Woke Twitter elitists are too stupid to realize Elon Musk is saving the platform

 From Brandon Smith of the Bob Livingston Personal Liberty Alerts

Twitter is a bit of an enigma. The social media company has gone from a relatively innocuous space for people to mostly market online businesses and for politicians and celebrities to engage with their followers or detractors, to a vicious battleground overrun with leftist zealots hellbent on using the platform as a weapon to silence dissent and destroy the lives of people that disagree with them. If I was to describe what Twitter really stands for today, I would say it is an attempt to build a global hive mind; a place where everyone is coerced into conformity with establishment ideals through peer pressure and mob aggression.

In other words, Twitter is the antithesis of a free-speech society. A beta test for the future of authoritarianism where you think you are allowed to speak your mind but only the "correct" opinions are allowed to pass.

How this happened is hard to say. Some theorize that leftist cultists scrambled like rats from the sinking ship of Tumblr and found their way over to Twitter to take up residency. I would argue that maybe Twitter was always intended to become what it now is. Just take a look at the monster's gallery of its largest shareholders.

There's Vanguard and Blackrock, which together represent a globalist vampire squid of epic proportions. Their tentacles are wrapped around almost every aspect of the economy including media, big pharma (including Pfizer), weapons manufacturers, huge swaths of the U.S. housing market, etc. If these two mega conglomerates were to somehow be wiped off the face of the Earth tomorrow, the world would be a much better place. For now, they own almost everything.

Then there is Morgan Stanley, another "too big to fail" international banking firm that for some reason has a major stake in the realm of "tweets." Whenever globalist companies like these pursue major investments in a communications platform there is generally something nefarious afoot. And it should be noted that almost all the media companies they own push an agenda that leans hard left and is authoritarian in nature. We witnessed this undeniable dynamic in the past two years as media companies attacked anyone that stood against the illegal covid mandates.

Why do major globalist institutions have so much interest in Twitter?  It's not because Twitter is a moneymaker. In 2020 the company suffered a net income loss of over $1.14 billion. In 2021 there was an income loss of $221 million. Twitter still claims it earns a profit, but this is primarily derived from stock buybacks and state and federal government subsidies, meaning, without overnight loans from the Federal Reserve and tax breaks from government Twitter simply would not exist.

Twitter is carrying a debt load of around $6.75 billion in total liabilities according to The Wall Street Journal, with a dismal stock performance until the pandemic which led to trillions in stimulus dollars flooding into equities markets. Now that the covid checks have dried up, the company's stock has spiraled down yet again. The only thing propping it up today is the sudden prospect of an Elon Musk buyout.

Twitter was bleeding users and was dealing with a declining membership base leading up to 2019 when the company decided it would fix the problem by not reporting traditional user numbers anymore. They shifted to a new metric that they claimed was designed to discount the removal of "spam and bot accounts." One has to wonder how much of Twitter's actual user base is made of real people rather than fake accounts?  Even with the new metrics, evidence suggests they have continued to lose users and revenues since 2019, largely due to the hostile political witch hunt environment that Twitter has developed in the past few years.

The U.S. government has also been heavily invested in Twitter over the years, throwing millions into various projects the company has undertaken including many overseas. This makes sense because Twitter regularly shares user data with government agencies, often while claiming they don't. Surveillance requests are kept secret and any release of information on such requests are blocked by U.S. courts.

Overall, Twitter is a cesspool of political and corporate corruption. A sock puppet of massive globalist shareholders and a data clearinghouse for conglomerates and governments alike. This is why I have never had an account with them, and likely never will.

It boggles my mind how all of these facts can be right out in the open, yet the one thing that sends leftists on Twitter into a rage is the notion that Elon Musk might buy up enough stock in the company to determine its future course. Here are some key facts that I think the Twitter elites need to consider:

1)  Twitter has been on a downward plunge in terms of user base and revenues for years now. The fact that the company's board has decided to assert a leftist political agenda and enforce unbalanced censorship rules is killing the company even further. In a few years, Twitter will not exist. Or, if it does, it will be a shell of its former self much like Myspace or Tumblr. The platform you people think you control is dying. Without fair public discourse and equally enforced guidelines Twitter serves no purpose other than to act as an echo chamber for leftist fanatics, and who wants to be a party to that?

