Lockdown Lunacy: Your Government-Ordered Depression Has Arrived - By David Stockman (Text only - link to website below for charts and graphs)

(We're approaching DaCliff and DaSmartPeople are staring at DaGrass in front of our feet and saying "We're doing great!" - CL)

 

"In short, what we have is a government-ordered depression, not a macroeconomic recession that is purportedly remediable by a huge dose of monetary and fiscal stimulus. So the truth is, the Virus Patrol, not the Fed and Washington’s everything bailout brigade, is in charge of the recovery from the Q2 disaster, and they are not much interested in letting it happen."

 

Well, the Virus Patrol sure has done it. In a fit of reckless overkill they have managed to vaporize six years of economic growth during the last 90 days. And that’s just by the mechanical reckoning of the GDP accounts, where total output in Q2 weighed in at essentially the same level as Q4 2014.

The real damage is far deeper, however, and is reflected in millions of small businesses permanently destroyed, tens of millions of households wiped-out financially and the vicious daisy chain of delinquencies, deferrals and defaults just beginning to rip through the $78 trillion edifice of debt which entombs the US economy.

Real GDP Level

 

Of course, most of the Wall Street talking heads were nonplussed by this morning’s release because, well, Q2 results are claimed to be ancient history: Reality is purportedly the “V”-shaped recovery on their spreadsheets, which really can’t fail to happen because it’s always two quarters out regardless of conditions at the moment.

 

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So let’s get something straight. What is happening is an economic catastrophe the likes of which we have never seen before, even during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In fact, the worst annual decline back then was a 14.8% drop in 1932, while the entire peak-to-trough real GDP decline between 1929 and the 1933 bottom was 30.5%.

So it would be fair to say that measured at an annualized rate, the idiotic Dr. Fauci and his Virus Patrol have now delivered a 32.9% GDP plunge, which single-handedly tops the entire contraction of the Great Depression.

Needless to say, the Q2 result also leaves the recessionary drops since 1950 way back in the dust. Even the auto industry induced plunge of Q1 1958 didn’t make the double-digit threshold. It clocked in at a 9.986% annualized decline or less than one-third of today’s cliff dive.

 

What was especially notable, however, was the vaporization of personal consumption spending on services, which ordinarily accounts for upwards of 70 percent of total PCE; and which is also ballyhooed by the paint-by-the-numbers Wall Street economist as the ballast the keeps GDP moving ever higher.

Not this time!

 

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Services spending literally fell through the trapdoor, contracting at a 43.4% annualized rate. That compares with the 11 recessions since 1950 where real spending on services never went negative, save for the pinprick decline of -1.6% annualized during the Q1 2009 bottom of the Great Recession.

By every account, the economic plunge in the winter of 2008-2009 was the worst since the 1930s, but today the Commerce Department reported a PCE-services drop that was 28X deeper!

Our purpose here is not to marshal scary numbers, even as they surely are. Rather, our point is that what is coursing through the Q2 numbers is not anything that resembles a normal chain-of-reactions macroeconomic cycle. For instance, where job losses cascade through to shrinking incomes, thereby causing consumer confidence and spending wherewithal to diminish and household spending to be curtailed.

To the contrary, what is depicted below is essentially economic marshal law. Agencies of the state commanded airports, restaurants, bars, hair salons, gyms, movies, dentist offices, theme parks, sporting events etc. to close or operate at drastically reduced capacity, which meant, in turn, that day-in-and-day out commerce and economic output vanished instantly.

Stated differently, this 43% plunge in services spending didn’t happen for the ordinary reason that people were short on cash. As we show below, personal income during the quarter – thanks to the massive flow of free stuff from Washington (aka government transfer payments) – clocked in at a record level!

Consequently, there will be no rebound in the plunging red line below no matter how much fiscal and monetary “stimulus” Washington pumps into the main street economy.

The services sector accounts for nearly 66% of total PCE, which, in turn, accounts for 68% of measured GDP. So the latter will not recover until the Virus Patrol gets its foot off the neck of what we call the social congregation activities of daily economic life; and also until it and its MSM collaborationist desist from fanning the false claim that the Covid is the equivalent of the Black Plague, thereby causing people to voluntarily quarantine out of misplaced fear.

Of course, you don’t have to listen to Dr. Fauci and the Scarf Lady for long – yes, they have not yet been locked up in padded cells where they belong – to realize that the Virus Patrol is on a once-in-a lifetime power trip.

In ultra-busy body/Nanny State fashion they are virtually regimenting the comings and goings of a $20 trillion economy – even as they keep the US economy on indefinite idle waiting for the vaccines and antivirals from their allies in Big Pharma and the Gates Complex to ride to the (mandatory) rescue.

Annualized Change In Personal Consumption Expenditures, Services, 1950-2020

 

We don’t expect the Virus Patrol to be put out of business any time soon because the Donald is too confused and weak to shut them down.

Moreover, if he keeps shooting himself in the kneecaps via tweets like today’s “lets-postpone-the-election” numbskullery, he will guarantee an even worse scenario: Namely, that while Sleepy Joe is being oxygenated and propped-up behind the Resolute Desk for daily Oval Office photo ops, the left-wing health Nazis who surround him will really go to town on Lockdown Nation.

Nor is that any kind of unhinged trashing of the camarilla of out-and-out statists who will form the core of the Biden Administration. The fact is, the Donald’s malpacticing doctors, the MSM and the Blue State mayors and governors have now unleashed a full-on public hysteria that is self-fueling.

 

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It is now transforming ordinary sheeples into obedient and unquestioning brown-shirts. Even in the purportedly enlightened, socialist republic of Aspen, where we are sheltering for the duration, we see them “mask-up” even with no one in sight, while pumping strenuously up the mountain side on a fat-tired bike.

On manifestation of the Covid-Hysteria is the soaring level of “testing” going on as people either try to get a hall pass in order to return to work or just plain run to the nearest testing station every time the media sends off new alarm bells.

During April, for instance, which was the very worst month of the contagion in terms of serious illnesses and deaths, 5.2 million new tests were reported or 175,000 per day.

By contrast, in July to date (thru the 29th), there have been 21.5 million new tests reported or an average of 745,000 per day.

In a population that has been thoroughly exposed to the virus after five months, it is a given that with the number of tests soaring, the number of positive cases will rise proportionately. But that’s a misdirection because the real issue is the true medical severity of the new cases, and that has dropped precipitously.

The death rate has dropped from 1,800 per day in April to 780 in July; and whereas 15-20% of new cases were being hospitalized in most states during April, that figure has now fallen to 2-4%.

