Shitshow Macro Issue 9, Part 1: Masks Off
The mass realization that the emperors are both naked and nefarious
Photo by John Noonan on Unsplash
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 edition
Introduction
Democracy or “Our Democracy™?”
Scale and Scope
The Blueprint of Slow Boil Tyranny (in the EU -> South America -> USA)
Astroturfed everything (i.e. “fake and ghey”)
Propaganda
Capitalism or Oligarchy?
Health & Wellness (Science or “The Science™?”)
Financial & Economic
Foreign policy
The surveillance state
The (Global) Censorship Industrial Complex
Introduction
“When change seems impossible, it becomes inevitable.”
-Sarah McBride/Alexander Mercouris, The Duran co-founder
Every Monday and Friday on the Shitshow Macro weekly prep and wrapup podcasts, I try to end with a “white pill,” or something that gives me hope for the future, if not the present. Part of that is because there is so much bad news of things being purposely burned to the ground all around us that I want to always leave our listeners with a silver lining.
Part is for a far more metaphysical and important reason, though:
Sometimes all you have is hope, and many times hope can be enough.
Many of the white pills that I’ve been imparting to our listeners over the past several months have centered around the mass awakening or “shedding of the veil or scales from people’s eyes” that I’ve seen happening on a massive basis at a quickening pace as of late.
If you’re a relative newcomer to this side of the fence and the understanding that reality is very different from what we’ve been sold over our lives in the West, it’s quite easy to quickly become “black pilled.” I see it often, both in real life and in the fake world of online interactions far too often.
It typically follows some variation of:
“Yeah, we know this [insert criminal, treasonous, or criminally treasonous action] happened, but nothing will ever come of it.”
Let me just say right up front: I get it.
I can totally understand where that line of thinking comes from in those who are just starting to realize the highly-manufactured reality that many of us believed in and were sold, via the fully processed, packaged, and artificial narratives designed to keep the great global NeoMarxist and rainbow jihad grifts going, was a house built nearly entirely on lies, facades, and fallacies.
For those new to the game and who are just waking up, the problems, scale, and scope of the treachery that has been visited upon us all can easily seem far too large, unwieldy, and total for anything to be done about it.
We’ve seen what happens to anyone who dares to stand up and make a concerted effort to punch above their weight in an attempt to fight back against The Machine, in the way that their lives are destroyed (or attempted to be destroyed) entirely when the full force of the corrupt aspects of our society take aim at them (see: Trump lawfare cases, legitimate whistleblowers, etc).
For those of us who have been able to see behind the curtain for many years, however, there is something happening at the moment, at scale, that we’ve never seen before. The masses are awakening and can see the facade, the naked emperors, the lies laid bare - and they are doing so globally.
False narratives from The Machine and its media propagandists are debunked, refuted, and pushed back upon in record time.
The Machine used to be able to hold up narratives for decades (Gulf of Tonkin, Desert Storm incubator babies), or multiple years (Russian Collusion Hoax), but now those of us with eyes to see and ears to hear are beginning to watch as the same high-level propaganda efforts are being refuted and actively pushed back against within hours or even minutes from their deployment across the media and social media.
While some are allowed to carry on and propagate for quite some time with no pushback from the “official channels,” I’ve seen many propaganda “trial balloons” pushed out over the past two years that receive so much immediate pushback from the public that they are resigned to the dustbin of history and never enacted.
The newcomers to this struggle against the narrative-setters and eyes-wide-open public don’t quite understand the macro-level effects that come from even these small victories, which are occurring far more often and with increasing regularity.
They only see the ones that are allowed to slip through and charge forward, not understanding that incremental progress is still forward progress - albeit slower than we may wish it were.
The Marxists hate more than anything when their own tactics are turned back against them, and what I’ve been seeing lately is a 180-degree flip of their most common tactics to enact their power competition to turn their own actions back against them, “everywhere and all at once,” as our friend EM Burlingame so eloquently describes it in his book The Eternal War.
To help you understand the significance of this loss of narrative-setting power due to the complete lost of trust in both the media and institutions, I would like to give you another quote that I heard quite some time ago and have long used as the basis for my ability and strategic thinking with regards to the “delayed gratification” necessary for those of us who think of business, strategy, planning, and other aspects of life in macro and long-term views:
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
And this brings us back to the quote that opened up this introduction, which will open up the greater topic of this post in breaking down something that I discussed in my first two posts & podcasts - which I fully believe is the greatest White Pill for everyone who wants to see equilibrium in society and a return to the America (and world) that many of us remember and yearn for.
Mercouris (co-founder of The Duran) is Greek by birth and now living in Britain. Many of my posts between the first two and this one have involved going into historical lessons for our readers and listeners to understand the deep history of the various cultures that are involved in The Great Power Competition right now, and how their centuries and epochs of history are often used to inform how those cultures see the world.
Like those that I have outlined (Russia, China, Iran, North Africa), Greece has a long and significant history.
Athens, Sparta, the birth of Democracy, Alexander the Great, and one of my own personal favorite history lessons to nerd out on, The Mystery School at Eleusis (the one location/school where the progenitors, creators, and forefathers of what we call Western society and Monotheism all attended, and all before Jesus Christ walked the earth).
Mercouris has a solid understanding of not just his own Greek history and all that it entails, but global history on a far more comprehensive and wide-scale than I do. While we typically have a self-centric view of the world and our place within it, I would like to once again repeat a line that I feel is quite germane to our current moment and this post:
While this moment in history is of course unique in the micro details, at the macro level, this is just one iteration in the timeline of human existence that we’ve seen repeated over and over - those of us who study history have seen it, that is.
