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NICOLE BROWN SIMPSON WAS
IN AN ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP

The O.J. Simpson Trial: Nicole Brown Simpson Part 1

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Mike and Sarah begin their epic journey into O.J. Simpson's trial for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, beginning with the story of Nicole's life with O.J. until their marriage in 1985.
[...]
So welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where, calm down Sarah. But I also love how whenever you get me into the hot seat, you're like, this is going to be the best podcast in the whole world. No pressure. It's fine. And it's great. 

And my name is Sarah Marshall, and I'm a writer working on a book about the Satanic Panic.

Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post and we are on Patreon at patreon.com/yourewrongabout 

Sarah: And today we're talking about Nicole Brown Simpson. 

Mike: Yes. Epic, huge podcast of the century.

Sarah: Stop it. I've just been non-stop reading for about three days now and also researching this case for the past two or three months. 

Mike: Yes. And much of your adult life too, because you've written about this before. You've been obsessed with this off and on for ages. 

Sarah: The first time I researched the OJ Simpson trial was in 2014, and I went in knowing almost only what I had learned when I was a child. Because I was six and seven years old when this was going on. 
What shocked me most, and what I therefore wanted to talk about first, because we were going to do more than one episode on this because we have to.

Mike: Because trial of the century. It’s literally the biggest event of the nineties, basically. However you measure public attention.

Sarah:  Definitely the biggest event of the nineties in the United States. And of course there have been probably like 20 trials of the century. Maybe you could call it the ‘trial of the turn of the century’ because I think it really did say in many important ways where America was at the period that it took place with regards to race, with regards to class, to celebrity, to our expectations about our legal system, to American's understanding of justice or understanding of gender, and domestic abuse, and so many other things. Women in the workplace, women as a general concept. 
And so anyway, I got really into it. And the first thing that I focused on, and then I was really amazed by was like, oh my God this was this horrible, tragic murder. And when I was a child, I had no sense of that. I remember asking my mom if she thought OJ did it. And my mom, to her credit, was like, yes, I do. And I remember being taken aback and I was like, well, I think he's innocent. And I think that I said that because, I mean, I initially didn't remember why. And then as I was reading and watching all this footage of the trial, because lately I'll have the OJ Simpson trial on very quietly in the background as I'm working and glance at it occasionally and turn it up when something interesting happens. Which I think is how people watched it in the workplace in 1995. And as I've had it on you see a lot of OJ Simpson's face, because that was the only way he could communicate in the trial. He never testified. And he really was a master of projecting geniality and this impression of genuine happiness and calm, and I'm so happy to see you. He knew how to project charm, basically. 
And I think as a kid I had seen his face and just been like, oh, that doesn't look like a murderer. That looks like a nice man. And so as a little kid, I think maybe I got the essential thing that many Americans were really struggling with. Which was aside from all the other issues that were part of this and that made us see this case from wildly different viewpoints, depending on where we were in terms of race and class and gender and so many other factors in America. There was also this sense I think of well, he's a nice man. He doesn't look like a murderer. He looks like a nice man. And how much we struggled with that.

Mike: I mean, it is amazing how many of these things that purport to be fact finding exercises are really these qualitative experiences of, is this person nice or not?

Sarah: Is this person human or not? And so my first memory of it is seeing it covered on the news as a little kid. And then I remember watching the Saturday Night Live sketches. The only person on SNL who really expressed the gravity of the situation was Norm McDonald. Do you remember Norm MacDonald?

Mike:  As a person, yeah. I don't remember his jokes about this. 

Sarah: He was the host of Weekend Update at the time. And so it was a running thing that he would have a completely seemingly unrelated piece that would be like, the Pope is coming out with a new book next month, it's called, OJ is Guilty and God Told Me. Or they would just be like, what seemed like kind of an innocuous late night joke about Johnny Cochran and Robert Shapiro mended their feud today after OJ Simpson threatened to cut both of their heads off. Because one of the things about the murder that I didn't know until I started researching it as an adult was that Nicole Brown Simpson had been almost beheaded. 

Mike: Oh, fuck. Jesus.

Sarah:  I was like, oh my God, everyone's forgotten that there's a woman in this story who was killed in this horrible way. And who had, what was in many ways, a wonderful and enviable life by many of the standards that we use in America. But also a life of pain and terror. And that all of that had been forgotten. 
I had grown up just thinking about the OJ Simpson trial as just a spectacle. It was a thing that took over media for about a year and a half. And everyone had opinions about it, and everyone watched it. And at the end of it we moved on. And in this interesting way, we lost track of it being about a person while making the trial such a big spectacle.

Mike: My main memory of Nicole Brown Simpson was that every once in a while, you'd get these stories that are like, we've forgotten about Nicole Brown Simpson or forgotten in the midst of this circus as Nicole Brown Simpson, the victim. And then I've always thought of it the way that we cover Africa in the media, technically. The tone of the coverage about those countries is sort of hectoring. No one's paying attention to this economic crash. Why aren't you looking at what's happening?

Sarah: No one is reporting on this thing.

Mike:  Yeah. And so it's almost like it's sort of shaming you at the same time they're sort of ignoring their own choices. And it always feels to me like, well, if you want to tell me about the economic crisis in Zimbabwe, just tell me about it. But make me interested in Zimbabwe. And I feel like there was a lot of the stuff with Nicole Brown Simpson that they're like, she's invisible at the heart of this scandal. And it's like, well you can just make her not invisible. Like you can just do a show about her or if you choose to, you can just do tonight's coverage of the trial from her perspective. That's a choice that you've made. It's not this inevitable thing.

Sarah:  You're right. I didn't even think of it that way before. But you have all these major networks and occasionally one coughs out a little piece. It's like, shame on you for not thinking about Nicole. And it's well, you control media.

Mike:  I also feel like I know basically nothing about her. I think that she was a model, I guess. I know that OJ was an abusive guy. I know that they had a terrible, he had an unbelievable temper and was incredibly violent, and this really terrible human being.

Sarah:  I mean, I wouldn't call anyone a terrible human being, but terrible husband. Terrible, terrible, terrible husband.

Mike: But where should we start with actually telling her stories here? Where do you want us to start?

Sarah:  I want to tell the story of her life until right before the murder. And then I want to pick up with the murder when we start talking about the investigation and trial. But anything before that, let's talk about that.

Mike: So, yeah. What's her upbringing? Where was she born? What’s her deal?

Sarah: Nicole Brown was born in Germany. She's the second of four daughters born to Lou and Juditha Brown. Her mom's German, her dad was an American living in Germany. So she lived in Germany until she was four and then the family moved to Southern California. 
So one of my main sources for my information about her is Raging Heart, by Sheila Weller, that comes out in February 1995, which is basically right as the OJ Simpson trial is starting. Marcia Clark, the prosecutor, has been trying to get information, and insight, and materials from the Brown family. And they have been, according to Marcia Clark in her memoir, reluctant to help her, slow to help her, kind of non-communicative in many ways. But it turns out they've been working on this book at the same time that Marcia Clark has had a hard time communicating with them. Which is a theme in the OJ Simpson trial. There was a lot of money in books in 1994 and 1995. And there were several books or book deals that directly affected the course of this trial. 

Mike: Wow. What a time capsule. 

Sarah: I know. Isn't that wild? And the stories about Nicole as that she's growing up, in Sheila Weller's book and from other people who knew her, is that she was just this just very active, headstrong, kind of diving headfirst into life kind of person. There are two separate stories about her being terribly injured and not really caring as a child. One where she's riding her bike as fast as she can to get home after going to the skating rink, when she wasn't supposed to, and then goes head over handlebars and gets a ride home and is, “It's fine. Everything's fine. I had my fun.” 
And then another where she and her sister, Denise, get really into horseback riding. And one day the horse throws her off. She hits her head on the ground, she has blood coming out of a head wound, and her sister has to ride her horse down to a gas station to call to get help. And at the end of it, Nicole recovers and immediately gets back on her horse and keeps riding around. That feels like the way people remember her, that she was known for not being scared of life.

Mike: She's a knockabout kid. She's like an eighties kid. We don't have kids like this anymore. Their parents just let them go and get in a bunch of accidents and scrape their knees and stuff. And we're just like, no big deal. Whereas now I feel like we'd all be calling CPS. 

Sarah: Yeah. She's an outdoor girl. And she's also raised Catholic because her mom is Catholic, and so she prays every night for her grandparents, and as a child would say her nightly prayers in German. Her sister, Denise, who's two years older than her, is known as kind of the pretty one.

Mike: Really? 

Sarah: Yes. This is a family where Nicole is not the pretty one.

Mike: How fucking pretty is Denise? Jesus Christ.

Sarah: I think it’s just that she's two years older, so she has a head start and she got to the, through the awkwardness a little bit faster.

Mike:  It's like me having a brother who's the short one. Like how tiny would this human being be? Jesus Christ. Okay. 

Sarah: Yeah. This is a good time for us to do my favorite feature, where you look up a picture of Nicole Brown Simpson. 

Mike: Which one am I looking up?

Sarah:  Just like general pictures of her alive.

Mike:  I'm Googling Nicole Brown Simpson alive. 

Sarah: Oh, okay. 

Mike: There's one. It's like a paparazzi photo and she's got like one of those Beverly Hills 90210 blouses on, where it's a button up blouse, but she's tied it around her waist, so her midriff is showing.

Sarah: It's more of a Melrose Place blouse. Yeah. I don't know. 

Mike: And she's got Daisy Dukes, super short jean shorts on, and she looks like Linda Hamilton in the Terminator, or like Terminator 2 where she's buff. 

Sarah: Yes, exactly. Yes. That's the comparison to spell alluding me this whole time. She does, because everyone mentions that she was a great beauty, which is absolutely true, but you know what else? She was jacked. 

Mike: She looked super athletic.

Sarah:  She ran nine miles a fucking day. Yeah. That is a lot of miles. I mean that's, in my opinion, too many.

Mike:  But yeah. In any other family, she would be the pretty one.

Sarah: Tell me about her. What is, what does she look like? Imagine yourself a straight male, if you will.

Mike: This is the hardest Avatar species for me to jack myself into. She has a really sharp jawline. She has almond eyes. She has this frowning kind of countenance, that a lot of the photos of her she looked sort of serious in them. She doesn't have an Anna Nicole Smith, always smiling, bubbliness. She looks sort of serious. And in a couple of them, she has her brows furrowed.

Sarah: She has a really serious beauty, right.

Mike:  I guess  what people would call it is like icy or something, or like sort of distant and perfect.

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. People use that word about her and it's often saying something to the effect of like, “When I first met Nicole, she seemed icy and distant to me, but then I realized that was just because she's shy and very symmetrical.” 

Mike: Right, right. I mean, there are many groups in society that, of course we should have perhaps more sympathy for, but I also think that attractive women who are shy probably get like the short end of the stick, because they always come off as being kind of ‘better than’ right? Even if they're not aware of their beauty or sort of thinking like I'm too hot for this, I think women are conditioned to never believe about themselves, right?

Sarah: Yes. And also if you're beautiful or conventionally attractive, whatever the fuck that means, and if you are inclined to be maybe on the passive side or on the people pleasing side, then things will happen to you. Things will get started that you do not have the strength to stop.

Mike: There is also the thing too, that if you're super smiley, if you're kind of in that role and you're super smiling and bubbly, your people are going to call you an airhead or a ditz, right? And if you're not, then people are going to call you an ice queen. Like those are your two options.

Sarah: Yeah. If you're a beautiful woman, you're fucked in America, too. It's just, maybe you're fucked nicely more often. But you know, everyone's fucked. That doesn't mean other people are less fucked. I think. There is, as you research the OJ Simpson whole thing, shebang, there is, especially in contemporary media, this just patina of casual self-aware misogyny.

Mike:  Against Nicole.

Sarah: Against Nicole and against her ilk, because she's always depicted as kind of a party girl, which I don't know, define party girl, we'll get into that. But one of Jeffrey Toobin's lines in The Run of His Life, which is the book that the Ryan Murphy show is based on. And it is a very good soup to nuts account of this happened and then this happened, and this happened, and here's what I think, and here's how I would have done a better job than all the lawyers. Like I recommend it, but he just makes remarks occasionally and he's like, all of the Brown sisters had breast implants and none of them had college degrees. And you're like, okay? So are you making an argument, Counselor? What's your point? 

Mike: How are those facts directly related to each other? And they were vegetarians. And one was left-handed. He’s clearly trying to turn those into a trail of breadcrumbs that's going to lead you to a particular conclusion.

Sarah: It’s like he’s saying that one thing has to do with the other. They all drank decaf and liked Bobby Sherman. And it's okay. There's just this sense of well, she wasn't a serious person and I think her appearance has something to do with it. 
And so Denise Brown graduates high school and goes off and becomes a fancy model in New York City and briefly lives the modeling highlife. And Nicole goes and visits her in Europe and kind of gets a taste of that and is writing to her family and friends these postcards from Greece. But pretty soon Denise gets called on another modeling job and Nicole is kind of alone in a far off country. And she's like, I really want to go back to Orange County. And who knows if the modeling life would have been for her, what she would have done. She loved photography and the guy who she eventually lived with when she moved to Los Angeles after she finished high school, they had become friends partly because they were both interested in photography and he was encouraging her to apply to go to school for it. But she moved to LA right after she turned 18. Her 18th birthday was May 19th, 1977. And she met OJ Simpson five weeks later. 

Mike: Wow. So she's fresh out of high school. She's dabbled very lightly in modeling, sort of through her sister. 

Sarah: Another great story about the extreme beauty of this crowd is that there's kind of a group of friends, Nicole and Denise among them, who hang out in Huntington Beach and are just like these beach pals that are seen a lot together. And Denise describes one of them to Sheila Weller as a nice, sweet, plain, normal girl named Michelle Pfeiffer. 

Mike: ‘Sweet and plain’.

Sarah: Just plain old Michelle Pfeiffer. 

Mike: So she's like in this group that is just rich kids. They're all super attractive. They're all kind of on this upward trajectory into becoming like their parents.

Sarah: Yeah. It's an environment of sheltered prosperity. 

Mike: And so out of that shelter, she moves to real LA. 

Sarah: Yeah. So she goes to real LA. She gets her first ever job at a boutique where she works for two weeks and the owner is like, why don't I give you a job at my club, The Daisy, as a waitress? It's very exclusive and celebrities come there like Jack Lemmon. So after two weeks at the boutique, she gets a job at The Daisy. 

Mike: I can't think of a less cool celebrity than Jack Lemmon. I'm going to be moving to LA and hobnobbing with Gene Hackman or something. 

Sarah: That’s not a quote, he didn't sell her on it that way. That's apparently how I would sell someone on that.

Mike: Oh that’s you. That’s a Sarah detail.

