Shitshow Macro Issue 2.X: Addendum & Update
Extra credit material (video) for previous topics
Money, war, religion, markets, geopolitics, social dynamics, the human condition, and societal implications. As everyone with a platform spends their time hyperfocused on single issues that draw you in, this is my attempt to step back to show the larger picture (and potential implications or concerns).
The ever-changing media cycle seems built to give us the attention spans of fruit flies - but there are issues that we should take the time to focus on and understand.
These are those issues.
Topics covered in this (extra credit video) edition
Introduction & update
The Great Taking author reveals himself & walks you through it
Tim Pool & Mike Cernovich walk you through The Epstein File releases, background, and current societal/metaphysical issues
Tucker Carlson and Alex Berenson walk you through the COVID lockdowns, lies, censorship, and lack of accountability
(Brief) Introduction
There’s been a longer-than-expected break between my last post and this one, but a recent conversation led me to reinvision how I write these posts. Namely, one of the very small number of people who I trust implicitly (my dad) made a comment that they have been great, but far, far too long.
I agree, and that was an issue that I was trying to figure out a way around as well. One of the things that led me to start writing this Substack was that there are so many issues that are linked, but most people just don’t have the time or background to pull all of the threads to discover how they are connected.
Even those who do have the time may not have the background to understand various aspects (financial, military, geopolitics, marketing/propaganda/messaging, history, etc).
I’ve had an extremely interesting life that has given me a lot of insights or knowledge that aren’t often present in one person, but it still amazes me how many different balls of yarn tend to emerge when you start pulling at strings - especially when you understand those strings and have been tracking many of these things long enough to notice the subtleties or connections that most may miss.
The piece that I’ve been working on since my last post is a great example of this. Going back over the past 10 years of history (a little further back, to be quite honest), one realizes that all of the major issues that we’re currently seeing and are being reported as “flare-ups” at the moment were set in motion over a decade ago:
Houthis in Yemen
Hamas and Israel
Iran & Hezbollah infiltrating D.C.
Washington’s (Obama’s) desire for Iran to be the Middle East power broker rather than Saudi or Israel
Russia/Ukraine War
COVID and other public health issues
The Marxist “Long March through the Institutions” (whose literal playbook from Italian communist Gramsci was translated into English by none other than “Mayor” Pete Buttigieg’s dad when he was a professor at Notre Dame)
The current and oncoming economic crisis
CBDCs and a system of control that is straight out of Orwell’s 1984
I could go on and on about that, but this is meant to be a short post to give you some “extra credit” over the long weekend.
Rather than putting every aspect of a topic and its subsequent threads into massive posts, I’m at work breaking these things down into posts that are shorter and connect to each other rather than being tomes that take hours to read each.
It just so happened that I had a lot of driving to do this week, and had time to listen to several videos and interviews that came out covering some of the major topics that we discussed in Issues 1 and 2. Some of these cover those topics in greater detail, and some add entirely new details.
For those of you who have been interested in all of the topics that we’ve covered so far, I’d suggest bookmarking this or the interviews themselves and taking the time to listen or watch them all. If you don’t have the time to watch them all, I’ll explain and link them each below so that you can consume the ones you feel are worth your time at your own discretion.
The Great Taking author reveals himself & walks you through it
In the first Shitshow Macro post we went through a book that was recently published called The Great Taking. The book was written by a former hedge founder called David Webb, in which he outlined the economic structures that have been put in place across the U.S. and now the globe that essentially give secured creditors the ability to take your assets even if they’ve been paid off in full or weren’t purchased with debt.
It sounds crazy, I know.
There’s no way that our elected officials would allow this to happen, right?
We have Federal agencies in place to ensure that nobody is allowed to do something like this, right?
Well, we have Federal agencies whose sole purpose is supposed to be ensuring that politicians aren’t corruptly taking insider info for stock trades (SEC), being bribed through their donations or foundations (FEC), and others who are supposed to ensure that the food and medicine we consume is safe (FDA).
How have those been working out for us over the past several years?
This is what some people refer to as “institutional capture,” and ties into what I mentioned in the bullet points above.
Italian communist Antonio Gramsci and his Long March Through the Institutions outlined how communists across the world could topple governments by entering government, rising through promotions, and hiring their fellow comrades along the way.
Other instances of institutional capture come through outright corruption and “the banality of evil” when business leaders or members of government are willing to accept money or business to do things that they know are wrong, but will pad their pocketbooks so they go along with it.
We’ll get into Gramsci and his comrades in a future post, so let’s get back to the point here.
Many in my corner of people who understand macroeconomics & finance and are awake to the way that firms like Blackrock and others have been using them in coordination with governments picked up The Great Taking book when it was published, devoured it, and tried to spread it as far and wide as we could.
I noted that I wasn’t the only one who had attempted to track down precisely who the author was, but found a lot of David Webbs in the finance world who had the resumes to fit who exactly the author was.
