freedom despite covid, then other nations will start to question the necessity of their own lockdowns. Even the Chinese people are starting to fight back. They can’t implement their NWO one country at a time, they will have to oppress many countries at once.

As I have been saying for the past year to some of the more nihilistic people in the liberty movement who think all it lost, understand that you are lucky to be living in the US right now and you should be thankful for the millions of conservatives that actively and vocally refused to comply with the mandates and vaccines. They saved the country from greater tyranny. If the globalists had got what they really wanted, we would look a lot like China right now.

We hovered close to that black sun and danced with the devil, but we are not beaten.

As it stands, China continues to represent a model of authoritarian dreams; a research study in mass psychological torture. Far from being a counter-point to the globalists, it is actually a globalist work in progress. Watch what happens there closely, because the evils perpetrated there will eventually be attempted here at home.

Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

Excerpts

“Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.” – Aldous Huxley – Letter to George Orwell about 1984 in 1949

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution” ― Aldous Huxley

When I step back from the day-to-day minutia and trivialities flooding my senses from all directions and media devices, it almost appears as if I’m living in a highly scripted reality TV program where the characters and plots are designed to create passions and reactions to support whatever narrative is being weaved by those directing the show. Huxley really did foresee the future as clearly and concisely as anyone could, decades before his dystopian vision came to fruition.

Orwell’s boot on the face vision is only now being initiated because a few too many critical thinkers have awoken from their pharmaceutically induced stupor and begun to question the plotline of this spectacle masquerading as our reality. The mass formation psychosis infecting the weak-minded masses; relentless mass propaganda designed to mislead, misinform, and brainwash a dumbed down and government indoctrinated populace; and complete control of the story line through media manipulation, regulation, and censorship of the truth; has run its course. As Charles Mackay stated 180 years ago, the masses go mad as a herd, but only regain their senses slowly, and one by one.

My recognition that the world seems to be scripted and directed by Machiavellian managers, working behind a dark shroud, representing an invisible governing authority, molding our minds, suggesting our ideas, dictating our tastes, and creating fear, triggered a recollection of the 1998 Jim Carrey movie – The Truman Show. The movie, directed by Peter Weir (Gallipoli, Witness, Dead Poet’s Society), had the surreal feel of Forest Gump, while beckoning the horrendous introduction of reality TV (Big Brother, Survivor), which poisons our shallow unserious society to this day. The plot of the movie focuses on individuality versus conformity, consumerism, voyeurism, reality versus manipulation, false narratives, the truth about the American Dream, and the dangers of surveillance in a technologically advanced society.

But this psychological phenomenon is not new to mankind, as Plato described an ancient Truman Show analog in the 6th Century with his Allegory of the Cave. The nature of human beings has not changed across the trials and tribulations of history.

In the allegory, Plato describes a group of people who have lived chained in a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners’ reality but are not an accurate representation of the real world. An enlightened man is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand the shadows on the wall are not reality.

The ignorant inmates do not desire to leave their prison/cave, for it is the only life they know, and they fear reality. The fire and the puppets, used to create shadows, are controlled by artists. Plato indicates the fire is also the political doctrine taught by a nation state. The artists use light and shadows to indoctrinate the masses with the dominant doctrines of the times. Few humans ever escape the cave. Most humans will remain at the bottom of the cave, with a small few elevated as major artists, to project the shadows keeping the masses disoriented, confused and fearful.

“Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst.” ― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

“Most people are not just comfortable in their ignorance, but hostile to anyone who points it out.” ― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

The State is run by an eager group of psychopaths who are hell bent on destroying our civil society and common culture on behalf of globalists attempting to implement their Great Reset agenda, and enforcing it through technological surveillance, mind control through propaganda messaging, and strict management of the daily plot via mainstream media and social media censorship of the truth. As Plato contemplated fifteen centuries ago, most men will remain in their cave, believing shadows presented by their overlords is reality, never questioning their servitude or seeking the truth.

Never has this fact been truer than during this covid pandemic reality show directed by our Christof – mass murderer Anthony Fauci. The willful ignorance of the masses was assumed by the covid controllers who cast shadows of fear and death on the cave walls of the locked down extras in this well-orchestrated reality show. Using a purposefully misleading PCR test to vastly overestimate “cases”, paying hospitals to classify all deaths as covid, and having the propaganda professionals at CNN, MSNBC and Fox showing Covid Death Counters on their screens 24/7 to terrify the masses into compliance was the Covid Show.

Once the fear level was ramped to eleven on the control dial, the producers of this show introduced the miraculous Big Pharma vaccine antidote to save the day. Their script was so believable they were able to convince over 5 billion members of their captive audience to inject themselves with an untested, unproven genetic therapy, that didn’t prevent you from catching, transmitting, getting sick, being hospitalized, or dying from the Fauci funded Wuhan lab produced virus. But, as a dramatic twist to the tale, it seems the “vaccine” causes myocarditis, blood clots, infertility, miscarriages, heart attacks, cancer, and sudden death.

Despite the obvious dangers and failures of these “vaccines”, those bullied into getting jabbed became so comfortable in their ignorance, they were easily persuaded to hate the unjabbed and wish for their deaths. Orwell’s “Two Minutes of Hate” was extended for over a year and continues to this day. Rather than think critically and question why annual flu cases averaged 35 million per year prior to 2020 but dropped to near ZERO during the covid “emergency”, the cave dwellers lashed out in anger at anyone questioning the plot, because to admit they were duped would destroy their self-esteem and decrease their virtue signal credits.

The annual flu didn’t disappear. Covid was the annual flu, with a multi-billion-dollar marketing campaign. This wasn’t a pandemic, but an IQ test, and most people failed miserably. But the critical thinking unvaxxed are still considered the enemy of the state, especially since they have been proven right.