That is, after the Grim Reaper’s original romp through the most vulnerable populations – especially the nursing homes and long-term care facilities in March/April – the preponderant share of the remaining populations being infected and testing positive appear to have stronger immune defenses, and are mainly either asymptomatic or treating and recovering at home in the normal flu-season manner.

So on the facts, the Hysteria should be dying out, but, alas, the facts are of small moment in the context of a runaway public hysteria that is being turbocharged by a severely aggravated anti-Trump partisanship that has no modern precedent, or any at all.

We are constantly reminded that there are less than 100 days until the election, but probably of even more salience is that the next flu season will be arriving even sooner in October. And it won’t matter whether the obvious herd immunities building up against the SARS-Cov-2 cause the next flu season to be unusually mild or not.

That’s because the Virus Patrol will be at shrill alert for the “second wave” in the run-up to October, keeping the suffocated economy evident in today’s GDP report on its back foot for the balance of the year, at least. That means the ballyhooed V is now surely dead-as-a-door nail.

In this context, it needs be recalled that the services sector of the US economy is bearing the brunt of the Lockdown orders, but that it now counts for fully $8.7 trillion or 45% of GDP. That compares to a mere 26% back in the days of America’s industrial might in the mid-1950s.

In the big picture context, therefore, national policy – especially at the Eccles Building – caused the off-shoring and hollowing-out of the US industrial economy over the last three decades. In turn, that has left main street especially vulnerable to a state-orchestrated attack on its new services sector center of gravity such as outpatient surgery clinics, Pilates studios and tapas bars.

Again, an economic marshal law attack on the new epicenter of the US economy means that the issue is not traditional stimulus, but clearing the decks and clearing the air of the Virus Patrol orders and Covid-Hysteria, which was the real culprit behind the Q2 GDP disaster.

Nominal GDP (light brown) Versus Service Sector PCE (dark brown), 1955-2020

 

Perhaps nowhere is the impact of economic marshal law more evident, ironically, than in the health care sub-sector of the services economy.

The former, of course, has been the workhorse of US GDP growth for decades. However, after peaking at $2.50 trillion in Q4 2019, it weighed in at just $1.89 trillion in Q2 2020. That’s a $608 billion decline, reflecting an astounding -24% contraction.

 

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And this is supposed to be the worst medical crisis to hit America since the Spanish Flu of 1918!

But, actually, the government’s data mill is telling an absolutely opposite, nay crazy, story. Namely, that the single largest sector of the US economy plunged at a 61.6% annualized rate in Q2 – meaning that the figure gives the notion of being “off the charts” of history an altogether new definition.

Needless to say, health care spending is not now and never has been amenable to Washington’s vaunted stimulus machines. The overwhelming share of spending is government funded directly through Medicare/Medicaid et al or through the $300 billion per year tax shelter for employer health plans; and whether public or private, consumer health payments are overwhelming made by third-parties, thereby further limiting the efficacy of the cheap money from the Fed and free money from Uncle Sam.

The plunging red line below, therefore, is the doing of the Virus Patrol and its orders to shutdown most so-called discretionary health care services, such as cancer screenings? So until it is put out of business and the public Covid-Hysteria is substantially abated, the rebound of the health services sector is likely to the contained and protracted.

 

In short, what we have is a government-ordered depression, not a macroeconomic recession that is purportedly remediable by a huge dose of monetary and fiscal stimulus. So the truth is, the Virus Patrol, not the Fed and Washington’s everything bailout brigade, is in charge of the recovery from the Q2 disaster, and they are not much interested in letting it happen.

To take another salient example, the go-to strategy of the Virus Patrol has been to shutdown large scale public gatherings entirely, but that’s obviously the venue of the recreation sector.

So it is not surprising that the PCE spending rate for this sector has given “cliff-diving” a run for its money. Compared to the $590 billion annualized rate of spending in Q4 2019, the current quarter clocked in at just $272 trillion.

The amounted to a 53.4% decline from Q4 and an out-of-this-world contraction of 61% annualized in the current quarter. Or alternatively, recreation spending in Lockdown Nation during Q2 reverted to the level first crossed in Q2 2002.

That’s 18 year’s worth of growth gone in a virtual economic heartbeat.

 

Of course, there was one thing that was way up in Q2 – transfer payments and personal income. And every dime of the massive increase in transfer payments shown below was borrowed by Uncle Sam and monetized by the Fed.

Yet the only thing it accomplished was to further balloon the public debt because the current depression does not flow from the want of means or desire to spend: It’s the product of economic marshal law ordered up by the Virus Patrol.

Still, it is worth noting that wage and salary income (brown line) was down by $680 billion at an annual rate in Q2, while the Washington spending machine boosted transfer payments at a $2.4 trillion annual rate, or by nearly four times more!

Once upon a time, that would have been considered insane overkill, and at least caused Republicans to screech at the top of their lungs about fiscal profligacy.

Alas, as they put up their $1.2 trillion Everything Bailout 5.0 against the House Dems’ $3.3 trillion alternative in the days just ahead, the chart below will be nowhere seen in the porkers’ lounges of Capitol Hill.

Change From Prior Quarter In Billions: Transfer Payments (purple line) Versus Wages and Salaries (brown line)

 

PEAK TRUMP, IMPENDING CRISES, ESSENTIAL INFO & ACTION

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The Best of David Stockman

Former Congressman David A. Stockman was Reagan's OMB director, which he wrote about in his best-selling book, The Triumph of Politics. His latest books are The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America and Peak Trump: The Undrainable Swamp And The Fantasy Of MAGA. He's the editor and publisher of the new David Stockman's Contra Corner. He was an original partner in the Blackstone Group, and reads LRC the first thing every morning.

Copyright © David Stockman

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/08/david-stockman/lockdown-lunacy-your-government-ordered-depression-has-arrived/ 

The Coronavirus Response Is Pure State Terrorism Based on Propaganda - By Gary D. Barnett

“The true terrorists of our world do not meet at the docks at midnight, or scream “Allahu Akbar” before some violent action. The true terrorists of our world wear 5000 dollar suits and work in the highest positions of finance, government and business.”

~ Peter Joseph, “Zeitgeist: Addendum”. Documentary, History, War, www.imdb.com. 2008.

 

So who are the real terrorists today? They are those that seek to gain total power and control over all of us, and they are called the State. Politically speaking, the use of terrorism is a mighty weapon because it instills much fear into the hearts of man, and fear can drive the masses into panic and hiding, leaving the door open to tyranny. The ruling class fully understands this concept, and uses it as a psychological tool to control the people, and by doing so the terroristic state claims to be our protector and savior instead of our aggressor. Only a system controlled by psychopaths would use such a strategy.

