Year: 2024

The mass shooting in Birmingham, Alabama, last night, that left four dead (so far), and seventeen wounded, is not a problem of guns but of violent crime. Guns don’t shoot themselves. People use guns to shoot other people (and themselves). If the public wants to reduce homicide, it needs to understand why people kill other people. Part of this is understanding who is doing the killing. The security state and the corporate media want the public to believe it’s the lone white male. The public has yet to learn who perpetrated the Birmingham shooting because it’s not. It usually isn’t.

Serious crime skyrocketed between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s. Why this happened requires a long and complex analysis. However, what brought down crime after the mid-1990s is not a complicated story. Progressives tell us that it was the assault weapons ban, which came into effect in September 1994 and sunset in September 2004. But so-called assault weapons are involved in a very small portion of homicides (fewer than one in twenty)—and who is robbing people with an AR-15? What brought crime rates down was a drastic expansion of the criminal justice system—incarcerating more violent offenders for longer periods of time and putting more police on the street focused on crime prevention, drug trafficking, and gang activity. NewYork City under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton is the paradigm.

Thanks to the tilt of criminal justice policy and practice towards law and order, the nation enjoyed a historic drop in crime after the mid-1990s. But that’s been reversed over the last decade. And it shows no signs of letting up. The DOJ’s Criminal Victimization for 2023 is out. The Department of Justice found that violent crime increased 37 percent from 2020 to 2023, rape 42 percent, robbery 63 percent, and stranger violence 61 percent. The NCVS does not include murder statistics, and the FBI has still not released the 2023 statistics (and the 2022 statistics are incomplete), so I can’t report that figure for that year. But I can report murder for the years earlier, and it’s scary. Also in the DOJ report, property crime is up 13 percent, driven by motor vehicle theft, which increased 48 percent.

What went wrong? Around 2010, academics and the mass media began pushing the white supremacy/white privilege narrative. In a detailed content analysis of major media sources published in Tablet in 2020, “How the Media Led the Great Racial Awakening,” Zach Goldberg finds that, “[y]ears before Trump’s election the media dramatically increased coverage of racism and embraced new theories of racial consciousness that set the stage for the latest unrest.”

You can find Goldberg’s article here, and I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing, but I want to pull a few charts from the piece to make the point immediate for you. In the first two charts, the reader will see the drastic increase of reference to “racists” and “racism” occurring around 2010 and a corresponding rise in the percentage of the population who reported that racism in the United States is a problem—this after a long decline.

Indicated by the next several charts, the use of terms like “racists” and “racism” were buttressed by a slew of novel or academic terms developed by progressive social scientists and historians and pushed out by the corporate media and culture industry: “systemic racism,” “structural racism,” and “institutional racism”; “racial privilege” and “white privilege”; “racial hierarchies,” “whiteness,” and “white supremacy”; “racial disparities,” “racial inequalities,” and “racial inequities.”

In this way, the alleged effects of “whiteness,” “systemic racism,” etc., were identified as causing racial disparities and inequities without any demonstration of the validity of the alleged independent variables or their explanatory power. No matter, the terms comprised the assumption in force. Reinforced by race hustlers like Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, and through constant repetition, the abstract facts of racial disparity became their own cause, especially since even suggesting they were explicable by reference to causes outside of the antiracist narrative risked being labeled a racist.

Two major pieces of this narrative played a critical role in producing the crime wave we’re currently suffering: (1) dissemination of the myth of a racist criminal justice system and (2) sowing resentment among racialized populations impoverished by globalization—offshoring and immigration. Elites blamed the situation of blacks on working class whites to deflect from the fact that transnational corporations and white progressives and their black collaborators were responsible. Against a backdrop of decades of decay in America’s central cities caused by Great Society social engineering and the destruction of the black family, demoralization combined with decarceration and depolicing produced rising rates of violent and serious property crime.

Today, there is more violent and serious property crime than there has been in a long time. It’s so bad that many city and state governments are not reporting out the statistics—hence in unavailability of the FBI Uniform Crime Report. Predictably, serious crime predominates in blue cities run by progressive politicians and policymakers. These are the same politicians and policymakers who manufactured the myth of the racist criminal justice system and socialized identity politics, i.e, the reracialization of the nation’s collective consciousness. Given the criminogenic conditions that these politicians and policymakers perpetuate, without effective public safety measures, violent and serious crime inevitably returned.

What can we do about it? If you don’t want to do anything about it, or make it worse, then vote Democrat. But if you want to return to the rule of law and public safety, then you will have to vote for the alternative. We are on the threshold of a new day—but we have to seize it. Not seizing the moment is not a neutral act. We can vote for Harris and remain in the ever-growing authoritarian darkness of the corporate state, or we can vote for a movement that is bringing together the left and the right around democratic-republican principles of governance and classical liberal values. Things are more hopeful than they have been in my lifetime. But half the nation wants to be governed harder by the nanny state. And the nanny state—and the destruction of the family it brings—lies at the heart of criminogenesis in America.