Whether we are trapped in an artificial world produced in a dome, cave, or our current technologically advanced surveillance propaganda state, the goal of those controlling our false reality is to take away our freedoms, crush dissent, keep us ignorant of the truth, and treat us as plebs to be taxed and molded. Christof, whose name is supposed to invoke him being a god-like figure ruling over Truman’s world, declares Truman could discover the truth and leave at any time, while using every diabolical trick to keep that from ever happening, because his show generated revenues exceeding the GDP of a small country.

Truman and ourselves are essentially prisoners in a vast production, and our overlords believe it is their duty to convince us to love our servitude and prefer our cells, because it is financially beneficial to the overlords and their crew.

Our world is not fake, but it is tightly controlled by those running the show. Seemingly random events, plots, and subplots are manipulated to generate specific emotions and reactions by the public in order to achieve the objectives of those benefitting from the various storylines. They are molding our minds and forming our tastes through psychological and technological manipulation of our daily existence. Christof explained why most rarely discover the truth or question the world they live in – “We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented. It’s as simple as that.”

We have allowed men we have never seen to dictate how we live our lives, the choices we make, and which politicians and “experts” to believe, without ever putting in the effort to understand why we are being prodded to do so. We are locked in a self-imposed prison of desires, emotions, and needs through mass media messaging and a constant barrage of advertisements. Conformity and obedience are the desired traits sought by the ruling class, while individuality and skepticism are frowned upon and punished through social ostracism.

We are conditioned from birth to believe what they tell us to believe. Government school indoctrination and mass media misinformation does the trick. Distracted by our techno-gadgets and ignorant of truth is how the globalist oligarchs methodically implement their Great Reset agenda. They are so convinced of the ignorance of the masses they openly proclaim their depopulation and techno-prison schemes with no fear of push back or retribution.

[ … ]

This is exactly how our controllers treat the ignorant masses. They feed us stories designed to make us fearful and compliant to the exhortations of their paid experts. Paid to lie. Paid to misinform. Paid to persuade people a dangerous concoction is “safe and effective”. The evilness of using Sesame Street characters to convince four-year-old children they need this Big Pharma gene altering toxic brew, even though essentially ZERO children on earth died from covid, is a testament to the greed and malevolent impulses of those in power. Vast amounts of ever-increasing advertising revenue are what kept The Truman Show on the air for thirty years.

The covid advertising campaign will never be topped, as Hollywood stars, top athletes, famous writers, rock legends, supposedly impartial journalists, and all the major networks said SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!! Everyone was for sale, and all they had to do was lie and say the jabs were “safe and effective”. Product placement was the money-making formula for the Truman Show, while hard selling a Big Pharma phony cure over the airwaves 24/7 using the tax dollars of the victims was the final solution of the Great Reset Cabal.

[…]

“Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light” ― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

This world of manufactured dystopian pleasure harkens more towards Huxley’s Brave New World, where pharmaceuticals and conditioning would keep the public seeking pleasure, pre-occupied with trivialities, distracted by materialism, unable to think critically, and reduced to passivity and egoism through the control of messaging by their controllers. Our efficient totalitarian state has gained complete control by convincing the masses to love their servitude and beg for more rules, restrictions, and reduction of liberties in the name of safety and security.

Smart phones, smart cities, and smart streets are nothing more than code for spying on you and controlling you. Truman finally understood his liberty was his to choose and not Christof’s to give. There is a small minority of Americans who are realizing the same thing after two years of totalitarian measures designed to take away our freedoms and liberty. The question is whether enough will exit this tyrannical government produced show to make a difference. The future of mankind literally depends on the answer to this question.

“Liberties aren’t given, they are taken.” T― Aldous Huxley

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Just as those controlling the Truman Show were not doing it for Truman’s benefit, but for their enrichment, those controlling the puppet strings of our society today had no interest in our health over the last two years, our financial well-being, our psychological well-being, or the peaceful rational functioning of our civilization. They have no interest in securing our border, reducing crime, holding fair elections, promoting peaceful solutions to global conflict, or allowing the truth to reach the masses. Their agenda has been and continues to be, the destruction of our civilized society, obliteration of our core standards and norms, depopulation of the planet, confiscation of our wealth, and ultimately our enslavement through technological shackles and chains.

As Huxley noted decades ago, technology has just provided our civilization with a more efficient means of going backwards. Technology is being used by our controllers to monitor our movements, communications, and to surveil, distract, and amuse us to death. It is no longer a force for good, but a means to control us. They plan to use technology to disarm their citizens through increasingly authoritarian regulations, sold as keeping us safe from mass shooters.

Their climate agenda isn’t about the climate, but about complete control of the masses. When government and their social media attack dogs monitor the citizens for “hate speech and misinformation”, and dole out retribution at their whim, our system is profoundly broken and extremely warped. They are supposed to answer to us. But these megalomaniacs have much bigger agenda.

We’ve lost all sense of reality, reason, and truth in a profoundly abnormal world, created by those we allowed to ascend to power through the control and influence of shadowy globalist billionaires operating as an invisible government, with Deep State apparatchiks doing the dirty work. Schwab, Gates, Soros, the World Economic Forum, and whoever hides in the shadows behind these psychopaths, intend to control the entire world and steal all the wealth because they believe they are smarter, more ruthless, and know what’s best for the lowly peasants polluting their satanic playground planet.

They know facts can be ignored when they’ve conditioned the masses to be willfully ignorant. They know they can lie without implications, but even more powerful, they can stay silent about the truth through censorship, suppression, and cancellation of truth tellers. The adaptation of the masses to this abnormal society, created by evil power-seeking men, is a form of mental illness – or as documented by Mattias Desmet in his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism – Mass Formation Psychosis.

