THE COLUMN: State of Fear

Contrary to the Washington Post, democracy does not "die in darkness." It dies in chaos, brought on by fear, engendered by uncertainty and birthed of instability —an instability that, in the case of the United States of America, has been deliberately cultivated and fanned by the nation's political leadership and other "elite" big chiefs by a decades-long policy of institutional and moral destabilization. And on this Presidents Day, chaos is exactly where we're heading.

Consider the events just since the fall of 2020. An aged, senescent, longtime party hack and lifelong corruptocrat named Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., (look up how many Democrat presidents since Carter have been either "Junior" or "the II" or even "the III." Answer: all of them.) somehow won the presidency by drooling at his opponent while "election reform" did the rest.

At the behest of a World Health Organization corruptocrat/terrorist-adjacent operative named Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Biden immediately ramped up the induced panic over the Chinese bioweapon called Covid-19—typically Chinese in the ineptitude of its weaponization, but enough to frighten the children—and then unleashed yet another corruptocrat/homunculus named Anthony Fauci to oversee a reign of terror that effectively destroyed the private economies of the West along with the American Constitution. In fact, three years after the greatest hoax in human history first showed its ugly face, the Biden administration still won't lift its "state of emergency" until May 11: the death grip of an 80-year-old man who knows his time on this earth is shortening rapidly.

Continuing on the medical front, doctors and formerly respectable hospitals and universities have gone full Dr. Mengele on several issues, including their fascistic partnership with government and the mainstream media to continue to push an ineffective and dangerous "vaccine" to combat an illness with a survival rate of 99+%, even as evidence mounts of the tremendous damage the ill-conceived experimental gene therapy masquerading as a "cure" does to once-healthy people. Not to mention the recent study that showed that you'd have done just as well not to do anything all about Covid (a claim which would have gotten you banned from social media just a year ago), and let natural immunity takes its course.

In addition to that, of course, they're all in on the sexual mutilation of children as the movement that began with gay marriage has now morphed into "gender identity" and "gender-affirming care," spawned a host of new "pronouns" along with exotic piercings, drag-queen story hours in schools, and lectures about its needs on TikTok, itself demoralizing Chinese spyware from the cabinet of Dr. Caligari. All the social changes being rung by the Left at first went the collective name of "Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity"—fittingly, DIE. —until they figured out that some folks might get the right idea, and so an easy fix turned it into DEI. 

And don't even get me started about another insane consensus: that the U.S. should do "whatever it takes" to preserve the reign of the midget dictator of the Ukraine, corruptocrat/Biden paymaster Vladimir Zelensky, so that he might continue to pressure America and other real countries into war with Russia. The spectacle of Robinette Junior cavorting in Kiev while the residents of East Palestine, Ohio, bear the brunt of a government decision to deliberately poison their air and water should get him impeached in the House tomorrow. Or, as National Propaganda Radio daintily put it: "Crews in Ohio successfully release toxic chemicals from derailed tankers." 

Hey, wait a minute—I thought we were against that sort of air, ground, and water pollution! If we are "contributing to climate change" simply by exhaling, isn't this a little much? Shouldn't we just do as Greta does, and hold our breath until we turn blue? With time running out for the third rock from the sun, the oceans rising, the glaciers melting, and little children crying themselves to sleep at night over the certain prospect of their imminent demise, what else can we do but kill ourselves?

In short, we are in the middle of an engineered State of Fear, to use Michael Crichton's term as well as the title of his 2004 techno-thriller, which was the first major expose of the malignant charlatans behind the "climate change" movement. (It is of course purely coincidental that, almost alone among his thrillers, this book has never been made into a movie. The author died at the young age of 66 of cancer in 2008.)

One timely extract from his speech, which comes during a discussion of the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986:

But most troubling of all, according to the UN report in 2005, is that "the largest public health problem created by the accident" is the "damaging psychological impact [due] to a lack of accurate information…[manifesting] as negative self-assessments of health, belief in a shortened life expectancy, lack of initiative, and dependency on assistance from the state."

In other words, the greatest damage to the people of Chernobyl was caused by bad information. These people weren’t blighted by radiation so much as by terrifying but false information. We ought to ponder, for a minute, exactly what that implies. We demand strict controls on radiation because it is such a health hazard. But Chernobyl suggests that false information can be a health hazard as damaging as radiation. I am not saying radiation is not a threat. I am not saying Chernobyl was not a genuinely serious event. 

But thousands of Ukrainians who didn’t die were made invalids out of fear. They were told to be afraid. They were told they were going to die when they weren’t. They were told their children would be deformed when they weren’t. They were told they couldn’t have children when they could. They were authoritatively promised a future of cancer, deformities, pain and decay. It’s no wonder they responded as they did. In fact, we need to recognize that this kind of human response is well-documented. Authoritatively telling people they are going to die can in itself be fatal.