Have you seen this? They don’t want you thinking about endocrine disrupters, food additives, forever chemicals, microplastics—emotion regulating, gene altering, mood alerting pharmaceuticals, etc. They want you worrying about practices that sustain human life, like growing food, heating homes, and fueling transportation.

I see something along the lines of this regurgitated endlessly X: “Nothing changes the fact that Donald Trump is a twice impeached, adjudicated rapist, business fraud and convicted felon traitor who incited a deadly attack on our Capitol.”

First, an impeachment isn’t a conviction. Impeachment is an indictment (or information). Trump was acquitted at trial on both impeachments, the latter concerning the charge of inciting a riot. A man is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Trump was found “not guilty.” Trump therefore retains his legal innocence.

Second, Trump has no criminal rape convictions. A judge in a civil trial said she believed Trump committed rape. Her beliefs do not substitute for a rape conviction. The opinion is an aside from a judge who took seriously the claims of a deranged plaintiff. Trump is not an adjudicated rapist. The man has never even been tried for rape.

Third, Trump is not convicted of any felony counts related to business fraud in New York until the jury verdict is entered into the record at sentencing. Sentencing has been postponed until after the election—and the judge will likely set aside the verdict after Trump is elected in November. And even if the judge were to affirm the verdict, Trump could appeal, and at some point up the appellate chain see the verdict is overturned, because the trial was facially fraudulent.

Democrats lie like dogs. Constantly. Pathologically. If the Democratic Party were a person, it’d be an individual who, if examined by a clinical psychologist, would be diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. Believe nothing Democrats tell you. Truth means nothing to them. They’re psychopaths.

Update (10:35 PM):

Absolute must listen!! @Mike BenzCyber does it again with opening up the can of worms! https://t.co/q6A4qATdYh

— Bree (@BreeFrom1983) September 17, 2024

* * *

The Democratic Party is all Establishment. By Establishment I mean the dominant economic, political, and social elites who hold power and influence in a society—the entrenched authority that maintains the status quo and resists change, controlling key aspects of business, government, education, media, and cultural production. The Establishment is out of touch with the broader population’s needs or desires (for example in Springfield, Ohio). The Establishment is a collective force that protects its own interests at the expense of the people.

The Establishment is globalists. The proxy war with Russia in Ukraine is an expression of globalist ambition. While the Democrats are all in, the Republican Party is split between the Establishment and the populist-nationalists. Trump represents the return to constitutional republicanism and classical liberal principles. Reclamation of our founding is antithetical to globalist ambitions. Ryan Wesley Routh, who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump yesterday in Florida, was on the side of the Republican Party he perceived was Establishment, correctly with Nikki Haley, wrongly with Vivek Ramaswamy. This is how he could support the Republicans but loathe Trump.

Trump is a populist-nationalists who doesn’t want the proxy war with Russia. That’s why the Establishment says he is Putin’s stooge. If you don’t understand this split then you won’t understand the assassin’s support for the Republican Party while parroting Biden-Harris talking points. We saw the same thing with the first assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks. Crooks was a registered Republican. But what kind of Republican? Establishment Republicans hate Trump because Trump is not Establishment. They have endorsed Harris-Walz because the Democratic Party is Establishment. Even Dick Cheney has come out in support of Harris-Walz.

It’s remarkable people haven’t figured all this out. I’ve been writing about this years on Freedom and Reason. We are in the midst of a great realignment. Realignment turns on the actual bifurcation point in a grand historical struggle between transnationalism and nationalism. The attempts on Trump’s life represent the effort to cut off the head of the populist-nationalist movement that represents resistance to globalization—open borders, the transnationalization of corporate power and its governance and legal structures, fusion with China and the entrenchment of authoritarian and technocratic control.

The Establishment wants things the way they were from January 20, 1989 to January 20, 2017. They thought Hillary Clinton would win the White House in 2016 and they could continue dismantling the American Republic and entrenching the corporate state. They rigged 2020 to get the project back on track. They thought they could delegitimize Trump before 2024—lawfare and all the rest of it. They haven’t been able to, so they’re turning to desperate measures.

The first assassin cannot tell us who he worked with, who prepared him, because he’s dead. But we know a lot about the second one. We can see he is aligned with the Establishment. He wanted the proxy war against Russia to continue. He was in Ukraine working with the Azov Battalion. Newsweek is reporting that Routh told The New York Times in March 2023 about his effort to recruit Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban to fight in Ukraine. He told the Times that he spent several months in Ukraine in 2022. A Semafor report published on March 2023 cited Routh as the head of the International Volunteer Center (IVC) in Ukraine. The Associated Press reported that Routh was convicted in 2002 of possessing a weapon of mass destruction. He saw a Trump victory as the potential end of the transnational project. When he parroted the Establishment rhetoric about Trump representing a threat to democracy, this is what he meant.

Was Routh a CIA asset? Ian Carroll has made some observations worth your attention.

Is this evidence the Trump assassin was a CIA asset?

It’s still early, don’t jump to any conclusions.

I’m just out here doing the FBIs job for them because we all know Chris Ray busy prepping the cover up as we speak.