2)  The Twitter cult and their "blue checkmark" gatekeepers are losing their minds over the prospect of a "billionaire" taking over Twitter when in reality the platform has been controlled by the world’s richest and most invasive shareholders for a long time. If you think Vanguard or BlackRock are better stewards than Elon Musk then I suggest you do a little more research on the history of these corporations.

3)  Elon Musk's interest in Twitter has stirred up excitement in a platform that was otherwise destined for the dumpster. I might even suggest that Musk's activities are prolonging Twitter's life span by drawing in investments that never would have been there otherwise. The blue checkmarks should be thanking him instead of attacking him.

4)  What is the primary complaint that Twitter elitists have when it comes to Musk?  That he might bring in more fair and balanced rules which would prevent political censorship. In other words, they are angry because he might allow true free speech within the boundaries of legality for conservatives as well as leftists. This is unacceptable to them. In their minds, free speech is only reserved for those with "correct thinking," and they believe they get to dictate what "correct thinking" is. It takes a special kind of evil to believe that their side is the only side of an issue that deserves to be heard.

In terms of Elon Musk, I'm reserving judgment for now. Tesla and SpaceX receive billions in government subsidies and tax incentives, far more than Twitter does. I question the validity of any company that relies on government handouts in order to survive.

Musk also is an attendee of the World Government Summit in Dubai, where globalists from various nations meet to talk about the agenda for global centralization. Musk's discussion was specifically on how he thinks the future of humanity is to "merge with machines," much like having your cellphone attached to your brain. This sounds like a dystopian nightmare to me; governments already track and monitor cellphone activity, do you really want them to do the same with your brain?

Setting all that aside, Musk's surprising pursuit of Twitter is interesting no matter which way it goes. He could take control and shut the whole thing down, which is what I would suggest given the platform is a cancer on society and rife with government and corporate surveillance. Scattering the blue check cult to the four winds would be one of the best gifts Musk could give the world right now. They can always complain about everything on other platforms, just not with so much concentrated corporate power at their disposal.

Musk could sell his nearly 10 percent share in the company and trigger a massive plunge in the stock price. This might even precipitate a faster end to the platform. Then again, he may continue to buy up shares and find a way around Twitter's "poison pill" initiative. In fact, in the back of my conspiracy brain, I wonder if Musk is actually saving Twitter rather than changing it or destroying it?

The company was entering the doldrums; its life expectancy was waning quickly. The influence of the Twitter mob has been decreasing and their ability to harm others is disappearing. Big tech companies are like sharks. They must keep moving forward in order to grow and survive. Twitter's momentum has been dead for some time. Maybe it is better to let them rot in their own filth rather than try to resurrect and revitalize a corpse?

Regardless of Musk's true intentions, something needs to change dramatically when it comes to Big Tech and social media in the west. These companies live on our tax dollars and government incentives and yet they get to enjoy the protections of limited liability and the auspices of "private businesses." They are publicly funded in many respects, but they claim the right to censor whoever they wish for any reason they wish. Any business that tries to directly compete with them is crushed, either by collusion between multiple corporations or collusion with governments. This is the epitome of monopoly and the complete opposite of free markets.

If Musk can throw a monkey wrench into the existing system then I hope he's successful; the majority of the public is on his side if that's the case. There is also the possibility that he is helping Twitter to survive. Even support from Vanguard, Blackrock and the seventh circle of hell has not been able to keep Twitter from going down the tubes, but the branding and personality power of Musk could keep the company alive.

My point is, if the leftists want to keep their favorite platform they will need Musk to do it. And beyond that, conservatives and moderates should also not put too much faith in any billionaire to accomplish a sea-change in social media. We are already winning by simply not playing the game. If Musk brings down or upends Twitter, great. If not, it's no loss. Just let them continue to crumble.

To truth and knowledge,

Brandon Smith

War in Ukraine and beyond — because the Globalists can never get enough

 From Bob Livingston, 18 April 2022

The Council on Foreign Relations would have you believe that they and their puppet world "leaders" feel something terrible is afoot in Ukraine — and that "Russia" is the bad guy — because there is a war going on. They claim it must stop, and offer supposed solutions to the crisis on its website and in press reports.

