Tag Archives: Populism

Leviathan Mobilises for Decisive Battle, by Alastair Crooke

Leviathan refers to the globalist deep state. From Alastair Crooke at strategic-culture.org:

Globalist forces are being mobilised to win a last battle in the ‘long-war’ – looking to break-through everywhere.

In The Revolt of the Public, Martin Gurri, a former CIA analyst, contends that western élites are experiencing a collapse of authority deriving from a failure to distinguish between legitimate criticism and – what he terms – illegitimate rebellion. Once control over the justifying myth of America was lost, the mask was off. And the disparity between the myth and public experience of it became only too evident.

Writing in 2014, Gurri foresaw that the Establishment would respond by denouncing all evidence of public discontent, as lies and disinformation. The Establishment would, in Gurri’s telling, be so constrained within their ‘bubble’ that they would be unable to assimilate their loss of monopoly over their own confected ‘reality’. This Establishment denial would be made manifest, he argued, in a delusional, ham-fisted authoritarian manner. His predictions have been vindicated with Trumpist dissidence denounced as a threat to ‘our democracy’ – amidst a media and social platform crackdown. Such a response would only confirm the suspicions of the public, thus setting off a vicious circle of yet more “distrust and loss of legitimacy”, Gurri concluded.

This was Gurri’s main thrust. The book’s striking feature however, was how it seemed so completely to nail the coming Trump and Brexit era – and the ‘anti-system’ impulse behind them. In America, this impulse found Trump – not the other way around. The point here essentially being that America no longer saw Red and Blue as the two extended wings belonging to the bird of liberal democracy. For something around half of America, the ‘system’ was rigged towards a profiteering 0.1%, and against them.

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Are You Ready for Total (Ideological) War? by CJ Hopkins

A renegade liberal has decided to repent and rejoin the one true faith. From C.J Hopkins at Consent Factory via zerohedge.com:

So, welcome to 2021! If last week was any indication, it is going to be quite an exciting year. It is going to be the year in which GloboCap reminds everyone who is actually in charge and restores “normality” throughout the world, or at least attempts to restore “normality,” or the “New Normality,” or the “Great Normal Reset,” or “The New Normal War on Domestic Terror” … or whatever they eventually decide to call it.

In any event, whatever they call it, GloboCap is done playing grab-ass. They have had it with all this “populism” malarkey that has been going on for the last four years. Yes, that’s right, the party is over, you Russian-backed white supremacist terrorists! You Trump-loving, anti-mask grandmother killers! You anti-vax, election-fraud-conspiracy theorists! You deviants who refuse to follow orders, wear your damn masks, vote for who they tell you, and believe whatever completely nonsensical official propaganda they pour into your heads!

Oh, yes, you really did it this time! You stormed the goddamned US Capitol. You and your racist, Russia-backed army of bison-hat wearing half-naked actors have meddled with the primal forces of GloboCap, and now, by God, you will atone! No, do not try to minimize your crimes. You entered a building without permission! The building where America simulates democracy! You walked around in there waving silly flags! You went into the Chamber, into people’s offices! One of you actually put his filthy populist feet up on Pelosi’s desk … ON HER DESK! This aggression will not stand!

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The Worst Literal Hitler Ever, by CJ Hopkins

Donald Trump doesn’t bear much resemblance to any of history’s dictators, but that is to whom he is being likened. From CJ Hopkins at consentfactory.org:

So, the GloboCap-Resistance Minneapolis Putsch appears to have not gone exactly to plan. Once again, Trump failed to go full-Hitler, despite their best efforts to goad him into doing so. They gave it quite a good shot, however. It was more or less a textbook regime-change op, or “color revolution,” or whatever you call it. All the essential pieces were in place. All they needed Trump to do was declare himself dictator and impose martial law, so the generals could step in and remove him from office.

Unfortunately for the Resistance, Trump didn’t do that. Instead, he did what he usually does, which is make a total ass of himself on international television. Which … OK, was cringeworthy, but didn’t quite provide the GloboCap gang with the pretext they needed to perp-walk him out of the Oval Office. Which, needless to say, was incredibly frustrating. After four long years of propaganda foreplay, there we were, finally at the moment of truth, and Adolf goes and loses his erection.

This guy is the worst literal Hitler ever.

Still, as far as regime-change ops go, and given that this one was a domestic operation, so trickier than the usual foreign version, I’d give the Resistance a B+ for effort.

