Epic Theatre

Whatever the outcome might be, the current US election has become an extended thriller, with plot twists coming thick and fast. Every day brings something new. And it’s set to run for another two months. The suspense is unbearable.

I’m hoping that Trump wins. I think he’s the best US president of the last 50 years, maybe the best president ever. I’m not even critical of his bombast or his language, as many others are. Trump is a phenomenon.

But the pundits are divided.

My favorite pundit is the ever-optimistic Steve Turley, who is predicting Trump’s re-election. Here’s his last couple of videos:

By contrast Laura Ingraham on Fox News is a pessimist who thinks Trump has lost:

Who to believe?

None of them.

The pundits are also players in an unfolding plot that rivals the Watergate affair (which I can remember).

But it’s great theatre.

I’m going to be feeling dazed and empty when it’s over, like after watching some epic movie.

Except it’s not a movie: it’s history being written.

To Hell With All Of Them

I’ve been watching Chris Snowdon talking about pubs and restaurants being closed down by the latest lockdown.

I found myself thinking that there’s nothing really new about this. The same thing happened on 1 July 2007, except that back then it was just smokers who were permanently expelled from society, Now it’s everybody else, but only for a month or two (we are told). In both cases draconian measures were taken to combat a small or non-existent health threat. Covid-19 is a small health threat, and tobacco smoke is a non-existent health threat.

Nobody spoke up for smokers back in 2007. Why should any smoker speak up now that everybody else is now being subjected to the same medical tyranny?

We’re in the grip of phantom menaces: tobacco smoke, global warming, Covid-19, etc. We’re under the spell of nightmares and dreams. And they’re being used to scare us into locking down society, and crashing the economy.

I suppose that in the end we’ll wake up. It doesn’t look like that will happen any time soon. But when it does, what might we expect, what might we hope for?

One desirable result would be the demise of all the experts, particularly health experts. It’s manifestly obvious that most of them know nothing about anything. They’ve made lucrative careers out of scare-mongering, peddling illusions in which everyone will have ceased to believe.

Another desirable result would be the demise of the mainstream media that helps peddle the fictions of the scare-mongering experts..

A good economic crash should wipe them all out, as we find ourselves no longer able to afford luxuries. For the nightmares and dreams the fear-mongers peddle are luxuries we’ll no longer be able to afford.

So I look forward to hearing that the BBC is being closed down. It will be no loss to me. I never listen to them anyway: I’m not allowed to, because I don’t pay a TV licence fee. Once they’re gone (and all the other TV stations as well), the scare-mongers will no longer have a platform from which to broadcast their scare stories. The current panic will subside. Nobody will talk about tobacco smoke or global warming or Covid any more. It will be a blessed peace.

I also look forward to seeing the UN and the WHO and BMA and Royal Society of Physicians closed down, They’re luxuries we won’t be able to afford either. Won’t it be bliss when we no longer have a Chief Medical Officer or a Surgeon General or whatever they’re called.

A self-induced economic crash is coming. And it’s going to sweep them all away.

To hell with all of them. The sooner it happens, the better.

The New Revolutionaries

People may wonder sometimes why I write not only about smoking bans but also about Brexit and ice ages and Covid lockdowns. The answer is: they’re all connected.

A video linked by Joe L helps explain. The gist of it is that the lockdowns resulting from the Covid pandemic provide an opportunity for a Great Reset to reduce global carbon emissions to Net Zero and prevent Climate Change.

They’re all tied together in the minds of the great and the good, the social elites.

For one of the odd things about our time seems to be that the new revolutionaries are now found at the top of society .rather than the bottom. So it’s the likes of Prince Charles and Joe Biden and Bill Gates and David Attenborough, not upstart Hitlers and Stalins and Mussolinis as in the past, who now lead the calls for the revolutionary reconstruction of the entire world.