 

 

Do not mistake anything about what is going on today, and do not underestimate the sinister aspect of this long planned and purposely-manufactured false pandemic. This is an act of terror that has been created for the purpose of spreading fear in order to gain more power and complete control over the world population. This is not only state sponsored terrorism, but is an active terroristic plot being accomplished by the state itself. The difference this time is that it is not cloaked in mystery or secrecy, there is no threat of bombs, and no group is claiming responsibility for this attack on humanity. It is terror by stealth alone, as this new claimed killer of the innocent is said to be a virus that has never even been properly or scientifically isolated or identified. No shot had to be fired in order to panic the masses, and all that was needed was a lie that could be easily sold to a population of pathetic brainwashed sheep awaiting their own slaughter.

This kind of terror relies completely on propaganda, and that propaganda must be constant and unrelenting so that the lower classes do not have any inclination or time for anything except concentrating on the illusion at hand. This strategy of the purveyors of terror is a clever scheme not because it is based on brilliance, but because it is based on the accepted destruction of the intellect of the herd. Once that has been accomplished, and it has been accomplished, the plan is easier to put into place. Confusion and fear are all that are necessary in order to complete the scheme.

Recent headlines from a controlled and complicit mainstream media exposes the extent of the constant and overwhelming propaganda coming from the news outlets. The airwaves are inundated with terrifying headlines all day every day in this nightmare plot called “coronavirus.’ This constant barrage of doomsday reporting is meant to inundate the minds of the common people to the point of saturation. That is the essence of successful propaganda, and this tactic is being used masterfully to achieve herd compliance to government orders that are meant to bring about total obedience to the state in order to advance mass behavioral modification.

 

The breakdown of the tactics being used by the state to gain adherence to its claimed authority are based on China as the model. By following this blueprint for control, the world, including the U.S., is becoming China. This is no accident, and was planned from the beginning. What happens in China will also happen here, so all those that criticize the draconian Chinese response to this hoax should understand that the U.S. is mirroring that response, as many aspects of total lockdown, surveillance, tracking, masks, economic destruction, and distancing have already happened here and around the world after China initiated those policies. The U.S. government is playing both sides of this game, first by blaming China for the virus without any supportive evidence, ridiculing their response techniques, and threatening them, while at the same time implementing the same strategy. This is completely hypocritical of course, but that is all part of the designed disinformation campaign. First condemn, then commend, and then copy.

Compared to just a few months ago, this country and most of the world have become unrecognizable. Human society as we have known it, has been decimated and altered beyond recognition. Beauty and pleasure, and all frivolity in life, including the essence of the human spirit, have been mostly eliminated in favor of isolation, masking, and distancing. What is left is a cold and dark landscape that is mostly devoid of joy. The precious nature of life and love, the taste of exquisite flavors, the freedom to explore, to travel, to play, to listen to live music, and to connect with people and cultures has all but disappeared. The terror inflicted on us all by the ruling class and the government has cut deeply into our souls. It is an abomination.

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During this terrorist attack on the masses by the use of a propagandized ‘virus’ scheme, the rich continue to get richer, while all the rest of humanity suffers. Wealth transfers at this level have never occurred, and with any continuation of this insanity, poverty will become universal in nature. This will necessarily finish off the middle class once and for all, leaving the very few privileged at the top, and all others at the bottom of the heap. That is the system desired, as any society that sinks into the abysmal state of rulers and serfs is bound to favor those claiming elite status. Once most of society becomes fully dependent due to the destruction of their lives and work, subordination to authority becomes commonplace, and the doling out of morsels by the state will be viewed as a benevolent act, when in fact it will only be used as a control measure.

The next major phase of this terror plot will be the rollout of a new Covid vaccine and vaccination mandates worldwide. None will be certain of the total makeup of these vaccines, as what may actually be in it could be hidden and deadly. There will certainly be multiple virus strains, there will be harmful adjuvants that could include mercury and aluminum, among many others, and there will most likely be unknown ingredients as well. With today’s technology, the list of possible components is endless, and many could be gene altering. DNA and RNA vaccines can allow for genetic engineering, although the mainstream will go to great lengths to deny this possibility. Tracking technology could also be implanted, as well as other invasive elements such as foreign nano-particles and RFID chips. This is not a claim that this has happened, but is a warning that it could happen. The technology is available. It is imperative to keep in mind that the U.S. government is in bed with the Gates Foundation, the CDC, the WHO, and many criminal pharmaceutical companies. Government contracts for Covid vaccine production, government/pharmaceutical partnerships, additional government funding, and delivery partnerships expose the fascist nature of these projects. The banking and corporate powerful and the government are the drivers of this fake pandemic, and are also working together to vaccinate the world. Be very aware of the dangerous nature of such a nefarious consolidation between these corrupt entities that are bound to have ulterior motives that will be deadly.

 

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We are heading into even more dangerous waters as this state terror continues. Hiding behind a mask will not protect you from what is to come.

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it.”

~  “The Ultimate Revolution”. Aldous Huxley’s speech at Berkeley Language Center, www.informationclearinghouse.info. March 20, 1962. 

Sources: Here, here, here,

The Best of Gary D. Barnett

Gary D. Barnett [send him mail] is a retired investment professional living and writing in Lewistown, Montana. Visit his website.

 

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/08/gary-d-barnett/the-coronavirus-response-is-pure-state-terrorism-based-on-propaganda/ 

Isaiah's Job | Mises Institute (Serve the Remnant - not DaMasses! - CL)

06/21/2008 Albert Jay Nock

This essay first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1936. An MP3 version of this article, read by Dr. Floy Lilley, is available for free download.

I

One evening last autumn, I sat long hours with a European acquaintance while he expounded a political-economic doctrine which seemed sound as a nut and in which I could find no defect. At the end, he said with great earnestness: "I have a mission to the masses. I feel that I am called to get the ear of the people. I shall devote the rest of my life to spreading my doctrine far and wide among the population. What do you think?"

An embarrassing question in any case, and doubly so under the circumstances, because my acquaintance is a very learned man, one of the three or four really first-class minds that Europe produced in his generation; and naturally I, as one of the unlearned, was inclined to regard his lightest word with reverence amounting to awe.

Still, I reflected, even the greatest mind cannot possibly know everything, and I was pretty sure he had not had my opportunities for observing the masses of mankind, and that therefore I probably knew them better than he did. So I mustered courage to say that he had no such mission and would do well to get the idea out of his head at once; he would find that the masses would not care two pins for his doctrine, and still less for himself, since in such circumstances the popular favorite is generally some Barabbas. I even went so far as to say (he is a Jew) that his idea seemed to show that he was not very well up on his own native literature. He smiled at my jest, and asked what I meant by it; and I referred him to the story of the prophet Isaiah.