Whether or not you subscribe to The Fourth Turning theory, it’s no new revelation that our world, society, and the universe around us move in cycles. While many people today like to believe that we are far too modern and enlightened to be subject to those cycles that affected our ancestors, that belief is simply folly.
One of those cycles, and its zenith before change happens on a massive, macro scale, is the tendency for power structures to gain more and more control and become ever more intrusive into people’s daily lives until things come to a breaking point, requiring a reset of some form or fashion.
For those worried about the debt and credit-based calamity that the West is certainly careening towards, I suggest you look up what a “debt jubilee” is, and when it has happened in the past.
As I’ve said numerous times on the Shitshow Macro weekly prep and wrap up podcasts, people aren’t prone to pay much attention to things outside of their own direct experience as long as things are going well for them and their lives are generally comfortable.
Whether on a financial or societal level, people begin to take closer and closer looks at the “spreadsheets” of their lives only when those lives become difficult.
We’re seeing this now in financial terms with many former and long-running grifts resulting in arrests and public scrutiny because every decimal point on a balance sheet becomes far more important when households and large corporations both begin to feel the squeeze of an economic downturn.
Likewise, the attention of Western societies have slowly started looking ever more closely at the way those in charge of everything from governments to institutions have been acting, and the daylight between the things they say in public and the actions that they actually take (or choose not to take, despite promises of action).
Seeing these things happening in real time can cause black pilling for those who don’t see action on the things that they consider to be the greatest existential threats.
On the flip side of that coin, I will be using this post to outline why I actually see a massive White Pill in it all.
I will be walking you through a series of some of the most egregious lies and false structures that have been built to lull us into a state of faux comfort, and the things that I see as building towards this Great Awakening (or whatever term you prefer to call it) of people finally coming to terms with the reality that it was all a facade at best, or a nefariously built house of lies to cover up industrial-level grift, corruption, and evil at worst.
I see this as a White Pill for a few reasons.
Firstly, you can never truly solve a problem until you can accurately and adequately name, identify, and target a root cause issue to be fixed.
Secondly, human beings are inherently lazy, and most will refuse or decline to take action or even speak up until they believe they are on the precipice of an existential threat.
Even when that existential threat is so massive and wide-reaching that it seems wholly unmanageable, if enough people can begin to see the root cause issue (or at least a near approximation of it), the sheer force of massive numbers of people demanding (real) change and solutions become a force in and of itself.
That, my friends, is why I took the quote repeated by Mercouris as so poignant for our current moment. It’s not the size and scope of the root cause problems that worries me - it’s the size and scope of the awakening, and the rapid quickening of its happening, that gives me hope.
People see that, “the emperor(s) have no clothes” on a larger scale than I’ve ever seen before. And despite the fears that some have that the entirety of The Machine has been corrupted beyond all repair, the scale of the awakening is what gives me hope.
So before we dive into the meat of this post, I’ll repeat that quote in the hopes that you too will take it to heart.
“When change seems impossible, it becomes inevitable.”
-Alexander Mercouris, The Duran co-founder
Democracy or “Our Democracy™?”
Let’s get something off the plate right up front before I begin getting hate mail from our friendly amateur Constitutional scholars: yes, I know that the United States of America is not a democracy. By its founding, the USA is a representative Constitutional Republic, but it has democratic characteristics - at least, it’s supposed to.
That is something that has been quite disheartening to have to explain to my son, as he’s come to the age where he’s beginning to ask some quite high-level questions about the way of the world and how things work.
I’ve found myself often having to explain the difference between the way things are supposed to work, based on things like laws, the social contract, or morals & values, versus how they actually work when money and/or politics get involved, even at the local governmental level.
There is quite a bit that I could focus on just based on the difference between a democracy and a Constitutional Republic, how the current political system of consultants, media, lobbyists, and the 2-party system in general have hijacked the way that our system is supposed to work in the first place, and how our current system of government bears no relation to the way things are supposed to work based on the operating charter of our nation, nor the oaths that every elected official in this country takes upon swearing into office.
Each of those things goes far too into the weeds for the average American, however. While they are extremely important, no amount of talking about it or “noticing” the discrepancy between actual functioning versus how things are supposed to function is going to move the needle for most of the public.
What is moving the needle is the constant usage of the word “democracy” in propaganda efforts from the media and both political parties, and the obvious nature in which it’s currently (and often) being used for un-democratic means and motives.
In case we have anyone reading this who missed their Civics 101 classes, let’s give a quick definition:
Democracy: A system of government in which the state power is vested in the will of the people. Democracy is often called “mob rule,” because any policy, law, or procedure that can garner 51% or more of the vote should be enacted in a true democracy.
Because propaganda, gaslighting, and low-information voters can be used to easily sway people to vote against their own interests, this is generally a bad way to run a nation (or any large organization).
It is an ugly part of history that many don’t want to talk about, but Nazi Germany is a great way to highlight the dangers of this: everything that the Nazis did during the WWII time frame was legal under German law.
This is not meant to pretend that Nazi Germany was a true democracy but to highlight the point that if enough people can be convinced to vote one way or another, even for things that are evil and totally devoid of morals or virtue, it can be canonized into law and enacted under a true form of democracy.
As many are seeing on full display right now, being legal certainly doesn’t mean that something is right. And in a true democracy, 51% of the people can make anything legal if they are convinced to vote for it, by hook or by crook.
Republic: a form of government that is ruled according to a charter, or a Constitution, and in which the people vote to elect or choose their leaders to represent their interests.
The founding fathers opted for a Republic over a true democracy due to an understanding of various forms of government that had been tried (and often failed) in the past.
We are far from the first society to be prone to propaganda that is used to incite our population against their own interests, nor are we the first to have it done by external, adversarial forces in addition to domestic forces that are horribly corrupt and devoid of any sense of true patriotism, love of country, ethics, morals, or virtue.