I thought this was supposed to be a conspiracy theory. But here it is, straight from Trudeau’s mouth. The pandemic is the excuse for a “Great Reset” of the world, led by the UN. pic.twitter.com/ybugYfjhAq

— Ezra Levant 🍁 (@ezralevant) November 15, 2020

Why do they all seem to think the same way? Why do they see threats of death and disaster – Covid. Climate change – everywhere? They seem to live in a separate reality than the rest of us.

The scary thing is that these new revolutionaries are already in power.

It Never Ever Ends

Britain entered a new month-long Covid-19 lockdown a few days ago.

Will these lockdowns ever end?

Probably not.

As far as I can see, the lockdowns do no good. Neither do the masks. The pandemic spreads anyway. But the pandemic isn’t much worse than influenza, and we never had lockdowns for that, so why have lockdowns now?

Worse, the lockdowns cripple the economy, driving it into recession/depression. The “cure” is worse than the disease.

So why do it? Why cripple the economy for no improvement in health? What’s the point? There must be some explanation.

It’s just like smoking bans. They also were a draconian response to a non-existent health threat. Ambient tobacco smoke harms nobody. But smoking bans fracture society and bankrupt pubs and cafes and restaurants. What was the point?

Control? Top-down totalitarian control? The locked down society becomes a police state. A police state where people can be arrested just for visiting neighbours.

With smoking bans they only locked out smokers. With Covid-19 they’re locking down absolutely everybody, and for no reason.

There are always people who want top-down totalitarian control of everything. There are always totalitarians among us. Read Hayek’s Road To Serfdom. Our new totalitarians are all the authorities and pundits and experts in Public Health and Tobacco Control and the World Health Organisation, making ever more detailed plans for everybody, and accountable to nobody. They are the new Stasi.

Add

Government Advisers Suggest Giving COVID-Free Brits “Permission” Wristbands

Add

Top UK Politician: Workplaces, Social Venues, May Ban Britons Without Vaccination Certificates

It never ends.

The result is mounting protest:

…as the pandemic has dragged on, the increasingly strained relationship between governments and citizens in many countries has brought demonstrators back into the streets. While many renewed protests reflect anger over familiar issues like corruption, political repression and economic hardship, a striking new trend is afoot: citizens openly challenging the public health measures governments have taken to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Since March, more than 30 major protests in 26 countries have targeted coronavirus restrictions. Such demonstrations have emerged in every region of the globe, not only in wealthy countries like Australia, Germany and the United States, but also in poorer ones like Brazil, Mexico and Nigeria. 

Rudy Giuliani shows affidavits reporting fraud:

Media Wars

In the confusion of current events, at least one observation may be made: Where you get your news from largely decides how you see things.

According to the mainstream media, Joe Biden won the election fair and square, and will be inaugurated as the next President of the USA,

According to large swathes of the online media, Joe Biden stole the election fair and square, and the result must be contested. For example:

If courts uphold election laws, the vote fraud in the swing states will be overturned, and Trump will be declared the winner.  There is no doubt about the vote fraud. The question is whether Trump in the face of media hostility, Antifa/BLM violence, and weak-kneed Republicans will have the support to see the fight to the end. 

There are at least two realities (and perhaps quite a few more). Which one will prevail?

I don’t pay attention to the mainstream media. I don’t watch TV or listen to the radio, I don’t read newspapers. I get my information almost exclusively from the internet.

In my view, the mainstream media are propaganda media marching in lockstep together to promote one reality to their consumers. And the online media present multiple rival alternative realities.

I used to watch TV and read newspapers, but that ended on 1 July 2007, as I watched in disbelief the news reports about the UK smoking ban that had come into effect that day. According to the mainstream media that day, it was a non-event: it had been universally accepted by everyone, and by 6 pm it was already past history. A colossal piece of top-down social engineering had been successfully implemented. Nobody was questioning it.