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

I know I will never adapt or adjust to this abnormal society. We certainly can’t change a system, so thoroughly rigged and controlled (e.g., 2022 Arizona election and the 2020 presidential election), through traditional means. Those in control can easily buy-off our politicians, scientists, doctors, academics, TV personalities, and journalists to spin whatever web they choose, enabling their despicable anti-human agenda of deviancy. The only viable solution is the individual solution of walking away from this phony world.

Armed revolution is a non-starter, as the oligarchs have far more firepower, and the dissenters are unorganized and scattered. A form of ‘Irish Democracy’ where a silent dogged resistance, marked by the withdrawal from society, belligerence to authority and non-compliance with government dictates by millions of ordinary people would accomplish far more than rioting and armed revolution. Millions have already practiced a form of Irish Democracy by not masking, not social distancing, not getting jabbed, and taking control of their own health decisions.

They have almost sealed the escape hatch in this dystopian paradise of pleasure and pain. They know their techniques of control through fear work like a charm. Their final task to achieve total control is central bank digital currencies (CBDC), where everything we buy and sell is tracked digitally, so taxes can be levied, your life tracked, and if you choose to dissent from government directives, your ability to utilize CBDCs will be turned off. Micro-chipping us is next on the agenda.

We need to reduce our tax and digital footprint now. It might seem hopeless in going to battle against these vile, vindictive vermin, but the solution is to not play. Many have already walked away from the modern world, taking to the country – farming, homesteading, bartering, and only giving to Caesar the bare minimum. They’ve chosen a hard, but a far more fulfilling life.

The more people who disassociate from their fake world, the weaker they get. As their hold on our lives weakens, they will lash out. This is why it is important to be armed. Direct armed confrontation with the establishment’s forces is foolish, but guerrilla tactics on land you know would start to eat away at the morale of the paid police thugs sent to enforce their dictates. The beast isn’t as strong as it portrays. It’s broke and its empire of debt is crumbling.

If millions walk out the exit door, the beast will begin to starve and eventually die. Maybe a new, less complex, smaller, more community-oriented society could be born from the ashes. Tribe up with like-minded individuals with different skills, if possible. There is hope if enough patriots decide to regain their senses and walk away from this abnormal society, leaving our totalitarian Christofs to wallow in their failure to control the truly awoken.

by Doug Casey via International Man

International Man: The World Economic Forum (WEF) describes its mission as the “international organization for public-private cooperation.”

What do you make of the WEF and the power it wields?

Doug Casey: “International organization for public-private cooperation” is a code phrase for economic fascism—which is to say, the hand-in-glove melding of the political power of the State with the economic power of corporations.

Things like the WEF, and other NGOs (non-governmental organizations), institutes, and think tanks, have proliferated in recent years. They’re almost all destructive parasites on productive society.

Almost all of them are leftist, statist, and collectivist in orientation. They’re typically populated by intellectuals and academics and funded by tax-exempt foundations, usually set up by elderly do-gooders interested in leaving a “legacy.”

The WEF is by far the most successful of the breed. Instead of just cadging donations so intellectuals could hang around and seem prestigious, in 1971, Klaus Schwab formed a club where the rich and powerful could discuss ideas with other members of the overlord class. Political and financial types could find a philosophical home, disguising the quest for money and power with a patina of benevolence. It’s become an amazingly large and powerful organization. They have roughly 800 full-time employees, most of them very highly paid. They have an annual budget of over $300 million. Their balance sheet indicates that the WEF is worth over $1 billion, funded by major corporations who give it millions of dollars, as do various governments. Most of the world’s political leaders and corporations are members.

Schwab was very clever to have put together an organization where the richest, most powerful, and most influential people in the world are charged huge amounts to be introduced to each other and talk about how they can become even richer, more powerful, and more influential.

It seems clear that members of the WEF have to toe the party line or be disinvited. Nobody wants to be excommunicated from the WEF or cut off from association with other rich and powerful people. It’s safe to say that WEF members share a common philosophy, one that’s in line with Schwab’s weltanschauung.

FWIW, I think it’s wrong for public corporations to make political, charitable, or indeed any kind of contributions. A corporation’s raison d’etre is to generate money for its shareholders, not allow management to play big shot. Managements often like to give away shareholders’ money; it costs them nothing, but they reap the prestige of giving. Better that the money be distributed to shareholders so they can dispose of it as they wish. If that were the case, outfits like the WEF would have a lot less money and power. And wouldn’t be in a position to promote the pernicious ideas it does.

For instance, it would appear that Klaus Schwab actually originated, or at least popularized, the term “stakeholder.” Stakeholderism believes that business is obligated to treat employees, customers, local residents, and anyone who claims to be affected by business as if they had some right to what a company produces. People who identify as stakeholders easily develop into mooches and leeches. Schwab was also an early supporter of the ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) movements. And political correctness in general.

With as much money, power, and influence as the WEF has, it’s easy for them to groom up-and-comers. They created several sub-organizations for people who are under 40 years old—where they can reinforce their beliefs that the world ought to go in a certain way—under the direction of WEF-type people.

Schwab has to be complimented for having built the WEF from nothing and making himself one of the most powerful people in the world. But the WEF is a dangerous and despicable organization. It’s basically what’s known as a self-licking ice cream cone—it serves no useful purpose but to perpetuate itself and its members.

International Man: Yuval Noah Harari is a key adviser to the WEF.

He has risen to fame as reviewers and editors have anointed him as a public intellectual.

What’s your take on the rise of Harari?

Doug Casey: Harari is a perfect example of how, when an organization like the WEF gets in the back of somebody, they can make him rich, famous, and influential. These people all feed each other and scratch each other’s backs.