In short, they're trying to drive us crazy. Why? Control, of course. In the opinion of the very silly men who control the technocracy, there are too many of us, we have too much freedom, the Western world (whence come most all the technological and high-cultural achievements throughout human history) is too white and too racist, that borders and biological sex are "constructs," that the civilizational-corroding pursuit of "diversity" is, like "tolerance," a virtue not a weakness, and cultural homogeneity is to be shunned as a high-trust community in which you leave your doors unlocked at night is replaced by a low-trust community in which people shit in the streets. 

There's a name for the cause of all of this, and it is Critical Theory. I Invite you to learn all about it in my 2015 bestseller, The Devil's Pleasure Palace, which outlined the origins of the Frankfurt School and examined its most destructive poisoned gift to Western civilization. Once again they want to invent the New Soviet Man: ex nihilo from the toxic minds and souls of Rousseau and Marx, people who think the right thoughts and live approved lives, who tolerate the increasing strictures of the surveillance state with a peep, people who won't put up a fuss about the occasional herd cull, which is what Covid was meant to be. In other words: sheep. 

This means you, bub.

What a stroke of genius it was to persuade everyone on the planet to willingly carry around their own ankle bracelet in the form of an iPhone or other smart phone, broadcasting their whereabouts to all relevant authorities 24 hours a day. To get them to happily provide reams of personal data and pictures to Facebook in exchange for being turned into the product that the Zuckerverse serves up to advertisers and from which he mints his billions. To express your personal opinions on Twitter regarding just about every subject under the sun, sometimes hiding behind the false and cowardly security of an easily busted alias, and then being hauled up on "community" charges of wrongthink whenever the media-operated Zeitgeist changes course with the speed of a flock of birds. Orwell's Emmanuel Goldstein's got nothing on you. 

State of Fear? You ain't seen nothin' yet.

It's Not About Energy, It's About Power

One of the argument of the globalists is that the amount of available fossil fuel cannot generate the energy required to lift the Third World to the First. Hence, the First World must reduce its energy consumption such that both First and Third Worlds come to a median usage – bad for the First World, great for the Third World (for now) and perfect for the elites no longer having the global middle class competing with them for energy and prosperity.

This is what the "climate change" hoax is about – not CO2. The poor become richer, the middle becomes poorer, and the ruling class continues their accelerating use of energy, and accumulation of wealth and power at the expense of the other eight billion human beings on planet earth. In short: the future is put on indefinite hold and the global poor never reach their potential as human beings. If you want to look for “systemic racism,” you just found it.

This way to the Egress!

The elites demand control over our energy because power is all that genuinely interests them. They have essentially immeasurable and un-spendable wealth that no longer differentiates them from each other; their “mine’s bigger” metric now is power. Why else would they seek more, always more, rather than work toward a prosperous global community, unfettered energy concerns, a beneficiary regardless of race, creed or color?

Skip the arrogance of globalists who believe and, because energy has given them the power to do so, act to reduce global wealth as they grab an ever-larger share of prosperity and energy from the working and poor peoples of the world… and consider instead progress.

Not creating energy and limiting its use reduces, retards and reverses progress. This harms everyone alive, and everyone not yet born. How can one begin to measure the immorality of a billionaire demanding his or her transient energy usage to be so important as to deprive billions of human beings yet unborn the progress they ought to be able to have expected? For that is exactly what is being done with the “climate change” hoax.

But – “abundant energy.” How (on earth) do we arrive at that? In the same way that the founder of Greenpeace – not your basic anti-environmental person – has been proselytizing: nuclear.

It really is that simple.

Regardless of the fact that, until Chernobyl, the worst thing to happen to nuclear power was a ridiculous movie from Hollywood, that more people had died in Ted Kennedy’s car than in nuclear power accidents, and that the accident at Chernobyl – an outdated reactor with outdated safety mechanisms that were ignored by ill-trained techs – killed about 30 people outright and, perhaps led to the deaths of as many as 6,000, nuclear is far and away the safest, cleanest, and lowest creator of greenhouse gases. That 6,000 number? A tragedy, to be sure. But about 1.25 percent of the annual smoking deaths in America.

Some will object, noting the deaths-over-time of radiation sickness. The U.N. looked at the 20 years following the disaster, writing,

Among the residents of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine, there had been up to the year 2005 more than 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer reported in children and adolescents who were exposed at the time of the accident, and more cases can be expected during the next decades.

However, the committee adds:

Apart from this increase, there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure two decades after the accident. There is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality rates or in rates of non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure. The incidence of leukemia in the general population, one of the main concerns owing to the shorter time expected between exposure and its occurrence compared with solid cancers, does not appear to be elevated.

