"Extraordinary Popular Delusions"

"Extraordinary Popular Delusions"

By Bill Bonner

"Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from

 the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which great 

minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive."

– 19th-century Scottish author Charles MacKay"

WEST RIVER, MARYLAND – "As you know, Dear Reader, we live in an Age of Miracles. Jesus could turn water into wine. But the Federal Reserve can go one better… It can turn worthless pieces of paper into – money! Trillions of dollars’ worth of money. Enough to “stimulate” the world’s biggest economy into a state of transcendental ecstasy. Or at least into a pleasurable, momentary delusion of normalcy.

Distraction: This is the big story of the 21st century… the fantasy of fake money and the subsequent real-world, real-time butt-kicking that Americans will get as a result. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. We are only in the fairly early stages, when the delusions are still more or less agreeable. Our biggest challenge here at the Diary is to avoid getting distracted and misled by them. Each incredible tale has its own trail of hooey leading to yet another incredible tale. Follow one… and then the other… and pretty soon, you are lost. But let’s see where we end up today.

Infinity Squeeze: Last week, the Reddit crew seemed to open a whole new chapter in financial history. Suddenly, using the internet, a flash mob of “little guy” investors was able to humble the big, rich hedge funds. The hedgies had sold some 140% of the GameStop shares outstanding. Some people wondered how that was possible. Others wondered why it was legal. Or how the young traders – led by Reddit users Roaring Kitty or DeepF**kingValue – could possibly execute an “infinity squeeze” against the pros.

Even the “infinity squeeze” itself is an object of wonder. In it, buyers drive up the price so high… leaving so little available float that the next buyer (say, a short seller who needs to cover his bet) must pay an infinitely higher price. We didn’t know how it would turn out in practice, but anyone could guess how it would go in theory. Once the shorts had all retreated, licking their wounded egos and counting their billions in losses, the longs would be masters of the field.

Back Down to Earth: But then what? They would be holding shares in a company, bought at an average basis cost far above what they are really worth – perhaps hundreds of times more than they are worth. These buyers had sworn to “never sell.” And perhaps, in the spirit of solidarity or insanity, they would stall before hitting the bid. But all is fair in love, war, and squeeze plays.

The smartest of them edged towards the exit last Thursday, selling a stock then worth more than $400. By yesterday, a crowd had rushed the open door, trampling many and bringing the price down to $90. In a few weeks, it ought to be back to where it began, around $15. By this time next year, it might be closer to zero.

For while the Fed can perform miracles of levitation on Wall Street, it leaves Main Street flat on the ground. And GameStop, a bricks-and-mortar retailer of video games now readily available online, seems likely to go out of business.

Hate the Rich: So what was that all about, we wonder? All the sturm and drang? All the huffing and puffing on the part of bystanders? Everybody seemed to get worked up about it. The shorts thought they were doing God’s work – helping Mr. Market find the appropriate price for GameStop shares. The longs all wore white, too, confident that they were on a crusade to stop the rich from taking over the world.

The only “takeaways” for us from the whole saga were that the Fed’s bubble must be getting ready to pop (the madness of the gaming crowd is reaching a fever pitch)… and that hatred towards “the rich” is running high – and growing. A recent news item told us that a wealthy white couple had rented a private plane in order to go into the wilds of Canada to get “the vaccine” that had been sent for the local people. The Guardian’s headline captured the hate-the-rich mood. ‘It disgusts me’: how a wealthy couple lied to get a vaccine meant for Indigenous people

It’s hard to know which part of the news item to wonder about first. The rich couple turned out to be young. They didn’t even need the vaccine. Why bother to fly across hundreds of miles of wilderness and pretend to be local motel staff in order to get it? And how did they get away with it? The town of Beaver Creek in Canada’s Yukon territory has a population of about 100. Everybody knows everybody else.

And isn’t the vaccine supposed to be in short supply? Isn’t it supposed to be the only thing standing between life and death for millions of people? Why send the precious elixir to the middle of nowhere and give it to people who’ve reportedly never had a single case of the disease? We have no answers. We only wonder.

And we wonder what the effect would be if the roles were reversed. Let’s try it out: Indigenous people lie in order to get vaccine intended for the wealthy Who would be disgusted then? At whom? We wonder.

White Hats: But wondering takes time. And energy. More important, it turns your attention away from the main drama. It is like a sidewalk clown who swallows a mouse so you won’t notice the bank robbery across the street. But more than a distraction, it is a formula… a universal template that you can use to shore up the levees on the magical river… and imagine that it always leads to ever-more miracles ahead.