Sarah: Well I couldn’t be like, “Hey Nicole, come work at my club. Maybe you’ll see Jack Lemmon.” 

Mike: Okay. So she gets a job at this club. She's super into Jack Lemmon. This is what I'm gathering so far. 

Sarah: She got some job at this cool nightspot that has also just started doing lunch, which is very exciting. That is where she meets OJ Simpson, when he comes in within five weeks of her turning 18. And according to people who were with him that day, he saw this 18 year old waitress and said, I'm going to marry that girl.

Mike: Oh man. And then he did bad. How old is he at that point?

Sarah: OJ Simpson is at the edge of 30. His 30th birthday is going to be at the beginning of July of that year. He’s nearing the end of his first marriage, which he will say later on was like basically over and he claims that his wife tricked him into getting her pregnant again. Who knows how seriously to take that claim. But the marriage has been in bad shape for a long time because he's been a philanderer. He can't say since day one, because that's probably not literally true, but it could be true. 

Mike: So he's already established a pattern of being a bad husband, basically.

Sarah: He’s established a pattern of being a bad husband in terms of cheating constantly. Definitely. And arguably, he's established a bad pattern in terms of abuse because there's also people who talked to the media after his arrest to talk about his first wife, Margarite, being known for wearing dark glasses a lot indoors. So that marriage is drawing to a conclusion. And at the same time, his NFL career is nearing its end. And he's trying to figure out what his life is going to be about? 

Mike: Oh, right. Because in the NFL, you're gone by age 30. This is not a mid-career thing. 

Sarah: OJ Simpson did an interview with Playboy in 1976, and he speaks very openly about that and about how much she has been strategizing what to do about the end of his football career and his relationship to fame. And basically his fear of experiencing what so many other stars of the sport have experienced, which is you matter one day and the next day you don’t.

Mike: I mean, if this was a podcast about a different person, we would talk about how sorry we feel for him, but we all kind of know how he manifested this anxiety. 

Sarah: I feel very sorry for him. I feel bad for everyone in this.

Mike: I think it’s a real human thing. Losing the purpose of your life hurts. 

Sarah: So at the time he really wanted to seize a role that would make his acting career gel. And he was lobbying very hard to play the role of Coalhouse Walker and the film adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime.

Mike: Because he was America's sweetheart. Right? I mean, as an NFL player, he had an American poster boy image. 

Sarah: Right. He did. And we'll get much deeper into this as we talk more about him later. But I mean, first of all, I didn't feel like I had a grasp on why American men were so attached to OJ Simpson until I watched the first episode of the OJ: Made in America documentary. You can read OJ Simpson gained this many yards in a season and it was great and everyone was happy. And you're like, okay, I barely know what football is, so good for him. Because that’s what I had done before. And then when you see footage of him, you start to get it. 
I mean, what do you know about him? What do you know about him? Let's start with that actually. Tell me your impressions of who is OJ Simpson? Who was he? How was he known before he was charged with murder?

Mike:  I mean, I have seen that documentary, but not since it came out however many years ago.

Sarah: And you've been tased a lot since then, so that spoils it.

Mike: But I mean, he was just, he was born in San Francisco, I believe. And like you said, he was preternaturally gifted. He was like one of the stars of football. He wasn't just a football player, he was like the Mozart of football. He was at the peak of the sport. 

Sarah: Yes. He was one of those people like Tanya. I think he was a lot like Tanya, because watching OJ run is like watching Tonya jump. You're like, no one else in the fucking world can do it like that. And he talks about this in the Playboy interview. He compares it, I believe, to his own state. Let me actually, just you OJ on OJ. The Playboy interviewer says, “What do you think enabled you to become unique as a runner?” And OJ says, “That's hard to say. I never consciously tried to develop a running style or to imitate anybody else's. When they hand you the ball, you don't think because you don't have time to think. You just run and you react. You gotta be able to recognize certain things that are happening out there and react without thinking. To do that, you have to daydream about it. I can watch a million game films, but I do myself more good driving down the freeway, daydreaming about runs against various teams. Last season you wouldn't believe how my K daydreamed about running 90 yards against Pittsburgh, which is one reason I was able to do it. When you're really into it, incredible things can happen. Some of the guys call that transcendental meditation, but to me, it's just putting yourself out there beforehand and imagining everything that's supposed to happen on every play. You gotta be very receptive to that during a game, but that's not always easy. It calls for deep concentration.” 
And then the Playboy interviewer says, “At what point during a game does all this concentration become something like pleasure?” And OJ says - this is also sports or an excuse for straight men to sit around talking about pleasure. Let's add that. - and OJ says, “When I'm doing my thing, man, the rush part of a game for me is running. And the biggest rush is setting the cat down. When you're running with the ball and you put an unbelievable move on a guy, just about every fan watching the game feels the same thing you do. It's a rush and the whole stadium shares it with you.”

Mike:  What  do you take away from that?

Sarah: What do you take away from that?

Mike:  No, I want to hear yours first. 

Sarah: Ah, okay. Well, what I take away from that is that football has been his entire life. You know, he grew up poor. He grew up in the projects. His dad wasn't around because his dad was gay, which is something that OJ was also extremely sensitive and angry about. He was in a lot of gangs when he was growing up. Some kind of adorable named West Side Story, sounding gangs, but he got in fights. He spent a lot of time fighting as a teenager. Fighting and stealing other guy's girlfriends, those were his main hobbies. And then track. And he was a record breaking track star, initially. 
And then he got into football and football was what carried him into prosperity and stability, but it also allowed him to provide for his whole family. The thing is people loved him and they did so for many reasons. And one was that he was kind of this community tent pole that everyone likes to have. You know, he loved to be generous. And of course it was often generosity that was for a purpose. Such as he set Nicole's mom up with a travel agency. He gets Nicole's Dad a Hertz dealership, because OJ famously was a spokesman for Hertz. He put one of Nicole's sisters through college. He financially supported her family for many years, so that when she tried to leave him, many people have said that one of the reasons that they may have talked to her out of ending the relationship with him was because they were financially dependent on him. He took care of his friends in many ways, not some of the more crucial ways, but he was generous. And he was generous with people from the neighborhood that he'd grown up in, but football was his way out. 
He says in the Playboy interview, something I find really interesting, which is that he was like, “I want to play for USC”. Which is a very interesting school. It was one of the schools implicated in the college admissions scandal recently. It’s historically known for just being a private, very white, very wealthy college. That's not part of the UC system. It's one letter away. And it's on the edge of Watts.

Mike: It’s this little bubble of privilege in the middle of this bigger messier city around it.

Sarah: And a white bubble in a very non-white environment. So he's recruited by USC, and he becomes extremely famous as a college football player, and then is sent to the Buffalo Bills. And he’s given a very lucrative contract. But the problem is he has to live in Buffalo. And also, he is underutilized by the team the first couple of years he was there. And then eventually the team comes under new management, and he vaults into the kind of stardom that he's been trying to get. And he's known and beloved. And he's quoted around this time of saying, “I want to walk down the street and be known.” He's like the Elizabeth Warren of his time in a way, because he will sign autographs for hours. He loves crowds. He loves talking to random fans. Like he might, at times, like being in the presence of random fans, much more than he likes being with the people who actually know him.

Mike: Oh really?

Sarah: Yeah, because he's someone who people are very happy to see. So the first episode of OJ: Made in America, one of the things that documentary does that I love is really like intersperse clips of OJ at USC with the social changes that are happening at that time, that OJ is sort of conspicuously absent from. Because 1968 is the year that the runners on the Olympic podium do a black power salute, and they had been runners from San Jose State. And OJ, who is from that same region, the documentary shows him doing a sketch at USC with Bob Hope. I feel like that's a really interesting illustration of the life that he chose. 
Mike: He did sort of choose the America’s sweetheart fork in the road.
Sarah: Yeah. And he knew that he wanted to make a living his whole life, he wanted to get paid and to be loved by the public. And I think he knew he needed to do that as an apolitical, eternally smiling, black man. And that's really my mental image of him. And that's how a lot of people saw him. And I think that what comes up in this story is like the story that you hear so often in cases of domestic violence where it's compartmentalized. Everyone knows him as this calm, happy, friendly guy. But Nicole is, for a long time, the only one who really sees that he can be this other way. 

Mike: Right. Also the public doesn't like it when we construct somebody as this kind of a political smiling flag and apple pie type of figure. And then we have to deal with the messy complexity of them as a person. This happens over and over again.

Sarah: Right. And that's exactly what goes on with him. Looking forward a little bit there's an incident with OJ assaulting Nicole in 1989, that does end up coming to the media's attention. And Nicole, when deciding whether or not to file charges against him or to pursue the matter says, you know, she doesn't want him to lose his endorsements. And that's one of his greatest fears, because he becomes the spokesman for Hertz and the 1970s based on his career in the NFL. And that's like this huge, long running, commercial partnership. There are so many Hertz commercials with OJ Simpson running through an airport. The people who made those commercials and OJ: Made in America talk about, we always positioned him with old, white people or like little, white children waving at him to show that he's safe, he's friendly. And he's always wearing a three piece suit, you know? And they talk about I'm doing this, like My Fair Lady thing with him, he would say, ‘git’ instead of ‘get’. And they would really insist on white sounding pronunciation. 

Mike: Wow. So it's like trying to make him as unthreatening as possible.

Sarah: The Venn diagram for the word ‘threatening’ and the word ‘black’ is just one circle by itself, you know? And he passed the test. He was able to be that. And it's very sad to think about someone who was dancing as fast as they could for his entire life. All of his friendships, except for a few exceptions, as he continued to rise were with middle-aged, wealthy, white men. Like Bob Kardashian, immortalized by David Schwimmer in the Ryan Murphy Show, is a great example of this. Robert Kardashian is an Armenian millionaire who has a house that I believe Jeffrey Toobin describes, I hope lovingly, looking like a, I think he said ‘brothel’. And the issue with him, so he's finishing his football career and he talks candidly in the Playboy interview about, “I want to go out when I'm on top. I want people to remember me at my best. I'm already declining, I can feel it.” You know? 
And I think reading the interview, you just feel this palpable anxiety about, everything's going to be fine. I'm just concentrating on picturing myself succeeding and getting the ball and just going. But it was hard for him to get his post football career off the ground.

Mike: So these are like the anxious waters that he's in when he meets Nicole. 

Sarah: Yeah. His marriage is ending. His career is ending. And most importantly of all, I think he is potentially looking at a future where people, as in Coco, start to forget about him. And if that happens, then he will gradually cease to exist. And into this walks Nicole, who is only 18 and five weeks old.

Mike: How does the courtship work?

Sarah:  He keeps coming back to the restaurant and asking her out for two days.

Mike: Why did she say no at first? 

Sarah: Because she was playing hard to get and that's it, because she doesn't know who he is. 

Mike: She's only 18. 

Sarah: Well, no, I mean, he's still playing in the NFL at this time. This is 1977. They were in each other's lives for more than half her life. Yeah, she had lived a long and terrifying life by the time she died. But no, she just didn't give a shit about football. She was talking to her friends, and she was like, which one is OJ Simpson again?

Mike: It's as if Ariana Grande's hit on you at a restaurant. 

Sarah: But after two days, she agrees to go out with him. And she's living in LA with her friend, David LeBon, he's sleeping on the floor and she's sleeping in the bed and they're platonic besties. So she comes home from her first date with OJ at 2:00 in the morning and earlier she was like, what should I wear? And he was like, you should wear tight jeans and a cute top. And she comes home, and the zipper of her jeans has been ripped off of the fabric. And David LeBon is like, Jesus fucking Christ. What happened? She was like, he ripped my pants off, but I really like him.

Mike:  Jesus. 

Sarah: That's the first date. They went to make out point and he ripped her pants. 

Mike: Wow. So it's like this perfect literary foreboding of the life that she's about to have. 

Sarah: Yes, this is a very literary situation. And OJ, very quickly says, “I don't like you living with some guy.”

Mike: Oh fuck. So like even within a couple of dates, he's already doing that. 

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. And so he's, “I'm going to put you up in an apartment because this is unacceptable.” What I keep thinking about is that her experience of adulthood lasts for five weeks. Because she's out of her parents' house for five weeks. She's in David LeBon's house and then she goes into OJ’s house, the house that OJ buys for her. 

Mike: And also depending on him financially very quickly, too. 

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. Because she immediately stops working. Probably she doesn't feel like it because he's rich and he's taking care of her, but I'm sure he's perfectly fine with her not being on display to other men. She only had five weeks.

Mike:  And then the rest of her life is dominated by this force. 

Sarah: And then the rest of her life belongs to him. I'm going to jump ahead in time a little and read you a little excerpt from Marcia Clark's memoir, Without a Doubt where she talks about going to OJ Simpson's house immediately following the murder and looking at photos of Nicole. And first of all, I want to tell you that she mentions a lot of pictures of OJ with various white, fat cats. And the first time I read that for several seconds, several wonderful seconds, I thought that OJ Simpson had a lot of pictures of himself with fat, white cats. And he was holding them.

Mike:  Just him and large blobs of fur.

Sarah: Yeah, one of those Persians that looks like Wilford Brimley. But following that, she looks at pictures of Nicole. And she thinks it’s very interesting that these people who are divorced and this man who maintains it, he has completely moved on, has all these pictures of his ex-wife in his house. And Marcia says of the pictures of Nicole, “She was blonde with handsome, almost man-ish features. Her hair, teeth, and skin all had that gloss peculiar to the west side elite. In some of the photos, she was with a pair of lovely brown skin children, a boy and a girl. They all wore ski attire. Her face was difficult to read. The expression in all the photos was uniformly happy, but her eyes were glazed. She had, how would he describe it, “a thousand yard stare.”

Mike:  Wow. I mean, that's the aloofness again, right? She doesn't seem present in any of the photos of herself.

Sarah: And I didn't realize until I read that, but I was like, yeah, they do have that quality. Jumping ahead in December of 1994, the district attorney gets a call from Nicole's bank saying that she had been renting a safe deposit box that her father was trying to get into. And so some DA investigators go down and drill it. And Marcia writes, “The contents were more disturbing to me than anything I had seen to date. There were three Polaroid pictures of Nicole. The first looked like it was taken when she was very young, early in her relationship with Simpson when she was still a teenager. Her hair was wrapped up in a towel. Her eye was blackened, her face puffed up and reddened. 
The box also contains several letters. One written by Nicole to OJ very early in their relationship complaining that he neglected her. There were three others from him to her apologizing for having abused her and taking responsibility for having gone crazy. Implicitly acknowledged in one of those letters is the fact that he'd beat her because she refused to have sex with him. Why would a woman keep those things in a lock box? There was only one explanation. Even if she was trying to break free of OJ, part of Nicole accepted that she would never really escape. That OJ Simpson might murder her. The message in the box was clear – ‘In the event of my death, look this guy.’ I kept looking back to her eyes. She was so young at the time those pictures were taken that her eyes still reflected authentic emotion. I compare the photos mentally to those hanging by the stairs at Rockingham, a decade or more had passed between those two shots. The pain in her eyes had gelled into a glassy deadened stare. 17 years of denying terror and clinging to hope, only to have that hope destroyed time and again.” 
In the time leading up to her death, she updated her will and she told many people that she was afraid that OJ would kill her and get away with it because he would ‘OJ his way out of it’.