It’s the same today. The mainstream media are reporting that Trump has been ousted, replaced by Joe Biden, and it’s already past history. The big news today is that there’s a coronavirus vaccine being unveiled by Pfizer or somebody, and that’s what everybody’s talking about.

But the difference today is that lots of people are questioning this new reality. And the questions are almost all being asked in the online media.

What’s the difference between 2007 and 2020? One answer is that the mainstream media has a smaller and dwindling audience today than they had 13 years ago, and the internet is much faster and more ubiquitous than it was back then. As the mainstream media’s power has been dwindling, the online media’s power has been growing. Has it now become more powerful than the mainstream media in shaping reality?

I suspect we may find out over the next few weeks. If the mainstream media can still shape reality, Joe Biden will become President in January. If the online media are more powerful, then it’s quite likely that Donald Trump will be re-elected instead.

But either way, it’s likely to be the last gasp of the mainstream media. Millions of Americans are just going to stop watching them, just like I stopped in 2007. Already the (mainstream) opinion polls have been completely discredited: they predicted a Democratic wave, and they got it wrong, just like they did 4 years ago. Fox News ratings collapsed after it called Arizona for Biden last week. Why? Because its viewers were getting most of their news from online sources, and comparing the two, and when they no longer agreed they believed the online media reports rather than Fox News.

Why is online media more credible than mainstream media? One simple explanation is that mainstream media are almost entirely scripted and edited: newsreaders read from a script, and so do the actors in comedies and fictions and documentaries. But online media are almost entirely unscripted and unedited: people say what they think. Whether it’s Joe Rogan or Michael Savage or Jordan Peterson, you’re hearing them say what they think. In the mainstream media you’re just hearing people reading lines. One is authentic and real, and the other is inauthentic and false. And that’s one very good reason why people trust the new voices that have been emerging online.

There’s another reason why the online media are more credible: smoking is permitted. In the mainstream media smoking is strictly verboten, except in period dramas. The mainstream media is a smokefree zone. But Joe Rogan will smoke cigars (and much else besides) , and so also will his guests. Tobacco is making a comeback in the online media, although cigarettes seem to still be a no-no. The same is true of alcohol, which is also verboten in the mainstream media: Joe Rogan features plenty of wine and beer being plied among guests. And he cusses liberally as well, which is also verboten in the MSM, of course. In addition, the online media usually don’t have elaborate studios with huge desks: they’re very often set in someone’s front room, with their own pictures and books and curtains and carpets, which also tell a story.

Donald Trump is another master of the new media. He tweets all the time. And he speaks very bluntly (too bluntly for many people). He’s someone who also says what he thinks. When has Joe Biden ever done that? Donald Trump versus Joe Biden is unscripted online media versus scripted mainstream media.

I don’t know who’ll win in Trump v. Biden, but Trump has a lot of advantages.

6:1

Watching and listening online today, I’ve been hearing one (well-respected) person after another saying something pretty much amounting to: “Sure, the election was stolen, but Joe Biden won it all the same.”

There seems to be a kind of passive acceptance. Some are even saying something like: “Elections are always stolen. Somebody always steals it. And this time it was Joe Biden who stole it, despite having stayed home, not campaigned, and nobody liked him, and nobody voted for him.”

A lot of people seem to have given up. They think it’s over. Once Fox News or CNN calls a race, that’s the end of it.

But one person who hasn’t given up is Donald Trump. He never gives up. So this is going to the courts, and very likely all the way to the Supreme Court by mid-December, with a whole raft of evidence of Democrat vote-rigging. It’s going to have to be a Republican-dominated Supreme Court that rules in Joe Biden’s favour before Trump finally concedes.

So I fully expect this to all rumble on through November and December. We may even see Trump returning to the campaign trail. holding rallies again, shoring up his base. Why not? It’s not over, even if a lot of people seem to think it is, because the mainstream media have been telling them that it is.

So I expect to see Trump come out fighting, fighting through the courts.