It seems that word got back to him that more was needed about both who he was and how he came about learning all of the things that he wrote about, so he recently put out a documentary that walks viewers through all of it.
I highly recommend watching this video in its entirety. Some of the topics included are:
The author and his family background. The son of doctors with a family history in Cincinnati, he saw firsthand and through family stories the destruction that the Great Depression and FDR’s closing of all non-Fed banks caused in that region.
His background in high-finance (mergers & acquisitions, hedge fund management) and how exactly he came to see aberrations in fund flows on both the private and public finance side, how that led him to predict the 2008 crisis, and how none of his hedge fund circle wanted to hear about these issues while times were good.
The parts of FDR’s policy that led to The Great Depression, and why that’s analogous to these economic mechanisms that have been put into place (FDR closed down 9,000 non-Federal Reserve banks, yet kept the debt owed by those who lost all of their savings in the bank closures actionable, leading to massive foreclosures. He then confiscated privately-held gold causing further damage, yet FDR’s policies are often taught in schools as having “ended” The Great Depression.
How and when The Great Taking mechanisms were being put into place as far back as the 1960s, who put them in place, their trajectory across the world, and what aspects of the economy are in danger.
Why the “banking crisis” that we saw last year is not over, and was only a canary in the coal mine.
What you can do to be prepared, and how we can push back against it.
Here is the video/documentary from the author himself. I’ll link both YouTube and Rumble, but only the YT link will auto-populate here. I do not trust YouTube one bit due to its extremely censorial nature, which is why I’ll add both for a topic like this.
The censorship has already started ramping up significantly ahead of this year’s election on that platform, so if the box below says “video unavailable” by the time you read this, just use the Rumble link.
https://rumble.com/v3yptkd-the-great-taking-documentary.html
Tim Pool & Mike Cernovich walk you through The Epstein File releases, background, and current societal/metaphysical issues
I’m a big fan of both Tim Pool and Mike Cernovich, and it’s certainly not because they say or think things that I agree with. While they were two people with major platforms who saw the societal battle that we’re currently in long before most, I like them because they come from varying backgrounds, they do see things differently than I do on more than a few issues, but they are fighters who are willing to say what they feel is right, regardless of whether the greater population agrees with them or not.
Tim got his start in media by going to the Occupy Wall Street protests with his camera phone, live streaming, and reporting on the ground before it was something that was popular to do. He was one of the original team for Vice News (before they went hardcore leftist), and was brought on to the original Fusion media group that was an attempt by several MSM outlets to capture the “edgy” youth media that Vice had created (and then fumbled by going full statist and pro-Regime leftist).
Despite what you’ll hear from the media consistently calling Tim “alt-right,” the dude is a self-avowed liberal yet also a 2024 Trump supporter because he “gets it.” The media attacks him often because they see him as a traitor to their “cause,” and he has a massive platform that he uses to promote conservative issues and puts a lot of money & effort into “the culture war” to bring things back into equilibrium.
Most importantly, as someone who spent his formative media years in places like Chicago and New York and has worked at the heart of the MSM, he knows how they think and knows many of these media personalities on a personal level. And they hate him for it because he sees and calls out the games they play and the lies they tell.
Cernovich is another that you have probably heard bad things about from both establishment conservatives, moderate liberals, and hardcore leftists. In my mind, it’s usually a good sign when someone is hated by all sides, because these days it’s an indicator that someone is pursuing the truth, no matter where it leads.
Being willing to call out bullshit, even from within your own “camp,” is necessary to fix things and the only way that we can get back to a healthy, functional society, in my opinion.
I bought into the bullshit spewed about Cernovich myself until I watched his documentary Hoaxed.
Like Tim Pool often does, Cerno’s documentary (linked above and available on all streaming platforms) directly calls out multiple race-based, race-baiting, and political media hoaxes that had occurred in the years before it was filmed (2019).
Watching that documentary helped me understand that what was said about Cernovich was not reality, and it also helped me to gain a better understanding of what he was really going for (exposing the bullshit). He’s great to follow on Twitter (now X) as well because he calls out media manipulation and propaganda in real-time.
I shared his Hoaxed documentary on my social media after watching it a couple of years ago and was immediately met with a surprising level of pushback from within my own circles. I’m not a social pressure kind of guy, so meeting that resistance is what made me look more deeply into, and become a fan of Cernovich.
If you want to follow either of them, their Twitter (X) handles are linked with their names at the top of this section.
Most importantly for the current moment, Cernovich is the reason that we’re getting Epstein legal file releases right now. They go into greater detail in the interview linked below, but Cerno is a lawyer and was the first to file for the case files in a civil defamation suit against Ghislane Maxwell to be released to the public.
They go into great detail about that process in the interview, and how it was something very different than what he and his legal team expected. The public release should be a pretty standard thing, but that case in particular became anything but normal.
SDNY quickly moved to intervene and file charges against Epstein, but did so in a way that is extremely irregular for that office. They declined to charge him on some of the most obvious charges, and many aspects of how they acted made it seem like the entire thing was nothing more than a cover-up operation.