Mike: These pictures indicate that the abuse started very early and was very severe early on.

Sarah: Yeah. On her 19th birthday she's staying at her parents' house. This is a year after she and he had gotten together. He has just possibly been physically violent with her for the first time ever and given her a black eye. And to apologize, he has a brand new Porsche with a big bow on it delivered to her parent’s house. 

Mike: Has anyone ever given anyone else a car with a bow on it not to apologize for something terrible? That move seems tailor made for ‘I did something that I really need to cover it up’. Right. It's not like I'm going to buy you a ticket to a matinee. I really fucked up if I'm giving you the Porsche with the bow on it.

Sarah: The best part - or the worst part - worst, is that this is how Nicole's dad finds out that she and OJ are dating, because she's been keeping it a secret from him for this whole year, because according to the sources Sheila Weller talks to, a little bit racist. He sees the Porsche, and according to Denise Brown, Nicole's older sister, she says, “I think my father's reaction was, well, I guess if it's going to be a black guy, I’m glad it’s someone who's not a bum.”

Mike:  Holy shit. 

Sarah: “I know he thought that because that's how he thinks.”

Mike: Oh my God. I mean, the intersection of race and class is really interesting. I will put aside my negative prejudice of black people if you suit my positive prejudice of rich people. 

Sarah: Oh yeah. And also that this gift, this extravagant gift that he has gotten her to apologize for assaulting her, is what proves to her racist dad that he's solvent and therefore responsible enough to be her boyfriend/husband. 
There's an anecdote at the start of Sheila Weller's book. And one of the things that Marcia Clark also talks about a lot in her book and is really struck by as she gets to know the Brown family, is that it's not that they didn't know that OJ was a controlling husband, or a very angry husband, or even a violent husband at times. But they didn't really see it as violence. They didn't really see it as abuse. 
One of the things that OJ did that became like a joke in the Brown family was that when he was raging at Nicole, but wasn't necessarily physically violent, she had a wall of family photos, and he would throw them down the stairs, throw them on the floor, throw them out on the yard and break the glass. And she would go and take them and have them repair it and hang them back up again. And this happened so many times that it became a joke ,and it was seen as that's what he does. He's blowing off steam. That’s who he is. And so Nicole's mom said later that she would say, “Is OJ angry at you - and therefore the family - is my portrait on the lawn again?”

Mike: Oh my God. 

Sarah: You know, it was just, it was something that they just talked about, and they didn't take it very seriously, which I think is pretty common.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, I guess if anything happens enough times, it's just, LOL got to go to Bartell's again. Like it just becomes normalized, I guess.

Sarah: Yeah. And there's other stuff that she actively conceals. There's a time when one of Nicole's friends comes over and wants to see her ,and OJ’s like, ”No, she can't come down. She's not feeling well. She doesn't want to see anybody.” And much later after she and OJ separate, Nicole says, “I couldn't come down that day because I was out of makeup to cover up the bruises on my face, so I couldn’t be seen by anybody.” Are you surprised at that degree of abuse in the marriage? 

Mike: No, just always the specifics of these things are always so sort of like, the everyday adaptations that people make to these extreme situations are always the most tragic somehow, right. That it has become normal and it's something that you just have to cope with. The extreme and violent and intolerable nature of it becomes hidden somehow after, oh no, I got to get some more makeup. It just becomes like another errand that you have to run somehow.  It's really dark to think about it.

Sarah: And then later on, he apologized by giving her a Ferrari.

Mike: Oh fuck. So as the abuse gets worse, the cars get better, and the jewelry gets more expensive. 

Sarah: So yeah, it begins early and then I'm going to jump. Well, let me ask before I go, what do you think so far?

Mike: She’s the perfect victim of abuse almost, or the perfect vulnerable person to this sort of behavior, because she doesn't have any other support systems in place. She doesn't have a group of friends that can be like, hey this guy really seems like news or her own money to just move away and move to Fresno and from him. She doesn't have any other options. Also, because she's so young, she doesn't know how adult life works. She wouldn't know what one does in these situations and what the signs to look for.

Sarah: I mean, think about how much confirmation bias any man gets in a domestic abuse claim. You know, it's like women are not listened to very much in this arena if they make claims or file charges against anyone. And then think about it being OJ Simpson, you know, and one of the things that various observers talk about later is that even the cops who investigated him immediately after his wife's murder were very sweet and deferential to him, considering the circumstances. You know, they were starstruck around him, I'm sure to a degree. And also because they didn't want to fuck things up with a celebrity who was like rich and powerful and can screw up their situation because it's power versus power. You know, if you investigate a powerful person, you need to be on your best behavior, unlike all of the other times.

Mike: Right. Right. So, yeah. So what are the first couple years of their courtship? Because they don't get married for a while, right? 

Sarah: Yeah. They don't get married until 1985. 

Mike: Okay. So there's seven years when they're dating. I did that math wrong. There's eight years when they're dating. 

Sarah: Yeah. Okay. So they meet in June and July of 1977, shortly after his 30th birthday. OJ  goes to Buffalo for Bill's training camp and comes to LA the next month for the birth of his daughter with Marguerite still married to. Big summer for OJ. And then in September, Nicole flies to Buffalo to be with him. And her sister, Denise, flies in and they both go see OJ in a game. And it's a beautiful day. 
And in Sheila Weller's book, the long quote from Simpson's friend, Mike Militello, who talks about OJ running out onto the field as the women are watching. And he says, “As he came running out, he looked up and winked at her”, says Militello. “She was amazed. She couldn't believe he could even see her. Then the game started and what a game. He ran over 200 yards and scored two touchdowns. And don't forget he was 30. He'd been talking about retiring for a year. I knew what was happening. The guy was in love. I turned to her and hugged her a little and said, ‘Those touchdowns were for you. He's doing this for you.’ And Nicole said, ‘Really?’ Oh, it was great. So incredibly pure.” 
And then the way Denise picks up the story is that OJ plays this amazing game. He's showing this woman, whose heart he has captured in spectacular fashion, this thing that he's great at and she's like amazed and happy and dazzled, you know? And then after the game, he happens to look up and as she kisses Mike Militello on the cheek, and that night he loses his goddamn mind, and he screams at her and berates her. And she cries to Denise and says like why does he do this to me? Like, why is he yelling at me like this? And she's crying and upset. And then they go all out. They all go out and have a good time and they just move on, you know. Because that's what you do, right? You're like, there's this guy and he's great most of the time. And some of the time he gets randomly really jealous, but we have this amazing connection. I'm head over heels in love with him. Everyone says there was a love connection there. And there was a sexual connection there. And they were very much in love when they met and for a long time after. And when things worked, they really worked. But then increasingly they didn't. And I think there's something that happens in any relationship where you get put on a pedestal, right. Because the way Nicole talked about it later was that OJ had molded her and decided who she would become. And she didn't even know who she was because she had grown up in accordance with OJ’s wishes and made herself who he wanted her to be. So she was like, I don't know who I am. Like she got breast implants because he wanted her to get them. And she made choices that he approved of. 

Mike: There’s this thing of, I don't know if it's misogyny or just people being bad at knowing their own feelings, but this extent to which like you're quote unquote in love with somebody. But it’s more like an infatuation with their physical beauty, and you never really see them as three-dimensional people. It seems like a pattern, anecdotally, in a lot of relationships, that you sort of become enamored with them. You're like, she's so beautiful. She's so amazing. But then like, when anything about her as a person starts to come up, like her family is kind of complicated and maybe she has some health issues or maybe she has some mental health stuff. Like all these messy complications that come with every single human being, it's almost like there’s this anger of no, you're supposed to be my trophy. You're supposed to be this one dimensional, perfect figure in my life. And you're making it hard.

Sarah: And I'm supposed to be able to shape you. Yeah. If you define yourself as having any particular preference that hasn't been dictated to you, you know, that can be threatening. Like I think another thing that happens in abusive relationships is that if someone is like, first time just going to yell at you and then I'm going to psychologically control you. And then I'm going to physically abuse and intimidate you. As my real-world control of you gets worse and I don't feel better, I have to keep being more and more controlling and more and more scary to you because hopefully if I get you like another step under my control then, I'll feel better, then I'll feel powerful, then I'll feel complete. Right. But you never get there which is why you get this escalation.

Mike: Is there like a honeymoon period or is it just already like conflict immediately?

Sarah: Around the time of the Porsche incident, Nicole shows up at her parent’s house and says, “I’m through with him. I'm done. Fuck him.” And OJ is in San Francisco at the time because he was seeing other women, and they had a fight about it. And he apparently called her and said, “If you don't get back up here, I'm going to get another girlfriend and fuck the shit out of her.” At which point Nicole got in her car and drove up to San Francisco. 

Mike: Really? Jesus, that sucks. 

Sarah: So he also starts cheating on her pretty early. I mean, it's not just that he's sitting there, obviously. And women are like walking by “Hey, OJ”, obviously that happens sometimes. But also, he talks about this in the Playboy interview, when he was growing up he would proposition any woman, any time. He would especially hit on women who he knew to be taken because he kind of liked the challenge. This is one of the ways that he shows himself who he is. It's by picking up women.

Mike: Women as conquest. 

Sarah: Yeah. For all of their relationship, Nicole, from the beginning was like, please stop. Can you please be faithful to me? And they went through so many phases of this, no, I don't need to. You have no right to tell me to stop. Yes, I will. Everything will change. You know what? What you  don't know doesn't hurt you. All of the different approaches to cheating on your wife, or your girlfriend. But the point is that this went on for 15 years.

Mike:  Wow. This is just like next level shit. Cause we all know that if she was cheating on him, he would lose his mind. Right. The kiss on the cheek, he loses his mind. 

Sarah: And throughout again, this is the thing, like he needs to be free to fuck anyone at any time, neither snow nor rain or dark of night will keep him from fucking anyone he feels like. But Nicole cannot kiss someone on the cheek when he's looking because he has license to do whatever he feels like.

Mike: Because it's all about him.

Sarah:  And it's all about his sense of ownership. So toward the end of her life, Nicole said about OJ, he doesn't love me. He's obsessed with me. And that's the exact phrase that Dominique Dunne used in a letter that she wrote to her boyfriend right before he murdered her. Dominique Dunn was the daughter of Dominick Dunne, who's a writer for Vanity Fair, wrote about the trial of Dominique's boyfriend who was convicted of killing her and who would go on to cover the OJ Simpson trial for Vanity Fair. So he's going to be someone that we'll see more of later. 
But I want to review some of Dominique's letter to her boyfriend, John Sweeney, because I feel like it's like a piece of literature about controlling behavior and this kind of possessive abuse basically. And so she wrote, “We have to be two individuals to work as a couple. I am not permitted to do things on my own. Why must you be a part of everything I do? Why do you want to come to my writing lessons and my acting classes? Why are you jealous of every scene partner I have? Why must you recount word for word, everything I spoke to Dr. Black about? Why must I talk about every audition when you know it is bad luck for me? Why do we have discussions at 3:00 AM all the time, instead of during the day? Why must you know the name of every person I come into contact with? You go crazy over my rehearsals. You insist on going to work with me when I have told you it makes me nervous. Your paranoia is overboard. You do not love me. You are obsessed with me. The person you think you love is not me at all. It is someone you have made up in your head. I'm the person who makes you angry, who you fight with sometimes. I think we only fight when I'm in his with me, fade away and you are faced with the real me. That's why arguments erupt out of nowhere.” 

Mike: Wow. I mean, this stuff is hard because jealous husbands, boyfriends are just such fucking cliches. It's every boring fucking trope you've seen in 750 movies by this point. Right. 

Sarah: It's like we have seen all the tropes by now. Yeah.

Mike: There’s just something so generic about people that act like this.

(read much more)

LET MY PEOPLE GO
For too long, the American government has been enslaved
by the Khazar Bolsheviks & their agents.

MIGHT THEIR FERTILITY IMPROVE IF UPPER CLASS BLACKS
MOVED INTO "MANUFACTURED HOUSING?"

THE NEXT TRUMP TRIAL IN NEW YORK
IS THE MOST RIDICULOUS

IMPORTING YOUNG MALES FROM THE
MURDER CAPITAL OF CENTRAL AMERICA
WAS NEVER A GOOD IDEA

THE COLORADO COMMISSARS WILL DRIVE
AMMO AND FIREARM SALES
TO UTAH, WYOMING AND NEBRASKA.

I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.

Uri Berliner, a veteran at the public radio institution, says the network lost its way when it started telling listeners how to think.

You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite. It doesn’t precisely describe me, but it’s not far off. I’m Sarah Lawrence–educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley. 

I fit the NPR mold. I’ll cop to that.

So when I got a job here 25 years ago, I never looked back. As a senior editor on the business desk where news is always breaking, we’ve covered upheavals in the workplace, supermarket prices, social media, and AI. 

It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding. 

In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population. 

If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.

But it hasn’t. [While it has always had a statist point of view, it has always been mystified about the source of monetary inflation (It's the Federal Reserve.), it never acknowledged the mountains of credible evidence of widespread electoral fraud in the 2020 elections (primaries + presidential), it has always lied about the connection between childhood vaccinations & Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, it has always exaggerated the accomplishments of certain minority groups and denigrated Caucasians, it has consistently worked to normalize the abnormal & abhorent, it has always minimized the disproportionate criminality of a certain race, it constantly lied about the Russia-Russia-Russia collusion hoax, it always lied about the synthetic coronavirus and the spike protein mRNA bioweapons, etc.]

For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically different from our own—engaging precisely because they were unguarded and unpredictable. No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise. 

Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.

By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals. 

An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America. 

That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model. 

Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency. 

Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff. 

Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming. 

It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story. 

What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media. 

Russiagate was not NPR’s only miscue.

In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop containing emails about his sordid business [and sexual] dealings. With the election only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here’s how NPR’s managing editor for news at the time explained the thinking: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” 

But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.

The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump. 

When the essential facts of the Post’s reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency. 

Politics also intruded into NPR’s Covid coverage, most notably in reporting on the origin of the pandemic. One of the most dismal aspects of Covid journalism is how quickly it defaulted to ideological story lines. For example, there was Team Natural Origin—supporting the hypothesis that the virus came from a wild animal market in Wuhan, China. And on the other side, Team Lab Leak, leaning into the idea that the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab. 