Don't be fooled. These globalists love war.

What they do not love is that you might remember who is behind it all by recalling a bit of recent history. The U.S. State Department and the CIA orchestrated the ouster of a legitimately elected government in Ukraine at the behest of the International Monetary Fund, and the U.S. then looted Ukraine's gold reserves and installed a puppet regime, leaving the region in chaos and the U.S. and Russia on the verge of war.

Elected Ukrainian pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted after he rejected the International Monetary Fund's demands to raise taxes and devalue the currency. So the U.S. and the EU installed central banker and hand puppet Arseniy "Yats" Yatsenyuk. A Forbes article described Yats as "... the kind of technocrat you want if you want austerity, with the veneer of professionalism. He's the type of guy who can hobnob with the European elite... unelected and willing to do the IMFs bidding."

In the wee hours of the morning, the U.S. took possession of Ukraine's $1.8 billion (estimated value) gold reserves. That's partial payback for the $5 billion the U.S. invested in dragging Ukraine toward the EU.

The looting continued as Vice President Joe Biden's son took a position with Ukraine's largest private gas producer. Yet it's a "conspiracy" to think that now-president Joe Biden was in any way guilty of any improper dealings in Ukraine while he was vice president.

You are not supposed to wonder about Ukrainian investigators catching representatives of the Burisma Oil Company, a company where Hunter Biden sat on the board of directors, "paying a $6 million bribe to the Ukrainian Anti-Corruption Burea (NABU) to get the NABU to shut down the investigation into political graft and corruption by the Ukrainian government that benefitted Burisma," according to published reports.

You are supposed to believe that many Western leaders and major bodies that give financial support to Ukraine also wanted the prosecutor in the Burisma case dismissed because they believed he was not "active enough in tackling corruption."

You are not supposed to remember that Democrats impeached then-sitting president Donald Trump because they claimed he "withheld military aid to Ukraine in pressuring the newly elected Volodymyr Zelensky government to investigate Hunter Biden's recent role as a Burisma board member."

You are not supposed to remember that Biden himself bragged about withholding Ukraine aid to the very Council on Foreign Relations I just mentioned, back in 2019.

You are supposed to gloss over the fact that in 2017, pool reporters were summoned at 11:20 a.m. for what they assumed would be a photo op of Trump and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the Oval Office. What they found was Trump seated beside the fossilized old war criminal, former NeverTrumper, long-time Council on Foreign Relations denizen and neocon war-making kingpin, Henry Kissinger.

From the report:

 POTUS, wearing a dark suit and red striped tie, said he met with Kissinger to talk "about Russia and various other matters."

"We're talking about Syria and I think that we're going to do very well with respect to Syria and things are happening that are really, really, really positive," Trump added. "We're going to stop the killing and the death."

Kissinger knows a thing or three about "killing and death." But not much, it seems, about how to stop it, and he did not in this case, either... as if that were ever the goal. Quite the opposite, I hope you now suspect.

Previous perturbations

The U.S. has been meddling in Ukraine for quite some time, and the powder keg almost blew in 2014, as Paul Craig Roberts wrote then, "I doubt that the Ukraine crisis precipitated by Washington's overthrow of the democratic government is over. Washington has won the propaganda war everywhere outside of Russia and Ukraine itself. Within Ukraine, people are aware that the coup has made them worse off. Crimea has already separated from the U.S. puppet government in Kiev and rejoined Russia. Other parts of Russian Ukraine could follow."

No one believes that Western Ukraine wants anything to do with Russia and that Putin is lying, and yet Ron Paul pointed out, again, during the original Ukraine unrest in 2014, "The current conflict stems from a divide between western Ukraine, which seeks a closer association with the European Union; and the eastern part of the country, which has closer historic ties to Russia.

"The usual interventionists in the U.S. have long meddled in the internal affairs of Ukraine. In 2003 it was U.S. government money that helped finance the Orange Revolution, as U.S.-funded NGOs favoring one political group over the other were able to change the regime. These same people have not given up on Ukraine. They keep pushing their own agenda for Ukraine behind the scenes, even as they ridicule anyone who claims U.S. involvement.

