Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"In the US today, we no longer have a constitutional republic or even a democracy.
Our rulers are doctors and lawyers in a strange alliance. The doctors control the pols and the lawyers sue the doctors and the pols. Mobs dominate the streets in what can be termed an ochlocracy.   
The law is no longer a predictable framework for justice and commerce. It is an unpredictable weapon for lawyers to wield against everyone else. The Supreme Court apparently just gave back half of Oklahoma to the Indians on the basis of some obscure textual séance by Neil Gorsuch.
Money has become an instrument of expropriation by pols and central banks in a hypertrophy of finance, with $6.7 trillion dollars a day worth of currency trading, some 70 times all trade in goods and services, while real trade shrinks.
Cancellation of freedom creates a perilous environment for investors."
George Gilder

"People have become accustomed to tyranny, and accept it without question. They have allowed the few to make laws restricting freedom; they have become accustomed to being ruled, and are simply rule-takers and rule-followers instead of freethinking individuals. They move in unison and show contempt for any that go their own way. They live in a land of confusion that they themselves created. The ruling elites have accomplished every aspect of this heinous plan to take over humanity due to the voluntary acceptance of all of it by the people. None of this evil plan could have even been attempted unless the people allowed it. This is the truth of the matter, and is a most pathetic example of universal apathy and weakness."
Gary D. Barnett

"What we have been seeing played out on the streets of America, particularly in large Blue State metropolitan areas and dense urban cities is classic planned chaos and the 'Strategy of Tension.' Unable to dislodge Donald Trump by the Russiagate hoax or the malicious soft coup impeachment process, his sworn enemies, using COVID-19 as their pretext, have turned to the destruction of the economy by repressive lockdowns, creating mass unemployment and annihilation of small businesses, thus fracturing civil society. The Democrats, elements of the deep state, and their complacent, compliant regime media pawns, have turned to an age-old psy/war strategy to be wielded as an ax against the president, insidiously using the weaponized corpse of the slain George Floyd as the new rationale for these riots and insurrections.
Historically there has been a symbiotic correlation relationship between agent provocateur groups, infiltration by police informers, and the counter-terrorism forces of the deep state. The repressive security state has molded and used such witting (or unwitting) terrorist pawns or drones in covert activities to create a 'strategy of tension' to instill fear and consolidate repressive power and control which would enhance strident calls for more intense police repression and clandestine surveillance of its subject general population. With countless decades of real-world experience and clinical research, masters of psychological warfare and mind control, expert manipulators and programmers of cult-like behavior, recruit those alienated arrested development post-adolescents and anti-social disillusioned vicarious thrill seekers who fit a susceptible psychological profile matrix and who relish vandalism, violence and destruction as a means of striking out at a world beyond the control of their misshapened lives. An ideological construct of direct action 'anarchism' or 'propaganda by the deed' is put forth as a purported justification for their aberrant thug-like terrorist behavior."
Charles Burris

"The nation is under the control of public health traitors. They can declare 'new waves' of cases. They can invent pretexts at the drop of a hat, and governors and mayors can declare lockdowns again. This is not over. The economic war against the people is being waged to destroy America.
Mr. President, don’t imagine that simply 'minimizing' the presence of Tony Fauci (your current plan) will significantly degrade his influence. The governors and mayors will still listen to him and follow his advice. Take him completely off the board as a member of the coronavirus task force. It’s not enough to say you disagree with him. Put him out to pasture. You don’t realize just how dangerous he is.
Do not believe any of his declarations of 'science.' They are, in fact, weapons of sabotage."
Jon Rappoport

"If you aren’t sick, refuse to be treated as if you were by people who are literally deranged. Their fear is real, but it doesn’t mean it’s rational and it certainly doesn’t give them the right to impose their illness on the healthy."
Eric Peters

"Politics demands that politicians be seen doing 'something' rather than nothing, even if that something is more harmful than doing nothing at all. That is why Washington is so addicted to sanctions.
The same has been true especially in Republican-controlled states in the US in response to the coronavirus. Faced with a virus that has killed about one-third as many people as the normal, seasonal flu virus in 2018, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has endorsed a partial shutdown of the economy resulting in millions tossed into the despair of unemployment. Then he arbitrarily shut down bars because massively increased testing showed more people have been exposed to the virus. And he mandated that people wear face masks. Neither shutting down bars (instead of restaurants or Walmarts) nor forcing people to wear masks will have any effect on the progression of the virus through society. But at least he looks like he’s doing 'something'."
Ron Paul

"The recent ramping up of this 'virus' propaganda has reached a level that should have been unimaginable to most, but instead of question and dissent, the general population has taken this all in stride, and have acquiesced to most every order given. Any that properly disagree with the state’s false narrative, and any that choose to fight against this tyranny, will face extreme prejudice because those seeking the truth will always be a small minority in this land of obedient order takers. Mass compliance of state guidelines leads to the shaming and threatening of those sane individuals not obeying politicized orders, and this pathetic and submissive behavior by the masses is the epitome of the common American mindset today. What once was a land of intelligent, freethinking individuals has turned into a society of manageable fools."
Gary D. Barnett