It occurred to me then that this story is much worth recalling just now when so many wise men and soothsayers appear to be burdened with a message to the masses. Dr. Townsend has a message, Father Coughlin has one, Mr. Upton Sinclair, Mr. Lippmann, Mr. Chase and the planned-economy brethren, Mr. Tugwell and the New Dealers, Mr. Smith and Liberty Leaguers — the list is endless. I cannot remember a time when so many energumens were so variously proclaiming the Word to the multitude and telling them what they must do to be saved. This being so, it occurred to me, as I say, that the story of Isaiah might have something in it to steady and compose the human spirit until this tyranny of windiness is overpast. I shall paraphrase the story in our common speech, since it has to be pieced out from various sources; and inasmuch as respectable scholars have thought fit to put out a whole new version of the Bible in the American vernacular, I shall take shelter behind them, if need be, against the charge of dealing irreverently with the Sacred Scriptures.

The prophet's career began at the end of King Uzziah's reign, say about 740 B.C. This reign was uncommonly long, almost half a century, and apparently prosperous. It was one of those prosperous reigns, however — like the reign of Marcus Aurelius at Rome, or the administration of Eubulus at Athens, or of Mr. Coolidge at Washington — where at the end the prosperity suddenly peters out and things go by the board with a resounding crash.

In the year of Uzziah's death, the Lord commissioned the prophet to go out and warn the people of the wrath to come. "Tell them what a worthless lot they are." He said, "Tell them what is wrong, and why and what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. Don't mince matters. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance. Give it to them good and strong and keep on giving it to them. I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you," He added, "that it won't do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life."

Isaiah had been very willing to take on the job — in fact, he had asked for it — but the prospect put a new face on the situation. It raised the obvious question: Why, if all that were so — if the enterprise were to be a failure from the start — was there any sense in starting it? "Ah," the Lord said, "you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it."

II

Apparently, then, if the Lord's word is good for anything — I do not offer any opinion about that, — the only element in Judean society that was particularly worth bothering about was the Remnant. Isaiah seems finally to have got it through his head that this was the case; that nothing was to be expected from the masses, but that if anything substantial were ever to be done in Judea, the Remnant would have to do it. This is a very striking and suggestive idea; but before going on to explore it, we need to be quite clear about our terms. What do we mean by the masses, and what by the Remnant?

As the word masses is commonly used, it suggests agglomerations of poor and underprivileged people, laboring people, proletarians, and it means nothing like that; it means simply the majority. The mass man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses. The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.

The picture which Isaiah presents of the Judean masses is most unfavorable. In his view, the mass man — be he high or be he lowly, rich or poor, prince or pauper — gets off very badly. He appears as not only weak minded and weak willed, but as by consequence knavish, arrogant, grasping, dissipated, unprincipled, unscrupulous. The mass woman also gets off badly, as sharing all the mass man's untoward qualities, and contributing a few of her own in the way of vanity and laziness, extravagance and foible. The list of luxury products that she patronized is interesting; it calls to mind the women's page of a Sunday newspaper in 1928, or the display set forth in one of our professedly "smart" periodicals. In another place, Isaiah even recalls the affectations that we used to know by the name "flapper gait" and the "debutante slouch." It may be fair to discount Isaiah's vivacity a little for prophetic fervor; after all, since his real job was not to convert the masses but to brace and reassure the Remnant, he probably felt that he might lay it on indiscriminately and as thick as he liked — in fact, that he was expected to do so. But even so, the Judean mass man must have been a most objectionable individual, and the mass woman utterly odious.

If the modern spirit, whatever that may be, is disinclined towards taking the Lord's word at its face value (as I hear is the case), we may observe that Isaiah's testimony to the character of the masses has strong collateral support from respectable Gentile authority. Plato lived into the administration of Eubulus, when Athens was at the peak of its jazz-and-paper era, and he speaks of the Athenian masses with all Isaiah's fervency, even comparing them to a herd of ravenous wild beasts. Curiously, too, he applies Isaiah's own word remnant to the worthier portion of Athenian society; "there is but a very small remnant," he says, of those who possess a saving force of intellect and force of character — too small, preciously as to Judea, to be of any avail against the ignorant and vicious preponderance of the masses.

But Isaiah was a preacher and Plato a philosopher; and we tend to regard preachers and philosophers rather as passive observers of the drama of life than as active participants. Hence in a matter of this kind their judgment might be suspected of being a little uncompromising, a little acrid, or as the French say, saugrenu. We may therefore bring forward another witness who was preeminently a man of affairs, and whose judgment cannot lie under this suspicion. Marcus Aurelius was ruler of the greatest of empires, and in that capacity he not only had the Roman mass man under observation, but he had him on his hands 24 hours a day for 18 years. What he did not know about him was not worth knowing and what he thought of him is abundantly attested on almost every page of the little book of jottings which he scribbled offhand from day to day, and which he meant for no eye but his own ever to see.

This view of the masses is the one that we find prevailing at large among the ancient authorities whose writings have come down to us. In the 18th century, however, certain European philosophers spread the notion that the mass man, in his natural state, is not at all the kind of person that earlier authorities made him out to be, but on the contrary, that he is a worthy object of interest. His untowardness is the effect of environment, an effect for which "society" is somehow responsible. If only his environment permitted him to live according to his lights, he would undoubtedly show himself to be quite a fellow; and the best way to secure a more favorable environment for him would be to let him arrange it for himself. The French Revolution acted powerfully as a springboard for this idea, projecting its influence in all directions throughout Europe.

On this side of the ocean a whole new continent stood ready for a large-scale experiment with this theory. It afforded every conceivable resource whereby the masses might develop a civilization made in their own likeness and after their own image. There was no force of tradition to disturb them in their preponderance, or to check them in a thoroughgoing disparagement of the Remnant. Immense natural wealth, unquestioned predominance, virtual isolation, freedom from external interference and the fear of it, and, finally, a century and a half of time — such are the advantages which the mass man has had in bringing forth a civilization which should set the earlier preachers and philosophers at naught in their belief that nothing substantial can be expected from the masses, but only from the Remnant.

His success is unimpressive. On the evidence so far presented one must say, I think, that the mass man's conception of what life has to offer, and his choice of what to ask from life, seem now to be pretty well what they were in the times of Isaiah and Plato; and so too seem the catastrophic social conflicts and convulsions in which his views of life and his demands on life involve him. I do not wish to dwell on this, however, but merely to observe that the monstrously inflated importance of the masses has apparently put all thought of a possible mission to the Remnant out of the modern prophet's head. This is obviously quite as it should be, provided that the earlier preachers and philosophers were actually wrong, and that all final hope of the human race is actually centered in the masses. If, on the other hand, it should turn out that the Lord and Isaiah and Plato and Marcus Aurelius were right in their estimate of the relative social value of the masses and the Remnant, the case is somewhat different. Moreover, since with everything in their favor the masses have so far given such an extremely discouraging account of themselves, it would seem that the question at issue between these two bodies of opinion might most profitably be reopened.