The GameStop story pitted the “little guys” against the “big guys.” The little guys won… until they lost. Then, the media dropped the story.

The “rich” stole the vaccine from “indigenous people.” Now, they are threatened with jail time.

An “insurrection” in Washington was a battle between the pristine forces of democracy… and a mob of barbarians. The bad guys are being hunted down.

And even the COVID-19 Plague story followed the same Hollywood script. The bug killed millions… but The Science and Mankind (oops, we mean Personkind) triumphed by developing miracle vaccines. Surely now, anno domini 2021, the white hats at the Fed – with their “miracle” money at hand – will triumph again… and banish poverty/recession/financial crises from the face of the Earth. Or not. Stay tuned."

- https://www.rogueeconomics.com/

"What Keeps You Going..."

"What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, 'What life can I live that will let me breathe in and out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?'"

- Barbara Kingsolver

"The Only Final Sin..."

"In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime 

is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity."

- Hunter S. Thompson

“Hedge Funds Will Eat You Alive; Silver Smashed; Stock Market Is A Video Game; Anxiety Soars”

Jeremiah Babe,

“Hedge Funds Will Eat You Alive; Silver Smashed; 

Stock Market Is A Video Game; Anxiety Soars”

"It's Official: The World's Biggest Silver Short Squeeze Has Begun!"

"It's Official: 

The World's Biggest Silver Short Squeeze Has Begun!"

by Epic Economist

"It's official: the world's biggest short squeeze has begun. As we previously reported, WallStreetBets members have been discussing on a Reddit forum and other places on social media about descending to the precious metal market. Yesterday, Silver stock prices hit an eight-year high as the online trading war against big banks and hedge funds found a new battleground. The conflict between short-sellers and the Reddit group has already seen GameStop’s share price skyrocket by 1,700% in the space of a month. But now, the small investor Reddit group’s trader frenzy is shifting its focus in order to team up and start to pump their money in silver shares to create a shortage of physical silver in the markets and send prices to unprecedented levels. The Reddit Rebellion against large institutional investors is attempting to destroy big banks they believe are artificially suppressing prices and manipulating the markets. And that's what we discuss in this video. 

Following a coordinated campaign to buy both silver exchange trading funds in the paper realm and precious metals in the physical, the Reddit-Raiders are putting their plan of triggering the world's biggest short squeeze into place, as online bullion dealers have seen such a huge demand for silver over the weekend that U.S. precious metals retailers were left with little to no physical inventory, while silver prices exploded higher following in the same footsteps of other "most-shorted" names. According to the last trading numbers, the precious metal is currently trading at around $30/ounce, an 11.5% surge which has been the biggest one-day increase since September 16, 2008 - the day Lehman filed for bankruptcy. If the price closes there, it is going to be the highest price since early 2013.

However, as Bloomberg accurately assesses, silver stocks are very different from stocks like GameStop. Starting with the fact that the extent of a short squeeze in silver is much more complex: data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission indicate that money managers have had a net-long position, futures, and options on the metal since mid-2019. More significantly, the market for silver is also much larger than those for smaller stocks like GameStop. While the bricks-and-mortar video game retailer had a market capitalization of about $1.4 billion in mid-January - before the Reddit movement prompt the company’s value to increase over 16-fold - according to LBMA data, London vaults hold 1.08 billion ounces of silver, whose worth is evaluated at approximately $32 billion at current prices. 

For the foreseeable future, it's very unlikely that a reversal of the surge occurs: short-term forward rates on the London silver market flatlined on Monday, which suggests that a strong demand for the metal will be seen over the coming weeks. Whether the price jump fuelled by the unprecedented demand is solely being sparked by the Reddit Rebellion or hedge funds might also be behind it, the truth is that silver shortages are already happening pretty much everywhere, and sellers of physical silver including Apmex - considered the "Walmart" of precious metals products in North America - have affirmed to be unable to process orders until Asian markets opened due to the record demand. Many of them have been taking extraordinary measures for the first time in their history by temporarily suspending silver sales while defending that it could take longer than usual to fill orders going forward. 