Now, before my “conspiracy theorist” readers get too excited about where I’m going with this column … no, this was not a “fake” uprising. There was an authentic uprising at the center of it. There’s always an authentic uprising at the center of every regime-change op, or at least the type that GloboCap has been carrying out and attempting recently. Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, the Ukraine, Bolivia, Venezuela; these things go pretty much by the numbers.

Here’s a quick breakdown of how that works.

 

History Was Supposed to End. What Happened? by Jeffrey Tucker

Is liberty the next stop in human political evolution? Let’s hope so. From Jeffrey Tucker at aier.org:

Anyone paying close attention at the turn of the 21st century could foresee the impending failure of the social-democratic consensus throughout the developed world.

The exalted experts who rose to power in the postwar period built gigantic state-based systems of social management and control and took over vast swaths of private society, imposing planning schemes across many sectors of economic life. They imagined themselves to be permanent fixtures of the socio-economic system. After all, this approach won the war (so they said), so why couldn’t it win the peace?

But there was a problem: over time nothing worked as it was supposed to. There were massive internal contradictions within the model, as Amity Shlaes shows in her new book on the Great Society. The new systems relied on bureaucratic command, not market signals. There was another problem: they were hugely imposing on people’s lives and property, and people don’t like that. Or rather: they will put up with it so long as they perceive that the benefits exceed or at least match the costs.

Building that apparatus – the efforts really began about a century ago, extended through the New Deal, but became a full model of social control in the postwar period – depended fundamentally on its successful sales pitch: these were programs built by workers for the sake of social justice, for the poor, for the marginalized, against plutocratic elites.

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Globalists Have Set Operation ‘Blame The Populists’ In Motion, by Brandon Smith

Updates on familiar themes from Brandon Smith. The long-predicted crash that will bring down the global economy has become. He may be right. From Smith at alt-market.com:

This past week’s events have sent the economic world into a tailspin. Mainstream analysts were so sure of themselves heading into the July Federal Reserve meeting – The Fed was going to cut rates by a respectable margin, or they were going to cut incrementally and promise the markets through thinly veiled language that QE4 was well on the way. This was supposed to be a certainty.

They did not get what they were hoping for, but I don’t think many people understand why the Fed did what they did.

I have long held that the Fed has no intention of kicking the can on the economic crash that is currently underway, and that the Fed’s tightening cycle was a way to restrict liquidity into economic weakness in order to trigger the collapse of the “Everything Bubble”. I predicted over the past two years that the Fed would keep liquidity conditions tight until right before or right after an accelerated crash in fundamentals and markets. The crash in fundamentals has already begun in 2018 and 2019. A return to incremental crash conditions in stock markets has also now likely started.

While I believed the central bank would hold rates steady in July, Jerome Powell’s public statements after the Fed announcement of a minor .25 bps rate cut were even worse for market investors to hear and only support my original position. Powell’s assertion that the cut was merely a mid-year “adjustment” and not the beginning of an easing cycle horrified the investment world. Powell was telling markets quite bluntly that the punch bowl was not coming back anytime soon.  On top of this, St. Louis Fed president James Bullard refused to commit to any further interest rate adjustments this year, citing a “wait and see” approach, which could take many months.  Once again, Fed officials are making it clear that expectations for a stimulus bonanza are naive.

The consensus seems to be that the Fed has offered “too little too late”, and I would say that this is a completely deliberate action. Frankly, there was nothing holding the Fed back from a cut of .50 bps and lavishing the financial media with images of QE heaven. Trump says he wants it, the daytrading world is begging for it, and central bankers rarely shy away from more money printing. Unless, of course, the banking elites WANT a crash to happen in the near term, that is.

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What next for the populist revolt? by Frank Furedi

The populist revolts we’ve seen so far—Brexit, Trump, the Yellow Vests—are nothing compared to what’s coming. From Frank Furedi at spiked-online.com:

People have rattled the elites – now they need to go further.

In the West in 2018, we witnessed the intensification of a new conflict – that between anti-populist political elites and a growing grassroots movement that is hostile to these elites.

Many commentators have interpreted this conflict in classical economic language. This is fundamentally a struggle over the distribution of resources, they claim. Even an astute commentator like Fareed Zakaria, who recognises that the ‘yellow vest’ protestsin France are underpinned by profound cultural tensions, especially between rural and urban France, is nevertheless drawn towards a narrowly economic explanation. ‘It’s part class, part culture, but there is a large element of economics to it as well’, he says.