III

But without following up this suggestion, I wish only, as I said, to remark the fact that as things now stand Isaiah's job seems rather to go begging. Everyone with a message nowadays is, like my venerable European friend, eager to take it to the masses. His first, last and only thought is of mass acceptance and mass approval. His great care is to put his doctrine in such shape as will capture the masses' attention and interest. This attitude towards the masses is so exclusive, so devout, that one is reminded of the troglodytic monster described by Plato, and the assiduous crowd at the entrance to its cave, trying obsequiously to placate it and win its favor, trying to interpret its inarticulate noises, trying to find out what it wants, and eagerly offering it all sorts of things that they think might strike its fancy.

The main trouble with all this is its reaction upon the mission itself. It necessitates an opportunist sophistication of one's doctrine, which profoundly alters its character and reduces it to a mere placebo. If, say, you are a preacher, you wish to attract as large a congregation as you can, which means an appeal to the masses; and this, in turn, means adapting the terms of your message to the order of intellect and character that the masses exhibit. If you are an educator, say with a college on your hands, you wish to get as many students as possible, and you whittle down your requirements accordingly. If a writer, you aim at getting many readers; if a publisher, many purchasers; if a philosopher, many disciples; if a reformer, many converts; if a musician, many auditors; and so on. But as we see on all sides, in the realization of these several desires, the prophetic message is so heavily adulterated with trivialities, in every instance, that its effect on the masses is merely to harden them in their sins. Meanwhile, the Remnant, aware of this adulteration and of the desires that prompt it, turn their backs on the prophet and will have nothing to do with him or his message.

Isaiah, on the other hand, worked under no such disabilities. He preached to the masses only in the sense that he preached publicly. Anyone who liked might listen; anyone who liked might pass by. He knew that the Remnant would listen; and knowing also that nothing was to be expected of the masses under any circumstances, he made no specific appeal to them, did not accommodate his message to their measure in any way, and did not care two straws whether they heeded it or not. As a modern publisher might put it, he was not worrying about circulation or about advertising. Hence, with all such obsessions quite out of the way, he was in a position to do his level best, without fear or favor, and answerable only to his august Boss.

If a prophet were not too particular about making money out of his mission or getting a dubious sort of notoriety out of it, the foregoing considerations would lead one to say that serving the Remnant looks like a good job. An assignment that you can really put your back into, and do your best without thinking about results, is a real job; whereas serving the masses is at best only half a job, considering the inexorable conditions that the masses impose upon their servants. They ask you to give them what they want, they insist upon it, and will take nothing else; and following their whims, their irrational changes of fancy, their hot and cold fits, is a tedious business, to say nothing of the fact that what they want at any time makes very little call on one's resources of prophesy. The Remnant, on the other hand, want only the best you have, whatever that may be. Give them that, and they are satisfied; you have nothing more to worry about. The prophet of the American masses must aim consciously at the lowest common denominator of intellect, taste, and character among 120,000,000 people; and this is a distressing task. The prophet of the Remnant, on the contrary, is in the enviable position of Papa Haydn in the household of Prince Esterhazy. All Haydn had to do was keep forking out the very best music he knew how to produce, knowing it would be understood and appreciated by those for whom he produced it, and caring not a button what anyone else thought of it — and that makes a good job.

In a sense, nevertheless, as I have said, it is not a rewarding job. If you can touch the fancy of the masses, and have the sagacity to keep always one jump ahead of their vagaries and vacillations, you can get good returns in money from serving the masses, and good returns also in a mouth-to-ear type of notoriety:

Digito monstrari et dicier, Hic est!

We all know innumerable politicians, journalists, dramatists, novelists and the like, who have done extremely well by themselves in these ways. Taking care of the Remnant, on the contrary, holds little promise of any such rewards. A prophet of the Remnant will not grow purse proud on the financial returns from his work, nor is it likely that he will get any great renown out of it. Isaiah's case was exceptional to this second rule, and there are others, but not many.

It may be thought, then, that while taking care of the Remnant is no doubt a good job, it is not an especially interesting job because it is as a rule so poorly paid. I have my doubts about this. There are other compensations to be got out of a job besides money and notoriety, and some of them seem substantial enough to be attractive. Many jobs which do not pay well are yet profoundly interesting, as, for instance, the job of research student in the sciences is said to be; and the job of looking after the Remnant seems to me, as I have surveyed it for many years from my seat in the grandstand, to be as interesting as any that can be found in the world.

IV

What chiefly makes it so, I think, is that in any given society the Remnant are always so largely an unknown quantity. You do not know, and will never know, more than two things about them. You can be sure of those — dead sure, as our phrase is — but you will never be able to make even a respectable guess at anything else. You do not know, and will never know, who the Remnant are, nor what they are doing or will do. Two things you do know, and no more: First, that they exist; second, that they will find you. Except for these two certainties, working for the Remnant means working in impenetrable darkness; and this, I should say, is just the condition calculated most effectively to pique the interest of any prophet who is properly gifted with the imagination, insight and intellectual curiosity necessary to a successful pursuit of his trade.

The fascination and the despair of the historian, as he looks back upon Isaiah's Jewry, upon Plato's Athens, or upon Rome of the Antonines, is the hope of discovering and laying bare the "substratum of right thinking and well doing" which he knows must have existed somewhere in those societies because no kind of collective life can possibly go on without it. He finds tantalizing intimations of it here and there in many places, as in the Greek Anthology, in the scrapbook of Aulus Gellius, in the poems of Ausonius, and in the brief and touching tribute, Bene merenti, bestowed upon the unknown occupants of Roman tombs. But these are vague and fragmentary; they lead him nowhere in his search for some kind of measure on this substratum, but merely testify to what he already knew a priori — that the substratum did somewhere exist. Where it was, how substantial it was, what its power of self-assertion and resistance was — of all this they tell him nothing.

Similarly, when the historian of 2,000 years hence, or 200 years, looks over the available testimony to the quality of our civilization and tries to get any kind of clear, competent evidence concerning the substratum of right thinking and well doing which he knows must have been here, he will have a devil of a time finding it. When he has assembled all he can and has made even a minimum allowance for speciousness, vagueness, and confusion of motive, he will sadly acknowledge that his net result is simply nothing. A Remnant were here, building a substratum like coral insects; so much he knows, but he will find nothing to put him on the track of who and where and how many they were and what their work was like.