The idea of a Republic is that the elected representatives are supposed to be those who are wise enough to be more immune to the propaganda and able to use better judgment when emotions are high or swaths of the populace have been whipped into a frenzy by bullshitters.
In a true representative Republic, constituents vote for officials who they believe will best represent our interests.
An entire industry of spin doctors, lie peddlers, and smear merchants have become big business through the utter debasement of this principle that is absolutely necessary for a true Republic as well.
When PR agents and campaign managers tell candidates what they should say based on polling and perception numbers, rather than what the candidate actually believes…it wouldn’t be a difficult argument to make that those constituents have no idea who will actually best represent their interests, as none of the candidates are speaking the truth about their actual policies, positions, “morals,” or beliefs.
We could dive pretty deeply into the genesis of and reasoning behind the average American being misled to believe that we live in a democracy rather than a Republic, and why that misinformation is so often repeated by the Mainstream Media and DC apparatchiks.
That does not matter as much, for the purposes of what I’m outlining here, as the fact that so many who repeat the misinformation are doing so while concurrently pushing entirely undemocratic ideals, policies, laws, and actions.
Let’s go through just a few of the most egregious examples.
I’ve mentioned this before, but when the USA was run with any semblance of democratic ideas, the idea of a “mandate” was used to drive the amount of leeway that a president and his administration were given to operate.
A president who won his election by a landslide (Biden did not, by any sense of the word) was afforded said leeway to enact major changes, as that “mandate” (via landslide victory) was the people’s voice saying that significantly more than a 50% majority were giving him that freedom of movement and trust in his decision making abilities to steer the country in the right direction.
In a nation run on any semblance of democratic ideals, a president with a disapproval rating this high (the numbers are 59% disapproval now, as I’m writing this) would step back from the policies that are so resoundingly unliked by the US populace, and would probably be firing a lot of cabinet members.
The Biden administration, instead, is doubling down and pushing forward on his widely unpopular policies that are causing so much economic and social damage. The day that I’m writing this, a global poll of citizens’ trust in government came out stating that only 31.02% of Americans trust their government currently. Another poll by Rasmussen found that 57% of Americans believe the government is operating with the consent of the governed.
Which brings us to our next example.
Across party lines and in nearly every demographic, unmitigated migration has been a major issue for quite some time, but it has now come to a head with the border crisis under Biden. He cannot be blamed for this alone, however, and the GOP fought tooth and nail against Trump when he wanted to build a border wall, despite it being a platform issue for the same GOP since the 1980s.
The desire to close the border and begin deporting the millions of totally unvetted (and unvaccinated, which was supposed to be important) immigrants who have illegally crossed the US borders (both north and south) is not only a totally bipartisan issue, but polling is showing that far, far more than a plurality of Americans want it done.
In a nation run with any semblance of democracy, that would mean a closed border and mass deportations would begin.
That is not, however, what is happening in our country.
And to my point of these unpopular (undemocratic) policies being pushed across all of Western society, whilst being wholeheartedly repudiated by their populaces (which, again, should be important in any semblance of democracy), a recent poll by BBC in the UK showed that their populace feels much the same about rampant immigration into their country - which, one should remember, was much of the reason behind UK citizens voting for Brexit in the first place, which their elected officials ignored.
How democratic of them (/sarcasm).
Which brings us to our next issue that flies in the face of the “will of the people.”
Sane, rational, and even reasonably decent human beings abhor even the idea of child trafficking, and yet the current political, law enforcement, and border control leadership seem totally unconcerned about this problem that most people in our nation see as a scourge upon humanity.
The movie The Sound of Freedom was so widely popular because child sex trafficking is a hot button issue for most Americans. It was selling out theaters for months because so many Americans are so stridently against it.
In a nation that was run with any semblance of democratic ideals, law enforcement, the military, and probably even the Intelligence Community would be tasked to tackle and end the problem, toot sweet.
Instead, here in the USA, it was just announced that the Biden administration is ending monitoring of unaccompanied minors after they cross the border and are placed with a “guardian” (for whom zero effort is made by the USGOV to verify whether they are a family member or child sex trafficker).
And on May 21, 2024, Germany passed a law that allegedly decriminalizes child pornography.
That isn’t even touching on the +100,000 Americans who have been dying every year due to fentanyl overdoses that are laced into drugs that are coming across the (wide open) southern border. Add in that it is known and publicly-available knowledge that the fentanyl precursors are being shipped by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from Wuhan, China into Columbia and Venezuela where they are laced into other drugs like bootleg pills, cocaine, and heroin.
And yet the agencies mentioned above whose sole purpose is to protect Americans don’t seem to care in the least bit that more Americans are dying every year from CCP-provided poison coming across the southern border than have died in any war in our history.
Americans are also aghast at the rise in crime and the revolving doors of jails in deep blue stronghold metro areas where ultra progressive mega donor Georgoe Soros has been donating (laundered US taxpayer grants and money) to District Attorney and sheriff’s election races.
In many places where Soros bucks essentially determined the outcome of races, the DAs and sheriffs that he funded have released a scourge of anarcho tyranny on residents. If you randomly attack old women in the street or on the subway, even dozens or hundreds of times, you will be back on the street in less than 24hrs after being arrested (if you ever even are arrested, that is).
If you are a Good Samaritan who stands between the criminally insane being violent or menacing towards innocent civilians, or even protecting your own property, a Soros DA like Kim Gardner (St. Louis/The McCloskeys) or Alvin Bragg (Manhattan/Daniel Penny) will use the fullest extent of the law and power of the state to throw you in jail for as long as possible - or at the very least bankrupt you through legal fees.