"A recent leaked telephone conversation between two senior government officials made it clear that not only was the U.S. involved in the Ukrainian unrest, the U.S. was actually seeking to determine who should make up the next Ukrainian government!"

The Russians amassed their forces on the Ukraine border and the Ukrainians called Putting a "fascist" for his actions in Crimea.

Does any of this sound familiar to you? It should. Which leads one to wonder why the members of the CFR are surprised that it has come to war? They are not, no matter what revisionist propaganda they write on their website.

My colleague Brandon Smith, if you recall, wrote: "In Ukraine, we find the globalists creating tensions between the West and the East. Russia's most vital naval base sits in Crimea, an autonomous state tethered to the Ukrainian mainland. Currently, Russia has flooded Crimea with troops in response to the regime change in Ukraine. The new Ukrainian government (backed by NATO) has called this an "invasion" and an act of war, while Western warmongers like McCain and Lindsay Graham spread the propaganda meme that Russia made such a move only because Putin believes the Obama Administration to be 'weak.' Clearly, the idea here is to engineer either high tensions or war between Russia and the United States. Syria failed to produce the desired outcome, so Ukraine was tapped instead."

Created conflict

Ukraine has been "tapped" as a pawn many times. The Terror-Famine struck Ukraine in 1932-33 when as many as 10 million starved. It should come as little surprise that Joseph Stalin was the architect of that tragedy.

Stalin unleashed his secret police (NKVD, which became the KGB, which became the FSB, from whence Vladimir Putin came) targeting capitalists and squeezing greater food production from the suffering peasants. In the 1930s, when quotas could not be met in the face of drought, the NKVD ruthlessly robbed Ukraine of its wheat and packed the grain back to Russia.

Seemingly any time there is unrest or trouble in Russia, Ukraine pays the price, just as it did during the massive heatwave, drought, and wheat crisis back in 2010. It is no coincidence that Crimea became a flashpoint as Russians faced starvation.

It's becoming increasingly obvious that the Ukraine situation has always been an orchestrated crisis. It's directed history orchestrated by the globalists. Ukrainians will likely end up like Iraqis and Libyans, destitute and living in a lawless society, with anyone filling the void who will foment more war for profit.

Putin and Biden are merely pieces on the globalist chessboard. Empires and wars throughout history have been built and fomented upon myths and deception.

Yours for the truth,

Bob Livingston
Editor, The Bob Livingston Letter®

Is Separation and a New, More Perfect Union, Inevitable?

 From Brandon Smith and Bob Livingston's Personal Liberty Alerts Newsletter Feb 7, 2022:

Separation or purge? Sharing a society with the political left is impossible

If you really think about it, of all the social drivers in history the concept of freedom is the most powerful and fascinating. There are many observable objective truths in the world and it's always important to recognize them, but the idea of freedom is rarer because it is a universal subjective truth. Meaning, it exists inherently in the majority of individuals. Most of us share this experience but there is no microscope or telescope in existence that can observe that experience. We just have to trust it, or perhaps, have faith.

We can only see the aftereffects of the human experience of freedom in the great upheavals that occur when our societies become too rigid, too controlled and too authoritarian. Some will argue that tyrants have no concept of freedom, and this debunks the notion that it's an inherent psychological quality, but this is a misconception. Many tyrants love freedom, but only for themselves. Like any obsessive compulsive, when the average tyrant sees free movement within the rest of society all he sees is chaos that needs to be micro-managed. He is so mentally unhinged by the existence of independent activity that he is compelled to crush it and impose his brand of "order."

If you want to understand the thinking process of the political left today, this is where you need to start. They believe only certain special people deserve to have freedom, and they are of course part of that group. The rest of us can't be trusted with freedom because we "think the wrong way," and so we need to be corralled and fenced in.

This is not to say that some structure within society is wrong, it can be a good thing, but not when it is imposed by an elitist minority of psychopathic people. There will never be any justice within such a system, no fairness and no true progress. Authoritarianism is the opposite of progress; it is the antithesis, and yet these people call themselves "progressives."