Shoutout @SomeBitchIIKnow for the archives pic.twitter.com/K3jARUWDYh

— Ian Carroll (@Cancelcloco) September 16, 2024

Responding to the killing of Cats in Ohio and elsewhere, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, has put out series of public service announcement emphasizing that “Outdoor cats don’t go missing by themselves.” This is true. Toms wander off from time to time, but generally speaking, if your cat doesn’t come home, it’s probably been killed. It could be coyotes. It could be humans. It seems that the authorities aren’t interested in finding out whether it’s the one or the other. But they are interested in racializing the problem of immigration by telling the public that concern over the safety of cats in Ohio is a symptom of white supremacy.

🔥🚨BREAKING NEWS: PETA is releasing a commercial that will be played nationwide in response to migrants eating cats in Ohio. Is this real life anymore? pic.twitter.com/qE2dLwYFpH

— Dom Lucre | Breaker of Narratives (@dom_lucre) September 14, 2024

The PETA ad is based on actual events. Here’s a report on these events, from the Dayton Daily News, dated July 10, 2024: Dayton man charged after reportedly setting kitten on fire. Eric Keith Williams, 21, of Dayton, faces charges of arson and cruelty to companion animals, according to records from Dayton Municipal Court. The arson charge is a first-degree misdemeanor, and the cruelty to companion animals charge is a fourth-degree felony. The Humane Society of Greater Dayton, assisting local authorities, has taken custody of the cat. Thankfully, the cat survived its injuries and is currently being treated as it recovers. Dayton is about thirty minutes from Springfield.

Above is the booking photo of Williams. Below is the cover image of the ad that depicts Williams’ crimes. It would seem that PETA felt it necessary to change the race of the perpetrator. PETA confirms that this is the case they built the video around. “Shocking reports of people attacking cats have recently grabbed headlines across the U.S., prompting a new PETA video series that will air nationwide, including in Dayton, where a man was arrested after intentionally setting a kitten named Joffrey on fire in July.” Another of PETA’s 30-second TV commercials, “Outdoor Cat,” also features a young white man. The race of the actual perpetrator in that case is unknown, as he (or she) has not been identified. Both men represent the stereotype of the antisocial white kid who revels in cruelty to animals.

I won’t share here the horror of cat killing videos one can find with little effort on X (formerly Twitter). I understand why they need to be shared, but as a cat lover they are difficult to watch. What concerns me is the way that criticism of migrant culture that permits the killing of cats for food or for protective magic in Caribbean religions, principally Obeah, Santería, and Vodou, are being portrayed as expressions of white supremacy. The reason for this is obvious— to tamp down opposition to the corporate state strategy of flooding the country with Third Worlders for the superexploitation of their labor and demographic realignment for political purposes.

It is important for the public to know something about the Third World cultures and religions that represent a threat to companion animals, as these cases are appearing with alarming frequency (hence the PETA campaign, which downplays the cultural aspect of the problem by focusing on decontextualized individual incidents). I will mention three here and then follow up in a day or so with a longer essay on why the conflation of culture and race is fallacious and why tens of thousands of Haitians were dumped on Springfield, Ohio. Culture is being conflated with race enable the smear that will bring disrepute on those who complain about mass immigration and paralyze those who consider joining them.

Obeah is a system of spiritual and healing practices originating in West Africa that was brought to the Caribbean during the transatlantic slave trade. It was characterized as a form of sorcery or witchcraft by colonial authorities, encompassing a wide range of practices including divination and protection against spiritual harm. Obeah is particularly associated with Jamaica, blending African spiritual traditions with indigenous and European influences. Cats’ teeth and other body parts are used as charms in this religion.

Santería is a syncretic religion that developed in Cuba among enslaved Africans, primarily of Yoruba descent. It blends traditional Yoruba religious practices with elements of Catholicism, as enslaved people were forced to adopt Christian rituals while covertly maintaining their own spiritual traditions. Central to Santería are the orishas, deities that embody natural forces and human qualities. Rituals often involve animal sacrifice and divination. While Santería is practiced widely in the Caribbean and Latin America, it has also spread to North America through diasporic communities.

Vodou, which I wrote about a few days ago (Is This the Second Coming of Hunter Biden’s Laptop is a Hoax?), is a religion with roots in West African Vodun and has evolved into a distinct tradition in Haiti. Like other Afro-Caribbean religions, it blends elements of African spirituality with Catholicism, with a strong emphasis on ancestor worship, ritual possession by spirits, and the maintenance of harmonious relationships with the spiritual world. Vodou practitioners honor loa (also spelled lwa), or spirits, which act as intermediaries between humans and the divine. Rituals often involve offering of food or animal sacrifices to the loa or for protective magic.

As I will explain that pending essay, increasing flows of Haitians, especially those from the poorest rural areas, are bringing Vodou to the United States. Enabled by the doctrine of multiculturalism, which portrays the demand for assimilation of foreigners into American culture as a expression of racism, Haitian migrants, especially coming in such large numbers, and effectively walled off from other workers in a split labor market, are forming ethnic enclaves in which conformity to civilized norms and values cannot develop.

“It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale.” —Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1965).