The lab leak theory came in for rough treatment almost immediately, dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory. Anthony Fauci and former NIH head Francis Collins, representing the public health establishment, were its most notable critics. And that was enough for NPR. We became fervent members of Team Natural Origin, even declaring that the lab leak had been debunked by scientists. 

But that wasn’t the case.

When word first broke of a mysterious virus in Wuhan, a number of leading virologists immediately suspected it could have leaked from a lab there conducting experiments on bat coronaviruses. This was in January 2020, during calmer moments before a global pandemic had been declared, and before fear spread and politics intruded. 

Reporting on a possible lab leak soon became radioactive. Fauci and Collins apparently encouraged the March publication of an influential scientific paper known as “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Its authors wrote they didn’t believe “any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” 

But the lab leak hypothesis wouldn’t die. And understandably so. In private, even some of the scientists who penned the article dismissing it sounded a different tune. One of the authors, Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist from Edinburgh University, wrote to his colleagues, “I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape or natural.”

Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak. But at NPR, we weren’t about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story. We didn’t budge when the Energy Department—the federal agency with the most expertise about laboratories and biological research—concluded, albeit with low confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the emergence of the virus.

Instead, we introduced our coverage of that development on February 28, 2023, by asserting confidently that “the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus.” 

When a colleague on our science desk was asked why they were so dismissive of the lab leak theory, the response was odd. The colleague compared it to the Bush administration’s unfounded argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won’t get fooled again. But these two events were not even remotely related. Again, politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work.

I’m offering three examples of widely followed stories where I believe we faltered. Our coverage is out there in the public domain. Anyone can read or listen for themselves and make his own judgment. But to truly understand how independent journalism suffered at NPR, you need to step inside the organization.

You need to start with former CEO John Lansing. Lansing came to NPR in 2019 from the federally funded agency that oversees Voice of America. Like others who have served in the top job at NPR, he was hired primarily to raise money and to ensure good working relations with hundreds of member stations that acquire NPR’s programming. 

After working mostly behind the scenes, Lansing became a more visible and forceful figure after the [overdose death] of George Floyd in May 2020. It was an anguished time in the newsroom, personally and professionally so for NPR staffers. Floyd’s [purported] murder, captured on video, changed both the conversation and the daily operations at NPR. 

Given the circumstances of Floyd’s death, it would have been an ideal moment to tackle a difficult question: Is America, as progressive activists claim, beset by systemic racism in the 2020s—in law enforcement, education, housing, and elsewhere? We happen to have a very powerful tool for answering such questions: journalism. Journalism that lets evidence lead the way. 

But the message from the top was very different. America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it.

“When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism,” Lansing wrote in a companywide article, “we can be agents of change. Listening and deep reflection are necessary but not enough. They must be followed by constructive and meaningful steps forward. I will hold myself accountable for this.”

And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language he said the leaders of public media, “starting with me—must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.”

He declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.

Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to “start talking about race.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and “men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too. 

These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots—among producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.

They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latino employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).

All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth. If, as NPR’s internal website suggested, the groups were simply a “great way to meet like-minded colleagues” and “help new employees feel included,” it would have been one thing. 

But the role and standing of affinity groups, including those outside NPR, were more than that. They became a priority for NPR’s union, SAG-AFTRA—an item in collective bargaining. The current contract, in a section on DEI, requires NPR management to “keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups” and to inform employees if language differs from the diktats of those groups. In such a case, the dispute could go before the DEI Accountability Committee.

In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage. 

Conflicts between workers and bosses, between labor and management, are common in workplaces. NPR has had its share. But what’s notable is the extent to which people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview. 

And this, I believe, is the most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity [and its hostile takeover by Bolshevik interests]. (read more)

ARE THEY SHARING THE REAL NUMBERS OR THE
FAKE NUMBERS THEY ANNOUNCE PUBLICLY?

WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT THE GREAT RESET, GREAT TAKING, GREAT REPLACEMENT, GREAT DEFLATION AND NEXT GREAT DEPRESSION?

“At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move all the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre.” – Frank Zappa

“In the past few years, you have been living within an escalating hybrid war. Globally, we have witnessed overt media control and propaganda campaigns; censorship, including arrests of people speaking in public; monitoring of all electronic communications and physical contact tracing; brutally enforced lock-down and masking requirements, with people being beaten, handcuffed, and arrested, even in their homes; suspension of healthcare services and weakening of healthcare systems; invasive testing requirements for employment and travel; forced quarantine of travelers; and coerced quarantine and “vaccination” of the healthy, general population.

Governments dropped all pretense of democracy and were emboldened to open despotism. There were no functioning checks on this power. The courts provided no effective recourse to the public. Governments broadly abused fundamental human rights using as justification prevention of the spread of infectious diseases, which are, in truth, a great many, ever-present, and continually evolving. And so, this justification, if allowed to stand, assures the end of democracy and installation of openly despotic government.” – David Webb – The Great Taking

After being fortunate enough to participate in a two hour zoom call with David Rogers Webb, author of The Great Taking, I was intrigued enough to download his free book and read it over the course of two days. I found David to be a humble, intelligent, thoughtful man who is deeply concerned about the future of mankind, leading him to write a book, putting him and his family at great personal risk. Using his decades of experience in the financial world and undertaking painstaking research regarding the systematic long-term rewriting of codes, laws, and regulations by those who constitute Bernays’ invisible government (aka Deep State), Webb makes a strong case the Ruling Elite/Deep State/Shadowy billionaires in smoke filled rooms have set the groundwork to crash the global financial system and abscond with all that remains of our accumulated wealth. I could feel his angst and anxiety about the future as he explained the details of their plan. After reading the book, I found myself agitated, angry, and feeling helpless.

You can’t help but be depressed that everything you’ve worked for over the last forty years could be “legally” stolen by those controlling the levers of our financial system in an instant. My first reaction was, how can they do this and expect to succeed. Wouldn’t the citizens across the world react violently and start hanging the culprits? And then I remembered how the masses reacted to being locked down, masked, forced to not earn a living, censored for questioning the government, arrested for swimming alone in the ocean, imprisoned for protesting a rigged election, and being coerced and threatened into getting jabbed with a toxic gene altering concoction which neither protected you from contracting, spreading or dying from the annual flu (sold and marketed as the greatest deadly pandemic in history).

The covid scandemic was nothing but a dry run to see how far they could push their agenda, using authoritarian measures and the full power of the surveillance state and regime media, in scaring the masses into compliance. It worked like a charm, with the vast majority of the global population proving to be nothing more than scared compliant sheep. The ruling elite are feeling their oats and no longer feel bound to follow any laws, constitutions, or moral code.

They have shifted from relying on Huxley’s dystopian vision of a populace enslaved by pleasure, drugs, and technological distractions to Orwell’s surveillance, fear, and boot on the face dystopia, where the masses will do as they are told, or else. The caressing is over, and the crushing has begun. When the Great Taking commences, it will be done ruthlessly, enforced by those with truncheons and automatic weapons, sold to the masses as the only way to save humanity, and enforced through the legal machinations they have surreptitiously put in place over the last two decades.

“People should either be caressed or crushed. If you do them minor damage they will get their revenge; but if you cripple them there is nothing they can do. If you need to injure someone, do it in such a way that you do not have to fear their vengeance.” – Niccolo Machiavelli

As David Webb lays out in painstaking detail in his book, using factual provable data and documentation, as opposed to the false narratives and propaganda spewed by those who have hatched this decades long diabolical plot to abscond with all of your hard-earned wealth, the ruling oligarchy have designed a financial system which will absolutely self-destruct when they choose to pull that lever. It has been premeditated and solidified in legal code that their scheme, through central banks and their co-conspirator financial institutions, will sweep all of your collateral (aka your financial wealth) into their grubby little hands, in order to save “the system”.

We will be left destitute, desperate, and indebted. With no means to service your debt, they will “legally” take the assets associated with that debt. Any rational critical thinking person who has been watching its government add $1 trillion to the national debt every 100 days, driving our annual interest on that debt to $1.6 trillion by the end of 2024, encouraging and aiding millions of third world diseased mutts to stream across our borders and be shipped to cities across the country, and purposely creating massive inflation while sabotaging our energy, food, and transportation systems, has to be asking what possible purpose could there be for these insane policies and actions. It only makes sense if their plan is to crash the global financial system on purpose.

David Webb is convinced that is the plan:

 “Inevitably following the “Everything Bubble” will be the “Everything Crash.” Once prices of essentially everything crash and all financial firms rapidly become insolvent, these collateral management systems will automatically sweep all collateral to the Central Clearing Counter-parties (CCPs) and Central Banks. The trap, into which all nations have been herded, is ready and waiting to be sprung. There will be an epic end point to the decades of seemingly out-of-control financialization, which served no beneficial purpose for humanity, but the devastating effects of which are apparent even now. It has been a deliberate strategy executed over decades. This was the purpose of inflating the global bubble entirely out of proportion with any real-world thing or activity, which must end in disaster for so many, with no pockets of resilience allowed to remain in any country.” – David Webb – The Great Taking

Your cognitive dissonance and normalcy bias tells you they could not and would not initiate such an evil plot. I know I don’t want to believe this could or will happen, because as a working professional for the last 38 years I’ve followed the rules and believed if I saved for my retirement, lived beneath my means, and invested my savings carefully, I would be rewarded with a relatively comfortable retirement. It is extremely difficult for me to comprehend how these psychopaths in suits, pulling the levers of this world, could hatch such a malevolent conspiracy, designed to cause so much misery and pain to so many.

But then I realize what they have done since 2019 with their totalitarian lockdowns, death jabs, surveillance mechanisms, imprisonment of dissenters, stealing of elections, destruction of societal norms, perpetuation of an invasion on our southern border, and provocation of global conflict designed to start World War 3. And yes, I do believe these traitorous billionaire scum would do this. David Webb shows how they did it before in 1933.

FDR shutdown all banks in the United States on March 6, 1933. Then Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act of 1933 on March 9. According to William L. Silber, who was an economic advisor to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Fed miraculously and suddenly in March of 1933 had the means “to supply unlimited amounts of currency to reopened banks”, which were, of course, only the banks selected by the Federal Reserve System.

The key point is the Fed chose which connected banks would survive and which banks would be permanently put out of business, resulting in millions losing their life savings. The Fed had the resources to keep thousands of banks open and avoid the pain and suffering for millions of Americans, but they purposely inflicted pain upon millions. Why? David Webb contends the Fed created the panic, provided a solution that benefited them and their crony banks, destroyed the lives of millions, and took their assets (homes, cars, farms, appliances) on a grand scale. This was done to inflict pain, vanquish the masses and foster a facade of power, which is as true today as it was then. Webb asks the relevant questions and provides the answers:

“Did “the bankers” need to take this property? What was the real purpose? Can you get past the idea that they were trying to help? Ask yourself: if they don’t want your money, and they don’t really want or need your stuff, and they’re not trying to help you, what do they want? What’s the point of all of their efforts? This may be difficult to hear: It was a deliberate strategy. It was about ultimate, complete power, allowing no centers of resistance. And so, it was about deprivation. It was about subjugation—and it still is, in more ways than we know. It was not about helping people then, and it’s not about helping people now. It is all part of the same deliberate herding of humanity and elimination of any pockets of resilience, which plagues us still.” – David Webb – The Great Taking

The Federal Reserve is owned by the Too Big To Trust Wall Street Behemoth Banks and does the bidding of the Deep State. The Fed is indemnified by the government (a.k.a. you and me) for any losses they incur, as they are currently sitting on $1 trillion of unrealized losses. They were a shadowy privileged institution in 1933 and have only become more powerful, shadowy, and corrupt today. They set the precedent of taking bank deposits from average Americans in the 1930s and will do it again without the slightest hesitation.

They have rigged the regulatory system in a way that makes anyone holding cash in banks an unsecured creditor with no enforceable claim to their own cash when they decide to crash the system. They won’t bail out the banks the way they did in 2008/2009. Too messy and time consuming. They will conduct a bail-in by “shifting” all your deposits from what you thought was your safe bank account to the accounts of a “protected class” created through legal machinations by our Deep State rulers. They did a test run in Cyprus in 2013. This is what is coming.

Since 2008 the Mega-Banks and Mega-Corps, with the patronage of the Fed, have achieved tremendous success in their endeavors to enrich themselves, while driving small businesses and small banks into bankruptcy, and impoverishing the masses they feign to embrace. Everything they do is built upon a foundation of lies, misinformation, disinformation, and propagandized narratives spun by their regime media co-conspirators.

Today’s “Everything Bubble” was created by the Fed, using the justification of “saving the world” during the Great Financial Crisis of 2008/2009 and “saving the world” again from the Great Flu Virus of 2020/2022 by lowering interest rates to zero for the most part of 15 years. The major Wall Street banks were all effectively bankrupt in the Fall of 2008 and should have been liquidated using our existing bankruptcy laws. Stockholders and bondholders would have been wiped out, while depositors would have been made whole. Their assets would have been sold off to smaller banks who did not take world destroying risks and leverage themselves 30 to 1.

Everything that has happened since 2008 has been nothing more than a vast pillaging operation disguised as saving humanity from a never-ending series of [fresh] crises created by the very psychopaths who purposely created the [original] crises in the first place. So why would it be so inconceivable to think they would initiate their final take down of the financial system, siphoning the remaining wealth of the masses?

How else can we explain the seemingly insane measures undertaken by the captured and controlled politician puppets, along with the central bankers (owned by Wall Street), and sold to the masses as normal by their regime media mouthpieces? They have secretively put all the pieces in place from a legal and regulatory standpoint to drain the remaining wealth from the financial accounts of tens of millions when they initiate the next planned and executed financial “crisis”.

Amidst the global chaos, as a wave of insolvencies sweeps the across the developed world, bloodshed from the ensuing global and civil wars scars the earth, wailing and gnashing of teeth by the victims reaches a crescendo, the Fed and their owners will not only survive, but thrive. We’ve seen this show before. During [their] covid [charade] we needed to follow their orders so we wouldn’t die or kill our neighbors. It was all a lie. This time, with your money, investments, and assets purchased with debt in the hands of the few connected financial institutions, the fear will be putting food on the table, obtaining healthcare, and trying to survive.

Those in control will use their regime media propaganda outlets to paint the narrative, everything they have done is to insure the survival of our system. They will act like noble caretakers of humanity, doing whatever it takes for mankind, while initiating the entire financial system demolition in the first place. They are counting on the ignorant masses to remain ignorant, fearful, and terrorized, willing to do whatever they are told to survive. According to David Webb, the CBDCs will be their solution. It’s all about power and control, just as it has always been.