And if he does end up losing, he’ll very likely be back in 2024, when he’ll still be younger than Joe Biden is now.

Back in 2016 I placed a bet on Trump to win. There were long odds against him winning back then. I haven’t looked, but I’m guessing that the odds are even longer this time around, and so I’ll be wanting to place another bet on Donald Trump.

(Update: When I bet on Trump to win in 2016, I got odds of 5:1. It had been 50:1 earlier. It seems that right now the odds are 6:1, so I’m guessing that a lot of people are betting that he’s still going to win.)

Heated moment now on @seanhannity:@marklevinshow says "I'm part of the new resistance, God forbid if our president doesn't win."

"I am not uniting around [Biden] anymore than they united around our man." pic.twitter.com/YQag3mHEkB

— Anthony Leonardi (@TonyDLeonardi) November 7, 2020

https://antidote.turleytalks.com/free-ebook

Political Crisis

Blatant fraud is what I’m hearing, as Joe Biden looks likely to win the US presidential election.

During the early hours of November 4 in both Wisconsin and Michigan there was a sudden vertical upward adjustment to Democrat votes, and every one of the approximately 150,000 newly found votes was for Biden.  This sudden ballot dump accounts for the lost of Trump’s lead in Michigan and Wisconsin: 

and

It’s already heading for the courts.

It’s a first magnitude US political crisis. Maybe the biggest ever. More or less anything could happen now.

Whoever wins, the other side is going to say it was stolen.

The USA is going to be in crisis now until at least the end of January, when either Trump or Biden become the next president. That’s the minimum duration of the crisis.

And it’s going to be a global political crisis, as the world holds its breath, and takes one side or the other. Who knows what that might bring.

http://banned.video/

Small Freedoms

Former Supreme Court judge, Lord Sumption:

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the British state has exercised coercive powers over its citizens on a scale never previously attempted. It has taken effective legal control, enforced by the police, over the personal lives of the entire population: where they could go, whom they could meet, what they could do even within their own homes. For three months it placed everybody under a form of house arrest, qualified only by their right to do a limited number of things approved by ministers. All of this has been authorised by ministerial decree with minimal Parliamentary involvement. It has been the most significant interference with personal freedom in the history of our country. We have never sought to do such a thing before, even in wartime and even when faced with health crises far more serious than this one.

He goes on:

The real problem is when human societies lose their freedom, it’s not usually because tyrants have taken it away, it’s usually because people willingly surrender their freedom in return for protection from some external threat. And the threat is usually a real threat, but usually exaggerated and that is what I fear we are seeing now…

Didn’t all this happen in 2007, not 2020? Didn’t most Britons willingly surrender their freedom on 1 July 2007 in return for protection from the exaggerated threat of ambient tobacco smoke?

We lost our freedom a long time ago, and nobody noticed.

Back in 2007 Britain’s smokers lost the freedom to sit in a pub and smoke tobacco. It was an ancient freedom, enjoyed for centuries, not even curtailed during two world wars. And then one day, in the blink of an eye, it was gone.

But most people didn’t care, because most people didn’t smoke. Smokers had become a minority. Nobody spoke up for them.

And now everybody else is losing their freedom too, and in the exact same way: a new health threat. I’m not a bit surprised.

Freedom. Truth. Justice. None of them matter any more. Health is the only thing that matters now. So it’s in the name of Health that a culture and a civilisation is being dismantled. The future is going to be one imaginary health threat after another, which will be used as an excuse to remove more and more small freedoms.

The freedom to sit in a pub and smoke a cigarette was one such small freedom. And freedom always comes with some threat to health. A soldier fighting for his country’s freedom always has his life in danger. Once his life matters more to him than freedom, he will lose that freedom very quickly. Those who love freedom must be careless of their lives.