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” —George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

I know it sometimes feels like the you’re losing your mind when you read and watch reporting by the mainstream media. You watch a presidential debate and think one thing and then listen to the media analysis the next day and wonder whether you actually saw what you saw. You watch a candidate tell lie after lie without the moderators fact-checking her only to see the media lie about what the other candidate said.

This is industrial strength gaslighting. Don’t let the corporate state propagandists demoralize you. Remember, they all told you that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian information. They told you that Trump praised neo-nazis and white supremacists at Charlottesville, incited a riot on January 6, 2021, and told people to inject bleach into their veins and drink fishtanks cleaner during the COVID-19 pandemic. They told you Ivermectin was horse dewormer and that mRNA shots were safe and effective, that they would provide you with immunity from COVID-19. They told you cloth masks provide protection from the virus.

I remember reading a study a long time ago that the majority of the public knows the media is biased but at the same time finds it credible. This is what George Orwell called “doublethink,” the ability to hold to contrary positions in one’s head simultaneously and believe both of them. Overcoming doublethink requires purging from your belief system the thing that cannot be true. This takes practice because lifelong conditioning is a powerful force in shaping your assumptions. Say it out loud: “If the media is biased, then it is not credible.” The media is not reporting the news but disseminating propaganda. Therefore, the default position of a rational mind is that the media is lying or misrepresenting the facts. Until you can verify that what they are telling you is true, do not believe them. Getting to this place involves self-deprogramming.

Long ago, linguist Noam Chomsky asked us to consider what the media is. It is this: mainstream news media is a propaganda tool that serves the interests of corporate entities and powerful elites, filtering information in ways that protect the interests of the wealthy and those in power by confusing and deceiving the masses. The media operates within an institutional framework shaped by ownership, advertising, sourcing of information (especially reliance on corporate and government sources), and other factors that lead to systematic bias. The media manufactures consent by controlling public perception, steering discussions towards topics that reinforce the status quo while marginalizing dissenting viewpoints.

Today, the mass media pushes out the progressive worldview, i.e., the corporatist-statist standpoint, advancing the aims of Democratic Party and allied Republicans who represent the interests of the corporate entities that control the world economy. Central to these aims is quashing the populist-nationalist movement to restore our constitutional republic and return to classical liberal norms and values.

Before getting to the nub of today’s essay, let’s recall together some past CNN post-debate polling. Remember Biden’s 60-28 win in his first 2020 debate against Trump? Trump went on to win 75 million votes, the largest number of votes by presidential aspirant (I don’t believe Biden won 81 million votes). How about Clinton’s 62-27 win over Trump in the first debate of 2016? Clinton lost to Trump. Or Mitt Romney’s 67-25 win over then-President Barack Obama in the first debate of 2012? Romney lost to Obama. The CNN poll showed Harris winning the debate 63 percent to 37 percent among debate-watchers.

The media is attempting to demoralize Trump voters by pushing the recent poll, but history tells us that winning a debate is not winning an election. The Washington Post reports that, despite her win, debate-watchers still preferred Trump by 20 points on the economy (55-35) and 23 points on immigration (56-33). “Those are actually bigger margins than he usually racks up on these issues,” the Post noted, “so it seems possible Trump’s attacks on the Biden administration’s record on these issues landed with some effect.” So Trump supporters should not let the media blitz get them down.

Now, about this “rumor” of Haitians eating cats in Springfield, Ohio (which triggered an avalanche of hilarious cat memes, for which I am grateful), the media is being disingenuous by declaring the matter “debunked.” (So what’s new?) Animal sacrifice is core a part of Haitian Vodou tradition and plays a significant role in its rituals. In Vodou, animal sacrifice is not merely about offering animals to the spirits; it is a sacred act that reflects the deep relationship between humans, the natural order, and the spirit world. The practice is rooted in the belief that blood contains life force or spiritual energy, which helps to feed and strengthen the loa (spirits) during ceremonies.

One purpose of animal sacrifices is to honor the loa and seek their assistance, there are also practices within Vodou that involve curses or protective magic. These are typically done with the intent of defending oneself or the community. Various indigenous or traditional African religions involve animal sacrifice in their rituals; the origins of Vodou lie in the fusion of West and Central African spiritual traditions with the Catholicism imposed by French colonial rulers, forming a syncretic belief system that allows for a complex relationship between the divine, humanity, and the natural world. In this respect (and others) it’s similar to Santería, another AfroCaribbean syncretic religion that has found its way into the United States.

ABC has let Harris get away with the Charlottesville hoax, bloodbath hoax, police officers dying on J6 hoax, etc

But they fact check Trump on animals in Ohio… when he was correct

— Shaun Maguire (@shaunmmaguire) September 11, 2024

I shared the above tweet on Facebook and was asked about what I knew about animals in Ohio. I presume the question concerned Springfield, and I confessed that I haven’t been there. I suggested he ask Shaun MaQuire about it since it is his post. However, I know that dozens of citizens in Springfield are reporting that animals are missing and that the police know about it. I also know a bit about animals in South Florida. I know that Haitians eat them there and use them to put curses on people. At least they did this back in the 1980s. They put a curse on me and my business partner in Coral Cables. Twice. It was some sort of foul (I presume a chicken). Beheaded, drained of blood, hanging upside down from a tree. (I am not ruling out practitioners of Santería here.)