Concerning all this, too, the prophet of the present knows precisely as much and as little as the historian of the future; and that, I repeat, is what makes his job seem to me so profoundly interesting. One of the most suggestive episodes recounted in the Bible is that of a prophet's attempt — the only attempt of the kind on the record, I believe — to count up the Remnant. Elijah had fled from persecution into the desert, where the Lord presently overhauled him and asked what he was doing so far away from his job.

He said that he was running away, not because he was a coward, but because all the Remnant had been killed off except himself. He had got away only by the skin of his teeth, and, he being now all the Remnant there was, if he were killed the True Faith would go flat. The Lord replied that he need not worry about that, for even without him the True Faith could probably manage to squeeze along somehow if it had to.

"And as for your figures on the Remnant," He said, "I don't mind telling you that there are 7,000 of them back there in Israel whom it seems you have not heard of, but you may take My word for it that there they are."

At that time, probably the population of Israel could not run to much more than a million or so; and a Remnant of 7,000 out of a million is a highly encouraging percentage for any prophet. With 7,000 of the boys on his side, there was no great reason for Elijah to feel lonesome; and incidentally, that would be something for the modern prophet of the Remnant to think of when he has a touch of the blues. But the main point is that if Elijah the Prophet could not make a closer guess on the number of the Remnant than he made when he missed it by 7,000, anyone else who tackled the problem would only waste his time.

The other certainty which the prophet of the Remnant may always have is that the Remnant will find him. He may rely on that with absolute assurance. They will find him without his doing anything about it; in fact, if he tries to do anything about it, he is pretty sure to put them off. He does not need to advertise for them nor resort to any schemes of publicity to get their attention. If he is a preacher or a public speaker, for example, he may be quite indifferent to going on show at receptions, getting his picture printed in the newspapers, or furnishing autobiographical material for publication on the side of "human interest." If a writer, he need not make a point of attending any pink teas, autographing books at wholesale, nor entering into any specious freemasonry with reviewers. All this and much more of the same order lies in the regular and necessary routine laid down for the prophet of the masses; it is, and must be, part of the great general technique of getting the mass man's ear — or as our vigorous and excellent publicist, Mr. H.L. Mencken, puts it, the technique of boob bumping. The prophet of the Remnant is not bound to this technique. He may be quite sure that the Remnant will make their own way to him without any adventitious aids; and not only so, but if they find him employing any such aids, as I said, it is ten to one that they will smell a rat in them and will sheer off.

The certainty that the Remnant will find him, however, leaves the prophet as much in the dark as ever, as helpless as ever in the matter of putting any estimate of any kind upon the Remnant; for, as appears in the case of Elijah, he remains ignorant of who they are that have found him or where they are or how many. They did not write in and tell him about it, after the manner of those who admire the vedettes of Hollywood, nor yet do they seek him out and attach themselves to his person. They are not that kind. They take his message much as drivers take the directions on a roadside signboard — that is, with very little thought about the signboard, beyond being gratefully glad that it happened to be there, but with every thought about the directions.

This impersonal attitude of the Remnant wonderfully enhances the interest of the imaginative prophet's job. Once in a while, just about often enough to keep his intellectual curiosity in good working order, he will quite accidentally come upon some distinct reflection of his own message in an unsuspected quarter. This enables him to entertain himself in his leisure moments with agreeable speculations about the course his message may have taken in reaching that particular quarter, and about what came of it after it got there. Most interesting of all are those instances, if one could only run them down (but one may always speculate about them), where the recipient himself no longer knows where nor when nor from whom he got the message — or even where, as sometimes happens, he has forgotten that he got it anywhere and imagines that it is all a self-sprung idea of his own.

Such instances as these are probably not infrequent, for, without presuming to enroll ourselves among the Remnant, we can all no doubt remember having found ourselves suddenly under the influence of an idea, the source of which we cannot possibly identify. "It came to us afterward," as we say; that is, we are aware of it only after it has shot up fullgrown in our minds, leaving us quite ignorant of how and when and by what agency it was planted there and left to germinate. It seems highly probable that the prophet's message often takes some such course with the Remnant.

If, for example, you are a writer or a speaker or a preacher, you put forth an idea which lodges in the Unbewußtsein of a casual member of the Remnant and sticks fast there. For some time it is inert; then it begins to fret and fester until presently it invades the man's conscious mind and, as one might say, corrupts it. Meanwhile, he has quite forgotten how he came by the idea in the first instance, and even perhaps thinks he has invented it; and in those circumstances, the most interesting thing of all is that you never know what the pressure of that idea will make him do.

For these reasons it appears to me that Isaiah's job is not only good but also extremely interesting; and especially so at the present time when nobody is doing it. If I were young and had the notion of embarking in the prophetical line, I would certainly take up this branch of the business; and therefore I have no hesitation about recommending it as a career for anyone in that position. It offers an open field, with no competition; our civilization so completely neglects and disallows the Remnant that anyone going in with an eye single to their service might pretty well count on getting all the trade there is

Even assuming that there is some social salvage to be screened out of the masses, even assuming that the testimony of history to their social value is a little too sweeping, that it depresses hopelessness a little too far, one must yet perceive, I think, that the masses have prophets enough and to spare. Even admitting that in the teeth of history that hope of the human race may not be quite exclusively centered in the Remnant, one must perceive that they have social value enough to entitle them to some measure of prophetic encouragement and consolation, and that our civilization allows them none whatever. Every prophetic voice is addressed to the masses, and to them alone; the voice of the pulpit, the voice of education, the voice of politics, of literature, drama, journalism — all these are directed towards the masses exclusively, and they marshal the masses in the way that they are going.

One might suggest, therefore, that aspiring prophetical talent may well turn to another field. Sat patriae Priamoque datum — whatever obligation of the kind may be due the masses is already monstrously overpaid. So long as the masses are taking up the tabernacle of Moloch and Chiun, their images, and following the star of their god Buncombe, they will have no lack of prophets to point the way that leadeth to the More Abundant Life; and hence a few of those who feel the prophetic afflatus might do better to apply themselves to serving the Remnant. It is a good job, an interesting job, much more interesting than serving the masses; and moreover it is the only job in our whole civilization, as far as I know, that offers a virgin field.

Author:

Albert Jay Nock

Albert Jay Nock (October 13, 1870–August 19, 1945) was an influential American libertarian author, educational theorist, and social critic of the early and middle twentieth century. Murray Rothbard was deeply influenced by him, and so was the whole generation of free market thinkers of the 1950s.

 

https://mises.org/library/isaiahs-job 

New York, Trump, Physical Freaks - By Jon Rappoport (Cowed by that slimy fraud Fauci!)