GoldSilver.com's President, Alex Daley, stressed that this rush on physical silver came at a time when the industry was already registering low supply. This shortage of physical silver is revealing a tear in the precious metals market unlike anything we have ever witnessed before. And although silver futures prices - which stand for paper silver - have remained stable during the day, physical silver prices remain at sky-highs. In other words, the elites can print all the paper silver it wants, but as there is no physical supply, this will likely end really badly for those trying to suppress the fact that this is indeed the most speculative market of all. Or as QTR Research has perfectly put into words: "no matter what happens with the Silver Squeeze, a lot of younger people are for the first time informing themselves that metals are the only true real money. That realization sticks for life, even when the squeezes end. This is a red pill moment for many, and it's beautiful."

- https://www.epiceconomist.com​

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"Insider Intel: "I work for a bank whose name I won’t disclose.

You fools. You have no idea what you’re doing."

- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

Gerald Celente, “Trends Journal: Youth Revolution, Stop the Game!”

Gerald Celente, 

“Trends Journal: Youth Revolution, Stop the Game!”

"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present Facts and Truth over hype and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for What’s Next in the increasingly turbulent times ahead."

- https://trendsresearch.com/

"Covid-19 Pandemic Updates 2/2/21"

"Covid-19 Pandemic Updates 2/2/21"

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- https://www.zerohedge.com/

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 Coronavirus Map: Tracking the Global Outbreak 

 Feb 2, 2021 8:01 PM ET: 

The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 103,821,800 

people, according to official counts, including 26,469,014 Americans.

Globally at least 2,249,900 have died.

  Feb. 2, 2021 8:01 PM ET: 

Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count

- www.nytimes.com

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"The COVID Tracking Project"
Every day, our volunteers compile the latest numbers on tests, cases, 
hospitalizations, and patient outcomes from every US state and territory.
- https://covidtracking.com/
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- https://www.cdc.gov/library/covid19/

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Coronavirus World Map: Tracking The Spread Of The Outbreak

Feb. 2, 2021 8:17 AM ET

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Where I Live:

- CP

Gregory Mannarino, Post-Market 2/2/21: "Alert! Do Not Follow The Crowd! SLV Dives"

Gregory Mannarino, 

Post-Market 2/2/21: "Alert! Do Not Follow The Crowd! 

SLV Dives... Is The Stock Market Correction Over?"

- https://traderschoice.net

Musical Interlude: Justin Hayward, "The Way of the World"

Justin Hayward, "The Way of the World"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Will the spider ever catch the fly? Not if both are large emission nebulas toward the constellation of the Charioteer (Auriga). The spider-shaped gas cloud on the left is actually an emission nebula labelled IC 417, while the smaller fly-shaped cloud on the right is dubbed NGC 1931 and is both an emission nebula and a reflection nebula. 

About 10,000 light-years distant, both nebulas harbor young, open star clusters. For scale, the more compact NGC 1931 (Fly) is about 10 light-years across.”

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180129.html

"A Strange Honey..."

"Bad things will happen and good things too. Your life will be full of surprises. Miracles happen only where there has been suffering. So taste your grief to the fullest. Don't try and press it down. Don't hide from it. Don't escape. It is life too. It is truth. But it will pass and time will put a strange honey in the bitterness. That's the way life goes."

- Ben Okri

Free Download: "The Essential Rumi"

"All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there. Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul? I cannot stop asking. If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks. I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way. Whoever brought me here, will have to take me home."

- Rumi, "The Tavern," Ch. 1:, p. 2, from "The Essential Rumi"

Freely download "The Essential Rumi" here:

= https://littlethingsaboutmeeh.files.wordpress.com/

"That's Why..."

"That's why crazy people are so dangerous. 

You think they're nice until they're chaining you up in the garage."

- Michael Buckley

The Daily "Near You?"

Salmon Arm, British Columbia, Canada

Thanks for stopping by!

"Meaningful Warnings...

“There are meaningful warnings which history gives a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, the decadence of art, or a lack of great statesmen. There are open and evident warnings, too. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy. But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their offensive; you can feel their pressure, and yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?”

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"H.R. 127: A New Bill In Congress Would Literally End Your 2nd Amendment Rights Permanently"

"H.R. 127: A New Bill In Congress Would 

Literally End Your 2nd Amendment Rights Permanently"

by Michael Snyder

"If a new bill that has been introduced in Congress eventually becomes law, the 2nd Amendment will still be in the U.S. Constitution, but for all practical purposes the rights that it is supposed to guarantee will be dead and gone. H.R. 127 was submitted on January 4th, and if you have not read it yet you can find the full text right here. It contains a lot of technical language, and so in this article I am going to try to break down what it means very simply. Now that the Democrats control the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, there is going to be a major push to ram through some form of gun control legislation. If it is not this bill, it will be another one, so we need to be diligent.