On August 12, NPR ran an exercise in prebunking on its All Things Considered program, “How Springfield, Ohio, took center stage in the election immigration debate.” The opportunity was a speech JD Vance had given on July 10 at the National Conservativism Conference, in which the Vice Presidential candidate had urged the audience to “go to Springfield, Ohio.” “I could not believe it when I first heard about it,” Vance said. “Ask the people there, whether they have been enriched by 20,000 newcomers in four years.” (For more on prebunking, see The Russia Fake News Narrative.)

The media hasn’t bothered to ask the people there—at least not the ones who are complaining—about it. Instead they have sought out the statements of city officials. “I think it’s sad that some people are using this as an opportunity to spread hate or spread fear,” says Officer Jason Via, Deputy Director of Public Safety and Operations, Springfield. “We get these reports ’the Haitians are killing ducks in a lot of our parks’ or ’the Haitians are eating vegetables right out of the aisle at the grocery store.’ And we haven’t really seen any of that. It’s really frustrating. As a community, it’s not helpful as we try to move forward,” Via says.

People are culture-bearers. They bring their culture with them. Animal sacrifice is a part of Vodou tradition and plays a significant role in its rituals. This is not a conspiracy. It’s anthropology. It would be surprising that the people who are reporting the killing and eating of various animals in Springfield were wrong. Their descriptions are accurate with what I know about Haitian gustatory and religious practices. I presume these residents aren’t experts. The association of Haitians and the killing of cats goes back decades, so maybe the retelling of history has come to substitute for direct observation. We’ll see. But the claims are plausible, and I won’t dismiss them out of hand. And I certainly won’t believe the media. After all, Hunter Biden’s laptop was a hoax.

I understand why the government would lie—they have a mass immigration project they need to keep going. I understand why the corporate media isn’t doing any investigatory journalism to find out what’s happening (instead giving the city manager Bryan Heck a call and taking his word for it—the same city manager who shills for the military-industrial complex in the video above)—they don’t want to know. They also can’t answer the question because they have framed the premise of the question as racist (as if culture is race). Since the truth can’t be racist, it’s better to just take the word of an official. What I don’t understand is why the ordinary citizen in Springfield would make up something like this. “Because they’re racist” won’t work. That’s a smear to delegitimize the burden imposed upon them.

I confess that I am not an elitist, nor do I toe the woke progressive line; the testimony of ordinary working people rings more true to me that functionaries who have a political interest in (a) hiding the truth of mass immigration to keep it going and (b) delegitimizing Donald Trump, who has promised to put a stop to it. 

pic.twitter.com/0GHYnRzGdO

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 12, 2024

I think it is remarkably naive to believe this couldn’t be happening—or that you can trust the media to tell you it is. It’s wrong to chalk the concern up to racism and xenophobia. These are cultures incompatible with ours and we are well beyond the ethic of assimilation. The citizens of Springfield, which number 60,000, are being saddled with the burden of 20,000 Haitian migrants, migrants they did not vote to allow into their community—a burden the government imposed on the residents there without their consent. 

This is why it is sad to see Springfield resident Nathan Clark, rather than blame the policies that led to his son’s death because of the actions of a Haitian migrant, say, “I wish that my son, Aiden Clark, was killed by a 60-year-old white man.” Expressions of collective self-loathing driven by identity politics is why people believe the corporate media and official sources over the testimony of ordinary Americans; it’s self-loathing that causes people to not even bother to find out what’s going on in Springfield and in cities across the nation, to wax incredulous at stories that those who have had experience with Haitian culture knows are not only plausible, but very likely, because white people are bad.

In the last several weeks, my office has received many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield who've said their neighbors' pets or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants. It's possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.

Do you know…

— JD Vance (@JDVance) September 10, 2024

* * *

The lies and misrepresentations coming from Kamala Harris night before last were many (I cover many of them here Harris Lies and Distortions). But the way she dismissed thousands of death on the eve of 9/11 anniversary was despicable.

Approximately 2,977 people were killed in the attacks on September 11, 2001. This number includes passengers on the planes, workers in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, firefighters, police officers, and emergency responders. Above are the faces of those killed on 9/11. Not quite the horror of January 6, 2021, Kamala Harris tells us. Nor does Pearl Harbor compare. The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, resulted in the deaths of 2,403 Americans. No, we have to go all the way back to the Civil War to find a tragedy comparable to January 6. An estimated 620,000 to 750,000 people died during the American Civil War, making it the deadliest conflict in US history. We know this because Kamala Harris told us. And since the media adores her, you can take this fact to the bank.

"She wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens who are in prison" is the WILDEST thing I've ever heard in any debate. EVER.

— Marc Lamont Hill (@marclamonthill) September 11, 2024

The media is hailing Harris’ performance as a success. This was expected. She certainly exceeded expectations. She was given talking points, many of which were designed to provoke Trump into losing his cool, and she deftly executed them. Although Trump was never rattled, he did take the bait a few times, for example talking about the crowd sizes of the respective campaigns.