Harari apparently came from a perfectly average middle-class Israeli family, but I would think that he’s got to be worth at least $50 million, just based upon sales of 30 million copies of his books. He appears to be an ideal court intellectual, living quietly with his husband in a modest suburb of Tel Aviv, promoting the party line.

International Man: Harari has made several disturbing statements, including:

“Covid is critical because this is what convinces people to accept, to legitimize, total biometric surveillance.

We want to stop this pandemic. We need not just to monitor people, we need to monitor what is happening under their skin.

Governments want to know not just where we go or who we meet. Above all, they want to know what is happening under our skin.”

What do you think about this?

Doug Casey: Well, he really wants to transform the world, and it’s kind of clever the way he proposes to do it.

His book Sapiens, which I read about 10 years ago, is a competent enough summation of how humans evolved over the course of the Pleistocene during the last 2.5 million years. It doesn’t make any cosmic breakthroughs but tells a basically correct story. He explains how technology started to take on a life of its own and how we changed the world. And how technology’s now changing us at the rate of Moore’s Law. Fair enough.

The problem lies in his projections of how and where humans will evolve over the years to come. In particular, who will guide that evolution. And if things continue advancing at the rate that they are, it’s likely that machines will integrate with humans.

I see no problem with that. If you voluntarily want to replace body parts with mechanical parts—a new knee, a new heart, be a $6 Million Man—that’s wonderful. Taking it one step further, if you can put a chip in your brain and instantly access all the knowledge on the Internet without going through a computer, that could be even more wonderful, except for the fact the Social Credit System and hackers will have access to your chip.

The problem is that the WEF people think that they know what’s best for the rest of humanity. And they feel it’s for the good of all that they be closely monitored, controlled, and guided. They’ve made statements to the effect that most people are “useless eaters,” which is probably true at this point. Or it will be once everybody gets a Guaranteed Annual Income—enough to keep them sated with avocado toast and vanilla lattes while they watch cat videos at the local Starbucks. They’d really like to do without superfluous humans and just have the elite calling the shots. Humans that remain would amount to serfs. The WEF have said, “You’ll own nothing and be happy.” They’re very bold.

It’s very disturbing how they talk about guiding the advance to the next stage of human evolution. As pessimistic as I am about the current state of the world and where it’s going, I still believe in The Ascent of Man— but I believe it can only happen if individual liberty is maximized. From the point of view of personal freedom, Harari is actually talking about regressing to feudal times. Albeit a kinder and gentler version, where wise solons like Klaus and Yuval are in charge.

As far as I can tell, his values are antithetical to those of Western Civilization. But he’s an effective mouthpiece to convince the hoi polloi that their leaders have their best interests at heart. And I suppose they do. At least the way a farmer has the best interests of his dairy—or beef—cattle at heart.

International Man: Harari has often described a high-tech totalitarian future where a small elite with access to the latest technology evolves into different beings. At the same time, drugs and video games pacify the masses until their eventual extinction.

What are your thoughts about this dystopian future? Is it inevitable?

Doug Casey: Harari projects a certain inevitability to the evolution of technology, and he may actually be right.

I don’t mind change. Rapid technological progress has been accelerating for the last 10,000 years and, with a little luck, will go hyperbolic with the evolution of nanotechnology, computers, biotech, space exploration, robotics, and artificial intelligence. These are all good things.

The question is whether these things will be imposed upon humanity or will they be something that individuals can adopt or not as they choose? To me, this is the essential ethical and moral question.

Harari, and for that matter, the rest of these WEF people, never examine any ethical or moral issues.

For instance, Harari is very big on transgenderism, which he seems to want to make into a political hobby horse—where it’s not just accepted as a psychological aberration, but is almost imposed on society, whether you like it or not.

He’s a vegan. I have no problem with being a vegan. It’s just that he wants to impose his views of the correct way to deal with animals (absolutely including humans) on everybody else. He’s certain that he knows what’s best for everybody else.

I’ve long believed in the arrival of the Singularity, which Ray Kurzweil has discussed in detail. I think it’s a good thing. Technological progress has always been a good thing—whether we’re talking about the invention of gunpowder that allowed the average man to overthrow his medieval rulers, or the printing press, that allowed peasants to access the knowledge of the ruling classes.

But the problem is that the bad guys usually get control of technology first. The powers-that-be use tech to impose their will upon the little people until the cat gets out of the bag.

I’m all for the rapid evolution of technology, even though it’s very dangerous because the power-mongers, the bad guys, and the minions of the State usually get it first.

On the bright side, I suspect that under the influence of Schwab and his muchacho de mantequilla Harari, the WEF will collapse. The snakes in the snake pit will eventually turn on each other. Optimism is warranted because stupid ideas have always come and gone throughout history. Evil is usually vanquished over the long run.

The WEF is promoting destructive ideas in a dangerous time. If you value free thought, free minds, and free markets, recognize the WEF as an enemy.

Editor’s Note: Sociopaths are drawn to the government and international organizations like the World Economic Forum. They seek power and control over others through coercion, taxation and more.

Unfortunately, there’s little any individual can practically do to change the course of these trends in motion.

The best you can and should do is to stay informed so that you can protect yourself in the best way possible, and even profit from the situation.

New York Times best-selling author Doug Casey and his team just released a guide that will show you exactly how. Click here to download the PDF now.

by Doug Casey via International Man

International Man: The decline of Western Civilization is on a lot of people’s minds.

Let’s talk about this trend.

Doug Casey: Western Civilization has its origins in ancient Greece. It’s unique among the world’s civilizations in putting the individual—as opposed to the collective—in a central position. It enshrined logic and rational thought—as opposed to mysticism and superstition—as the way to deal with the world. It’s because of this that we have science, technology, great literature and art, capitalism, personal freedom, the concept of progress, and much, much more. In fact, almost everything worth having in the material world is due to Western Civilization.