One of the biggest things that H.R. 127 would do is that it would create a national firearms registration system that would literally be accessible by anyone: "HR 127 establishes a federal firearms registration system that will be accessible by federal, state, and local governments, including the military – even the GENERAL PUBLIC! The system will track the make, model, and serial number of all firearms, their owners, the dates they were acquired, and where they are being stored."

So if your neighbor, a co-worker, or someone that just wanted to rob your home wanted to know how you were armed, all they would have to do would be to look it up in the firearms registration system. This bill would also apply retroactively. Within three months, you would have to report to the government where you bought all of your guns, when they were purchased, and where they are currently being stored. Needless to say, if the government knows where all of your guns are being stored, it would make it that much easier to grab them from you at some future date.

H.R. 127 would also require all gun owners to be federally licensed. That would mean that owning a gun would no longer be a right. Instead, it would be reduced to a “privilege” that the government could take away at any time. According to the bill, the licensing procedure would include “a psychological evaluation”: "The licensing requirement mandates that the license applicant undergoes a criminal background check, and then submits to a psychological evaluation to determine whether the person is psychologically unsuited to possess a firearm. Successful licensees must show they have an insurance policy which will cost $800."

I know a lot of guys out there that would definitely not want to go through any sort of a “psychological evaluation” by a government-approved psychologist. And it wouldn’t just be you that would get interviewed. According to the bill, spouses and other family members would be interviewed as well: "For the psychological evaluation, a licensed psychologist will interview individuals’ spouses and at least two other family members or associates to “further determine the state of the mental emotional, and relational stability of the individual in relation to firearms.” Licenses will be denied to individuals hospitalized for issues such as depressive episodes; no duration for license disability is specified, and it does not matter whether the individual sought help voluntarily."

The goal, of course, is to make owning guns as difficult as possible. Democrats figure that if they can put up as many barriers to gun ownership as possible, a lot less people will end up owning them.

Thirdly, this bill would also greatly restrict the type of ammunition that you can own: "Finally, HR 127 also criminalizes the possession of “large-capacity magazines” (those carrying greater than 10 rounds) and “ammunition that is 0.50 caliber or greater.”

I know that all of this sounds utterly ridiculous, but the restrictions in this bill actually sound very, very similar to what Joe Biden has been publicly proposing: "During the 2020 campaign, Joe Biden promised a long list of gun control regulations. There is a reason that Michael Bloomberg spent $125 million helping Biden in Florida and something over $600 million nationally in the general election. The agenda includes: classifying many semi-automatic rifles and magazines holding more than 10 bullets as Class 3 weapons (which can require nine months or more for approval and a $200 fee), national gun licensing, “red flag” laws that let judges take away people’s guns without a hearing, background checks on the private transfer of guns, and bans on some semi-automatic firearms that happen to look like military weapons.

Gun control is very high on the list of things that Joe Biden wants to get accomplished during the next four years. So like I said, if it isn’t this bill, it will be another one that is similar. They are coming for your 2nd Amendment, and they aren’t going to stop until they get what they want.

Meanwhile, this is all happening at a time when murder rates all across America are going through the roof: “Homicide rates were higher during every month of 2020 relative to rates from the previous year,” the report states, calling the 30 percent surge “a large and troubling increase that has no modern precedent.” We have never seen major city murder rates jump by an average of 30 percent in a single year.

Things are getting really crazy out there, and many believe that 2021 will be even worse. For almost a year, there has been civil unrest in our cities on an almost nightly basis. As I write this, civil unrest has erupted in Rochester, New York. We live at a time when rioting, looting, arson and vandalism have become commonplace, and the senseless violence that we have witnessed so far is just the leading edge of the storm.

Millions of Americans can see what is happening to our society and they are quite concerned. 2020 was a record year for gun sales in the United States, and dealers have reported that demand is extremely strong so far in 2021 as well. The Democrats do not like this one bit, and they are going to do their very best to put a stop to it.

Please let your friends, family and contacts know about H.R. 127, because an all-out attack on the 2nd Amendment is coming, but at this point most people are not even aware that it is about to happen."

- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

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"Perhaps It Is Better..."

"Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. 

But it is the best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants

can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. 

Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future."