"There’s no political salvation coming from the Republican party. Like Trump himself, it doesn’t have any core principles. It just reacts to the Dems and proposes less radical alternatives to their ideas. It doesn’t stand for anything. It’s only capable of putting forward empty suits, pure establishment figures like Bob Dole, Mitt Romney, or a Bush. Or a non-entity like Pence. That’s a formula for disaster in today’s demographic and cultural environment."
Doug Casey

"Declaring a wide variety of social ills to be a 'public health crisis' is a timeworn tactic used to raise the profile of a specific policy issue. Thus, poverty, pornography, inequality, inadequate housing, road traffic deaths, and capitalism have all been declared to be public health crises.
'Public health crisis' is essentially a left-wing stock phrase at this point, as is reflected by the fact that the solutions proffered to the social ills in question are virtually always some sort of government regulation or income redistribution scheme forced upon the nation's population.
It is only natural, of course, for scholars of public health to automatically assume that coercive state measures are the solution to nearly every problem. This is how public health officials and scholars think. Moreover, over the past century the field of public health has expanded to cover nearly every field of public policy as a public health concern. Whether we're talking about urban planning, crime, highway design, or climate change, bureaucrats and academics—there's really no difference between the two—in the field of public health have an easy 'solution' for you. Chances are it involves a new set of laws and government regulations."
Ryan McMaken

"I saw a car with an old Trump/Pence bumper sticker today. Above their names it said: 'Grow Business, Shrink Government.' Shrink government? Before the coronavirus nonsense even started, Trump had shrunk nothing. He in fact added over a trillion dollars to the national debt. That large military he likes is expensive. Sorry Trumpers, doing away with a few Obama regulations does not equate to shrinking the government."
Laurence Vance

"Is the education establishment primarily responsible for the disaster that is 2020 for free range humanity? No, root cause has many parents. Critical thinking skills and the wherewithal to question authority has taken a long sleep in today’s Amerika.
Defund universities and the police, that’s a good start. Everything government funds is poisonous and turns whatever it touches to shit.
Government is the maximalist application of moral injury on a wholesale scale.
You can thank half a century of climate alarmism based on nonsense, non-science, communist fever-dreams and the elevation of 'experts' as the gateway drug to the deluded opium den delusions of the Peking Pox and its weaponization to game political power.
Then the floodgates open as yet another victim of government policing assumes room temperature and the usual suspects in the government supremacist industry stoke the fires and spin the tires to behave destructively and predictably in the urban hives run by the CPUSA for decades.
All of this frisson and fire may magically evaporate if Comrade Joe and his bloated VP-thing manage to commit enough fraud to stuff the ballots for the Party that gave us the KKK, segregation, lunch tables, lynching, Jim Crow, the Great Society and the entry into every major conflict in the twentieth century until 1980."
The Democrats as a party were founded to protect chattel slavery. Nothing has changed, the plantation boundaries and legal niceties have changed."
Bill Buppert

"As has been proven so many times, the so-called 'Civil War' was fought over economics, not slavery. Lincoln himself intended to send the blacks back to Africa, judging them unfit to live among white people.  Lincoln said over and over that the war was fought to preserve the Union. He gave assurances to the South that they could have slaves as long as they stayed in the Union and paid the tariff. Historians have researched the letters and diaries of participants on both sides of the war and found that soldiers were not fighting for or against slavery. The North was fighting for the Union, and the South was fighting because the South was invaded."
Paul Craig Roberts

"Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; Whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by out wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first, a patron, the last a punisher."
Thomas Paine

"The US and Chinese governments are posturing at each other like a couple of angry chimpanzees. The Chinese government and the US government are both dead hands on their economies. Neither serves a useful purpose. They’re the problem, not Chinese and American businessmen.
We shouldn’t call it communist China, because it’s not communist. It’s not even socialist. They have a fascist system, just like we have in the US. In other words, business is privately owned, and consumer goods are widely available—but it’s all controlled by the State. It’s an authoritarian system. The Chinese have moved towards the US system, even while the US is moving towards the Chinese system."
Doug Casey

"Far from defacing the Lincoln Memorial or other Zeus-like images of Lincoln around the country, the radical, violent, and often criminal communists of Antifa and Only Black Lives Matter ('We are trained Marxists,' one of the founders of OBLM has said) are more likely to continue using the image, words, and deeds of Lincoln to assist in their crusade to destroy American civilization and replace it with another communist hell.  If they ever get control of the government it is not beyond the imagination that they would follow Lincoln’s footsteps and suspend habeas corpus, mass arrest and imprison dissenters, censor communications, shut down conservative newspapers, withdraw licenses from conservative talk radio and television stations, deport or imprison some opposition members of Congress to send a message to all the rest, abolish the separation of powers, confiscate firearms, and use the military to wage total war on the civilian population of areas of the country where 'deplorable' political dissent is strongest."
Tom DiLorenzo