Ayn Rand once said “East minus West equals zero.” I think she went a bit too far, as a rhetorical device, but she was essentially right. When you look at what the world’s other civilizations have brought to the party, at least over the last 2,500 years, it’s trivial.

I lived in the Orient for years. There are many things I love about it—martial arts, yoga, and the cuisine among them. But all the progress they’ve made is due to adopting the fruits of the West.

International Man: There are so many things degrading Western Civilization. Where do we begin?

Doug Casey: It’s been said, correctly, that a civilization always collapses from within. World War 1, in 1914, signaled the start of the long collapse of Western Civilization. Of course, termites were already eating away at the foundations, with the writings of people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx. It’s been on an accelerating downward path ever since, even though technology and science have been improving at a quantum pace. They are, however, like delayed action flywheels, operating on stored energy and accumulated capital. Without capital, intellectual freedom, and entrepreneurialism, science and technology will slow down. I’m optimistic we’ll make it to Kurzweil’s Singularity, but there are no guarantees.

Things also changed with the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. Before that, the US used gold coinage for money. “The dollar” was just a name for 1/20th of an ounce of gold. That is what the dollar was. Paper dollars were just receipts for gold on deposit in the Treasury. The income tax, enacted the same year, threw more sand in the gears of civilization. The world was much freer before the events of 1913 and 1914, which acted to put the State at the center of everything.

The Fed and the income tax are both disastrous and unnecessary things, enemies of the common man in every way. Unfortunately, people have come to believe they’re fixtures in the cosmic firmament. They’re the main reasons—there are many other reasons, though, unfortunately—why the average American’s standard of living has been dropping since the early 1970s. In fact, were it not for these things, and the immense amount of capital destroyed during the numerous wars of the last 100 years, I expect we’d have already colonized the moon and Mars. Among many other things…

But I want to re-emphasize that the science, the technology, and all the wonderful toys we have are not the essence of Western Civilization. They’re consequences of individualism, capitalism, rational thought, and personal freedom. It’s critical not to confuse cause and effect.

International Man: You mentioned that the average American’s standard of living has dropped since the early 1970s. This is directly related to the US government abandoning the dollar’s last link to gold in 1971. Since then, the Federal Reserve has been able to debase the US dollar without limit.

I think the dollar’s transformation into a purely fiat currency has eroded the rule of law and morality in the US. It’s similar to what happened in the Roman Empire after it started debasing its currency.

What do you think, Doug?

Doug Casey: All the world’s governments and central banks share a common philosophy, which drives these policies. They believe that you create economic activity by stimulating demand, and you stimulate demand by printing money. And, of course, it’s true, in a way. Roughly the same way a counterfeiter can stimulate a local economy.

Unfortunately, they ignore that, and completely ignore that the way a person or a society becomes wealthy is by producing more than they consume and saving the difference. That difference, savings, is how you create capital. Without capital you’re reduced to subsistence, scratching at the earth with a stick. These people think that by inflating—which is to say destroying—the currency, they can create prosperity. But what they’re really doing, is destroying capital: When you destroy the value of the currency, that discourages people from saving it. And when people don’t save, they can’t build capital, and the vicious cycle goes on.

This is destructive for civilization itself, in both the long term and the short term. The more paper money, the more credit, they create, the more society focuses on finance, as opposed to production. It’s why there are many times more people studying finance than science. The focus is increasingly on speculation, not production. Financial engineering, not mechanical, electrical, or chemical engineering. And lots of laws and regulations to keep the unstable structure from collapsing.

What keeps a truly civil society together isn’t laws, regulations, and police. It’s peer pressure, social opprobrium, moral approbation, and your reputation. These are the four elements that keep things together. Western Civilization is built on voluntarism. But, as the State grows, that’s being replaced by coercion in every aspect of society. There are regulations on the most obscure areas of life. As Harvey Silverglate pointed out in his book, the average American commits three felonies a day. Whether he’s caught and prosecuted is a subject of luck and the arbitrary will of some functionary. That’s antithetical to the core values of Western Civilization.

International Man: Speaking of ancient civilizations like Rome, interest rates are just coming off the the lowest levels they’ve been in 5,000 years of recorded history. Trillions of dollars’ worth of government bonds trade at negative yields.

Of course, this couldn’t happen in a free market. It’s only possible because of central bank manipulation.

How will artificially low interest rates affect the collapse of Western Civilization?

Doug Casey: It’s really, really serious. I previously thought it was metaphysically impossible to have negative interest rates but, in the Bizarro World central banks have created, it’s happened.

Negative interest rates discourage saving. Once again, saving is what builds capital. Without capital you wind up as an empty shell—Rome in 450 A.D., or Detroit today—lots of wonderful but empty buildings and no economic activity. Worse, it forces people to desperately put their money in all manner of idiotic speculations in an effort to stay ahead of inflation. They wind up chasing the bubbles the funny money creates.

Let me re-emphasize something: in order for science and technology to advance you need capital. Where does capital come from? It comes from people producing more than they consume and saving the difference. Debt, on the other hand, means you’re living above your means. You’re either consuming the capital others have saved, or you’re mortgaging your future.

Zero and negative interest rate policies, and the creation of money out of nowhere, are actually destructive of civilization itself. It makes the average guy feel that he’s not in control of his own destiny. He starts believing that the State, or luck, or Allah will provide for him. That attitude is typical of people from backward parts of the world—not Western Civilization.

International Man: What does it say about the economy and society that people work so hard to interpret what officials from the Federal Reserve and other central banks say?

Doug Casey: It’s a shameful waste of time. They remind me of primitives seeking the counsel of witch doctors. One hundred years ago, the richest people in the country—the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, and such—made their money creating industries that actually made stuff. Now, the richest people in the country just shuffle money around. They get rich because they’re close to the government and the hydrant of currency materialized by the Federal Reserve. I’d say it’s a sign that society in the US has become quite degraded.