“The focus of the Atlantic Council is military strategy, not economics. And what is the Atlantic Council focusing on now? Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), which is virtual money backed and issued directly by central banks. All G7 economies have now moved into the development stage of CBDC, and 18 of the G20 countries are now in the advanced stage of development. Why is this happening now globally? Is it really a desire to bring “financial inclusion” to the disadvantaged? Why would The Atlantic Council, a military strategy think tank, focus on CBDC? We are living within a global hybrid war, a component of which will be the collapse of the banking, money, and payments systems globally. War aims will be achieved by means other than kinetic war. The foremost aim of the people who have privately controlled the central banks and money creation is that they will remain in power, forever. They can risk no pockets of resistance.” – David Webb – The Great Reset

They have been setting up the infrastructure for CBDCs, just as they rigged the financial system to abscond with your wealth, for over a decade, as they plan to force you into their new totalitarian electronic gulag. When they are confident their CBDC scheme is ready to launch, they will push the demolition button on the debt saturated house of cards, known as our financial system. When you wrap your head around their evil blueprint to enslave the world, you can make sense of what you see happening with your own eyes. What is happening is not normal. It makes no sense to any normal critical thinking person, but the majority of the population are addicted to their phones and believe whatever they are told by their government, regime media, Tik Tok influencers, and Facebook friends.

How could our “elected” leaders be adding $1 trillion to the national debt every 100 days, while jacking the interest on that debt to $1.6 trillion per year, unless they want to crash the financial system. How could our “president” (his handlers) encourage, sponsor, and facilitate the invasion of our country by millions of 3^rd world, tuberculosis ridden, mutts, drug dealers, child traffickers, and terrorists, unless they want to collapse our cities and social welfare system?

How could our government medical agencies promote the poisoning of the masses with a gene altering Big Pharma [mRNA] jab, the mutilation of children because they were brainwashed by mentally ill left-wing teachers who told them they can be whatever sex they choose, drugging young boys who act like boys in an effort to make them like girls, and doling out anti-depressants like candy to middle aged unhappy cat ladies who bought the entire feminism narrative hook, line and sinker, unless they wanted to create a nation of physically and mentally damaged, easily manipulated drones?

In addition, they are attempting to destroy our energy infrastructure, our farmers, and small businesses, while attempting to ignite a civil war within our borders and a global war with Ukraine and the Middle East, to further spur a global collapse. First collapse, then controls through CBDCs.

“The key difference with the CBDC is the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and also, we will have the technology to enforce that. In other words: CBDC means absolute control and so, if the “old” money system somehow collapses, new money will be provided by the central banks in the form of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), the new and improved control system. Imagine . . . it is chaos. You have lost everything but your smart phone (If you don’t have one, don’t worry—you will be issued one.) You will download an app. You will click boxes agreeing to everything. You will become increasingly indebted with each payment you make using the CBDC you are “given” on your phone. You will be told what to do and what not to do from then on. You will comply if you want to eat.” – David Webb – The Great Reset

Deprivation and subjugation are their goals and being they are evil psychopaths; they have no empathy for you or your plight. They have moved into the Orwellian stage of power for its own sake and a boot stomping on your face forever. Webb contends the “Great Reset” is anti-human and will introduce a modern-day techno-feudalistic system, built upon a foundation of fear, scarcity, surveillance, and threats of violence for non-compliance.

A caste system more extreme than currently exists will separate the lords of the manor from the enslaved serfs. The first Great Depression was caused by the Fed, benefited the favored Wall Street banks, created a decade of deflation, bankrupted businesses, and destroyed the lives of the poorest. This Greater Depression will be far worse, as the immense consumer credit and mortgage credit bubbles will result in tens of millions losing their homes, automobiles, and various electronic gadgets bought on credit. Those who forget the past are condemned to relive it.

“When the “Everything Bubble” is imploded, we will face a deflationary depression, which will span many years, even decades. This coming Great Deflation is intrinsic to the Great Taking. The Architects of the Great Taking have planned and prepared to use this dynamic fully, secure in their knowledge that, as night follows day, massive and prolonged deflation will certainly follow the epic debt expansion super cycle, which they created. The Architects have assured that they alone are positioned to take everything, and that you and your children are positioned on the other side of that, i.e., to lose everything, to be enslaved and even destroyed by it. People will be knocked down, and not be able to get up again. That is intentional, as the populace has been systematically encouraged to go deeply into debt.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first cause to borrow at low rates of interest! As in the Great Depression, prolonged deflation will ensure that people who are in debt will not be able to make payments on their debts, let alone repay them. They will be trapped. All property and businesses financed with debt will be taken. With profound and persistent deflation assured to stretch over many years, debt becomes a powerful weapon of conquest. Debt is not a real thing. It is an invention, a construct designed to take real things.” – David Webb – The Great Reset

Ever since reading Webb’s book my mind has been unsettled, trying to grasp how this could possibly happen, while trying to convince myself it won’t. We’ve muddled along for years and all predictions of collapse due to unsustainable debt growth have failed to materialize. My mind tells me Webb is right, while my heart hopes he’s wrong. But I know hope is not an option. No one in my financial position, or likely 99.9% of the population, will be able to avoid this accelerating train coming down the track.

Every non-insider on the planet will be negatively impacted by the Great Taking. The best we can do is prepare and prep based on our resources, location, family situation, abilities, and attitude. Eliminating debt, having cash-on-hand, having precious metals on-hand, being heavily armed, creating a local network of like-minded people, having no cash or investments in Wall Street banks, and even owning bitcoin in your private wallet, could help alleviate some of the pain from the “Great Taking”.

Webb recognizes we are already in a hybrid war against these psychopathic billionaire totalitarians bent on implementing their Great Reset, simultaneously with their Great Taking. It is a multi-front war waged on the financial battlefield, demographic battlefield, culture battlefield, technological battlefield, and ultimately will need to be settled on traditional battlefields across the globe. The level of malevolence required to perpetrate these heinous crimes against humanity is incomprehensible to the average person, therefore the masses don’t believe anyone would commit such acts. Webb knows these people exist and are capable of the vilest atrocities.

“Wars have always been not so much about taking things as about subjugation of populations on all sides. Vast destruction and death are acceptable to their planners. You might ask, how could the people plotting and executing such insane schemes be held together? I suggest that it has something to do with the binding power of shared guilt, of the criminal pact. The perpetrators are each and all bound, whether explicitly or unconsciously, by evidence of shameful, treasonous acts committed against their own people. The commission of crime is a power totem among them. The more heinous the crime, the more powerful is the binding force.” – David Webb – The Great Taking

Based on my observations during the zoom call with David Webb, he struck me as a mild-mannered guy who is obviously nervous about the future of the world and can identify the culprits, based on their actions. Despite understanding their level of psychotic behavior and disregard for the future of humanity, he seems to think they can be defeated through non-violent means. I think that is a false hope, as you can only defeat power through superior power on a physical, intellectual, and spiritual level.

I do believe they are losing control, resulting in an acceleration of their plans, ramping up of violence, blatant disregard for laws or the Constitution, and [even more] mistakes and missteps on their part. Based on their need for an accelerated collapse, I have a hard time believing we make it to the November elections without a triggering event initiating the dominoes toppling, and all hell breaking loose financially, militarily, and on a societal basis. Their deceptions are being revealed and an increasing number of citizens are angry and unwilling to comply.

The “Great Taking” is a well thought out plan, but it is still just a plan. It can be thwarted and resisted if enough people awaken from their normalcy stupor. The odds are not in our favor, as the masses remain ignorant of what is coming, but the more people who can be awakened, the better our chances. We know the Deep State billionaire brain trust behind these schemes are heavily guarded and protected from us commoners. But these aren’t the heavily compensated apparatchik front men doing the day-to-day dirty work. These vile cogs in this machinery of destruction have names, addresses, and families. Fear works both ways. The good guys also have tech savvy individuals capable of throwing electronic monkey wrenches into the gears of the Deep State machinery.

This entire episode is playing out during the second half of this Fourth Turning, where chaos and bloodshed reach a crescendo, as we approach the climax. The battle between good and evil couldn’t be any starker. Everyone will be forced to choose a side. I’ve spent the last sixteen years of my life trying to convince as many people as possible this nation has been on a burning platform of unsustainable choices. Instead of trying to extinguish the flames, our so-called leaders have sprayed gasoline onto the burning platform.

We are closer than ever to seeing that platform collapse and sink to the bottom of the sea. The Great Reset and Great Taking schemes must be prevented from happening at all costs. Our moment of truth approaches. We need to meet the challenges ahead with no fear and no doubts. It’s time to channel our inner Josey Wales if we want to win. Good luck and Godspeed.

(read more)

THE RICHEST KHAZARS HAVE BEEN FOMENTING REVOLUTIONS AND WARS FOR CENTURIES

World War III Is Now Inevitable – Here’s Why It Can’t Be Avoided

Then there’s Israel and Gaza. I warned months ago in my article ‘It’s A Trap! The Wave Of Repercussions As The Middle East Fights “The Last War”’ that the war in Gaza would expand into a multi-front conflict that would probably include Iran. I also warned that it would be to Israel’s benefit if Iran entered the war because this would force the US to become directly involved. To be sure, Iran has already been engaging in proxy attacks on Israel through Lebanon, but Israel’s attack on the Iranian “embassy” or diplomatic station in Syria basically ensures that Iran will now directly commit to strikes on Israeli targets.

In other words, much like WWI, the situation is being escalated by the political elites despite the fact that the general public in the west is increasingly opposed to participating in the conflict. The globalists want to send us to war whether we like it or not.  Every decision they have made so far makes peaceful resolution impossible.

One saving grace that is perhaps new in the entire history of geopolitics is that the public is far more awake and aware of the fact that it’s not necessarily their “duty” to blindly go fight when their government calls on them to do so. Social media has also given a platform for people to widely voice their concerns about war, whereas in the past objectors felt isolated.

Obviously, some of this is based purely on fear – A large percentage of Gen Z is unequipped mentally or physically to go to war, which is why more than 70% of potential military recruits today are rejected before they even get to boot camp. These are many of the same young people who post Ukrainian flags to their social media profiles and jump headfirst into anti-Russian rhetoric, but now that they are faced with the possibility of having to sacrifice themselves for Ukraine they are angry and terrified.

However, there is also a large contingent of capable (and mostly conservative) men with the background and the aptitude for combat that still want nothing to do with Ukraine. The reason is simple: They believe that far-left western governments and globalists want to use them as cannon fodder to get rid of them. Once they are used up in war, there will be no one left to appose the leftist takeover at home.

For most of us in America, Ukraine is irrelevant and we grow tired of wars in the Middle East. Whether left or right, we have no interest in fighting for them. But that’s not going to matter much, at least in terms of preventing a global war.

European Fear Mongering

War with Russia will depend more on European involvement than US involvement. While the US has been the largest provider of armaments to Ukraine by far, the ultimate goal I believe is to integrate European troops into the Ukrainian front, which would be an automatic declaration of global war.

The basis for mobilization of troops from Europe is “domino theory” propaganda. We’ve heard some of it here in America but nowhere near the same level as the EU populace. Governments assert that Russia’s goal is to clear Ukraine as a pathway to invade the rest of Europe. This is the same claim used as justification for the US war in Vietnam: “If we let one country fall to the enemy, all the surrounding countries will fall also.”

Both Ukrainian and NATO leadership suggests that war must continue in Ukraine in order to contain it. There has been no serious discussion of diplomacy, which is utterly bizarre considering the stakes involved. A peace proposal should have been broached the moment the war kicked off and there should have been ongoing efforts to come to an agreement. Instead, even limited peace talks have been thwarted before they truly begin.

A military draft in Europe is far more likely to succeed, given the socialist nature of the population and the fact that only a tiny percentage of civilians are armed to defend themselves. Even with a public protest movement I have little doubt EU governments will be able to secure a large enough force to send into Ukraine and escalate the war.

According to the evidence, it’s clear that some NATO troops have already been deployed to Ukraine and have been there for some time. As I’ve noted in past articles, the strategies used during the first Ukrainian counter-attack were far too advanced for Ukrainian troops and leadership to pull off without help. Anti-armor tactics in particular were very familiar; similar in execution to tactics used by US and British special forces. Not surprisingly, as soon as foreign mercenary recruit rates dropped off, Ukraine’s momentum fizzled.

The Russians are likely well aware of this situation, but as long as smaller groups of soldiers can be sent under the guise of mercenary forces, there’s not much they can do about it. It’s the open deployment of NATO battalions that is cause for greater worry.

There is zero basis for the domino narrative. Not once has Russia indicated since the start of the conflict that they intend to invade the EU. In fact, Putin has long stated that the war in Ukraine is about protecting the separatists of the Donbas region from Ukrainian reprisal, and about the continued escalation of NATO armament.

My suspicions about Putin’s connections to the globalists aside, if we look at the war from a basic cost/benefit analysis there is really nothing for Russia to gain by threatening Europe.

Then there’s the problem of logistics. If Russia is supposedly struggling in Ukraine, how could they have the means to fight on an expanded front against the combined military might of Europe and the US? The only end result would be nuclear war, which both sides would lose. But if you look at the situation objectively, there is a group of people out there that have a lot to gain…

Attacks On Russian Interior Accelerate

Smaller attacks on Russian supplies as well as civilians have been escalating in the past month. The terror attack in Moscow (which US intel blames on ISIS) resulted in the deaths of at least 130 people and drone attacks are threatening oil depots along with other resources. In the grand scheme of the war these attacks are inconsequential, but they will undoubtedly lead to extensive bombardment of Ukrainian cities and the further disablement of Ukrainian infrastructure. Power, water and other utilities will be destroyed and a resource crisis will ensue.

Compared to the US invasion of Iraq, Russia has managed to keep civilian casualties in Ukraine very low. But, each new attack on Russian soil instigates a larger Russian retaliation. And maybe this is the goal – To get the Russians to crater a larger Ukrainian population center thereby giving NATO an excuse to send troops to the region.

Iran And The Oil Imperative

In the Middle East the primary driver for international involvement is oil. We all know this. But oil access is not the end goal to the war in Gaza, just a mechanism for getting the US involved.

I’ll reiterate here that I don’t care which side started the fight or how far back the conflict supposedly goes in history. This is irrelevant. What I do know is that Hamas started this particular war by killing civilians in Israel and you should not start a war unless you’re willing to accept the consequences. That said, I do find it suspicious that Israel’s defensive measures were so useless that they were completely unaware of the Hamas incursion until it was too late.

In any case the conflagration is guaranteed to bring in other larger military elements. Iran is going to enter the fray now, there’s no way around it. This might happen first in the form of economic warfare, and the Strait of Hormuz is the most likely target. Shutting down 30% of the world’s oil traffic would be disastrous for the west. So, America’s entry is thus also guaranteed.