- Arthur C. Clarke

"Our Fragile, Brittle Stock Market"

"Our Fragile, Brittle Stock Market"

by Charles Hugh Smith

"The relentless melt-up in stocks offers ample evidence that the market is rock-solid and that any decline is an enormous opportunity to buy the dip. That this has worked splendidly for the past 13 years cannot be denied. This doesn't necessarily guarantee the next 13 years will merely be an extension of the same trend. The market's sources of fragility and brittleness are well cloaked by low-volume melt-ups; these vulnerabilities only become visible in high-volume sell-offs such as 2020's brief mini-crash.

To understand the fragility at the heart of the market, we must return to the Global Financial Meltdown of 2008-09 and former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's explanation of why he and all the other experts failed to understand the market's vulnerabilities and thus failed to forecast the global crash.

"Never Saw It Coming: Why the Financial Crisis Took Economists By Surprise" (Dec. 2013 Foreign Affairs): "The financial crisis that ensued represented an existential crisis for economic forecasting. The conventional method of predicting macroeconomic developments - econometric modeling, the roots of which lie in the work of John Maynard Keynes - had failed when it was needed most, much to the chagrin of economists. In the run-up to the crisis, the Federal Reserve Board's sophisticated forecasting system did not foresee the major risks to the global economy. Nor did the model developed by the International Monetary Fund."

In essence, Greenspan argued that the fancy models did not anticipate or capture human emotions in a financial panic. This is a remarkable confession, given the long study of panics and the wealth of research available on human emotions. Greenspan then moved on to the real issue: liquidity - the bid to buy stocks - disappears:

"They (financial firms) failed to recognize that market liquidity is largely a function of the degree of investors' risk aversion, the most dominant animal spirit that drives financial markets. But when fear-induced market retrenchment set in, that liquidity disappeared overnight, as buyers pulled back. In fact, in many markets, at the height of the crisis of 2008, bids virtually disappeared."

In effect, Greenspan et al. assumed there would always be a pool of buyers willing to buy whatever stocks sellers were unloading. One potential pool of such buyers are those traders who bet on a market decline by selling short - selling shares at the top that they would buy back after a decline, pocketing the difference as profit.

What Greenspan did not acknowledge in his mea culpa was central banks' role in goosing markets so relentlessly that short selling dried up. Why bet on a market decline in a central-bank managed melt-up? Why lose money by betting against managers with trillions at their fingertips? So short interest declines to a negligible backstop against a crash - precisely the situation now as short interest has declined to recent lows: 

The other source of bids is buy the dip traders conditioned by the melt-up to aggressively buy every drop in the market. These buyers may be retail (individual) human speculators or they may be computers programmed to buy the dip. This buy the dip reaction (greed) was on display in 2020's mini-crash, as every plunge was aggressively bought. However, each spike higher was soon sold (fear) and the market promptly fell to new lows.

Many of the buy the dip players are leveraged, meaning that they are using borrowed money (margin debt) to buy more stocks. Should the market drop instead of rebounding, their account will fall below minimum requirements and they will have to add cash or sell stocks. When buy the dip fails, those with margin calls add to the selling.

Most of the trading volume nowadays is generated by computers - called algos because they're programmed to trade based on algorithms that have been tweaked by very smart people and machine learning. The problem with algos is it's difficult to program for black swans or unpredictable rogue-wave monstrous moves. So the prudent programmer takes the computer offline to avoid the risk of the algo making a trading decision in a rare and thus difficult to model crisis that ends up wiping out the financial firm.

This is why liquidity - traders willing to buying stocks at the bid - dries up incredibly fast. Short sellers are such a thin slice of the market now that their buying is little more than a sand castle in a tsunami. Algos programmed to escape a decline by selling pile in while algos programmed to buy the dip quickly reverse and sell when the expected rally fails to materialize. As the rogue wave washes away all the sand castles, the algos are taken offline and liquidity goes to zero.

This is how the price of oil crashed to a negative number in the 2020 mini-crash. The market went bidless, meaning there were no buyers at any price. In Street jargon, trying to buy on the way down is called catching the falling knife: the knife is in free-fall, and buying in at what you guess is the bottom can turn out to be only halfway down the decline. Oops.

This is the consequence of managing markets to only melt up and reversing every decline with trillions in freshly created "money." The market structure has been stripped of actual market dynamics, leaving it exquisitely fragile and brittle. Put another way, this heavily managed market structure is far from equilibrium and extremely prone to instability. All this is hidden behind the curtain, where the managers are furiously pulling levers and pushing buttons to maintain the illusion of stability needed to forecast melt-ups are forever.