Freedom requires boldness and courage because it demands personal responsibility. When you are free to make your own decisions, you are also free to fail, and only you can be blamed for your own failures. This is a terrifying notion for most leftists and collectivists because they believe that they are owed a positive outcome regardless of their actions or merit. They believe it is their "right" to be taken care of by others if they are incapable of taking care of themselves, but this is not equality, this is "equity." This is stealing wealth and opportunity from more worthy people in order to artificially inflate others that put in little or no effort.

Meritocracy is the most equal system in existence because it is freedom based; equality of opportunity is the epitome of fairness, equity of outcome is the epitome of injustice.

Leftists hyperfocus on race, skin color and sexual identity for this very reason. They are desperately searching for a way to circumvent the obstacles of freedom and merit. If everything in society is based on race, then personal accomplishment and responsibility are no longer relevant. In the mind of the leftist, if certain people are inherently oppressed and others are inherently oppressive, then equality of opportunity is not enough, and equity of outcome must be enforced. Making everything about victim group status thereby erases freedom, and meritocracy cannot function. All a person needs to do is say "I am oppressed; therefore I am entitled," and if they meet the leftist criteria then they are handed a livelihood or success simply because they exist.

I saw a commercial on YouTube yesterday for yet another social justice documentary about "white people" and our supposed reign of dominance over the world and I could not help but think this entire narrative is nothing more than a cowardly attempt to deflect responsibility. Yes, it's also an attempt to divide and conquer western nations but how many people are actually watching these race hyped movies and TV shows un-ironically?  According to the stats and reviews, there aren't very many.

Nearly every claim made in these productions is based on previously debunked social justice misrepresentations of history from books like White Fragility and movements like the 1619 Project. If you really want to get an accurate representation of U.S. history in particular and the limited role slavery played in terms of modern social outcomes, then I suggest reading the works of Thomas Sowell, a black American economist and historian with no bias in his analysis.

Slavery is a mere footnote in our past, not an all-encompassing determinant of our present and future as leftists like to argue. There is no legal slavery in America today, and there is no one alive today in America who has experienced race-based slavery or that has been affected by it. Slavery and racism were far more pervasive in nations of brown and black people in history. In fact, some of these countries still engage in various forms of slavery today. White people are not the problem, people who disrespect the benefits of freedom are the problem regardless of their skin color.

What we need to understand is that race and oppression propaganda are not really rooted in race and oppression. They appeal to a certain subset of our population because it offers them a way to rationalize their lack of merit and their fears of freedom and consequence. If you can blame white people for all your problems and have this be believed, then the temptation to fail is increased because there are no consequences. Why work hard to make something of yourself if you can do nothing and be rewarded for it?

By extension, the racism blame game is alluring to many in society because it can be used as a weapon to harm political enemies. When leftists complain about the evils of "white people" what they are really talking about are the "evils" of conservatives and others that do not conform to the leftist ideology. They rarely come right out and say it, but one day the documentaries will switch from Dear White People to Dear Conservatives. The fight has never been about race, it's always been about ideals and principles and eliminating the ideals leftists do not like. This is why they are consistently hostile to anyone conservative, even more so if that person is black.

The leftist agenda is all about diminishing freedom and societal respect for freedom by whatever means necessary. Everything is about management, everything is about centralization, everything is about control. Conservatives and many moderates stand in direct opposition to this.

The most common and idiotic argument I hear among newbies in the liberty movement is when they try to explain away leftist actions by bringing up the "false left/right paradigm." These people don't understand what this actually means. The left/right paradigm exists at the top of the social and political pyramid; top political and corporate leaders pretend to be in one party or the other while in reality they are all working together and implementing the same policies. At the bottom of the pyramid among regular people, there is no false left/right paradigm. There is a very real left/right division.

This is undeniable now in the face of the COVID and vaccine mandates. For the longest time, I have heard people claim that when the push for authoritarianism in the U.S. arrived many conservatives would simply go along with it. Yet, today numerous conservative red states are fighting the mandates tooth and nail while leftist blue states are being suffocated by them. In fact, red states have acted as beacons of rebellion for the world. Without them, it is unlikely that the Supreme Court would have dropped Biden's federal vax mandates. The threat of war is tangible if such mandates are ever instituted, and the Supreme Court knows this.