In 1928, Edward Bernays, the wretched father of modern propaganda, wrote: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…”

 

Take a deep breath. Ready? In today’s episode of the current president in the iron mask, and a 77-year-old physical freak, Biden, with a brain aneurysm (and twelve doctors) who won’t make it through the swearing-in ceremony if he’s elected, leaving the fate of the nation to one Kamala Harris; and a country smoking in ruins, sold out by Fauci to the Chinese—hold your horses, no self-respecting B studio will green-light this mess, it could never happen, this is America, this is the land of the rednecks with big guns ready to invade governors’ offices alongside coiffed soccer moms who see their kiddies quarantined and locked down in schools after several snot-bubble sneezing third graders test positive on a viral assay geared to inflate case numbers…

What do they have on President Trump? Is it his taxes? Something much worse? A night in a hotel room? I’m asking, because the US GDP has just dropped more than 30 percent this past quarter—the greatest collapse in US history. Bar none. And what is the president saying, what is he doing? Besides wearing a black mask. And talking about operation warp speed to develop a killer Gates vaccine. And wondering whether the presidential election should be postponed.

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Recently, I wrote five consecutive pieces directed at Trump, urging him to use the full power of his office to force open the economy of the country, come hell or high water, deploying the military or the DOJ—because the economic wreckage was that bad, and the danger line had been crossed months ago—and how much more evidence does the man need to convince himself this is an economic war being waged against The People, under the cover of a fake pandemic? Does he need Fauci to confess before a tribunal, Gates to admit he’s a Howdy Doody eugenicist on YouTube, the UN to issue a directive swearing allegiance to Mao and Stalin and Lenin and turning over its priceless piece of NYC real estate donated by Rockefeller to ANTIFA? Would that do it? Does he need raging mobs of dispossessed and evicted Americans attacking the White House and being gunned down by troops? Would that do it? Does he need a spinning silver Saucer landing in the Rose Garden with gray men stepping out holding a communique from the Milky Way Council of Elders stating America is finished? Would that be enough? Or does the president just want to wear a black mask and not find his ass with both hands?

In 1928, Edward Bernays, the wretched father of modern propaganda, wrote: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…”

It’s obvious that the global virus fakery called COVID depends on The Individual conceived as a social construct. He is now a carrier, infector, transmitter, vector of disease.

Even more important in this personality makeover, he is now a socially conscious member of the community of share and care and collective goo.

“Once we convince you that you’re an altruist down to your toes, we can manipulate you six ways from Sunday.”

That’s the synthetic part. You take a direct ideal—humans helping other humans—and you twist it into papier mache and plastic and cartoons and deflating politeness and robothood and automatic reflex and stimulus response. Everybody’s a good neighbor in Pleasantville. Everybody wants to “save the world.” There is a new gloss over society. Shiny. Oh so shiny.

 

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This operation takes decades to perform. It involves constant messaging on television, in classrooms—especially in classrooms—in the workplace, in homes, in churches.

And when the operation succeeds, guess what? The government can enlist untold numbers of people in self-immolating programs on behalf of Humanity. Pull the trigger, obtain compliance.

“Of course I’ll go along with the masks and lockdowns. Anything to serve a higher cause.”

Yes, indeed.

A new identity has been glued to The Individual. He is no longer just himself. He’s been made “better.”

Again, the trick is starting out with something genuine—and then twisting it into an artificial shape and imposing it on the mind.

Plotline: people were once strong, independent, resistant, and highly suspicious of all efforts to entrain them into cartoon versions of themselves. But after enough messaging, they became docile.

Thread: Once upon a time, pro athletes were highly difficult to control as “citizens.” But then came the concept of being role models. Which meant: behaving. Which meant doing good works in the community, for charity, for the less fortunate. Nothing wrong with good works. Certainly not. But hidden in the background, there was a successful effort to make these men over into obedient members inside society’s structure, willing to follow orders on behalf of the greater good. As defined by appointed anointed officials. There was a reversal in their minds—along with very large amounts of money….have to protect that cash…

Sports tough guys, billionaire team owners submit to COVID.

 

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I stand in awe of their cowardice.

Not one of them will grow a pair and say NO to COVID. They obey senseless and destructive government directives like abject weaklings. The whole lot of them.

As the three major sports leagues in America try to open their seasons, the athletes bend and bow before warnings: THE WHOLE YEAR COULD BE LOST IF ENOUGH PLAYERS TEST POSITIVE. That little worm Fauci actually controls their every move, their dollars, their careers, their teams, their fortunes. And they take it.

The team owners, rough and ready capitalists who do cutthroat business like pirates of old, meekly submit as well.

Yes, these sports heroes and their owners do exhibit all the signs of living in a state of hypnosis about “the pandemic.” But that’s too easy as a final answer. The athletes are supposed to have enormous reserves of adrenaline and courage. They play through pain. They endure injuries that would make ordinary civilians flee to Disability.

And yes, it’s about the money, just as it was about the money when the China-Nike scandal blew up and pro basketball stars kept their mouths shut about the horrific human rights abuses (mass murders) in China, in order to protect their shoe contracts. Sure. Money.

But again, it goes beyond that to basic courage and independence, which these players are showing NONE of.

No guts, no glory.

Some of the more famous athletes are acting as overt whores of the State. They make little video vignettes for propaganda television. They’re “at home with the family,” urging the public to go along with the hammer directives of the State lockdowns, which are destroying millions and millions of lives.

 

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The athletes and the owners and the coaches have fitted themselves into the weave of society at a level that is the ultimate choke.

Where is the team that says NO, WE WON’T GET TESTED, WE WON’T COOPERATE WITH CONTACT TRACING, WE’RE READY TO PLAY, WE’RE NOT BUYING THIS LOCKDOWN.

Where are the sons of bitches of days of yore who went out there and ran and hit and slid and tackled and blocked and fought and clawed for every advantage? These modern-day Sampsons have had haircuts. They’re bald.

I try to imagine what men like Ted Williams and John McGraw would have done and said in the face of a Fauci lockdown warning. It would have been a sight to behold.

There was a time when the men who built cars at the Ford factory—who staged a massive sit-down strike at their work benches and wrestled the right to unionize away from Henry Ford himself—these men would have rushed INTO work, no matter what, if told they had to stay at home and lock themselves in because of a GERM.

Now, like little lambs, the athletes’ unions fold up their tents and obey the governors’ edicts.

Take all the coaches of all the sports in the country—not one of them is saying NO to the lockdowns and the insane directives about distancing and masks. Not one coach among all these tough guys, most of whom are former players, is saying the whole vicious charade is insane and he’s not going to give in.