What's going on behind the curtain? Few seem to care. Eventually they will, but like Greenspan in 2013, it will be long after the losses have been wept over."

- https://www.oftwominds.com/

"How They'd Really Like You To Think It Was"

 

"The American Government Is At War With Its Own People"

Tucker Carlson,

"The American Government Is At War With Its Own People"

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"Enemies Of The State Vs. Enemies Of The People"

by Frank Miele 

"I didn’t declare war on the establishment; it declared war on me.

It declared war on me when it supported energy policies that could enrich Saudi Arabia and Russia and would cost me more money at the gas pump or on my power bill.

It declared war on me when it told me my ideas weren’t worthy of debate and discussion or that they were even so dangerous they couldn’t be shared publicly.

It declared war on me when it used the police powers of the FBI and CIA to first spy on a presidential candidate and then worked to undermine the administration of that candidate after he was elected.

It declared war on me when it told me my religious beliefs did not deserve the protection of the First Amendment.

It declared war on me when it told me boys could compete against girls in high school sports and that they could shower together afterwards.

It declared war on me when it offered citizenship to illegal aliens and shipped American jobs to China.

It declared war on me when it mocked the usefulness of a wall on the Mexican border and simultaneously put up a razor-wire fence around the Capitol.

It declared war on me when it tried to defund the police so that millions of Americans would be left defenseless against mobs from Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

It declared war on me when it said America was never great.

It declared war on me when it told my children they are not good enough because they are white.

It declared war on me when it said that defending the Constitution’s rules on federal elections is sedition.

It declared war on me when it told me that I was a domestic terrorist if I didn’t believe the government’s official pronouncements about elections, about free speech, and about right and wrong.

Let’s just say it plainly: The establishment declared war on me and on all conservative Americans when it decided that leftist orthodoxy was more important than the Constitution.

Don’t believe me? Fine, why should you believe a Trump supporter? You’ve been indoctrinated by the national media, Big Tech oligarchs, the Democratic Party, and academic elites to believe without questioning that people like me can’t be trusted. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Listen instead to John Brennan, the former CIA director under President Obama, who speaks authoritatively for the Deep State:

He said on MSNBC that “the members of the Biden team who have been nominated or have been appointed, are now moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about what looks very similar to insurgency movements that we've seen overseas, where they germinate in different parts of the country and they gain strength and it brings together an unholy alliance frequently of religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians.”

This “guilt by labeling” is the antithesis of fair play or justice. It is a convenient mechanism for the ruling class to herd people into identity clusters so that individual rights can be supplanted by group responsibility. If this reminds you of China’s Cultural Revolution, you are not wrong. The ruling class wants you to conform, confirm and comply. If you step outside the lines, be prepared to be shamed, silenced and ostracized.

A shocking example was provided Wednesday when Douglass Mackey of Delray Beach, Fla., was arrested for creating memes that allegedly misled voters in 2016 to think they could vote by texting instead of by actually going to the polls. This is the equivalent of arresting Sacha Baron Cohen for exposing the gullibility of the rich and famous. The FBI offered no evidence that Mackey actually convinced anyone not to vote, but even if it did, so what? Would you rather live in a country where the FBI is hunting down pranksters - four years after the supposed transgression - or a country where voters are expected to be able to recognize a joke when they see one?

But nothing can be taken for granted any more. The people - and even their representatives and senators - are considered enemies of the state because they hold opinions that don’t meet the standards of Joe Biden or (this is even scarier!) Jake Tapper.

No wonder the people are starting to rise up and rebel against the plutocracy. It’s not “We the Oligarchs” who are the source of power in the Constitution, but “We the People,” yet the ruling establishment has forgotten that. If people like Donald Trump and Douglass Mackey are deemed to be “enemies of the state,” then those who would suppress them and their freedoms must be considered “enemies of the people.”

A house divided against itself cannot long stand, but if there is to be a truce it will not come from submission, but from a recognition that all people are created equal, that they all have certain inalienable rights, and that among those are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Those words were worth fighting for once. Are they worth fighting for today?

I don’t know, but I do know this: If Americans can’t have liberty, we can’t have America either - at least not one that is distinguishable from China. The time has come to make a choice."

- https://www.realclearpolitics.com/

- https://www.zerohedge.com/