In contrast to that 6,000 number, in that same twenty-year span America experienced about 9.5 million smoking deaths, 1.1 million motor-vehicle deaths, and about 4 million deaths from medical mistakes. None of these produced one watt of energy to help the feed, clothe, house, educate or provide prosperity to the populace.

What about the costs of studying, industrializing, and deploying a green infrastructure? Since 1993, OMB has reported over $154 billion in funding for federal climate change activities, plus a half-a-billion dollars wasted in the Solyndra scandal that did nothing for energy.

Is this “green” infrastructure zero-greenhouse gas? No. Millions of tons of steel and concrete – that otherwise would not have been mined, transported, refined, transported, formed, transported, erected, and then taken down in twenty years, transported and dumped into a landfill, are the non-green costs of this boondoggle that, at the end of this 30-year period still has not produced one watt of base-load electricity. The kind of electricity the Davos clique needs to run their server farms to better surveil us.

Is nuclear a good investment? True, the expense of building current-generation nuclear plants is enormous. But,

This energy return on investment (EROI), the ratio of the energy delivered by a process to the energy used directly and indirectly in that process, is part of life-cycle analysis (LCA). …. The major published study on EROI, by Weissbach et al (2013, since the early editions of this paper) states: “The results show that nuclear, hydro, coal, and natural gas power systems (in this order) are one order of magnitude more effective than photovoltaics and wind power.”

“In this order…” Nuclear is at the top of the list in productivity of energy creation, higher than GHG-creating fossil fuels and ten times more efficient than “renewables” unable to consistently power a modern society.

But – safety!

Chernobyl, 1986

Unlike Chernobyl or Fukushima, when control mechanisms fail in a modern design the plant shuts down in a process called “passive safety,” successfully tested for over twenty years. A Three Mile Island or a Chernobyl or Fukushima simply cannot happen. Another safety issue in the global nuclear-waste discussion is that new systems can burn spent fuel rods and unused weapons-grade material, of which the First World has far too much laying around.

If we want to alleviate greenhouse gases, clean-up the environment, create the jobs energy creates (rather than destroy the jobs which green agendas destroy), reduce – or eliminate – the risk of weapons-grade fuel stored in various locations with varying degrees of security around the world, and ensure the continued fruits of liberty, invention, prosperity for future generations, one – and only one – answer exists: Nuclear.

If we chose to spend as much in nuclear reactor research as we throw-away on centuries-old “technology” of windmills, we all could move into a cleaner and more prosperous future in the liberty the Green elites and our own government seek to deny us.

'Progressivism' Versus Progress

A cry is going up across the world— in Cambridge England, in Germany, and above all in Canada. It’s the cry heard down the ages from the Common People, the Reasonable Person, the Over-burdened Taxpayer, the Forgotten Man, the Silent Majority, and whoever is feeling his shoes pinching and his belt tightening. That cry today is more puzzled and poignant than usual because it expresses bafflement as well as indignation.

That cry is: “What the hell’s going on?”

The note of inquiry is entirely justified. Last week some hooligans (in Newspeak: protesters) invaded Trinity College, Cambridge and dug up its famous lawn, carting off the soil and dumping it in Barclay’s Bank. They were activists from Extinction Rebellion, or XR, a group of Green extremists, who argue that since there is a “climate emergency” that will destroy humanity, civilization, and the world in about a decade, they will take direct action now to obstruct and punish companies and institutions that “profit from” the emergency.

Their justifications for this ecological vandalism—the Trinity lawn was itself a symbol of environmental stewardship over centuries—both vary and multiply.

In this case the protesters were angry both because Trinity has investments in “fossil fuel” companies and because it had sold land to the Port of Felixstowe which might be used for a car park. Half of Britain (and most of the world) depends on fossil fuels for their energy. Industry and individual car-owners depend on car parks in order to move goods and themselves around the country. All these activities are legal, and the government regulates them to ensure that, as far as possible, they don’t impose unwanted costs on third parties or the general public. XR’s vandalism, on the other hand, imposed quite serious costs on Trinity, Barclay’s, the people living in Cambridge, and not least the environment.

Two days later, while the public outrage was still fresh, the protesters added a new complaint: the university had sold land for developers to build housing. The project in question had been designed to be environmentally sustainable. The claim of sustainability did not save it, however, because it was to be sold at a unit price of £385,000 that could only be bought by wealthy people.

A quick check via Google shows that £385,000 is lower than the average price for a Cambridge house which is a little over £388,000. So, in principle, Extinction Rebellion is opposed to building sufficient housing in Cambridge for a rising population. If XR runs out of specific justifications for its vandalism, however, that won’t really handicap it. Any extended discussion of XR’s aims invariably climaxes with its call to end “capitalism” which in XR’s ideology is the cause of all environmental ills.