I have had people ask me in the past why there haven't been any major actions on the part of conservatives in the U.S. against the mandates and I have to break it to them that there are no mandates in conservative places and there haven't been for at least 18 months. None. Zero. Zip. We don't need to protest because we stopped the mandates before they could take hold.

As I have said from the very beginning of the pandemic response, if even a handful of places can remain free from COVID controls they will inspire people around the world and act as proof that the mandates are pointless. Today, as America continues to beat back the COVID agenda there are mass protests in Canada and the UK has cut all COVID restrictions. Freedom spreads like wildfire once the flames are sparked.

Leftists hate this. COVID, like the fantasy of "institutional racism," is a tempting vehicle to forward their agenda. If you can convince the public that they are a threat to themselves and each other, then it is a small matter to convince them that government needs to step in and protect society from itself and from notions of freedom that might put society at risk. Without COVID as a foil, the political left has nothing, and so they continue to perpetuate the lie that the virus is an imminent threat to the majority of people when the average Infection Fatality Rate is a tiny 0.27 percent.

The real question here is when a group of people hate freedom this much how is it possible to coexist with them? The answer is we can't.

Anyone who defends merit and liberty will always be a target of those that despise merit and liberty. They will never stop. They will forever be looking for ways to undermine both. If COVID mandates and race-based propaganda don't work then they will search for another tool to do the job. If one can say anything "good" about leftists, it's that they do not give up even when they are clearly outmatched and beaten. The problem is that this dedication to their cause is not based on love or passion, but in zealotry. They are jihadists, and nothing, not logic, not facts, not reason nor moral principle will convince them of the error of their ways.

So, what is the solution? One could suggest that we make it easy for them to leave. After all, if they hate America as much as they say they do then why are they still living here? Probably because most other places in the world are abysmal in comparison. But if we keep them around, they will drag the country down to the same level. It's a conundrum. Beyond that, what country would want them? Social justice is seen as a cancer in many countries and an injection of leftist migrants would be a disaster for them economically and socially, even in nations that claim to support leftist models.

Most leftists would also refuse to take the opportunity to leave because they believe they should decide the path of America's future. As much as they hate this country, they see themselves as its saviors.

Then there is the option of internal separation, which I see as preferable. This is already happening in many forms as conservatives and moderates from blue states relocate by the millions to red states. In my home state of Montana, there has been an influx of migrants from blue states and every single new person I have talked to is a conservative/prepper whose family lived in a blue state for generations, and they finally got fed up. The vast majority of people moving are conservative-minded and they are congregating in the red states.

Why not carry this process forward to its natural conclusion? Red states break from blue states and red counties break from blue state control and we live our lives the way we see fit. Let the leftists continue with their draconian economic and political models and see how well that goes for them. I guarantee they will be in financial ruins within a decade (the list of most indebted places in the country is dominated by blue states) and they will be begging to return to a union with red states (except for the zealots, which would lose influence as they continue to fail).

But this will not happen peacefully because, again, leftists cannot tolerate free activity. Their OCD will not allow them to be content with living in a collectivist state of their own; all states must be collectivist before they are satisfied. People are property to them; property of the collective, and people who are property cannot be allowed to make decisions without oversight.

Unfortunately, the only path this leaves is one of violence. Leftists will have to be forced out of positions of power and influence and removed from our culture like a cancerous tumor is cut from the body to save the body. I don't think this should be the obvious choice. I don't want it to be. What I am saying is, leftists and their partners in government and the corporate world will force the issue because they cannot help it; like the story of the scorpion and the frog, it's in their nature to destroy.

They will continue to push and steal and threaten and abuse until they get the inevitable response of a punch in the teeth. Then, they will play the victim like they always do. This crying and gaslighting will have to be ignored. In the end, these people cannot be tolerated in a free culture and their means of harming and enslaving others must be removed, one way or another.

To truth and knowledge,

Brandon Smith

Simple fixes to our economic problems that (((establishment elites))) won't allow

 From Brandon Smith of The Bob Livingston Personal Liberty Alerts

I think one of the great misconceptions about the economic crisis is that solutions are always dependent on centralized government action. In truth, most financial disasters are actually caused by too much government action and involvement. This is not to overlook the fact that central banks like the Federal Reserve are also primer culprits; their machinations which are independent of government oversight fall into the category of deliberate sabotage, as I outlined in last week's article. Basically, the Fed bankrolls the corruption through fiat money creation while government officials and corporations utilize the money to wreak havoc on our living standards.