The Inflation Factor, US Elections And How Globalists Benefit

Joe Biden has been struggling for the past three years to manipulate oil prices down by dumping strategic reserves on the market. By artificially keeping oil prices down he keeps energy prices down, and by keeping energy prices down he reduces the growth of CPI.

The Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil depots have helped to spike gas prices in the past month exactly because Russian oil is still being purchased by western countries through back channels. You can’t just cut off one of the largest energy suppliers in the world without huge effects on prices at the pump. And these attacks are revealing how sensitive the oil market is to the slightest threat to supply.

Any major conflict in the Middle East will seal the deal and gas prices will explode. Inflation is not just going to be the death knell of Biden’s presidency (assuming presidential elections still matter), it’s going to be the death knell of the leftists and globalists overall UNLESS they can delay a larger economic calamity until they have a scapegoat, or, until they can start a massive war.

That scapegoat will either be Trump and conservatives, or, Russia and the BRICS (or both). If Trump replaces Biden in 2025 then a crash will be fast and assured and it will be blamed on conservative movements. If Biden stays in a crash will be slower but will still hit hard after it can be blamed on the widening wars.

Then there’s the scenario of globalists securing a war BEFORE elections take place. Perhaps with the intention of preventing or delaying the vote. Perhaps with the intention of creating enough chaos that the vote can be rigged, or giving the impression that it was rigged, triggering civil unrest. Perhaps with the intention of declaring martial law.

Obviously, this is where the globalists benefit; either by preventing conservatives from taking power or by embroiling conservatives in a global calamity that they eventually get blamed for. Keep in mind that any conservative/independent opposition to the globalist establishment can now be accused of “Russian collusion.”

What’s the value of this? Well, it’s an age-old strategy for demonizing freedom fighters – If they are seen by the public as fellow citizens fighting for their rights, then they might be treated as heroes. But, if they’re painted as foreign assests and terrorists seeking to destabilize society, then the public sees them as villains. It’s just another advantage that explains why globalists seem so intent on creating a world war.

I believe that the reason the establishment is pressing so hard for WWIII is partly because of the upcoming elections and also because their covid agenda failed. Covid lockdowns and the vaccine passport system were their big play to create a permanent authoritarian environment with the ability to crush conservative groups that refused to submit. And no matter how you slice it they didn’t get what they wanted. World war is the natural Plan B.

It’s important to understand that every crisis created by globalists is meant to destroy the freedom minded. The true target is not Russia or Iran; they are peripheral. These events are designed to create an environment conducive to tyranny, they act as cover for engineered economic collapse, and they act as cover for the REAL war against those people that still defend liberty.

You could say that WWIII has already started, at least in economic terms. I also highly doubt that the end game for the globalists is a worldwide nuclear exchange; why spend decades building a massive control grid only to vaporize it all in seconds? I do think the danger of kinetic warfare is skyrocketing and that US and European citizens will be directly affected. It will take a sizable resistance movement to change the path we are being forced to follow, and things will get much worse before they get better. (read more)

WET WORK OPERATIVES OF THE DEEP STATE,
AREN'T KILLING THIS INTELLIGENCE ASSET.
RFK, Jr. KNOWS HE'S SAFE.
His presidential run is an intelligence operation
to facilitate vote-switching in November.

Socialist economist Robert Heilbroner was the founding father of the
modern climate cult. His article, After Communism, The New Yorker,
Reflections, 10 September 1990, page 91, was his attempt to restore,
“the honorable title of socialism,” after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
He envisioned socialism being reborn by destroying
capitalism and restoring central planning to mitigate, “the ecological
burden that economic growth is placing on the environment.”

NetZero and Human Rights are Mutually Exclusive

(Featuring: The Three Big Lies of “Climate Action”)

Everybody talks a good game when asked about environmental concerns. But they underestimate what real “climate action” will cost them, personally, and they’re prone to balking when they figure it out.

In 2018, The Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago conducted a survey of 1,202 people asking them if they thought climate change was an issue, and if so, how much were they willing to contribute, out of their own pockets, towards “fixing it”:

• 71% of the respondents said that climate change was a reality, and most of those thought human activity was largely responsible for it.
• 57% said they’d be willing to spend $1/month, or $12 annually.
• 23% were willing to go big: $40 a month, in order to “fix” climate change.

A more recent study of ten European countries in 2021 found that most people feel as though they are already doing their part to live a climate conscious lifestyle – and further – they are individually doing more than those in the media, or their governments (hold that thought).

In other words, while most respondents believed that there was an impending climate crisis, they also believe they had already made all the personal lifestyle adjustments they’ll need to make in order to address it.

These attitudes are pretty typical of a populace who has already undergone massive conditioning by the media and academia around climate alarmism, but who otherwise live largely insular, bubble-wrapped lifestyles and think food comes from Uber Eats.

They have no idea that  that climate targets, like “netzero” or Agenda 2030 will cost more them more than a few hundred bucks a year, per person, to “fix”.

Even with carbon taxes becoming more prevalent – citizens think the extent of the impact on their lives are the economic pressures of them inexorably rising (here in Canada, the carbon tax went up 23% on April 1st, the same day all federal Members of Parliament got a pay raise).

That’s bad enough – but people are still completely unprepared for what has already been decided from on high for their personal destinies:

Climate Action requires a complete re-ordering of society and civilization itself.

“De-carbonization” requires “#degrowth”, a euphemistic hashtag that really means forced austerity on all of humanity – save for those apparatchiks imposing it on the rest of us.

The Big Lie of climate alarmism is threefold:

1. That the climate goals of netzero and decarbonization can boost the economy and increase prosperity for all
2. That achieving said goals will afford us control over the climate and alter the planetary physics of the earth itself
3. That this is all “settled science”

Let’s look at each of these in order:

Big Lie #1: Pursuing Netzero will boost prosperity

Many politicians like to gaslight us that there is a way achieve netzero targets in an economically beneficial manner. A good example, again here in Canada – is the carbon tax.

Everybody pays the carbon tax – on gas, on flights, on heating their homes, etc. Most households get a “carbon tax rebate” – which is invariably, for less money than they have paid in carbon taxes. This is borne out in countless analyses on this, including the government’s own Parliamentary Budget Office report, which found that:

“most households will experience a net loss of income from the federal carbon tax, even after rebates.

Specifically, in fiscal year 2024-25, 60 per cent of households in Alberta, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Manitoba will pay more in carbon taxes than what they receive in rebates, after accounting for both direct and indirect costs of the carbon tax. By 2030, 80 per cent of households in Alberta, Ontario, Manitoba, Nova Scotia and P.E.I. will be worse off, as will 60 per cent of households in Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador.

Indeed, according to the PBO estimates, the carbon tax will cost the average Canadian household between $377 and $911 in 2024-25—even after rebates, with Albertans being the most affected. As the carbon tax escalates annually, the financial burden will intensify. By 2030, the carbon tax’s average net cost for Canadian households will rise to $1,490 in Manitoba, $1,723 in Saskatchewan, $1,820 in Ontario and $2,773 in Alberta.”
— Via Fraser Institute

Yet the Trudeau government frames the rebate as “free money” for Canadians, and demonizes anybody who wants to “Axe The Tax” as though they are trying to take money away from taxpayers.

If decarbonization was economically viable, then it would be happening on its own, without governments and the corporate media relentlessly brainwashing us to do it.

For example, we would probably have mini-nuclear reactors all over the place by now if private industry was given some latitude to implement it.

Instead we have millions of hectares of wind turbines that are only “green” if you can amortize the carbon inputs over 30 or 40 years. Alas, the typical wind turbine is cooked within a decade (that’s if they don’t explode first). Apparently they can’t be recycled, either. It’s actually making the situation worse.

 Big Lie #2: Achieving Netzero will enable us to control the planet’s climate

There has perhaps never been a more grandiose and categorically impossible vision for humanity than the one where technocrats and experts can massage the trajectory of global climate through the judicious employment of carbon taxes, personal carbon footprint quotas and forced collectivism.

On the planetary level – it makes no difference if a country like Canada decarbonized 100% – compared to the emissions of China alone. Right now they’re lighting up two new coal fired plants every week. Wake me up when they decarbonize.

Not to mention numerous other countries who have no intention of foregoing their shot at economic prosperity at the behest of already an affluent (not to mention overly sanctimonious), West…

The discrepancies in values and aims between nation states already makes the 100% conformity that climate action requires a non-starter.

That doesn’t even account for things we absolutely can’t control like the solar system itself.

The best and brightest minds can’t even get interest rates right, nor “manage the economy” and that’s near 100% human driven. What are we supposed to do about the elephant in the room in terms of the single most relevant driver of climate cycles here on the planet: the sun?

Our sun outputs an estimated 6 billion times more energy per second than all of humanity generates and consumes in an entire year. It is the likeliest candidate for what drives long term heating and cooling cycles, not only here on earth – but throughout the entire solar system.

Granted – that energy radiates in all directions – if you only count all the energy that actually hits earth, that number drops: to 100 million times annual energy usage, per second.

No amount of carbon taxes or collectivism is going to overpower that.

Big Lie #3: The Science Is Settled™

Decades of propaganda and operant conditioning has browbeat the public into believing, or at least not arguing, that “the science is settled” when it comes to climate. One of the most well worn tropes around this is “97% of climate scientists agree” that “humans are causing global warming”.

Marc Morano’s, ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide To Climate Change’, (essential reading) years ago exposed the origin of that magical number, “97%”:

In 2013, Australian researcher John Cook analyzed 11,944 peer-reviewed papers on climate change, from which the famous, mystical 97% figure emerged. It later came out (via UN lead author Richard Tol), that of those papers, 66.4% expressed “no opinion at all” on human-caused global warming. Those were eliminated. 

The minority of papers that were left, and did express an opinion, were mostly on the same page, and Cook took his 97% from that.

What is actually true, however, from the study’s own numbers, is this:

• 11,944 papers were analyzed
• 7,930 of them expressed no opinion on AGW (66.4%)
• 97% of the remaining 4,013 papers did

So it turns out that 97% of climate scientists do not agree that humans are causing global warming. It was more like 32.5% (97% of 33.6% of 11,944).

Doesn’t have the same punch, does it?

Of course, since then, 97% became Holy Canon. So much so that any climate scientists who knew what side of the bread the butter was on, got the message loud and clear: your academic career depends on aligning with the consensus.

So called “climate deniers” are continually deplatformed and countervailing data suppressed. This may be changing, again owing to widespread disenchantment with how the “experts” managed the pandemic, the public seems to be more questioning.

The recent Climate The Movie: The Cold Truth has gone viral – and in it we see how the machinations of Big Climate may be driven more by junk science and hidden agendas than an altruistic desire to protect the environment.

So it’s no surprise then, that the climate alarmists are turning out in full force to have it suppressed:

Fortunately, the genie is out of the bottle now – Climate The Movie is being circulated far and wide, even having been uploaded to the decentralized InterPlanetary File System

After the botched policy responses to Covid, when it comes to climate,  the public increasingly isn’t buying it.  We’ll see this in action when the Canada’s Liberals, who have clearly gone “all in” on climate, lose the next election. I’ve been predicting a 1993-style blowout (when Bryan Mulroney’s deeply loathed Conservatives lost all but three seats, including their party status).

However, the public seemingly possesses but a single lever to resist all this: the ability to vote out politicians hellbent on impoverishing them.

But if the rabble continues in its propensity to vote the “wrong way”, how much longer will they be permitted to do so?

As we’ll see below – this lever will have to be rescinded, because otherwise the world will end.

Which is why the only forward course of action is political, economic and cultural tyranny.

If the plebs won’t voluntarily accept climate action – it will have to be forced on them.

The unpleasant truth is – if policy makers are serious about achieving netzero, it will require a massive policy of degrowth that will impoverish the masses and demolish the economy – none of which is conducive to being re-elected.

Which means: if world governments are serious about climate action, they will have to impose a totalitarian dictatorship to achieve it.

This has already been understood and internalized by the mainstream corporate media – after experiencing the destruction of their monopoly on “news” at the hands of the internet – have aggressively pivoted into a new business model: that of being propagandists for eco-Marxism.

Academia is right there alongside, putting out research papers to enshrine climate collectivism into the public discourse, and freeze out any dissenters.

In “Political Legitimacy, Authoritarianism, and Climate Change”, Ross Mittiga, a professor of Political Theory at the Catholic University of Chile (and Democratic Socialist) argues that political aspirants should not even be permitted to seek office unless they pass a “climate litmus test”;

“Governments might also justifiably limit certain democratic institutions and processes to the extent these bear on the promulgation or implementation of environmental policy. This could involve imposing a climate litmus-test on those who seek public office, disqualifying anyone who has significant (relational or financial) ties to climate-harming industries or a history of climate denialism.”

“More strongly, governments may establish institutions capable of overturning previous democratic decisions (expressed, for example, in popu- lar referenda or plebiscites) against the implementation of carbon taxes or other necessary climate policies.”

In a 2023 piece via BBC’s “Future World”, the prospect of climate change and action around it was deemed “too important to be left to personal choice”, which laments,

”what do truly low-carbon lifestyles look like – and can they really be achieved by personal choice alone?“

Future Labs – also out of the UK – put out a paper on the future of travel last year, that predicted mandatory “carbon passports” that would limit one’s travel based on their C02 footprint:

A personal carbon emissions limit will become the new normal…

These allowances will manifest as passports that force people to ration their carbon in line with the global carbon budget…

By 2040, we can expect to see limitations imposed on the amount of travel that is permitted each year.

Experts suggest that individuals should currently limit their carbon emissions to 2.3 tonnes each year

This last line is important – because it puts a number to how far down the rabble is expected to ratchet down their living standards: it’s about one quarter of what the typical G20 citizen emits today – by 2040, and “experts suggest” that gets cut again by half by 2050.

In the carbon passports article I laid out a table showing by how much individuals in each country would have to ratchet down their output to meet the personal carbon allowances, set by unelected and unaccountable experts:

Both politicians and their appointed apparatchiks are being more open about their ideologies and decidedly collectivist aims:

In 2023 a federal report published by Health Canada openly advocated for the dismantling of capitalism itself, equating it with white supremacy and colonialism – attributing them all as core drivers of the climate crisis. Another term for “capitalism” is “free markets”.