This goes against every sensibility and right of self defense that US (and human rights) laws are based on. St. Louis (Missouri) even has Castle Doctrine enshrined into the State Constitution, yet that didn’t stop Soros-funded DA Gardener from charging the McCloskeys.
Not a single Republican stood up to defend them or to defund/defang the DA.
While there is no hard data (that I know of, at least) to track this, the level to which the “Epstein didn’t kill himself” memes and others like the one above have entered the American zeitgeist shows that a very large number of people are quite unhappy that whole Shitshow was left entirely unresolved.
What happened to all those folders of CD ROMs filled with videos, cameras that were hidden throughout the house, and binders full of pictures that the FBI “lost” after raiding Epstein’s NY penthouse?
Why does the FBI keep fighting against turning over the Seth Rich laptop a decade after what was described as merely a “robbery gone wrong?”
Whatever happened to the Anthony Weiner laptop and the “insurance” file that we all heard about before it disappeared into the FBI’s “black hole of evidence against democrats that tends to blink out of existence.”
We could go on and on about the scumbaggery that people want purged from our political system, yet the DC KGB seems fully designed to hide, use, and keep in action. Which, again, in a nation run based on any semblance of democratic ideals, would not even be a consideration at the FBI HQ.
If nearly 10% more people who were polled in Arizona say that they voted for Kari Lake than Katie Hobbs in the Governor’s race, and that number is statistically significant (which is important), wouldn’t a nation with any semblance of democratic ideals be interested in investigating why that discrepancy exists, and whether or not there is something to it?
Yes, it would.
And no, that investigation is not happening in Arizona or the USA at the Federal level.
The Arizona Governor isn’t the only one with outstanding questions regarding whether or not she is legitimately in office. The current AZ Attorney General, Kris Mayes, only “won” her election by several hundred votes.
The reason this has opened up so many questions is because there are thousands of votes still left uncounted from her race against Abe Hamedah. Notably, those uncounted votes are all from heavily conservative-leaning districts of AZ.
The polling above seems to tell the same story we may expect about those uncounted ballots - that they would shift the balance of power in two of the most powerful seats of Arizona. It’s not hard to imagine a world in which that’s the sole reason they remain uncounted.
If over 60% of Independants and over 80% of Republicans believe that cheating impacted the results of the 2020 election, wouldn’t a nation that was run with any semblance of democratic ideals be spurred to action by the “will of the people” to investigate and determine whether or not their fears were warranted?
If a democracy or nation run with democratic ideals required voting to express the will of the people, wouldn’t that nation want to do everything it could to ensure that elections were on the up & up and that the people had faith in them?
And yet none of the above is happening in the USA.
If you try to look inside machines, run a proper audit, or ask too many questions about Zuckerbucks, mail in voting, #2000Mules, dropbox videos that magically go missing, Georgia not having over 300,000 physical ballots to match votes and ballot images, or any other number of questions, you’re smeared by the media and indicted by the Biden DOJ.
The media and DOJ who do that are doing the opposite of upholding democratic ideals, in case you needed someone to explain that to you.
Across nearly every political persuasion and demographic, a majority of people have questions about the 2020 election and whether cheating affected the outcome.
Does it seem like the people who constantly wail about “threats to our democracy” care?
Nope.
How very democratic of them to ignore the will of the people. (/sarcasm)
And it should be noted - the inaction and inattention are not only from democrats.
The GOP has done diddly and squat about these issues either.
Scale and Scope
As “normies” begin to awaken, one of the first questions that they seem to have is often:
“Well just how bad is it? How deep does the rot go?”
Does everyone remember the oft-repeated mantra of the “interagency consensus” from the Ukraine Impeachment Hoax?
In essence, this line was constantly uttered by unelected bureaucrats and faux whistleblowers to say that, in effect, their “consensus” outweighed the decisions of a President of the United States. The testimony of each of those who testified on the side of the pro-impeachment team (or, some could arguably say, palace coup plotters) was essentially saying that democracy doesn’t exist.
The very essence of the “interagency consensus” being used to impeach a democratically-elected POTUS means that they care not about the democracy that they claim to love, support, and defend - when it can be used as a cudgel in their political favor.
As a military combat veteran who served in three different theaters of the GWOT (OIF/OEF/OEF-TS), it pains me greatly to know that the Pentagon is just as infected with this scourge of anti-democratic and anti-republican ideals as Langley, Quantico, Foggy Bottom, and that “hive of scum and villainy” that has become Washington, DC.
Alexander Vindman wore his uniform to play his role in the Ukraine impeachment hoax very publicly, but those of us who followed the Spygate fiasco closely also know that one of the spies sent into the Trump 2016 campaign orbit was paid directly by the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessments.
The FBI was caught putting pressure on Big Tech companies to censor American citizens and violate their 1st Amendment rights, with agent Elvis Chan and his “visits” to Silicon Valley being put on full display in the Missouri v Biden lawsuits.
And we all remember, of course, the 51 “Spies Who Lie” who lied about the Hunter Biden laptop, calling it “Russian misinformation” in the runup to the 2020 election. This allowed good old Elvis Chan to pressure Silicon Valley to censor it, even temporarily banning the social media accounts of the oldest news outlet in the USA (The New York Post) for reporting on it.
Post-election polling showed that over 10% of 2020 Biden voters would not have voted for him had they known about the laptop and its contents. Biden did not win by a 10% margin, by the way, which means that it would not be a stretch to call that lie “election interference.”
Some people have taken to calling it the Deep State, or the Total State, The Hydra, or one of my favorites from Mike Benz, The Blob. Whatever your name for it, this total perversion of how our nation is supposed to operate has never been more on full display than it is right now.