Harris’s performance was riddled with debunked claims and distortions. Her repeated insistence on the false narrative that Trump praised white supremacists in Charlottesville and incited the January 6 riot were only a few examples. She avoided direct answers on topics like abortion restrictions, opting instead for broad, sweeping statements. Harris’ attempt to distance herself from previous comments on defunding the police came off as disingenuous. Her tendency to overstate and sidestep key issues gave the impression of a candidate more focused on scoring political points than delivering substantive policy ideas.

Vice President Kamala Harris has made several claims during her public appearances and debates, many of which have been contested or debunked. She said several things at the debate last night that are false or misleading. Although moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis went out of their way to factcheck Trump in real time, they did not do the same with Harris. This left the impression that Trump was lying and Harris wasn’t. I want to review some of Harris’ lies and distortions in this essay. (I reviewed some of these before. See Three Big Lies About Trump—and Promising Developments in the Transatlantic Space.)

Harris asserted that Trump would implement Project 2025 if elected, despite Trump’s repeated denials that he has any involvement with the initiative. She also claimed that Trump would implement a sales tax if he wins, but Trump has not promised to introduce such a tax.

Regarding the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, Harris argued that Trump incited the violence, yet the former president specifically instructed his supporters to “peacefully and patriotically make [their] voices heard.” Additionally, Harris suggested that police officers died due to the events of January 6, which is inaccurate. For example, medical examiners confirmed that Officer Brian Sicknick died of natural causes. Harris also labeled the riot the “worst attack on democracy since the Civil War,” but the riot did not pose the same threat to the nation as events like 9/11 or Pearl Harbor and what they represented.

Harris repeated the misleading claim that Trump praised white supremacists during the 2017 Charlottesville rally when he said there were “fine people on both sides.” In fact, Trump was referring to individuals on both sides of the debate regarding the preservation of historical monuments, not to extremists. He repeatedly condemned neo-nazis and white supremacists at that press conference.

Harris mischaracterized Trump’s comments by suggesting he had warned of a “bloodbath” in the event of his electoral defeat, implying that he was advocating or predicting violence. Like the “fine people on both sides” narrative, this interpretation distorts the original context of Trump’s remarks. In reality, Trump was addressing the potential economic downturn and hardships that he believed would follow if Democrats were to win the election, specifically referring to the importation of Chinese electric vehicles. His comments centered around the notion that a Democratic victory would lead to significant financial instability, rather than a call for physical conflict. Harris’s portrayal of this as a violent threat undermined the substantive economic warning Trump was attempting to convey.

In terms of Trump’s stance on abortion, Harris warned that Trump would sign a national abortion ban and appoint an “abortion monitor” to oversee pregnancies. However, Trump has consistently stated that decisions about abortion should be left to individual states. Harris also claimed that several states have “Trump abortion bans” that criminalize medical professionals and offer no exceptions for rape or incest. In reality, such laws generally include exceptions for situations where a pregnant woman’s life is at risk. Additionally, Harris denied that women are seeking late-term abortions, but data from the CDC shows that thousands of abortions are performed after 21 weeks, and this figure does not include states where abortion reporting is not mandated. Harris also inaccurately linked Trump’s abortion policies to restrictions on in vitro fertilization (IVF), claiming that Trump’s abortion bans deny couples the chance to undergo IVF. However, Trump has previously voiced support for IVF and promised to expand access to the treatment.

Harris’ denials of late-term abortions is especially problematic because under a 2015 Minnesota law, the state was previously required to report when abortions resulted in a live birth, detailing the actions taken to preserve the infant’s life and whether the child survived. Data from January 1 to December 31, 2021, revealed that five abortions resulted in live births. In three cases, no measures were taken to assist the infants, while the remaining two were provided with “comfort care measures” before they passed away. Governor Tim Walz, who is Harris’ running mate, presided over the changes to the reporting requirements.

When challenged on her position regarding law enforcement, Harris denied supporting defunding the police. Yet, she has previously advocated for “reimagining” policing and redirecting resources to other areas of government, including education and small businesses. She further denied fundraising efforts to bail out protesters following George Floyd’s death, but Harris did promote a bail fund that helped release rioters and others arrested during the 2020 unrest. As for the claim that crime rates have declined under Biden-Harris, what has actually happened is that crime reporting by police agencies and city governments has decline. Lastly, on the matter of Second Amendment rights, which protects citizen’s ability to effect the foundational right of self-defense, Harris denied supporting mandatory gun confiscation, though she has expressed support for such measures in the past.

On national security, Harris claimed that Trump’s policies weakened the United States, yet under his administration, the US southern border was more secure, and several peace agreements were brokered between Israel and Arab states. Under the Biden-Harris administration, geopolitical tensions have escalated, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and increased hostility from Iran-backed Hamas, as well as China’s aggressive posturing towards Taiwan and other neighboring countries.