"The over-arching means to get us on some sort of non-suicidal path is to destroy centralized power-structures. Decentralize radically. Accept individual responsibility. Do not attempt to reform government power structures. Reduce their power and grasp at every level. Our coercive organization structures are our enemy, not the people who happen to be occupying their positions. Do not think that by putting in your own party personnel, you’ll be able to rectify our situation. Place no hope in that kind of politics. Learn to live without government. As much as possible, social problems should be addressed by voluntary means. It sounds old-fashioned. And it is. Self-reliance. Emerson wrote about it in 1841."
Michael Rozeff

"The American people are manipulated into serfdom with semantic trickery. Word twisting and semantic trickery is used around the clock to control and manipulate the population's perception of reality. Public perception is channeled wherever the political establishment wants it to go.
So the difference in people is the way they think. Our individual perception of reality controls our thought processes. Our thought processes control our lives. Word manipulation and semantic trickery controls our thoughts and our total being.
Politicians, bureaucrats, et al. are wordsmiths. They twist words that sound good to us but lead to opposite conclusions. This semantic trickery is used in everything and every proposed piece of legislation.
Many of them are lawyers and doublethink legalese is their forte. Their political life is all about deception. This is their cover so that they hide the fact that they work for the government."
Bob Livingston

"Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing."
Hannah Arendt

"The real Marxist revolution in the West never happened. But with Gramsci’s long march, the first thing they do is take over the schools. Now we can brainwash entire generations. And as those generations go out in the world, they're carrying this ideological virus with them. And then next we'll take over government agencies. This is the so-called deep state. And then we'll take over unions and then we'll take over the colleges and universities. And then eventually we'll take over the political system."
Jim Rickards

"Any chain of command is meant to operate as a top down, class system of control, where the real power, the oligarchy, is shielded from those who do the bidding of the upper class bosses. This strategy purposely eliminates the individual, and without individual thought and action, there is no greater good, only greater corruption and greater authority. In the military, this is said to be for advancing and accomplishing the mission, in the corporation, it is said to be for group efficiency, and in the general population, it is said to be for the greater good of all. It is none of these things; it is only indoctrination propaganda that is meant to create a docile underclass."
Gary D. Barnett

"I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him. Surely a striking situation! Yet it is so common that one must grieve the more and wonder the less at the spectacle of a million men serving in wretchedness, their necks under the yoke, not constrained by a greater multitude than they…"
Etienne de al Boetie

"I’ve never been a big fan of current day policing, with their bloated ranks, no-knock raids, militarization at the behest of the military industrial complex, shaking down the public for government revenue, and using their unions to protect bad cops. In civilized regions of the country, the police are virtually unnecessary. But, in the Democrat run urban shitholes, where the agitators are screeching for defunding the police, cops are the only thing keeping those cities from becoming a living hell.
The looting and killing would become the norm. We already have real world examples in Baltimore and Chicago. When a few bad cops were caught on tape killing black men the reaction was to pull back from the worst neighborhoods. They are now lawless kill zones. Blacks murdering blacks by the dozens is completely ignored by BLM because it doesn’t fit their narrative of being oppressed by the white man."
Jim Quinn

"Governments by their very nature, are parasitic. They produce nothing and live off wealth created by the electorate. In order to advance themselves, they learn to squeeze the people as much as they can get away with, with the claim that they will then redistribute the wealth. But, as we know, their real goal is to use as much of that wealth as possible to increase their own wealth and power.
They do their best to create rhetoric that implies that one political party or another is quite guilty of this, whilst they (and their political party) are entirely innocent.
But the sad fact is that all political parties, in the end, are equally guilty of the desire to grab all they can, while they can, and why not? After all, the subjugation and sheering of the sheep is their life’s blood.
But there is that one caveat mentioned above: 'as much as they can get away with'."
Jeff Thomas

"Domestic war is not something undertaken lightly or haphazardly. The average person knows at least subconsciously that it is better to seek resolution or to remain patient as events unfold. Conservatives aren't stupid, we know that before any civil war there is first a culture war. And we know that the cards are stacked against us and that if we act rashly in any way we will lose position in that culture war.
Let the leftists spit and rage like madmen for a little while. Each day people who were on the fence when it comes to the culture war will see this and come over to our side because we're the only side that is sane. The drawback is, there comes a point in which calm professionalism might be wrongly perceived as weakness. And when people sense weakness among conservatives, they might run into the arms of the extreme left thinking that it's safer to join the 'winning team.'
I think conservatives have not been sucked into a reactionary stance yet because they are being smart and refusing to play the game for now. Ultimately, it is how we enter the fight that is more important than the fight itself."
Brandon Smith