People are waking up to the fact that our Republic, and what are supposed to be its democratic characteristics, have been hijacked by unelected bureaucrats who are paid by US taxpayers yet who undermine their wills and best interests far too often.
That awakening, the realization of people that things are not being run or operated in the way that they were taught by Schoolhouse Rock as children or learned in civics classes, is leading to a level of pushback and undercurrents of willful and civil disobedience that we’ve not seen in a long time in this country.
Much of that is due to the people below - those who have enormous platforms that far eclipse even the most-watched MainStream Media “journalists” who have neglected to properly inform Americans as to what is actually going on in their country - and who have neglected those duties for quite some time.
If you want to truly understand the scale and scope of just how bad the hyper partisan institutional capture has become, the three interviews below give a great summary of some of the most (but not all of the) captured institutions.
Erik Prince - Blood Money: The Neocon establishment’s conspiracy to profit from endless war
Tucker Carlson and Dave Smith on how NeoCons wrecked the country:
Russel Brand and Mike Benz on the CIA’s Dirty Tricks That Destroyed Our Foreign (and Domestic) Policies
The Blueprint of Slow Boil Tyranny (in the EU -> South America -> USA)
There used to be a popular saying in domestic politics:
“As goes California, so goes the nation.”
California’s totally inept (but I would say it’s more due to the rampant corruption) government has made the beautiful state a laughing stock and cautionary tale of what happens when you give inept hyper partisans total control of the state.
The same has been on full display in the other one-party rule states around the country, as Illinois, New York, and Michigan have quickly devolved into unaffordable cities that are filled with illegal immigrants and anarcho-tyranny.
Some US states have begun to push back, but there is a far larger, global trend that has begun to emerge in the post-Gaddafi regicide at the hands of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
Gaddafi gave many speeches and made many public statements describing how Libya was the “gatekeeper” that held the hordes of Africa and the southern hemisphere out of Western Europe.
While the intellectually dishonest or historically illiterate can try to call that sentiment racist, an honest person who wonders why Gaddafi would say this may be more inclined to ask:
“If the African continent is so resource-rich that the Ethiopian king was once considered the richest man on the planet, and all modern-day first world nations are currently competing for Africa’s resources, why are the people of Africa largely poor, illiterate, and uneducated?”
In its past, parts of Africa have been colonized by France, the Dutch, Italy, and Spain, with current statecraft competition over resources mainly taking place between the US, China, Russia, and Iran.
On the commercial side, critical elements for every smartphone, computer, and electric vehicle battery are mined in large part via forced labor in many different parts of Africa, as outlined in my previous post and podcast Shitshow Macro 7: Why Are (Were) US Special Operations Troops in North Africa?
And yet, over centuries of various state and commercial actors taking a vested interest in the resources of the African continent, none have made any true efforts to improve the rampant corruption, constant genocide/warlords/coups/color revolutions, or to truly improve the living conditions or education of the African people.
So is Gaddafi to blame for calling attention to it, or are the state actors and corporate interests whose statecraft led to those conditions more to blame?
Regardless of where you want to lay the blame, Gaddafi spoke the truth, and his statements were proven true when Hilllary and Obama decided to enact her statements of “we came, we saw, he died.”
After those actions led to Gaddafi being killed in the streets of Libya (sodomized to death, as Dave Smith so eloquently and accurately puts it in his interview with Tucker linked above), there were three distinct and important chains of events that were put into motion:
Libya became wholly destabilized, leading to…
Wholesale mass migration from Africa into Western Europe, the Benghazi tragedy, and…
Open-air slave markets becoming a regular occurrence in the country once again (with the slaves being traded across Africa and into the Middle East)
While this open and widespread (illegal) migration into Western Europe has destroyed societies writ large across the region, the leaders of those nations not only accepted it with open arms (despite loud protestations by their populaces), but it was used as a blueprint to enact across other Western nations of the world.
Many of the same NGOs who facilitate that migration that led to Sweden becoming the “rape capital of the world,” over 70% of rapes taking place in Germany, France, and others being at the hands of illegal immigrants, the vast increases in crimes (including especially heinous ones like the grooming gangs in the UK), and the economic destruction that unmitigated illegal immigration and importation of the 3rd world into 1st world cultures are now responsible for doing the same across South America and leading the immigrants into the USA.
The craziest part is that the US State Department is funding that illegal immigration both in Europe and here in the USA.
For the nations in Europe that were holdouts against the open spigot of 3rd world importation into their nations and destructions of their national culture, there has been a routine enough blueprint that has emerged over the past several years in which we can safely call it a trend.
By the way, the Slovakian Prime Minister who recently was hit with an assassination attempt (Fico) had only a month previously stated publicly that he would resist the EU’s migration policy demands.
Within a month he was shot.
While that assassination was initially called a “lone wolf” attack, in recent days the Slovakian security forces have begun looking into a potential conspiracy, as the “lone wolf” shooter’s entire social media footprint was totally erased, externally, within two hours of the shooting.
The trend that has emerged largely deals with these “holdout” nations who refuse to see their national cultural identity washed away by mass immigration by people who don’t share their culture, don’t speak the language, and have no respect for the host nation’s culture.
Progressives were once able to call this type of pushback xenophobic, but we’ve seen precisely what happens when nations like the UK, Ireland, France, Scotland, Canada, and others allow it to happen - and often against the will of their populaces.