I want to close noting Trump’s missed opportunity. Here is what he should have done: It’s his first turn to speak. He says he will answer the question, but first he needs to remind viewers at home that tomorrow is the day terrorists flew planes into the twin towers of his beloved City of New York. He reminds viewers that George Bush and Dick Cheney were on watch that day and they failed to protect America from the worst attack on United States territory since Pearl Harbor. Trump then points out that Bush refuses to endorse him and that Cheney endorses her. These are the same two men, he tells viewers, who lied the nation into war and that the President under whom she currently serves was one of the Senators who authorized the criminal invasion of Iraq. Trump finishes by telling viewers that Biden-Harris regime has thrown the world in turmoil, that they are of the class of the warmongers, and that he, Trump, will be a peace president.

Readers will note that Trump lacks the discipline to do something like this. Perhaps. Those praising Harris say she has the discipline he lacks. However, what we see in Harris are performances. Her performances are poorly performed. She is inauthentic. To be sure, it takes some discipline to memorize talking points. And she was able to push through them despite her nerves. But she is a construct. There is no actual substance there. Trump, on the other hand, is authentic. Rosanne Barr puts the matter well in this tweet:

Once you understand how corporate state propaganda works, and what the power elite intends with its perennial resort to the Russia fake news narrative, the programming becomes obvious. A few days ago Attorney General Merrick Garland outlined a sophisticated disinformation campaign undertaken by Russia to interfere with the US presidential election. Garland warned that Russia is pumping lies into the United States using fake news outlets and “right wing” social media influencers, among them Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and Dave Rubin.

The Department of Justice reported that it has charged two employees of a Russian state-controlled media outlet, RT, who are alleged to have paid influencers ten million dollars to distribute content with “hidden Russian government messaging.” The 2024 narrative is much the same as the 2020 and 2016 narrative. A September 2020 story “How to Combat Russian Disinformation in the US Presidential Election,” published on the Columbia University news page, well illustrates the two previous points on the propaganda timeline: “As in 2016, Russia is looking to intensify whatever can further divide American society. The Kremlin isn’t ideological. Its outlets have agitated for and against the Black Lives Matter movement, for and against vaccinations, and boosted Bernie Sanders when he seemed to be splitting the Democratic Party. The Russian goal is simply to encourage any force that can add stress to US politics and society.”

“The Justice Department’s message is clear,” Garland told those assembled: “We have no tolerance for attempts by authoritarian regimes to exploit our democratic system of government. We will be relentlessly aggressive in countering and disrupting attempts by Russia and Iran, as well as China or any other foreign malign actor, to interfere in our elections and undermine our democracy.”

The corporate state propaganda organ NPR dutifully ran the headline “DOJ says Russia paid right-wing influencers to spread Russian propaganda.” The host, Scott Simon, reported, “The US Justice Department said this week Russia is trying to use fake news to influence US policy and politics.” Then he defined “fake news” for the viewer: “That’s fraudulent news stories made to look real.” He next turned to a usual suspect, Renee DiResta, “a disinformation expert who has been called upon by Congress for her expertise.”

DiResta, who wrote Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality, published this past June to rave reviews, says that government official are “trying to create just a general resilience by helping people understand that these kinds of messages, particularly when they’re repeated, particularly when they’re pervasive and they’re all around you, are used to turn other people into enemies and to create social divisions that really undermine the ability to reach consensus and solve collective problems, that really increase and exacerbate polarization.”

What does “general resilience” mean? The industry term for this is “prebunking.” DiResta is defining it for listeners. Here’s how it works: corporate state programmers prepare people to disbelieve anything they hear that sounds like what the programmers have identified as coming from Russian agents. This mind control trick involves sensitizing targets—the general population in this case—to specific content their brains will automatically interpret and reject as Russian “disinformation” or “fake news.” The word “general” is crucial here, since most of what will be coded as Russian disinformation is not the work of Russian agents but arguments coming from the side the Establishment is seeking to discredit and marginalize, obviously Donald Trump and information supporting his candidacy. The design is to make information and opinion that’s generated internal to the Untied States appear to be externally produced, i.e., to make the organic appear artificial or synthetic.

For example, if I make the argument that immigrants are replacing American workers (which I did a few days ago), and the public is told that Russian agents manufactured that narrative to make immigrants appear to be enemies of native born workers, then a portion of my readers will regard information about the mass immigration as Russian propaganda and therefore fake news and conclude that immigration is not harmful to the interests of native born workers and their family. Or suppose one is skeptical of the proxy war in Ukraine. Like me. If one hears a story about how some of the Ukrainian soldiers are neo-Nazis but has been conditioned to believe such a story is Russian disinformation, then the person will be more likely to disbelieve the neo-Nazi story and then either support Western funding of the proxy war or at least be ambivalent about it.

The Russian fake news narration tells Americans that criticisms of Harris-Walz, support for Trump-Vance, the funding of the proxy war in Ukraine, concern about free speech, etc., may be the work of Russian propagandists designed to undermine the narrative generated by the power elite, who are promoting Harris-Walz, portraying Trump as the enemy of democracy, promoting neoconservative foreign policy and more aggressive censorship, etc., the opposite of what the other side represents.