Ending the Fed would solve the fiat money problem, but there's still a host of agenda-driven politicians and bureaucrats to deal with before our nation can right the ship.

Really, the best way to fix our system would be to first force the government to interfere less. As a point of reference, consider the common media narratives surrounding the COVID pandemic. Along with the White House, the media has been the premier driver of irrational fear over the spread of COVID, which ended up being a minor threat compared to the hype as the median Infection Fatality Rate was no more than 0.27 percent. Yet, in response to this nothing-burger bureaucrats declared a national emergency requiring insane and unconstitutional lockdowns.

The lockdowns damaged the economy in ways people are only now beginning to comprehend, with hundreds of thousands of small businesses lost across the country. Not only that, but in response to the economic implosion the elites created, they then created over $6 trillion in new money through the Fed in a single year. This helicopter money or UBI (Universal Basic Income) has expedited a stagflationary disaster and helped to push prices on necessities to 40-year highs.

The media claims it was "COVID that caused the crash," but this is a lie. It was the response to COVID that caused the crash. The virus was merely incidental to the economic sabotage by governments and central banks. As we saw in conservative red states that defied the lockdowns and the vax mandates, economic activity thrived while leftists blue states suffered. And what did these blue states get in return for their economic sacrifices?  Nothing. COVID infections continued to rage in blue states and deaths often outpaced red states with similar-sized populations.

In other words, the lockdowns, the mask mandates and the attempts to force vaccinations through medical tyranny saved zero lives and possibly made things worse. This is the legacy of government micro-management (And yes, let's not forget that Trump went along with these lockdowns at the beginning of the pandemic also. Biden is just the dirt-bag that continued the measures despite the massive amount of evidence that they don't work).

While the COVID event illustrates my point in a big way, there are a lot of more subtle problems that government intervention has caused that add up to one big fiscal calamity. Many of these threats require relatively simple solutions that government elites will rarely address and will try to stop at all costs. Here are just a few examples...

Inflation and stagflation? Back the dollar with hard commodities

The Federal Reserve and their minions have spent the better part of a century trying to convince the public that a gold standard for our currency is what caused the Great Depression and what could cause future depressions. They claim that limitations on money printing strangle liquidity and disrupt velocity. This is a lie.

Former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke openly admitted in 2002 in a speech in honor of Milton Friedman that it was the central bank that actually caused the deflationary collapse of the 1930s, not the existence of the gold standard. This rare moment of truth from a fed official was perhaps due to the sheer amount of evidence that Friedman often cited that contradicted the original anti-gold propaganda. Or maybe it happened because the banking elites did not see Friedman as a particular threat and figured no one among the public would read Bernanke's speech anyway.

In fact, a commodities foundation held the U.S. economy together for centuries until the Fed came along and the government slowly began removing gold from the picture. All subsequent economic crisis events have been exponentially worse ever since. When a commodities standard is employed, stability always follows. Just look at what has happened in Russia recently; their currency was on a downward spiral due to international sanctions, yet, when they reopened markets this past week the Ruble skyrocketed back to normal. Why? Because Putin had the currency coupled with gold. It's really that simple.

The U.S. and parts of Europe are facing their own inflationary disasters, and this is largely due to the unchecked avarice of central bank stimulus and government spending. The only way to secure the dollar's existence as a stable store of wealth would be to back it with hard commodities like precious metals (among others). This might kill the dollar's world reserve status because fiat printing would be impossible from that point on, but I got a news flash for those that hate the idea of grounding the dollar in commodities:  We're going to lose world reserve status anyway, and it's going to happen soon.

One third of the world's population including Russia, China and India are already breaking from the dollar in bilateral trade. The U.S. might as well accept this as the reality and prepare to mitigate the coming currency collapse by supporting the dollar with commodities.

Oil shortages and energy inflation? Stop interfering with oil exploration

In early February of this year, the Biden administration made legal filings that halted new oil and gas leases including exploration due to conflicts over "climate costs." This interference with America's oil independence is only one of many instances starting with Biden's sabotage of the Keystone Pipeline in 2021. Interestingly, with gas prices doubling ever since Biden entered office, the White House now claims that they have nothing to do with energy inflation and are not preventing drilling in the U.S.