The world revolves much less around actual production, but around guessing the direction of financial markets. Negative interest rates are creating bubbles, and will eventually result in an economic collapse.

International Man: Negative interest rates are essentially a tax on savings. A lot of people would rather pull their money out of the bank and stuff it under a mattress than suffer that sting.

The economic central planners know this. It’s why they’re using negative interest rates to ramp up the War on Cash—the push to eliminate paper currency and create a cashless society.

The banking system is very fragile. Banks don’t hold much paper cash. It’s mostly digital bytes on a computer. If people start withdrawing paper money en masse, it won’t take much to bring the whole system down.

Their solution is to make accessing cash harder, and in some cases, illegal. That’s why the economic witch doctors at Harvard are pounding the table to get rid of the $100 bill.

Take France, for example. It’s now illegal to make cash transactions over €1,000 without documenting them properly.

Negative interest rates have turbocharged the War on Cash. If the central planners win this war, it would be the final deathblow to financial privacy.

How does this all relate to the collapse of Western Civilization?

Doug Casey: I believe the next step in their idiotic plan is to abolish cash. Decades ago they got rid of gold coinage, which used to circulate day to day in people’s pockets. Then they got rid of silver coinage. Now, they’re planning to get rid of cash altogether. So you won’t even have euros or dollars or pounds in your wallet anymore, or if you do, it will only be very small denominations. Everything else is going to have to be done through electronic payment processing.

This is a huge disaster for the average person: absolutely everything that you buy or sell, other than perhaps a candy bar or a hamburger, is going to have to go through the banking system. Thus, the government will be able to monitor every transaction and payment. Financial privacy, even what’s left of it today, will literally cease to exist.

Privacy is one of the big differences between a civilized society and a primitive society. In a primitive society, in your little dirt hut village, anybody can look through your window or pull back the flap on your tent. You have no privacy. Everybody can hear everything; see anything. This was one of the marvelous things about Western Civilization—privacy was valued, and respected. But that concept, like so many others, is on its way out…

International Man: You’ve mentioned before that language and words provide important clues to the collapse of Western Civilization. How so?

Doug Casey: Many of the words you hear, especially on television and other media, are confused, conflated, or completely misused. Many recent changes in the way words are used are corrupting the language. As George Orwell liked to point out, to control language is to control thought. The corruption of language is adding to the corruption of civilization itself. This is not a trivial factor in the degradation of Western Civilization.

Words—their exact meanings, and how they’re used—are critically important. If you don’t mean what you say and say what you mean, then it’s impossible to communicate accurately. Forget about transmitting philosophical concepts.

Take for example shareholders and stakeholders. We all know that a shareholder actually owns a share in a company, but have you noticed that over the last generation shareholders have become less important than stakeholders? Even though stakeholders are just hangers-on, employees, or people who are looking to get in on a shakedown. But everybody slavishly acknowledges, “Yes, we’ve got to look out for the stakeholders.”

Where did that concept come from? It’s a recent creation, but Boobus americanus seems to think it was carved in stone at the country’s founding.

We’re told to protect them, as if they were a valuable and endangered species. I say, “A pox upon stakeholders.” If they want a vote in what a company does, then they ought to become shareholders. Stakeholders are a class of being created out of nothing by Cultural Marxists for the purpose of shaking down shareholders.

Editor’s Note: Economically, politically, and socially, the United States seems to be headed down a path that’s not only inconsistent with the founding principles of the country, but accelerating quickly toward boundless decay.

In the years ahead, there will likely be much less stability of any kind.

That’s exactly why New York Times bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released an urgent new report titled Doug Casey’s Top 7 Predictions for the Raging 2020s.

Click here to download the free PDF now.

Other articles from this contributor:

• Doug Casey on the End of Western Civilization
• The Height of Idiocy
• Doug Casey on Class Warfare, “Eat the Rich” Sentiment, and What Happens Next
• Doug Casey on the Controlled Demolition of Food and Energy Supplies
• The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

What’s wrong with WhatsApp (hereafter WA)?

• It’s giving away your data to US intelligence agencies. And these are not mere words, on November 29, 2021, the US media declassified a document on what kind of data is given away by which messenger.

WA gives away your metadata every 15 minutes, including who you’ve texted, or called. Who is in the same chats with you and when you text there. That’s a lot even without the content of the messages themselves. In fact, the intelligence services can monitor you online, who you text and when, and if you back up your WA to iCloud or Google Drive, they get all your messages too. As the cooperation on warrants is established with them too. Yes, everything is on warrants, but writing a warrant for an enemy of the state? Not a problem.

What about Telegram? Terrorism warrants will only give away your phone number and IP address. Much more modest, not critical.

• WA is leaky. There was a great story in the media about how the Israeli commercial company NSO Group sold a special spy virus (Pegasus) to intelligence agencies around the world, working through hacking of WA. It targeted prominent journalists, politicians, and businessmen, including the world’s richest man at the time, Jeff Bezos. The CIA and NSA try to look for such vulnerabilities themselves, and if they find them, they try to keep them secret. If they repeat the successes of their Israeli colleagues, the WA on your phone will turn into a full-fledged spy, and leak all the data they have access to (geolocation, photos, correspondence, files).

WhatsApp may agree to “not shut down the vulnerability for a while due to a requirement of the authorities”, they are affiliated. The hacking story is real, the vulnerability was fixed after the scandal, and the author of these lines read the technical details of how this spyware works.

No such serious vulnerabilities were found in Telegram. No spyware was spread through it. Telegram’s code is open and has been scrutinized more thoroughly by experts around the world.