When leaders of nations pushback against the EU or others’ demands to allow mass migration, as the Slovakian PM recently found, there is a trend of events that often occurs in relatively rapid succession:
A highly contested election (coup?) in which an unpopular but pro-EU leader is put into command
Immediately upon taking office, that leader:
Opens up the borders to unchecked illegal immigration
Enacts some form of hate speech laws
Immediately enacts pro-gender confusing laws (even in heavily Roman Catholic or family values-driven societies)
Demands censorship of dissenting opinions
Often targets dissenting politicians or political parties
Changes out law enforcement leadership to those politically-minded leaders who are willing to enforce draconian policies against any dissent
In Europe, we’ve seen this now in:
Spain
Poland
Ireland
The UK
France
While Canada is on our continent, it is still a British commonwealth and seems to be following the same blueprint, although slightly different by keeping Trudeau in power despite him being very unliked
While I used the European nations as examples, we have seen Brazil follow the same blueprint in the election of Lula, which was so unpopular that it led to a (brief) uprising.
Astroturfed everything (i.e. “fake and ghey”)
One of the memes that has taken hold within the Western zeitgeist is that everything has become “fake and ghey.”
This is an oversimplification (as memes are designed to do) of the pushing of wildly unpopular views that are only held by the most fanatical political zealots (or cultists, in many opinions) yet use astroturfing campaigns across social media and MainStream Media to make people believe they are more popular than they really are.
We’ve defined astroturfing before, but it may be a good term to revisit for new readers.
Social media originally provided the ability for people to connect or reconnect over long distances, and to have a national (or even global) voice without needing the MainStream Media to do it.
One of the many things that people have only awakened to relatively recently is that as soon as wide-reaching technologies become available, they are picked up by scammers and the deceitful to use for nefarious means.
Social media was no different.
Bots, chatbots, AI, and sock puppet accounts were first thought to only be tools used by companies to help communicate with large numbers of customer service needs, but they have been used far more often (and effectively) by propagandists, activists, and state actors to fool populations into believing that certain beliefs or special interests were far more popular than they actually were.
While the Twitter Files caught a lot of steam when Elon Musk bought Twitter (now X), they only proved something that many of us who were paying attention had known for at least a handful of years.
Across the most popular social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram), left wing activists and progressives were given an artificially-inflated follower count and algorithm push in order to make their views seem far more popular than they actually were.
In addition to these progressives and activist groups being given artificial pushes and dispersion by the algorithms, “sock puppet” accounts and bots allowed for very small groups of people to control thousands or tens of thousands of accounts to make it seem as if the ideas that they wanted to push had organic popular support.
These “astroturfing” campaigns were often highly targeted, and could be used for both negative and positive means. The term “positive” here is not to mean that the ideas they pushed were for positive, good means: it just means that they were meant to push artificial “positive” support for the activists’ goals or campaigns.
In the “negative” campaigns, “bot swarms” would attack anyone who spoke out against or stood up to those campaigns, as we’ve seen so often against celebrity names like JK Rowling in her public spats against radical and violent trans activists.
These sock puppet accounts and “bot swarms” became so prevalent that they led to the “dead internet theory.”
I’ve mentioned this theory on the Shitshow Macro podcasts before, and the theory essentially states that bots, chatbots, and sock puppet accounts have become so prevalent that the theory states most (if not all) interactions that a person has online today are with some form of bot, and not a genuine human being.
Sure, you may have DMs or other interactions with other people that you know In Real Life (IRL)...but if you’ve been interacting with a person online that you’ve never met offline, can you really know they’re a real person?
Dating sites have long been known to create fake accounts for females backed by chatbots to make it seem as if they have a high female-to-male ratio on their sites (the things that make dating sites popular and well-visited).
OnlyFans was caught several years ago being filled with males pretending to be females and responding and interacting with paying males for many of the female models. There are even models on that platform and Instagram who are 100% AI-generated to bilk unsuspecting males out of their money.
Online forums have long been known to be lousy with “glowies” (FBI or other Intelligence Community moles) whose sole purpose is to set up entrapment schemes and try to steer people or conversations into things they can use as a basis to open investigations.
If this seems too out of bounds for you because you still believe that our Federal law enforcement agencies are above board, there are plenty of teenage Muslim boys who were fully “radicalized,” entrapped, and arrested by the FBI post-9/11 due to these online forums.
This same tactic has been in place against any white males who they can label as “domestic extremists” before and especially since January 6, 2021.
The joke in old Soviet Russia and Communist East Germany used to be that, “if there are three people meeting to discuss anti-government plans or sentiment, two of them are from the government.”
I’m sorry if I’m the first to inform you of this, but if you’re anywhere online in America today and someone starts making anti-government posts about civil war or the need to take some kind of violent action, you are nearly 100% communicating with a “glowie.”
There was even one caught last year who was posting illegal gun parts for sale on Facebook who had forgotten to turn off his location data - which showed him to be at the FBI HQ.
Propaganda
Prior to SOCMED (Social Media), the only way to really get a major platform was through the MSM.
Whether it was celebrities going on Johnny Carson, the knock off (and far less talented) late night hosts of late, or authors promoting their books via media outlets, magazine, or newspaper highlights, that really was the only way to get the word out about something.
If you’ve never read the books by the godfather of both Public Relations (PR) and propaganda (which are the same thing), Edward Bernays, you should.
He is famously the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and his books Crystalizing Public Opinion and Propaganda set the stage for both state actors and commercial interests to fool the public into believing something that may not always be in their best interests.
His works were widely read and studied by state actors, and often by the most nefarious types (Nazi propagandist Goebbels is probably the most well-known nefarious student of Bernays’ work).
It was first only known and discussed in “conspiracy theorist” circles, but it’s now entered more of the popular zeitgeist that Obama repealed the Smith-Mundt Act that was within the US Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948.
This act was one that made it illegal for the US Government to propagandize its own people, and it’s pretty easy to understand why post-war America would no longer need the government propaganda departments that had been set up to push things like war bonds or “Rosie the Riveter” propaganda that had been used to drive positive US sentiment for the World War II effort.