During the same period, Russia was establishing a 30-year oil and gas contract with China and laying the groundwork for a major pipeline to be finished by 2025. Russia was planning ahead while the U.S. was shifting from energy independence and a net exporter of oil, to once again becoming dependent on authoritarian regimes in the Arab world. Why?

Biden's excuse is usually climate alarmism. The Earth's temperature has only risen by 1 DEGREE CELCIUS in the past 100 years according to the NOAA, so the main argument against oil production in the U.S. is based on the fallacy that man-made carbon has any bearing whatsoever on climate changes. But maybe the carbon fraud is just a distraction from something else?

To fix any supply and demand issues in the U.S., we only need to start producing once again at levels that were easily obtainable in 2020. But what if the issue of supply contraction is not the main cause of oil inflation? I would note that the dollar is not only the world reserve currency but also the global petro-currency. Until recently, almost all oil was traded internationally using dollars. The decline or collapse of the dollar's buying power due to money printing and runaway inflation is more likely the direct cause of rising oil prices, and supply issues are secondary.

If the dollar was to collapse due to inflation, oil would be one of the first early indicators. With the establishment blocking new oil production and hindering the most cost-effective method for oil transport (pipelines), an engineered decline in supply becomes a very effective smokescreen for the death of the dollar. The crisis caused by the government and the Federal Reserve's currency destruction could then be blamed on supply chain issues and climate "peril." This is the reason why the establishment will not allow any future growth in U.S. oil production. They cannot allow the public to realize the precarious position our currency is in.

Debt and liquidity crisis? Let states establish their own banks and currencies

The state of North Dakota has an interesting model for economic independence, which utilizes a state-sponsored bank designed specifically to help businesses in North Dakota.  I would say it's bizarre that this idea has not become popular across the nation, but I understand that if it did, the federal government and the central bankers would be very unhappy.

Here's the thing, while it is true that the Constitution explicitly states that the U.S. Treasury becomes the only issuer of U.S. currency, this was done at a time when our currency was backed by gold and silver and there was no corrupt middleman in the form of a central bank. In truth, the Treasury is now second fiddle to the Federal Reserve, and the constitutional regulations on money have already been broken. It's time for a new currency model and banking model.

An official bank in each state could decentralize power away from the Federal Reserve in terms of how debt and interest rates are handled, creating something closer to free-market discovery of interest rates rather than a rate dictatorship controlled by the Fed. By extension, each state could also issue currency scrip legal for use only within the borders of those states. This would create a secondary safety net against inflation in the dollar.

In other words, we decentralize the banking system, and we offer state alternatives that function not so much as competing currencies but as parallel or complementary currencies backed by and exchangeable in certain commodities. I believe very strongly that this model (along with a couple of dozen other measures I don't have space to cover here) could save our country from decades of economic mismanagement and bring us back from the brink of catastrophe.

States could do this without the permission of the federal government or the Federal Reserve, but I have little doubt that the elites would be in an uproar. Make no mistake, states will have to move to decouple from the national financial system and build alternatives as soon as they realize that the dollar is tanking, and stagflation is here to stay. And when they do, the establishment will declare such actions on par with "insurrection."

In the meantime, there are numerous preparations, and each individual can make in their local communities to insulate themselves from economic dangers. There are those that will say that local measures are only a stopgap and more national action needs to be taken. They are partially correct; in the long run, there needs to be wider organization toward free markets once again, along with redundancies in state economies. In the short term, we must do what we can.

Ultimately, the clearest solutions to our fiscal fate are not pursued because the elites do not want to save the economy, at least not in a way that ends up with them having less power. They want even more power and centralization that extends beyond national boundaries into the realm of a single global currency and a single globally managed market. Fixing the system can't happen because they won't let it happen.

This means that the only fix that truly matters will be the one that allows all other others to progress, and that fix is to remove these people from positions of influence and authority. You can't really repair the body in the wake of an illness until the offending disease is first eliminated.

To truth and knowledge,

Brandon Smith