These athletes have been mind-controlled at a level that is astonishing, given how they used to think and live and play their sports. Their natural impulses to do good have been turned against them, through the magic of years and years of propaganda messaging.

—Now let’s turn from these bald Sampsons to the people of New York.

I was born there. One of my early memories was looking across 2nd Avenue at a candy store. This was 1943. The candy store no longer sold Fleer’s bubble gum—the best bubble gum—because the latex was needed for the War effort. But the rumor was, they peddled it under the counter for an exorbitant two cents a chunk, with the cartoon inside the wrapper.

When I was 22, after growing up in the suburbs, I moved back to NY and for several years lived among some of the smartest asymmetric people in the world. You could have an argument with the dumbest person in the city and it would be a smart argument. Everyone had opinions, and they could back them up. There was no such thing as political correctness, believe me. If you had uttered the phrase, no one would have known what you were talking about.

New York was a great city. The thing was, no one was proud to BE a New Yorker. That false synthetic layer of goo came much later. In the old days, there was no pose, no artificial front. People had ideas, they had talent, they had survival instincts.

The best jazz musicians in the world lived and played in New York. When a giant like Bud Powell was playing at Birdland, you could get in for a dollar and sit in a hard wooden chair and listen to him until two in the morning. A buck for the greatest pianist in the world.

And now, the city is wrecked and boarded up, and the people are locked in.

Out on the street, the few aimless glazed pedestrians wear masks. They’re not the same people. They’re replacements. Pods.

OVERNIGHT, the people of New York could throw off the whole phony pandemic, not only for themselves, but the world. They could come out of their apartments and go back to work, defying the petty little lunatics like Cuomo and De Blasio. They could open up their restaurants and bars and stack in the customers. They could start building again. They could open wide the libraries and museums and fill the concert halls. They could open up the little groceries to all comers. They could laugh in the face of the public health authorities.

And it would be OVER.

In 1962, that’s exactly what would have happened. And not for some cause. Not for the chance to do a little virtue signaling. Not for the sake of “being a New Yorker.” For survival. For continuing to live their lives, people would have shaken off that slimy fraud Fauci like a five-minute bad dream. A joke played by an idiot.

They would have looked at the screaming lockdown headlines in the newspapers on the corner stand and shrugged and gone on their way. “You’re telling me I can’t walk down the street and listen to John Coltrane at the Jazz Gallery on a summer night? You’re out of your mind.” And the Termini brothers, who owned the club, would have packed the place even tighter than usual, just to thumb their noses at the mayor and his con artists. They would have put in a call to their contact at Democratic Machine headquarters. And it would have been OVER.

No one would have obeyed. Independent scholars would have walked into the 42nd St. library, as they did every day, and gone to the reference desk and asked for manuscripts on ancient Roman law and the Walt Whitman papers and the early maps of the city. The quiet upstairs macrobiotic restaurant on 2nd Avenue (1962) would have served supper as usual. The Cedar Bar on University Place would have turned in another raucous night. The Irish bars would have been jammed. A chamber orchestra in Washington Square Park would have performed Vivaldi, with the sounds of traffic from 6th Avenue in the background. Miles Davis would have played at the Apollo. If Ravi Shankar was in town, he would have done a couple of stunning hours of ragas at the Asia Society and adjourned to an East Side apartment to continue on until dawn. No one and nothing would have obeyed a lockdown.

Pandemic? Virus? Get serious.

That New York…where is it? Who are all these one-dimensional super-politicized puny goofs of the city swearing allegiance to the medical fakers? Are they waiting for gold stars on the blackboard from the teacher?

In the old days, New York had DISDAIN. You didn’t get by with platitudes. You didn’t blithely mouth Left or Right and get away with it. The city was plugged into its own non-stop bullshit detector. What did you have to OFFER? Aimless blabbermouths were consigned to a special circle of Hell.

There was no political PROGRAM. Today’s “New Yorkers” would apparently be afraid to live in a landscape like that. They wouldn’t know which way to turn. They have a desperate need to become slaves to an IDEA. In this case, an idea about a virus.

In the 1960s, concealed by the Vietnam War, the city was undergoing a transformation into a cartoon of itself. That’s when the synthetic notion of “being a New Yorker”—based on nothing—started to take hold.

There were many reasons. Mind numbing leveling television. The raising of children to be targets of advertising and fetish objects in a consumer society. The new New Yorkers were taught that liberal politics were a necessary adjunct of their status. Liberal equaled big government. Messaging from every possible quarter was aimed at turning the people of the city into servants of share and care as defined by government…

Going to doctors and acquiring diagnoses of physical and mental conditions was starting to take off as a social trend. It was part of “good behavior” and “being good.” The medicines and the vaccines were, of course, toxic. Street drugs were also trending upward. Although no one wanted to admit it, because “being good for the greater good” was paramount, the city was taking in more immigrants than it could handle. There weren’t enough jobs. Desultory schools were steamrollered. Even skyscraper architecture was moving away from unique structures like the Chrysler and the Empire State, into functional steel and glass boxes. Signs of the minds. “We need more offices so more people can be good workers for good companies.”

With people dumbed down enough, they would fall for any con. Any piece of shiny gloss. And it was provided:

New York media (the greatest communication center in the world) covered the rise of New Money as if it were a perfumed cultural signal of a dawning epoch. By the 1970s, intellectuals in the city were reading hyped chronicles of the emerging $$ stars of Manhattan. Painters, fashioneers, stock speculators. And yes, Trump. The content of these celebs’ output was entirely irrelevant. All that mattered was that it was ringing up extraordinary sales in inflated dollars.

To view how thin and vulnerable new New York had become, and how brainless—when, in 2020, the fake pandemic hit, and lockdowns were announced, the population promptly folded, and went into mask and social distance mode without a whisper of protest.

In short order, the city was made over into abject wreckage, shuttered, obedient, loyal to a psychotic delusion.

In a silly song he recorded long after its internal demise, Frank Sinatra said New York was the city that never sleeps.

Now that’s all it does.

CODA: If the September 11th attacks had happened in 1962, there would have been no need for Billy Joel or the Yankees to rally “all New Yorkers.” The people of the city would have looked at the firemen and cops as human heroes risking everything for other humans. Period. That would have been enough. More than enough. That would have gone deeper into souls and minds. Where it counts.

—Entraining minds. The job of the super-State. Reworking independence into devotion to a synthetic pose of altruism.

But in this phony pandemic, it’s good to be BAD…

Reprinted with permission from Jon Rappoport’s blog.

The Best of Jon Rappoport

Jon Rappoport runs No More Fake News. The author of an explosive collection, The Matrix Revealed, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe.

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