Remember when fifty-one top intelligence officials circulated a letter misleading the public about Hunter Biden’s laptop, telling them that it was Russia disinformation? On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published a report detailing how Hunter Biden used the position and influence of his father, now-President Joe Biden, for personal gain with the apparent awareness of President Biden. Within days, top former intelligence officials signed on to a public statement, released October 19, 2020, stating that the Hunter Biden laptop story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The purpose of the letter was so that when the public learned about the laptop and saw its contents they would assume the emails and photographs were fabricated by Russian agents. This is prebunking.

It is also election interference. The letter was coordinated by the Biden campaign. Top Biden campaign official, and now Secretary of State, Antony Blinken contacted former Deputy Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Michael Morell to arrange for the letter. Morell assembled the intelligent officials. The letter was signed by fifty former senior intelligence officials alleging that the laptop was potentially tied to Russian disinformation efforts. Some of the notable signatories included John Brennan, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Michael Hayden, former Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), Leon Panetta, former Director of the CIA and Secretary of Defense, James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines – Former Deputy Director of the CIA. This was a Deep State influence operation, carried out not against America’s adversaries on foreign soil, but against the American people, designed to interfere with the 2020 election.

The Russian fake news narrative is not content-neutral but functions to pump anti-Trump and anti-populism into mass consciousness disguised as the government protecting the public from Russian disinformation. The ruse means to make political arguments appear to not originate from genuine disagreement over issues, but to be artificially constructed and conveyed, and to make those who are critical of the power elite appear unhinged and easily duped. Only those who accept the official narrative pumped out by the corporate state media apparatus are portrayed as sane and rational. This is industrial-strength psychological warfare—and it’s being waged on the American public by their own government. NPR is a CIA cutout that functions to make the propaganda appear as journalism.

The Deceit of Transhumanism

In James Cameron’s 2009 movie Avatar, humans were able to embody beings called “Na’vi.” The Na’vi are a fictional humanoid species native to the moon Pandora. Through the use of advanced technology, humans were able to remotely control and inhabit genetically engineered Na’vi bodies, known as “avatars.” This allowed humans to interact with the native population and explore Pandora more intimately to facilitating resource extraction from the moon for the sake of corporate profits.

The avatars in Cameron’s movie are genetically engineered bodies grown in labs designed to be controlled by a human operator through a neural link. The human operator lies in a pod-like apparatus, and their consciousness is linked to the avatar’s nervous system via a neural interface. This allows the operator to experience the avatar’s sensory perceptions and control its movements as if they were physically present in the Na’vi body. The central character, Jake Sully, eventually becomes fused with his avatar, thus permanently inhabiting a new body.

One of the key concepts in Karl Marx’s theory of value is the idea of commodity fetishism, where the social relationships between people are mediated through the exchange value of commodities. Jean Baudrillard’s work takes this idea further by exploring how capitalism has evolved to a point where the sign value and symbolic representations of commodities become detached from their material attributes. He argues that in a hyperreal society, the simulated signs and symbols associated with commodities become more significant than their actual use value or exchange value.

Baudrillard’s analysis introduces the concept of the “simulacrum,” which refers to copies or representations that have no original referent or reality. In this context, Baudrillard suggests that capitalism has reached a stage where the production of commodities and their representation in media have become so detached from any original reality that they become self-referential, leading to a blurring of distinctions between reality and simulation.

The problem of “biological essentialism” is a construct to transhumanist ideology. The idea is that if we are not real bodies resulting from natural history then we can become anything we (or others) want. We can remain human (if we wish) when at the same time we become more than human by radically altering our physical bodies, such as via cyberneticization, or upload some thing that appears to others as our self into a computer program—not an avatar but some thing. Again, if being human is at all what we desire. (Maybe we desire something else.)

It also means that other things can be human (whatever that is) and humans can integrate themselves with other animals and things. It is a world in which avatars, furries, and gendered souls are real possibilities. A desire to go beyond the third order simulacra that already exist everywhere and step into the fourth order—into the Matrix.

Transhumanism is a profound expression of alienation. It’s the idea that we can escape our bodies or modify them to the point where we are something else or more than we are now. That we can be modified. It’s the fascist dream expressed by the futurism that became a fundamental element in both Italian fascism and German national socialism. It’s Filippo Marinetti’s “dreamt-of metallization of the human body”—bound up not only in a loathing of the human body and an obsession with medicalization of everything but the aesthetics of war and conquest. Of destruction.

Transgenderism is a subset of transhumanism wherein the individual is alienated specifically from his gendered body and believes that by altering it through technology he can escape its reality. It is the delusion that he can become what we thinks he is through destructive cosmetic alterations. It’s the same as the man who thinks he becomes a lizard by splitting his tongue, cutting off his nose, tattooing his body, and implanting horns and other bumps and lines under his skin. He becomes nothing but a self-harming and mutilated human being. 

All this is why progressives are so enamored by the medical-industrial complex and, more broadly, scientism. It’s why those drawn to progressivism are natural allies of corporate state elites—they express the social logic of corporatism. It’s why they seek mRNA jabs. It’s why they are ready to be chipped—and chip everybody else. It’s a generation raised on latter iterations of Star Trek—the holodeck—but never taught to differentiate between science fiction and reality.