The report also advocated for collectivism and decried individualism as “one of the core values of society that has to change”:

“The hopes expressed by participants encompassed such a vision of collectivism”

“there are 3 core values in western society, and for that matter, in global society, that have to change. One core value is about growth and materialism. The second core value is liberty and individualism, which has to be rethought because the kind of individualism that is preached by neoliberals is part of the problem. It advances the individual over the collective… it leads to a huge number of problems, and it undermines the collective process”

“If we don’t address capitalism, if we don’t address colonialism, racism, the patriarchy, et cetera, we’re going to tread water for a long time until we eventually drown …”

As I remarked at the time: this was not a think piece or a screed from Vox or Jacobin Magazine – it was an official Canadian government report issued in the name of “His Majesty the King in Right of Canada, as represented by the Minister of Health, 2023”.

Canadian politicians across all parties have been coalescing around climate authoritarianism for decades. In 2007, Canada’s Laurentian Elite met in Merrickville, Ontario to discuss how best to advance the climate agenda – and was later analyzed via a series of interviews with the participants who comprised a who’s who of Canadian dynastic wealth, corporate power, politics – and media.

They transcended party boundaries: Former Prime Minister Joe Clark, Justin Trudeau bagman Stephen Bronfman, Patrick Daniel (Enbridge), Stéphane Dion, former Quebec premiere Pierre Marc Johnson, WE Charity co-founder Mark Kielburger, the list goes on.

From the “strictly confidential” briefings which are openly linked from this UCLA professor’s web page we learn how Canada’s elite ruminated about the lack of action on climate change, and how untenable the required societal mobilization would be in a democracy:

During the proceedings…

Today we have Canadian Members of Parliament attempting to advance legislation that would imprison people for speaking in favour of fossil fuels.

This move toward climate authoritarianism is spreading throughout the neoLiberal world order – most recently in Germany a “Climate Justice” report by the German Ethics Council concluded that “restricting freedoms may be necessary to fight climate change”.

The original is in german, although there is an english summary here, I had the full PDF run through DeepL and is here.

From the summary, we do get the juicy bits:

“Responsibility presupposes freedom, and freedom includes responsibility. This principle also applies for climate change; it is crucial for our free and democratic society and safeguarded and guaranteed by law. Social coexistence requires mutual restrictions of freedom, in order to provide equitable freedom for all.“

“The inner and rationally guided realisation of the necessity for action leads to self-commitment as an expression of one’s individual freedom. This may imply that people question their former lifestyle or adapt their behaviour, for example by voluntarily abandoning certain vacation, consumption or mobility practices.”

And the Orwell Award goes to:

“On grounds of justice, it can be morally required to contribute to measures to tackle climate change. If one’s own exercise of freedom interferes in an unjust manner with the freedom and welfare of others or of future generations, for example through consumption that is harmful to the climate, the authorities may intervene with restrictions of freedom.

As long as there is no regulatory obligation, it is left up to the individual to accept a moral obligation to co-operate.”

This would be a good place to ask yourself: what do you think the relentless attacks on Bitcoin’s Proof of Work mining has really been about? It isn’t to save the environment from Bitcoin’s electricity consumption – it’s to create the pretext for asserting authority over all energy usage.

We could probably even riff out one of those Martin Niemöller “First They Came For…” poetic reboots:

“First they came for the Bitcoin miners (but I didn’t care because I was a no-coiner)…” (or one of those PoS retards).

“Then they came for…” yada yada yada – guess how it ends?

“Then they came for me, because of my heated bathroom floors”

There’s only one other problem with all this…

#Degrowth For Thee, But Not For Me

It’s not bad enough that your consumption choices are being decided for you by unelected technocrats informed by garbage computer models predicting an unfalsifiable eco-Eschaton.

What’s worse is that while you’re personal standard of living is going to be attenuated, metered, capped and regulated (this is what the coming CBDCs are all about) – the apparatchiks, functionaries and career politicians who force this on you will not ratchet back their own consumption patterns, not at all.

When I reported on COP26’s takeaways (basically, they’re coming after your meat consumption), what stood out the most was the hypocrisy of a strategic objective emerging from an elite conclave that was arrived at almost exclusively by private jet, and whose culinary menu contained some of the most carbon heavy delicacies available. High grade Scottish haggis and venison were served,  soy protein and bugs were not.

This is the rule, not the exception. Canada’s environment minister, who doesn’t mince words that “fighting climate change is about limiting your energy usage”:

But has no qualms around spending millions of dollars flying his entourage out to COP28 and staying in a $2,000/night luxury hotel suite.aa

Never forget this: whenever you hear politicians, “experts”, policy wonks and especially celebrities talking about the need to dial back consumption, energy usage, travel, meat consumption and even owning pets in order to “Save The World” they aren’t talking about their own lifestyles. They’re talking about yours.

The Public Has Had Enough

Earlier I mentioned how there’s basically one lever the public can use to skate eco-authoritarianism into the boards, and that’s the electoral process – which is why we wonder out loud how long those will be allowed to continue.

Here’s Klaus Schwab navel gazing with Sergei Brin about how Big Tech and algorithms will make elections unnecessary, “because the algos will already know who is going to win” (he poses this hypothetical about a minute after he says “in ten years we’ll all be sitting here with our brain implants”)

Back here in reality: Canada’s left-wing coalition will be ejected from power in the next election, that’s pretty well a forgone conclusion.

The US would be headed in that direction, provided the election in November actually takes place and isn’t rigged. The stakes are so high there, it’s hard to know what will happen. I once said that Donald Trump would be the penultimate President of the United States as we know them. Meaning, whoever came after him, would be the last President of a United States. We’ll see.

The public sentiment is overwhelmingly done with climate alarmism, wokeness and cultural Marxism in general. The question now is, will this backlash and turning point be allowed to express itself peacefully and democratically? Or will it end up unleashing a more forceful backlash?

This is all part of the war between centralization and decentralization, which I’ve always said is, and will be, the defining tension of our era. This will transcend left vs. right, conservative vs. liberal.

The battle now is between people who want to decide things for everybody else, vs. people who want control over their own lives.

The Most Important Thing You Can Do

First – you have to help dismantle the norm that it is somehow unacceptable or immoral to reject the prevailing climate alarmism.

When Karen the co-worker goes off on a sermon in  the lunchroom that “Pierre Poilievre has no climate action plan”, instead of internally smirking and looking forward to the next election, you have to speak up, right there and then, “Yes, that’s why everybody is going to vote for him, including me”.

This is important because, as we saw under COVID, the tyrannical regimens continued as long as normal people were afraid to speak their minds.

Nobody liked being arbitrarily divided into “essential” and “non-essential” workers and businesses.

Nobody liked wearing masks, sticking PCR tests up their noses or standing on the fucking dots. But everybody did it, because the first two doctors who spoke up about how stupid it all was, had their careers destroyed – and that set the trend for the next two years.

It was the forced vaccinations that finally put the public over the edge, and it took a near uprising by the #FreedomConvoy to finally turn the tide and put an end to it.

The coming Climate Authoritarianism will make COVID tyranny seem like a libertarian paradise.

In today’s landscape of internet connected everything, big data, and now AI, and soon, monetary Apartheid via CBDCs, all the ingredients will be there for a technocratic authoritarianism that netzero and degrowth requires.

Your job isn’t to tell the government you aren’t on board with this: your job is to demonstrate to those around you that it’s ok not to be on board with it.

That also means you will have to be able the weather the consequences of not being on board with it.

My advice continues to be: strive for financial independence – if you have a job, start your own business on the side. If you already own a business, start, buy or invest in another one. Get yourself to the point where you can be fired, canceled, ridiculed and shunned and it not being the end of you.

Of course, that also means, if you haven’t already, start stacking Bitcoin. It’s the one monetary asset no government, no bureaucrat and no supranational entity can ever take away from you, that gains purchasing power over time and is in general, The Big Short on clown world we’re heading into. (read more)

FANI WILLIS IS A,
"D.E.I. THUG WITH A LAW LICENSE."

"Oh Man, This Is Huge": Video Revealed By Jan. 6 Defendant Raises Questions About Undercover Agents

Recently released Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol Police security video shows a suspected FBI special agent clapping and cheering as crowds surged up steps to the Columbus Doors and another meeting with an FBI tactical team just before it entered the Capitol after the fatal shooting of Ashli Babbitt.

The videos were first identified by defendant William Pope of Topeka, Kansas, in court filings in his own Jan. 6 criminal case. Exhibits Mr. Pope originally filed under seal have become public since the release of thousands of hours of Jan. 6 security video by the Committee on House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight.

Two possible FBI special agents and a third unknown colleague were with John D. Guandolo, the FBI’s former liaison with U.S. Capitol Police, at the Women for a Great America event on the East Front of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to Mr. Pope.

In sworn testimony in a December 2022 Alaska civil court trial and in numerous media appearances, Mr. Guandolo said he was with two FBI special agents and a colleague with whom he traveled to Washington on Jan. 6. Mr. Guandolo has indicated that he was also introduced to other FBI personnel at the Capitol that day.

Mr. Pope is seeking to compel federal prosecutors to identify them all. He said even if the men were at the Capitol on personal time, their free movement around the grounds shows they did not believe the Capitol was off limits to the public.

Mr. Guandolo, who handled counterterrorism and criminal investigations for nearly 13 years—from 1996 to 2008—as an FBI special agent, has said he was at the Capitol in a personal capacity and went primarily to pray.

He was interviewed by the FBI about his Jan. 6 visit on July 6, 2022. A heavily redacted copy of the FBI 302 interview summary has been made public.

‘This Is Huge’

Security video shows that as the crowd broke through the police line on the East Plaza and surged up the steps to the Columbus Doors, one of Mr. Guandolo’s colleagues clapped enthusiastically.

“Oh, oh, oh man, this is huge,” the man said, heard on Mr. Guandolo’s cell phone video that showed the crowd ascending the east steps.

On Capitol Police security Camera 7231, which looks out at the House Egg on the East Front, Mr. Guandolo was seen filming while standing on a chair just before 2:05 p.m. The clapping man, wearing a grey knit cap and dark coat, is identified in Mr. Pope’s court filing as “the Clapper” and “Colleague 2.”

While Colleague 2 cheered the protesters’ advance on the Capitol, a man on Mr. Guandolo’s left, “Colleague 1,” had his phone raised, presumably capturing his own video of the advancing crowd. He wore a brown knit cap and blue jacket, and carried a backpack, video showed.

Mr. Pope asked U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras to compel the Department of Justice to identify all FBI agents “who were material witnesses at the Capitol.” Mr. Pope wants the FBI “to produce all photographs, videos, and records related to their presence.”

The DOJ has filed opposition to Mr. Pope’s motion, saying it has “no obligation to investigate” who the men in the videos are.

Some of the exhibits in Mr. Pope’s Feb. 12 motion were redacted, but the recent release of thousands of hours of Jan. 6 security video by the Subcommittee on Oversight allows them to be released publicly, Mr. Pope said.

Capitol Police security video shows Mr. Guandolo, Colleague 1, and Colleague 2—often trailed by a third unidentified man, “Colleague 3”—moving about the Capitol grounds.

“For the record, my friend and colleague with me for most of the day on January 6th was not working,“ Mr. Guandolo told The Epoch Times in an April 2 email. ”He was there with his family to experience the event like most of us.”

Subsequently asked to clarify which of the men shown on CCTV he was referring to, Mr. Guandolo did not reply before press time.

“The other FBI guys I saw there I cannot speak about their capacity that day,” Mr. Guandolo added.

Mr. Guandolo said he testified for the defense in the criminal trial of Jan. 6 defendant Rebecca Lavrenz on March 29 and has been “asked to testify in several upcoming cases.”

Mr. Guandolo said his statements about Jan. 6 have been “very public and very clear.”

“There was an insurrection and revolution, and it was not done by the participants of January 6th but by senior government officials of the U.S. government,” he said.

‘Right to Be There’

The video from Mr. Guandolo and security cameras “also indicates that active-duty FBI agents perceived events at the Capitol to not be criminal,” Mr. Pope wrote in his motion. “From the clapping and celebratory expression we can conclude that these FBI agents were in favor of people accessing the building and that they believed the people had a First Amendment right to be there.”

At 2:28 p.m., Camera 7202 captured footage of Colleague 2 walking across the East Plaza and climbing the House steps. He stopped to shoot video or photos just a few feet from a group of Capitol Police officers, the video showed.

He appeared to be filming or photographing a group of five—two young men and three young women or teens—standing about a dozen steps above him. The five then descended the stairs and walked off camera with Colleague 2.

The group of five young adults was also seen walking immediately in front of Mr. Guandolo and his three colleagues on the House Plaza Egress—Camera 0811—at 2:55 p.m. and on Camera 0681 on the Southwest Walk at 2:57 p.m., video shows. One of the young adults carried on a conversation with Colleague 2 during part of the walk.

“Since this FBI Agent has professional law enforcement training, and since he found it permissible to walk up on the steps while three Capitol Police officers looked on nearby ... it is reasonable for me to conclude that this FBI agent will provide favorable testimony about the permissive actions of police that is likely to sway a jury away from a determination of guilt,” Mr. Pope wrote.

At 2:32 p.m., an FBI tactical team drove onto the East Plaza in an MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicle. After the dark green vehicle was parked, Colleague 1 came from the area of the Women for a Great America event, walked around the front of the vehicle and spoke to someone inside the front passenger door for approximately five minutes, video showed.

“This could indicate that FBI Colleague 1 was indeed on the clock at the Capitol on January 6, or that the uniformed FBI SWAT team did not consider the events at the Capitol to be a pressing matter and that they had time to shoot the breeze with an off-duty FBI colleague,” Mr. Pope wrote.

Members of the FBI SWAT team were seen on security video entering the South Door of the Capitol just before 2:50 p.m. They immediately turned right down a side hallway and helped Capitol Police carry a mortally wounded Ms. Babbitt, who'd been shot outside the Speaker’s Lobby minutes earlier.

Ms. Babbitt was set on the floor near the south entrance and emergency care was provided by FBI medics and Capitol Police until paramedics from the District of Columbia Fire and EMS Department took over.

At about 2:55 p.m. Camera 0948 on the southeast roof of the Capitol showed Mr. Guandolo and his three colleagues walking away from the east steps. Camera 0811 on the House Plaza Egress sidewalk showed the men walking past just before 2:56 pm. Mr. Guandolo looked to his right and appeared to be speaking to someone just before he disappeared from view, Mr. Pope wrote.

A few seconds later, a man known only by the hashtag #FenceCutterBulwark walked into view from the opposite direction. The identity of #FenceCutterBulwark has been a longstanding mystery after he was shown on public video cutting down the green plastic security fencing erected by Capitol Police to keep crowds away from the Capitol.

Mr. Guandolo told The Epoch Times, “I do not know #FenceCutterBulwark.”

While he was carrying out his fence destruction, #FenceCutterBulwark was filmed by Metropolitan Police Department undercover officer Ryan Roe, who said to him, “Appreciate it, brother.”