• When there’s nothing to lose and the White House’s pressure on the company is exceptionally strong, WA could be turned into full-fledged spyware. To do that, just release an update. Yes, it will be seen all over the world by researchers, but a lot of invaluable data will be collected in the meantime. WA will lose its reputation in individual countries, but the western media will support its “help against dreaded Russia”. It’s entirely possible, it won’t ruin the company, but it’s far from a core product.

Telegram? The White House has no such leverage on them.

https://t.me/NeoficialniyBeZsonoV/18048


The World Economic Forum (WEF) has announced it has recruited hundreds of thousands of “information warriors” to control the internet, policing social media and forums for “misinformation” and conspiracy content which will then be systematically shut down.
According to Klaus Schwab’s WEF, misinformation on the internet is an “infodemic” that is “potentially deadly” and requires a “cure.” The definition of misinformation, according to the WEF, is anything they disagree with. This means the information warriors will essentially be engaged in the act of shutting down dissent.

Conspiracy forums and Youtube comments sections are being targeted by the “digital first responders”who pretend to be ordinary users of the platform, but are actually working to disrupt proceedings and support the ideology of Klaus Schwab’s WEF.

Announcing the news on a WEF podcast, UN communications director Melissa Fleming said “So far, we’ve recruited 110,000 information volunteers, and we equip these information volunteers with the kind of knowledge about how misinformation spreads and ask them to serve as kind of ‘digital first-responders’ in those spaces where misinformation travels.”

The WEF are subliminally influencing the masses in order to push their narratives onto the people.

You can listen to the podcast in question here.

Also on the podcast, mainstream journalist Mark Little sets out potential solutions to the “infodemic.”

Little has worked for Twitter and founded Storyful, a social media news agency closely linked to the fact-checking program. He has now launched Kinzen, a company which is threatening to use artificial intelligence to censor online content.

“I‘ve started to see the spread of misinformation as a global health crisis,” Little tells World Vs Virus. “Misinformation is that serious a threat to our society.

“Misinformation is happening within our friends and families. So we have to find strategies to, first of all, recognize it. And, secondly, as active citizens, just like we wear masks to protect others, we need to be the good citizen, the active vector fighting back in our daily lives.”

Editor’s Note: This is an excellent description of the “political dog fight under the carpet” in the so-called West: the juggernaut Globalists and the weakling defenders of the traditional national order. What is missing is identifying who are the Globalists, the ultimate minuscule clique at the top, the “wizards” behind the curtain. Still a good round-up of recent events.

by Graham Hryce, an Australian journalist and former media lawyer, whose work has been published in The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Sunday Mail, the Spectator and Quadrant.

The Tory leadership candidates are a ‘confederacy of dunces’ united to tear Johnson down at the behest of global elites.

The global elites are no doubt still celebrating the political demise of Boris Johnson. In one sense, they are entitled to do so – after all, it was the dysfunctional and anti-democratic political culture they spawned over the past thirty years that brought him down.

With scant loyalty to the economic and cultural traditions of the countries in which they have accumulated nearly unchecked power, these new overlords have ushered in a globalised economy that has gradually and – ever more tumultuously since the 1990s – replaced the older economic order grounded in the nation state. The previous national elites were pushed aside in most Western democracies and now maintain only limited influence culturally and within certain traditional conservative parties.

All important institutions in most Western democracies have come under the control of the global elite. This includes the large transnational corporations, the financial sector, universities, the bureaucracy, the professions, legal institutions, large sections of the media. In addition to advocating an economic program that has impoverished and hollowed out the working and middle classes, their myriad ideologies – perhaps most prominent of which are catastrophic climate change, identity politics and political correctness – have decisively won the ‘culture wars’ in most Western societies.

The dramatic economic and ideological changes brought about by this cohort have also fundamentally reshaped and revolutionised politics in the West. Indicative of this is that both the Democratic Party in America and the Labour party in the United Kingdom have been fully taken over by these forces, and both have long since abandoned their traditional working-class constituencies.

These elites have also divided, and in some countries – such as France – completely destroyed traditional conservative and centrist parties. In the process, they have generated a powerful anti-democratic populist political backlash – personified by Donald Trump – that threatens to seriously destabilise democracy in the West.

It was the historian Christopher Lasch who first pointed out the intrinsically dysfunctional and anti-democratic aspects of the political culture created by the global elites in his book ‘The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy’, published in 1994.

For a brilliantly satirical account of precisely how the greed-driven global elites operate in the UK, both at a personal and institutional level, readers should consult Quentin Letts’ 2017 book ‘Patronising Bastards – How the Elites Betrayed Britain’.

Boris Johnson is at heart a traditional conservative politician (not for nothing is he the biographer of Winston Churchill), so it is not surprising that, within the West’s fractured and volatile contemporary political culture, his career has been a controversial and turbulent one.

Pushing through Brexit against the determined opposition of the global elites and the institutions they control – including the powerful Remainer segment of the Tory party (led by the gormless Theresa May), the former speaker of the House of Commons, the Supreme Court, and the woke establishment media – was a remarkable achievement.

So too was winning the 2019 election with an eighty-seat majority that brought substantial numbers of traditional working-class voters (in the so-called “Red Wall” seats) back within the Tory party fold for the first time in decades.

No contemporary British conservative politician other than Johnson could have accomplished either of these things. Paradoxically, however, it was these very achievements that the global elites could never forgive Johnson for.

Johnson tried to placate them by embracing their climate change program and even their misguided foreign policy of perpetuating the conflict in Ukraine. But these concessions were never going to be enough to save him.

Johnson’s poor political judgment and erratic behaviour – including his fragmented domestic political program, his sacking of Dominic Cummings, his indulging of the crassness and narcissism of his younger millennial wife, and his arrogant refusal to create a viable support base within the Conservative party – certainly played a part in his downfall.