The question should be asked, although I’ve not seen it asked by the people who should be asking it: why did Obama repeal that?
Why did his administration suddenly believe it was important and should be legal for the US Government to once again have the ability to push propaganda to its people?
There have been constant, loud cries of “DISINFORMATION!!!” from many in Washington, DC and their lapdogs in the MainStream Media over the past several years, with an entire Disinformation Industrial Complex popping up in think tanks and universities across the country.
The more that these operations have been investigated, however, the more it looks like these DIC(k)s have been nothing more than political activists seeking to silence opposing political views.
The New Knowledge and Hamilton 68 controversy found people at the heart of this DIC getting many tens of thousands of Americans kicked off of social media as alleged “Russian agents,” when in fact they were merely American citizens with opposing political views.
Hamilton 68 had leaders who used their Intelligence Community background as bona fides, funding from a wealthy progressive tech billionaire, and fawning media who reported everything they told them without any real due diligence into the reality of the claims.
The Twitter Files revealed that even Twitter staff found those claims to be egregious and not based in reality, but Twitter received White House and media pushback and so allowed the propaganda and false accusations of “Russia Russia Russia” to be used to censor those opposing political views (held by non-Russia backed or aligned American citizens).
The basis of the Missouri v Biden lawsuit and the Alex Berenson court cases were 1st Amendment violations enacted, conducted, and forced at the behest of the US Government who it turns out, - and has now been undoubtedly proven - was the greatest purveyor of mis and disinformation during the entirety of the COVID fiasco.
One of the most darkly hilarious things to come out of those court cases was the government's position on what they called “malinformation,” which they defined as “information that is true but harmful to the government’s position (see: false narrative).”
While it took several years, now that the smoke has cleared on that entire COVID and lockdown fiasco, the reality has been laid bare for all to see.
The people who were viciously censored, blacklisted, and fired for the things they said were telling the truth. Many of them were highly esteemed and credentialed doctors, scientists, and people actually treating patients who knew what was working in the real world.
The people insistent on censoring, blacklisting, and firing those people were not telling the truth.
In everything from the IFR (infection rate) to the PCR test gates, the forced shots and mandates, the mortality rates, and who was actually at risk of COVID (not the kids who were locked out of school), the people in charge of the censorship machine were lying about the realities and censoring those who spoke the truth.
Why? We still don’t know exactly why.
But with all of the truths and indications it now is apparent that this was a “known factor” that we funded the research that created COVID and the vaccine manufacturers’ own studies showed the vaccines to be dangerous and/or ineffective, let’s repeat a question that needs to be asked:
Why did Obama repeal the Smith-Mundt Act and allow the USGOV to once again begin propagandizing its own people?
Capitalism, Oligarchy, or Fascism?
Our nation has also been beset by a self-imposed crisis of people using terms to describe things that they don’t actually understand or know the definition for.
We like to think of our nation as one being run as a free market, capitalistic enterprise, yet we have become anything but.
In the truest sense of the word, we have not had free market capitalism for at least a century.
In a truly free market, the government has no intervention, whatsoever. This means there aren’t prohibitive regulations that make it cost-prohibitive for small companies to compete with larger ones due to the immense legal costs to keep up with said regulations. It means there aren’t multiple trillions of dollars given out by the government in cost-plus or no-bid government contracts.
It means there are no bailouts, subsidies, or lobbyists who are allowed to write bills that the politicians they bribe…I mean, uh, “donate” to…get passed or slipped into massive omnibus or continuing resolution bills.
Many people call our current system an oligarchy, which is a market-based system that is controlled by a small handful of companies or people.
It’s not hard to see why people believe that this is the system that we currently operate under, with a small handful of media companies controlling all of your news or entertainment, tech behemoths like Amazon, Facebook, or Google who can afford to quickly gobble up through acquisitions or put them out of business through stifling regulations (see: lobbyists mentioned above), and an even smaller number of parent companies who control nearly the entire US food supply.
I don’t believe we currently exist in either of those market-based paradigms. While it may seem dark to read or hear, it seems more likely that our current environment is one of fascism.
Based on the improper definitions crisis noted at the beginning of this section, most people hear that word and immediately think of Mussolini, or the leftist radicals who love to call Trump, Desantis, or any conservative political leader who they don’t like a fascist (despite their actions being the opposite of fascism, as we’ll get into).
In reality, fascism is a merging of the state with private companies, and this is how confusion is often found between the definitions of socialism, communism, and fascism.
In socialism, private industry still controls the means of production, but the state sets prices, controls, and essentially pays for its output (until socialism collapses under its own weight, as it typically does).
In communism, the state owns and controls the means of production, which is why communism inevitably leads to massive famines, deaths, and death squads.
Communism tends to put the dumbest among us in charge of the most critical aspects of society, and I often use the analogy of taking DC think tank & NGO staffers and putting them in charge of all of the farms in Iowa, Idaho, and the breadbasket of California.
Fascism is where the state and private enterprise essentially merge, which is the best example that I can think of for how our nation currently operates.
Amazon’s AWS controls the data centers for the CIA and DoD. The defense contracting industry has shrunk from dozens of competitors to a very small handful, with employees that sometimes work directly in government offices.
Food, communications, auto manufacturers, home builders, aerospace, banks - all of these industries (and many more) are so heavily regulated and controlled by government regulators and are often largely funded by government contracts or subsidies that they may as well be arms of the government.
If you doubt that the definition of fascism most accurately describes our current environment - just look at how many attack vectors the US Government has used to go after Elon Musk for buying X and kicking out the censors, NGOs, and activists who had listened to government agents like Elvis Chan to censor Americans’ voices and violate their 1st Amendment rights.