A man claiming to be #FenceCutterBulwark appeared on the Patriot Punk Network podcast in September 2023, saying he was not a provocateur or a federal informant, and did not know Officer Roe.

“If he said, ‘Thanks, brother,’ then our, I’m assuming our exchange would have been, you know, me just basically saying, ‘Hey, I’m just trying to get this out of the way. It’s a hazard. It’s dangerous, or whatever. I don’t want people getting hurt,’” the man told Patriot Punk host Chase Matheson.

Mr. Pope has petitioned Judge Contreras to order the release of video shot by all members of the Metropolitan Police Department Electronic Surveillance Unit (MPD ESU) who captured video on Jan. 6 using cell phones, camcorders and GoPro cameras.

Nearly 30 ESU officers were assigned for duty on Jan. 6, organized into eight teams. Some of the men used their phones to live stream to the MPD command center, according to court records.

One of the undercover officers allegedly acted as a provocateur in the crowd on the Northwest Steps, according to previous court filings by Mr. Pope.

Officer Nicholas Tomasula confirmed in an interview with defense attorneys in the Proud Boys case that he was heard on Jan. 6 video chanting, “Whose House? Our House!” and “Stop the Steal!”

Mr. Tomasula was identified as “Officer 1” in Mr. Pope’s February 2023 motion seeking to make Officer 1’s undercover video public.

At the foot of the Northwest Steps, as a protester climbed up a makeshift ladder onto the balustrade, Mr. Tomasula shouted: “C’mon, man, let’s go! Leave that [expletive],” his video showed. Mr. Tomasula got help from a protester climbing onto the balustrade, then shouted to protesters moving up the steps, “C’mon, go, go, go!”

Mr. Pope said that Mr. Tomasula was not alone in encouraging protesters on Jan. 6.

“MPD’s internal investigation on Tomasula and my own research has identified that other undercover MPD officers were, in real time, praising protesters who broke windows at the Capitol and thanking persons who removed fencing,” he wrote in a motion on Aug. 21, 2023.

Mr. Guandolo and his three colleagues were seen on two security cameras on the southwest drive, passing by at 2:57 p.m.

“It is significant that there were several agents present. The testimony of these FBI agents who believed it was acceptable to be in this alleged restricted area will weigh favorably on the minds of the jury against any contrary testimony brought by the government,” Mr. Pope wrote.

“For this reason, the court should compel the government to identify all FBI agents who directly witnessed events at the Capitol since the exculpatory testimony of many, many agents will lend strength in numbers to my defense.”

(read more)

STEPHANIE CLIFFORD (STORMY DANIELS)
IS DEFINITELY NOT DONALD J. TRUMP'S TYPE

Jesse Watters Summarizes Judicial Bias/Corruption in the New York ‘Hush Money’ Case

Jesse Watters ran a devastating segment last night on radical Judge Juan Merchan who silenced President Donald Trump from talking about his family’s financial ties to the current junk case he is presiding over against Donald Trump in New York City. Judge Merchan should be removed for his conflicts. This is peak corruption and cannot stand.

As Jesse Watters outlined succinctly in his monologue, “Trump is banned from talking about the judge’s family. Why? Because the judge’s family was paid by the Biden campaign. The judge’s family is currently being paid by Adam Schiff over $10 million.”

“The judge is threatening to put Trump in jail for pointing out that his liberal family is getting rich off this trial and richer if he’s convicted.” “The judge’s daughter isn’t seven. She’s 34. He’s not attacking her. He’s just saying what she does for a living. How’s that an attack? He just wants a new judge. One whose family isn’t funded by Democrats.” (read more)

Example: A politician gets a face-lift which seemingly makes them a better-looking candidate and improves their electability; but they don’t report it.  It’s not an example of honest services fraud, because the action of the politician has no bearing of political policy influence.  The same applies to paying off people to keep their mouth shut and retain the impression of the candidate.

Michael Cohen previously gave a written statement to the FEC that candidate Trump knew nothing of the payment he made to Stormy Daniels.  [LINK] Again, everyone forgets that key detail.  And according to the latest reporting, Cohen might have set the entire thing up as an extortion effort against Trump.  Regardless, you enter the NYC ‘Stop Trump’ judicial system and Lawfare finds a home to explore stupid stuff for public consumption.

The Judge in the case, Juan Merchan, triggered a gag order against President Trump, in an attempt to silence him and stop him from talking about all the sketchy details in the background of the case, as well as all the sketchy people associated with it.

As you know, Lawfare is a media narrative function using the court system.  The Lawfare operation needs a quiet target to work best.   President Trump is not a quiet target – hence, the gag order.

Today, President Trump calls attention to Judge Merchan and his family of leftists, which includes his daughter who has bragged on social media about her anti-Trump bonafides.  Trump blasted the obvious conflict of interest and transparent appearance of judicial bias. (source)

THE COVID-CON
The spike protein holocaust is yet another killing cult orchestrated
by the same group implementing NetZero & starting World War III.

https://armageddonprose.substack.com/p/covid-propaganda-roundup-the-granny

https://armageddonprose.substack.com/p/covid-propaganda-trump-brags-again

https://brownstone.org/articles/3-2-1-timber/

https://brownstone.org/articles/a-close-look-at-the-amici-briefs-in-murthy-v-missouri/

https://brownstone.org/articles/a-nation-of-non-compliers/

https://brownstone.org/articles/australian-court-blocks-covid-vaccine-challenge/

https://brownstone.org/articles/australia-to-face-an-honest-inquiry/

https://brownstone.org/articles/can-the-chief-justice-stand-up-to-the-censors/

https://brownstone.org/articles/fact-checker-check-thyself/

https://brownstone.org/articles/february-27-2020-the-lockdown-plan-goes-public/

https://brownstone.org/articles/four-years-ago-this-week-freedom-was-torched/

https://brownstone.org/articles/germanys-role-in-what-happened/

https://brownstone.org/articles/health-care-right-privilege-or-neither/

https://brownstone.org/articles/health-factors-paradoxes-and-dark-matter/

https://brownstone.org/articles/how-the-sea-turns-stones-into-pebbles/

https://brownstone.org/articles/how-will-we-remember-the-pandemic-era/

https://brownstone.org/articles/ignorance-stupidity-or-malice/

https://brownstone.org/articles/in-health-care-we-are-flying-blind/

https://brownstone.org/articles/jesus-or-amazon-loves-you/

https://brownstone.org/articles/kid-lab-rats/

https://brownstone.org/articles/life-after-lockdown-introduction/

https://brownstone.org/articles/mainstream-measles-mongers/

https://brownstone.org/articles/mechanisms-of-harm-introduction/

https://brownstone.org/articles/patents-pharma-government-the-unholy-alliance/

https://brownstone.org/articles/science-writing-is-rarely-journalism/

https://brownstone.org/articles/sickness-everywhere/

https://brownstone.org/articles/technology-weapon-of-the-people/

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-ama-is-wrong-about-julie-sladden/

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-cdc-intervened-in-voting-protocols/

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-crucifixion-of-kulvinder-kaur/

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-end-of-the-end-of-ideology/

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-harm-of-college-vaccine-mandates/

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-history-of-public-health-colonialism/

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-playmobil-society-vs-the-game-of-nations/

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-prep-act-swallowed-the-bill-of-rights/

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-silent-shame-of-health-institutions/

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-social-pole-switch/

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-virality-projects-censorship-agenda/

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-war-between-knowledge-and-stupidity/

https://brownstone.org/articles/two-weeks-to-flatten-became-eight-months-to-change-the-election/

https://brownstone.org/articles/we-are-being-systemically-blinded/

https://brownstone.org/articles/we-build-anew-in-australia/

https://brownstone.org/articles/what-we-lost-between-then-and-now/

https://brownstone.org/articles/when-panic-became-normalized/

https://brownstone.org/articles/whos-guilty-of-fake-news-now/

https://www.emerald.tv/p/could-the-clot-shots-unleash-prion

https://kirschsubstack.com/p/know-anyone-thinking-of-getting-another

https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/the-covid-gene-jab-inconvenient-truths

https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/covid-19-vaccines-effectiveness-and

https://www.unz.com/proberts/us-navy-medic-shut-down-for-releasing-unclassified-dod-data-showing-a-937-increase-in-heart-failure-among-vaccinated-us-military-personnel/

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/bombshell-buried-project-veritas-recording-shows-top-pfizer-scientists-suppressed-concerns

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/covid-experiment

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/covid-showed-us-who-really-rules-america

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/japanese-preprint-calls-mrna-vaccinesto-be-suspended-over-blood-bank-contamination

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/problems-after-covid-19-vaccination-more-prevalent-among-naturally-immune-study

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/veterans-affairs-kept-covid-19-vaccine-mandate-place-without-evidence

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/lockdowns-fourth-birthday

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/people-who-received-ivermectin-were-better-study-finds

https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/cdc-tells-people-65-and-older-take-more-covid-19-booster-shots

https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/covid-19-vaccines-can-affect-menstrual-cycle-researchers-find

https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/fauci-deputy-warned-him-against-vaccine-mandates-email

https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/harvard-medical-school-professor-was-fired-over-not-getting-covid-vaccine

https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/heart-scarring-detected-over-1-year-after-covid-19-vaccination-studies

https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/new-bill-would-strip-covid-19-vaccine-manufacturers-liability-protection

https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/rsv-vaccines-may-increase-risk-rare-neurological-condition

https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/those-who-are-vaxxed-and-boosted-may-have-immune-imprinting-ignores-new-jabs

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2024-03-11/covid-propaganda-trump-brags-again-about-operation-warp-speed-shills-vaxxes

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/covid-19-infection-increases-risk-autoimmune-diseases-30-percent-study

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/did-covid-psyop-fail

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/extreme-events-us-cancer-deaths-spiked-2021-and-2022-large-excess-over-trend

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fda-settles-ivermectin-case-agrees-remove-controversial-stop-it-post

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/mistakes-were-made

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/moderna-vaccine-recipients-have-greater-risk-developing-chronic-condition-study

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/secret-docs-reveal-germanys-public-health-agency-warned-lockdowns-cause-more-harm-good

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/trump-clearly-hasnt-learned-his-covid-era-mistakes-rfk-jr-says

D.E.I. = Didn't Earn It.

Minorities Don't Need DEI If They're Actually Qualified For The Job

Woke progressives have spent a considerable amount of time and energy over the past several years trying to hide and deny the existence of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion agenda.  The reasons are obvious - The philosophy removes all merit from society and replaces it with a cult of perceived oppression.  Academic prowess, mental drive, personal success, inherent intelligence or toughness; none of these things matter anymore when it comes to college admissions, corporate employment, municipal job access or political promotion. 

All that has mattered for almost a decade is skin color, gender, sexual orientation and how much a person's minority status raises the ESG score of a particular institution.   

DEI goes far beyond the notion of Affirmative Action.  While the value of AA alone is questionable in western societies today, it is simply a legal affirmation that companies should hire minorities that have the correct qualifications and not ignore them based merely on their ethnicity.  Does AA still lead to unqualified hires?  Yes.  But DEI takes the problem to a whole new level by incentivizing the erasure of merit as a "social construct." 

That is to say, DEI demonizes the concept of merit as evil and racist.  Such an ideology can only lead to one thing:  The saturation of all important jobs and positions with people that represent the lowest common denominator, not to mention the inevitable downfall of civilization. 

The effects of hiring practices based on woke virtue signaling are becoming more apparent by the day.  Corporations that engage in DEI all see the quality of their labor, the quality of their management and the quality of their products and services decline.  It is a near guarantee that any company that goes woke will eventually go broke (unless they are getting artificial support from investment firms and government programs).  

The proliferation of the system has led to a growing public outcry, not only because DEI is specifically discriminatory against straight white men even when they are the best candidates for higher education or a particular job, but also because hiring the unqualified leads to a degradation of value everywhere we turn. 

Most people don't care if a doctor or lawyer or firefighter or architect or their manager in charge is a minority, they just want the best person for the job.  DEI makes this impossible.  By creating quotas and percentages of minority representatives within any working environment, there is no way to fill those positions without hiring people that fail the basic standards.  There aren't enough qualified minorities in existence to meet the fabricated demand.

Beyond that, DEI is detrimental to minority professionals with actual skills, because now whenever we see a minority in a vital job we're going to wonder if they got that position because they're capable or because of their skin color and sexual preferences.

In other words, DEI = Didn't Earn It.

The political left is outraged at the exposure of DEI and have taken to social media recently to declare the use of the term a "racial slur."  As the Mayor of Baltimore, Brandon Scott, argued in his interview with Joy Reid on MSNBC, he thinks white people who say "DEI" are using it in place of the "N-word."  

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott:

“White people use the term DEI hire because they don't have the courage to say the N-word.”

A national tragedy where multiple people are dead and missing and Joy Reid and Mayor Scott want to make it about race? Despicable. pic.twitter.com/BwvEHZhYwo

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) March 28, 2024

It should be noted that Baltimore has had minority mayors in power since 1987 (with the exception of Martin O'Malley) and the city has been in steep decline for decades.  Of course, correlation is not necessarily causation - The fact that all of these mayors were Democrats might have more to do with the city's problems than their skin color.  The point is, Brandon Scott has no room to blame white people for the failings of his city.  Black people have been in charge of Baltimore for a long time; maybe it's time to take responsibility.

And this is the crux of DEI thinking, isn't it?  Adherents to the ideal want more access to "power" and authority without without the talent needed to handle it or the responsibility required to wield it.  They want access to college education based on assumed disadvantage rather than real accomplishment.  They want accolades for simply existing as minorities in a world they claim is holding them back, all while being treated with kid gloves and extensive privilege.

Truly successful people don't need to have their hands held through the process of life at every turn.  They accomplish their goals through hard work, intelligence and persistence.  Leftists say that DEI is necessary because there are "invisible barriers for minority groups" in the west.  This is a lie.

A perfect example is the Asian community, which is a tiny portion of the US population yet they find academic and business success at an extraordinary rate.  Promoters of DEI constantly ignore the data when it comes to Asians in America and are often hostile towards them exactly because they win on merit alone, proving the entire basis of DEI wrong.  Diversity quotas within many colleges have even discriminated against Asians in favor of other minorities (or female applicants) because they are considered "too advantaged."  The problem was so pervasive it was taken to the Supreme Court in 2023. 

The bottom line is that merit is the only reasonable way to run a society.  Once decisions are made and leaders are chosen based on who claims they are the most historically oppressed there is no way to clarify value.  Who is truly more worthy - A person whose DNA barely connects them to trespasses from distant history?  Or, a person who is able to do the job right?  Diversity is not necessarily strength. Historic oppression is meaningless.  Merit is everything. (read more)

DIVERSITY REQUIRES DISCRIMINATION