It is a moot point as to whether Johnson could have survived had he behaved differently. I suspect that he was simply incapable of doing so.

What sealed Johnson’s political fate, however, was his anachronistic vision of the United Kingdom as an independent nation state that needed to integrate its displaced working class economically and politically (his “levelling up” program) – a worldview fundamentally at odds with the globalised perspective of the ruling elites.

The global elites are determined to destroy the nation state and the nineteenth century bourgeois values that underpinned it – hence their fervent and ruthless commitment to transnational ideologies and organisations, most notably the European Union.

They also despise the traditional working class, whose lives, values and culture they have upended, and whose economic security they have progressively destroyed over the past five decades. There is simply no place within their economic and cultural vision of a brave new world for those people that Hilary Clinton so contemptuously and revealingly described as “deplorables.” After all, didn’t this lot vote in droves for Brexit?

Now completely abandoned by traditional labour and centrist parties that once protected their interests, it is this group that has now – what other choice did it have? – turned in desperation to populist leaders such as Trump.

Therein lies the root of the intractable instability and irrationality at the heart of contemporary politics in most Western democracies.

Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each Western democracy is disintegrating in its own peculiar fashion. Johnson attempted to reverse this process in the United Kingdom by keeping working class voters within the Tory party. Now that Johnson has gone, however, these voters will desert the Tories and look for a populist alternative. This will create even more political instability and ensure that the Conservative Party cannot win the next election.

One aspect of this process of political disintegration is the poor quality of politician that it inevitably throws up.

The last thing that the global elites want are politicians of real stature; rather, they seek pliable non-entities that simply mouth their ideologies endlessly, and who can be controlled and dismissed when and as the elites see fit.

Johnson, for all his manifold faults, was a genuine political leader – and virtually uncontrollable.

Rational political discourse and debate is now impossible, it is the global elites that created in the West this irrational mode of politics, in which opponents are not debated but only “cancelled” – as Johnson has been.

It is now standard practice to use minor transgressions against the canons of political correctness – sensationalised ad nauseam by a compliant and debauched media – to depose political leaders. This is precisely what happened in Johnson’s case.

What were the egregious crimes that necessitated Johnson’s political cancelling? He and his staff at Number 10 had a few late-night drinks in breach of the Covid lockdown regulations (for which they later paid the requisite fines); and Johnson appointed an obscure MP party whip against whom historical allegations of sexual impropriety (some dating back to 2005) had been made. Johnson is also alleged to have lied about both matters.

These are not serious offences in any meaningful sense. But such ‘crimes’ contravene the deep-seated puritanism and narcissistic eagerness to be offended that are at the heart of the elites’ politically correct worldview.

These are mere hypocritical pretences for ‘cancellation’ – simply the ‘justification’ for the vituperative political campaign that the Labour Party and the Remainer faction of his own party waged against Johnson for months. A complicit and woke media did the rest.

Tony Blair took the UK into an unlawful war in Iraq that led to nearly a million deaths, but the elites took that in stride. Having a few drinks late at night, however, apparently requires the dismissal of a conservative prime minister.

As to the consequences of Johnson’s sacking, we only have to take a glance at the politicians who emerged as his potential replacement as prime minister.

Five candidates presented themselves for approval in the first two televised debates. Having observed them, Jonathan Swift’s epigram came immediately to mind: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”

Such a group of political dullards has rarely been assembled in one room. None of them could possibly lead the Tories to an election victory in two years’ time.

Let us describe the leading candidates in turn.

Rishi Sunak is a failed chancellor and multi-millionaire who previously worked for Goldman Sachs. His wife is even wealthier than he is, and until recently had arranged her affairs such that she paid no tax at all in the UK. Sunak preaches the virtues of austerity to the average Briton. Like Johnson, Sunak also breached the Covid regulations and was fined. It was Sunak’s mutinous resignation from the cabinet that triggered Johnson’s resignation. A more typical representative of the global elite one could not find – even Quentin Letts could not have invented him.

Liz Truss, a former Remainer, of whom Alistair Campbell said this week: “Liz Truss would be so appalling as Prime Minister that it’s almost unthinkable, which means it could happen.” Journalist John Crace described her as “a politician totally without effect ….. an ideologue without ideas.”

Penny Mordaunt is a failed defence secretary, who Tory peer Daniel Moylan branded this week as “incompetent.” Former Brexit minister David Frost said that she was “missing in action” when they worked together. Mordaunt was this week caught out in a blatant lie as she attempted to backpedal from her unqualified support for transgender athletes.

The first two televised debates – in which the candidates tore into each other like deranged pit bulls – were such unedifying spectacles that this week’s third debate was cancelled at the behest of Sunak and Truss, no doubt in order to preserve whatever small shreds of credibility and dignity the candidates may still have possessed.

When conservative commentator Peter Hitchens was asked this week who his favourite candidate was, he replied: “What is your favourite disease?” Does anyone seriously believe that any of them can unify a Tory party that has been torn apart by Johnson’s political assassination?

The new prime minister will be selected by a vote of the 160,000 Tory party members – rather than the entire British electorate – and on Wednesday the party unsurprisingly selected Sunak and Truss as the final two candidates who will vie for that vote.

In deposing Johnson, a serious political crisis has been created – Nicola Sturgeon and Sinn Fein cannot believe their luck – that can only hasten the demise of democracy in the UK.

Flawed though he was, Johnson will leave office with a record of substantial achievement behind him – “mission largely accomplished, for now” as he jauntily put it in his bravura farewell speech in the Commons this week. (Pointedly, arch Remainer Theresa May refused to applaud Johnson’s speech.)

It is absolutely certain, however, that none of the dunces that joined together to depose Boris Johnson will ever will ever find themselves in the position of departing office with such an array of accomplishments.