Yet even a brief glance at the history of the Soviet bloc would show that it had a far worse environmental record than any Western country. Two examples from its last days suggest the ecological consequences of replacing capitalism with “socialism”: the pollution of Lake Baikal so befouled with chemicals that it actually caught fire—and the breakdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor (recorded in a brilliant dramatized HBO miniseries.) Chernobyl’s breakdown scattered nuclear fallout over a large region but it was concealed for a time by a managerial bureaucracy anxious to protect the good name of Soviet nuclear power. Such risks inevitably grow when a Politburo which manages industry consists of the same people who appoint the regulators and dictate coverage in the media.

If it makes you happier, by all means call them “the People.”

 

Nevertheless, the environmental history of socialism provides a very weak argument for getting rid of capitalism. Yet, it is where most solutions to the climate emergency end up and, not coincidentally, where they begin too.

Why so?

XR’s multiplication of justifications for their hooliganism is explicable when you realize that their predictions of doom keep not happening. And when any particular doom doesn’t happen, the climate seer needs to invent another likely catastrophe to justify his activism. Dr. Madsen Pirie, founder of the Adam Smith Institute in London, gave a fairly comprehensive list of such predictions here.

Of course, Pirie was writing in 2014; the list will be longer now. But however often the predictions are falsified, the soothsayers never admit error. Like the religious lunatics who assemble on a mountain to witness the Apocalypse in this Peter Cook sketch, their conclusion is always: “Okay, next week, same time, same place. We must get a winner some time.”

This combination of hooliganism and hysteria is happening not only in Cambridge. Similar protests erupted recently in Germany where the local XR activists were trying to halt the building of a factory that will manufacture electric cars. (Such are the contradictions of climate emergency ideology.) Parts of London have been repeatedly brought to a halt by XR demonstrators who have glued themselves to streets and police vehicles in recent months to demand a change in government energy policy from its current enthusiasm for carbon reduction to monomaniacal passion on the topic. And as readers of The Pipeline know better than anyone, half of Canada has been effectively immobilized by protesters who block railroads and highways in a campaign of forceful obstruction to prevent a pipeline that has passed every legal, democratic, and indigenous test laid down by governments hostile to it.

All of these cases of activism, though described as “non-violent,” involve the use of force to prevent individuals and companies going about their lawful business or simply going about. This is worth pondering. If protesters leave others only a choice between using force of their own to overcome obstruction or abandoning their lawful business, it is false to describe the obstruction as non-violent. Obstruction is itself a kind of tame violence—which is why laws in every country prohibit it. And why the police are required by law to intervene, prevent the obstruction, and enable the general public to live their lives.

Which brings us to a curious aspect of these protests—namely, the passive (and sometimes active) cooperation of the police and governments with the protesters. In Cambridge the police discussed with XR protesters which roads should be closed; they were on hand to see that their obstructionism observed the agreement; and they stopped members of the general public from removing the obstacles erected (one of which forced an ambulance to turn back.) They took no action to prevent the digging up of the Trinity lawn. Nor does Trinity seem to have requested their intervention. And though they have since brought charges against people suspected of offenses in these cases, that was probably in reaction to the angry and widespread public criticism of their previous inaction.

Earlier that inaction had been defended by a police spokesman on the grounds that legislation gives police a duty to superintend political protests. That seems right. But commonsense suggests that it means they should regulate such protests rather than assist them to gain their objectives. Laws also require the police to enable ordinary citizens to go about their lawful business unhindered. Taking those two duties together, they require police to regulate protests in such a way as to enable citizens to go about their lawful business. If it comes to a choice between those two duties, helping members of the public should come ahead of enforcing the will of activists upon them.

In the case of Canada, an entire government has been wobbling nervously for more than a week in order to avoid enforcing public order on left-wing and environmentalist constituencies whose support it is reluctant to lose. Only when those defending the pipeline failed to surrender in a timely fashion did the Trudeau government move—still nervously—to require that the law and the democratic decision making process it supports be upheld. And as to that, we’ll see.

For the moment, these different but similar events illustrate the degree to which our political life throughout the West has been changed by the cultural conquest of our institutions by progressive ideas. Under progressive governments which sympathize with the protesters, of course, but also under conservative governments which fear to challenge a respectable orthodoxy even when it breaks the rules that are supposed to govern everyone.

That conquest, which had already taken over the HR departments of corporations, the media, and even the armed forces, has now spread to the police who seem to have imbibed the silliest sociological ideas of the last few decades. In these cases they apparently have decided that the police should, where any choice exists, side with the protesters against society—even when, as here, the protest movement is unusually “white”—against the respectable classes who bear the odium of keeping society’s rules, obeying the law, and seeking change only through democratic channels. It looks liberal, but it is really a form of anarchy. And an anarchic police force is not something to treat lightly. It is odd and perhaps sinister.

Which is why people say: “What the hell is going on?”