*all of the other large social media platforms are still doing this at full-throttle, by the way, especially Facebook and YouTube
As with each of the sections above, this may seem like a Black Pill and insurmountable issue to some of you, but I see it as a White Pill.
From the Twitter Files to the Missouri v Biden lawsuit and people like Tucker, Joe Rogan, Glenn Greenwald, Dave Smith, Erik Prince, and others gaining large platforms - more people than ever are becoming aware of what we are actually living under.
“When change seems impossible, it becomes inevitable.”
Health & Wellness (Science or “The Science™?”)
When Anthony Fauci exclaimed “I am The Science™,” many of us with even a basic understanding of how science works had to laugh out loud.
The entirety of the scientific method and theories or hypotheses is one of constant testing, questioning, and attempting to disprove an initial hypothesis or null hypothesis until either the theory is disproven or proven.
From all that has come out about the vaccines and what was known by DARPA and the pharmaceutical companies themselves, it’s clear that even they knew that the proclamations being given to the public were untrue. (misinformation).
As I write this, it just came out today that the state of California paid $9.2 billion to hospitals and doctors to push the vaccines, with $20mm alleged to have been paid to the regents of UCLA (my former employer) alone.
I say alleged, but today (May 21th, 2024) spreadsheets of the alleged payments were made public.
There was a time in the not-too-distant past when propaganda could easily be pushed through celebrities, and there are many a conspiracy theory (and some very well-proven facts) that some only became celebrities because of their willingness to do so.
From the Colbert Show’s ultra-cringe vaccine song & dance to social media “influencers” talking about getting jabbed, many a celebrity was quick to jump on that bandwagon.
While we haven’t seen the payment streams yet, I am very curious to see how many were funded by and how much they were funded by US taxpayer dollars to push misinformation about the “100% safe & effective” jabs that would stop COVID transmission because “we’re all in this together.”
Some, however, took an early stand. Others are only now starting to come out and publicly state that they lost jobs in Hollywood because of their refusal to take the vaccine.
Professional football quarterback Aaron Rogers has a debilitating allergy to one of the components of the vaccine, yet he was viciously attacked and mocked by the media for refusing to take it, choosing other more holistic methods.
Joe Rogan actually signed up to take the vaccine, but there was a last-minute change and he missed his shot by a very small margin.
When he later got sick and was healed within days under direct supervision by his doctor, the entirety of the media beclowned themselves and even edited the video that he posted on social media to make it seem like he looked unhealthy (they added gray pigment to his face), and mocked his taking Ivermectin as “horse dewormer.”
As he has routinely stated - and should have been common sense - the dude who sold his podcast to Spotify for several hundred millions of dollars can afford to take people medicine.
Obviously.
The FDA wanted to hide the pharmaceutical company’s trial data from the public for 75 years.
Why would a taxpayer-funded agency whose sole job is to protect Americans from harmful foods and drugs want to hide that data until everyone who took the shot was dead?
However you feel about Robert Kennedy Jr and his presidential run, his book The Real Anthony Fauci laid bare just how captured and corrupted many of our institutions have become.
Through direct royalty payouts, a revolving door with government positions, and likely backroom deals for which accountability regulators look the other way, it’s no wonder why our nation is sicker and more mentally unbalanced than it's ever been.
When the people charged with (and paid to) look out for our best interests and safety are instead getting filthy rich from the companies that are supposed to hold them to account, it’s no wonder that obesity, autism, chronic illness, and auto-immune disorders have all skyrocketed.
A decade ago, you were called a crazy tin foil hat nutter for even talking about this.
Now, it’s a subject of widespread discussion and even presidential campaigns.
The only way to solve a problem is to first accurately name and identify it.
Conclusion (for now)
I have five other topics that I want to dive into for this discussion, but those topics in and of themselves will likely double the length of this.
They are:
Financial & Economic
Foreign policy
The surveillance state
The (Global) Censorship Industrial Complex
Trump is Merely an Archetype
I know that these topics, and this discussion, can lead some to negative feelings and a loss of hope. I would like to reiterate, however, that I see these as massive White Pills and reasons for hope, not a loss of it.
Throughout 2020 and 2021, I met a lot of people who saw the dangers ahead but who would write it all off, refuse to speak up or push back by saying that it was, “all according to God’s plan.”
While I agree with this sentiment in part, I also disagree with it in part.
Firstly, for those of you who have read The Old Testament (Christian) or Pentateuch (Jewish), God’s plan can be pretty…severe. The longer this Shitshow goes on, however, and the more people who I see forced awake, the more I start to wonder if God decided that people had gone so far off of the path that it was time for a rude awakening.
If you have read those Holy books, you know that God promised that He would never visit another near-extinction event upon humanity again. Perhaps this is a slap in the face to wake up those who have refused to wake up to this point.
And if that’s what this all is, it seems to be working to a massive extent.
I also believe, however, that God gave us humans free will as a means to make our own choices - obviously.
Many anti-Christians take the stance that if God truly existed, there would be no evil in the world. I’m not the first to challenge this belief by informing my own understanding of what free will really means, and I’ll explain.
By giving His most beloved creation free will and allowing evil to exist upon the earth, God gave us the ability to choose to simply ignore it, stand by and watch it happen, speak up, or to directly oppose it.
“The end of the world will be overseen by people who were just doing their job.”
This is your chance to make that choice, if you haven’t already.
Sit by and watch, or stand up and oppose it, in whatever way you can or will?
Rage, rage, against the dying of the Light.
I’m terrible at asking others for things, but…
It’s my intention to keep this platform free to read, but with the ability for people to donate if they are so inclined and feel the content here is worth their hard-earned dollars. These posts take quite a bit of time and research, but as I work it into my routine the flash-to-bang on new posts should reduce dramatically.
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