Zakaria’s commentary – titled ‘The new dividing line in Western politics’ – is a good illustration of today’s widespread reluctance to face up to new cultural and political tensions, to recognise that people are moved to protest these days by concerns that do not fit into the 20th-century model of socio-economic class struggle.

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Democracy Is Sacred – Except When It Isn’t, by Justin Raimondo

The nationalism tide keeps rising in Europe. From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com:

On both sides of the Atlantic the regnant elites have launched a furious regime change campaign not all that different from the ones they started in the former Soviet republics. The formula seems to go like this: hold an election in which the full resources of the EU states and their upper classes are brought to bear on one side of the question. Vilify dissenters as more than likely agents of Vladimir Putin.

On the British side the government of Prime Minister Theresa May, which has been all along pretending to be in favor the people’s decision to leave the EU, has effectively sabotaged the process with so many exceptions, amendments, other concessions to Brussels that they might as well have stayed in.

Shocked by their defeat, the Remainers have been scheming and plotting and demand a new election – and are presumably willing to keep voting until they get the “right” result.

But events are overtaking them: the right-wing populist upsurge that threatens the very existence of the EU is not quite through making waves. The French “yellow vests” have arisen from the rural and poorer sections of the countryside. These are France’s forgotten as Macron raises the petroleum price by 15% – one third of that in the name of stopping global warming.

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Hillary Clinton: Conservatives Were Right on Mass Migration, by Hillary Clinton

Next thing you know, she’ll be saying minimum wage laws increase youth and minority unemployment, and gun control laws don’t reduce crime. Maybe not; Rome wasn’t built in a day. From James Pinkerton at theamericanconservative.com:

Progressives melt down after the Democratic doyenne denounces open borders here and in Europe.

Amidst the hurly-burly of politics these days, it can be hard to notice when your side has won a victory. Yet that’s what’s just happened for conservatives on immigration: they’ve won. Okay, it’s not a final victory, nor even a crushing victory, but, even so, it’s a win.

We know this because Hillary Clinton, arguably still the biggest name in Democratic politics, has just said that conservatives were right. She has conceded the essence of the rightist—and, by the way, centrist—critique of the open-borders approach to immigration.

On November 22, Clinton said in an interview with The Guardian, “I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame.” Continuing in that vein, she damned German Chancellor Angela Merkel with faint praise: “I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken particularly by leaders like Angela Merkel, but I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message—‘we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and support’—because if we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic.” In other words, when Merkel opened the German border in 2015, she was being nice, but misguided. Of course, Clinton is no doubt aware that the global backlash against Merkelism was felt in America, too, contributing to her own defeat in 2016.

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Canada: Shielded From the Populist Wave No Longer, by Benjamin L. Woodfinden

Justin Trudea, dashing progressive hero, may end up a goat if Canada’s seething populist discontent explodes. From Benjamin L. Woodfinded at The American Conservative via theburningplatform.com:

In the aftermath of the 2016 election and the rapid spread of populism around the globe, one country seemed immune: Canada. Justin Trudeau, the charismatic, dashing, and woke prime minister, sees himself as progressive liberalism’s leading light. But Canada is ripe for a populist revolt, and Trudeau may end up being its perfect catalyst.

Contrary to its mild-mannered international image, Canada has a long history of populism. Its upper crust are sometimes referred to as the “Laurentian elite.” Concentrated in downtown Toronto, Montréal, and Ottawa, these are Canada’s equivalent of East Coast elites. They dominate their country’s political, academic, cultural, media, and business institutions, and are ideologically homogeneous.

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The Real Contagion Threat is Political, by Tom Luongo

Sweden is now another data point on the growing strength of populist and nationalist movements. From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:

The real danger to the current institutional order was just demonstrated in Sweden. While I’ve talked at length about the potential financial contagion stemming from the implosion of multiple emerging market currencies it is the growing political crisis in Europe that will shape our future.

Sweden is The Land where Socialism Works, or so I keep getting told by ignorant leftists who cling to the power fantasy that central planning is the only way to make the trains run on time.

Central planning does do that, but only to deliver people into the nightmare of social disorder brought on by the disruption of the natural flow of capital.

Venezuela, South Africa, Soviet Union, post WWII Britain … you get the idea.

But, the effects of the collectivist mindset are far more pernicious than those extreme examples.  And it is important we understand how little policies grow into big problems over time due to shaping people’s decisions through government edicts. Continue reading