Trump was in office at the time that Cerno filed, and someone from Trump’s camp let Cerno know that there were rumblings within the intel community that they were going to “take him off the board.” Thankfully The Miami Herald decided to join Cerno and also filed for public release, which gave him a little top cover and breathing room.
But also morphed it from a wetwork op to a cover-up op from the intel community.
The latter part of the interview is also excellent, and I highly recommend watching the whole thing if you can spare the time. Cerno has been fighting this fight for longer than most of us have even known there was a fight to be had, and so his insights about what “the great battle” really is are extremely valuable to understand.
https://www.youtube.com/live/oX8J5e6fcf0?si=-X6E4uwQRoaS030K
Tucker Carlson and Alex Berenson walk you through the COVID lockdowns, lies, censorship, and lack of accountability
If you read the previous issues of Shitshow Macro, you probably have a pretty good understanding that COVID was not what it was sold as. Yes, there was a virus. I got it twice, the first time I shook it off and it barely slowed me down but the second iteration put me down hard.
Where it came from, who funded it, the need to lock down the world, the damage to our kids, the damage to the world, the election laws that were flagrantly violated, the massive money laundering that happened (hundreds of billions fraudulently distributed in California alone), the fear-mongering, the censorship operations that were put into place, the demonization of anyone who asked common-sense questions…those are all things that were not organic, and there are a substantial number of angry people who demand answers and accountability.
Yet as much as we learn about the entire episode, nobody with the power to do so seems at all interested in doing anything about it, asking the right questions, or demanding any accountability.
This is pretty strange given the polling that somewhere around 70% of the population says they directly know someone who was harmed by the shots, and yet the elected officials who loudly scream about “our democracy” don’t seem interested in answering the questions that a majority of our population want to be answered.
Weird, huh?
One of the first people with a large platform who started using it to ask the questions that pushed the envelope to our current understanding of the ineffective shots and censorship regime that was put into place to silence any doctors, journalists, or citizens who dared ask questions was Alex Berenson.
Like Tim Pool and Mike Cernovich, Alex is by no means a staunch conservative. He’s a former NYT journalist and published author who started asking questions, uncovered lies that we were being told almost immediately, and was forced off of Twitter (pre-Elon) at the direct prodding of the Biden White House.
I would say allegedly, but Berenson took them to court in his own suit, and the Missouri v Biden Federal court case has also shown the direct communications from the White House to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube demanding censorship of millions of Americans who dared to ask questions.
If you don’t know what the Missouri v Biden case was, that’s because our friend Tracy Beanz and her journalistic outlet UncoverDC were the only media that really covered it. It’s probably the most important 1st Amendment case in a generation, but because the Biden administration was found censoring people, the MSM wouldn’t touch it.
Tracy did, and you can read her excellent reporting on that case here at UncoverDC.
Berenson’s case and that of the State AGs from Missouri and Louisianna were different, but each helped to uncover a massive censorship operation that was put into place ahead of the 2020 election and then put into overdrive to censor anyone asking questions about lockdowns, shots, or alternative treatments.
It was Berenson’s case that came first and led to many of the discoveries that helped to inform the cases later filed by the two states. Despite being a lifelong liberal, Berenson helped to open many eyes to the surveillance state that had been built all around us using the legal infrastructure of the PATRIOT Act and taxpayer funding.
Tucker Carlson dropped an interview with Berenson on his Twitter (now X) show today (Friday, January 12) and it goes through much of what he’s learned about the entire COVID escapade and subsequent government crackdowns:
https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1745581351498060019?s=20
*I don’t know if X will auto-populate to Substack or not - I guess we’ll have to find out. That’s the only place the interview is posted unless you have subscribed to Tucker's new network at TuckerCarlson.com. Wherever you get it, I suggest watching the interview.
Closing
I hope that was pithy (short) enough for all of you truth seekers and freedom fighters out there. I’ll try to keep the future issues shorter and hope to have the past decade of the Houthi trajectory in Yemen out at the beginning of next week for you.
There are a handful of topics that we’ll be covering over the next several weeks that are being sold to you as current conflagrations and “happenings,” but which have really been in the works for quite some time.
Every thread that I pull seems to lead to more and more balls of yarn, but pulling all of the bullshit out into the open sunlight is one of the ways in which we fix things.
Another is by realizing that many of the things that we think separate us are only constructed divisions that have been used to keep us infighting, which again can hopefully be fixed through bringing the truth out into the open and forging unlikely alliances of people who realize that many of us have been lied to.
The only way out is through, my friends.
Enjoy the long weekend.
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If you are so inclined and feel this is worth your time to subscribe for updates, share with others, or become a paid member, I’d greatly appreciate it.
Regardless, we’re all in this shitshow together. I’m going to do what I can to help you see the bigger picture and keep your eyes on the things that matter.
Until next time,
RPL