Now that everybody just wants to simply stay alive as long as possible, they will not fight for anything. They will become slaves. All it needs is an army of Health Experts to conjure up new Health Threats to stampede them in whatever direction they like. First tobacco smoke. Then carbon dioxide. Now a mild influenza-like contagion.

Why not asteroid impacts? Aren’t they a Health Threat too? Didn’t an asteroid wipe out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago?

Isn’t night another Health Threat? At night people can’t see. Perhaps we should have sirens at nightfall, warning of the encroaching darkness. And sound the All Clear every morning once the sun has risen again. With a strict curfew during the night hours, with nobody allowed to go anywhere. This is where we’re heading.

Small freedoms add up to large freedoms.  Once you’ve lost all your small freedoms, you will have lost all freedom.

President For Life

I will be very glad when the US election is over next week. I feel sure Trump will win. In fact I can’t see how he can not win. The mainstream media are saying Biden will win, but they said Hillary would win in 2016. There seems to be little enthusiasm for Biden, and in addition he doesn’t seem to be campaigning at all. And he seems to be mired in some Ukraine scandal involving his son. It’s all rather sad.

By contrast Trump is speaking at crowded rallies every day.

One explanation for the pro-Biden polls may be that people are lying to pollsters.

CALLER: Yep. Every time that a pollster calls me, I’m giving bad information. I’m saying that I’m voting for Biden, that I have a very poor view of Trump as far as what he’s done. 

It makes sense. So much vitriol is thrown at Trump votes that it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re telling everyone they’re going to vote for Biden, and then going and voting for Trump. Why should they tell anyone who they’re going to vote for?

Add to that all the riots in Democrat-controlled cities, and it’s likely that this will boost the Republican vote.

So I expect a landslide for Trump. And it seems the Democrats expect one too, and are already planning to fight it in the courts. Why else is Hillary Clinton saying that Biden should not cocede under any circumstances? Fighting in the courts probably won’t help much, now that Trump has installed three new justices in the Supreme Court.

The real question seems to be: who’s going to step into Trump’s shoes in 2024? How does anyone follow that act?

With the Democrats threatening to stack the Supreme Court, why not do the same thing, and have Trump made President-for-Life? If Michael Bloomberg could have term limits lifted on being mayor of New York City, why can’t Trump do the same?

Too Many News Sources To Tell One Big Lie

ZeroHedge:

For the last four years the Russiagate coup has dogged Trump, as Obama, Clinton, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Mueller and a myriad of lesser co-conspirators have propagated the Big Lie to cover-up their traitorous actions of trying to overthrow Trump.

An honest truth-seeking press with unbiased journalists would have uncovered this conspiracy and revealed the truthful facts to a concerned public. Instead, a completely captured corporate media has turned a blind eye to the truth as they have acted as accomplices of the coup culprits. Just as evil is the suppression of truth through censorship and keeping silent regarding the truth.

Is this true? Is the mainstream media really telling us lies that we all swallow?

The way I see it, that’s how things used to be, when the only sources of news were three or four TV channels and about as many radio channels.

But these days I don’t watch any TV, or listen to any radio. I get all my information from the internet, on which there are thousands of news sources. It’s a cacophony. I wonder who to believe, or whether to believe anyone. It’s a fog. There’s no certainty. It’s a very different world.

I think we’re living through the death of the mainstream media, and the death of authoritative expertise. You can maybe make people think one way if you have just one radio station broadcasting to them. But when you have a thousand of them, all saying different things, you’re guaranteed confusion, everyone thinking differently. It’s become impossible to shape public opinion.

The 20th century was the era of mainstream media. That was the time of just one radio station. It was the only show in town.

But those days are long over. Now we’ve effectively got thousands of radio stations. Nothing is certain any more. But was it ever certain?

So is it a surprise if some people believe one thing, and other people believe the opposite, with any number of shades of opinion in between?

The attempt now is to block or ban undesirable news sources, or restrict access to them. How long is that likely to work? There are now too many news sources to tell one Big Lie.