Teats on a Bull, but Lusting for Relevance

Reading Elizabeth Nickson’s gripping Pipeline article about the derring-dos of Celtic warriors who conquered the Canadian wastelands set me thinking. I bet they would have been mere wimps without politicians at the helm. Henry Ford would have been helpless without Theodore Roosevelt. James Watt, Thomas Edison, Guglielmo Marconi, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Steve Jobs, et al; you name them, vassals all in the thrall of the politicians of their day. Rodney Stark (in The Triumph of Christianity) attributes the rise of peerless western values, and the free and prosperous countries which those values nurtured, to Christianity; while glaringly neglecting the primary role of politicians. Remiss of him.

I’m being a touch ironic, to save you guessing. Any way you slice it, politicians are largely irrelevant to progress. At best they’re an adornment. And, most typically, an encumbrance. However, being full of ruthless ambition, even if empty of talent, they yearn to be center stage. There are exceptions. Calvin Coolidge “determined that the world would do better if he involved himself less,” according to Amity Shlaes (in The Forgotten Man). Unfortunately, self-effacement is uncommon. Thus, politicians remain ever alert for opportunities to trip the light fantastic. Wars can be a godsend. Look at Zelensky.

Covid too was an opportunity of a political lifetime. Milk it for all its worth was the raison d’etre of the political class. Go hang balance, perspective, reason, common sense, any questioning of the received wisdom of public health gurus and Dr Fauci. Even Trump succumbed to Fauci fandom at one point.

Con man extraordinaire.

It’s a safe bet even now that numerous political leaders secretly crave the return of the "halcyon days" of lockdowns, masks, and compulsory jabs. When then-N.Y. governor Andrew Cuomo could woo the adoring media daily and dream of the White House, all the while condemning elderly people to their deaths in nursing homes. When Dan Andrews, the premier of the Australian state of Victoria, could gain popular support for “saving us” while being a complete authoritarian thug. Alas, the virus lost its virulence. More correctly, its lack of virulence could no longer be disguised.

Never mind, all was not lost among the political class. Acting on "climate change" is an ever headline-giving gift; saving the world no less, while robbing people of reliable and affordable power. An even bigger lark than confected Covid hysteria.

To those of us who've managed to keep our sanity, it's hard to understand how everything is being turned on its head. Reliable and affordable power, without which none of the prosperity we enjoy would have been remotely possible, is now evil incarnate. So evil that those countries which have used it little over the past two-hundred and fifty years are entitled to reparations. According to the U.N., reparations in the order of $100 billion USD per year from willful rich countries. If only we’d stuck to horses and buggies and retained our pre-industrial integrity, the planet would be a safer and better place. Visit nomadic tribes in South Sudan for an idyllic taste or maybe visit remote Aboriginal settlements in Arnhem Land.

To be absolutely clear, on the basis of a tenuous and contested scientific proposition, whose alarmist predictions of warming and of extreme weather events have fallen foul of experience, we have set a course to tear the existing high-performance energy system to pieces and become substantially reliant on intermittent, low density energy from the wind and sun; full well knowing that this cannot power a modern economy. How to explain this madness?

Life is better in Arnhem Land.

I have speculated before on a paganised climate hysteria replacing Christianity and, more materially, on the allure of climate boondoggles to opportunists. Whatever the complete explanation, the desperate search for relevance on the part of politicians must, I think, bulk large. Consider the attention they get when trooping to the latest U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP).

Before COP 26 in Glasgow in November 2021, the political debate in Australia was all about whether the then prime minister Scott Morrison would commit to net-zero by 2050. He had the fate of Australia’s energy system for the next thirty years in his very hands; without having, by the way, the least idea of what to do with it.

Politicians, complicit in starting the climate scare, are now its principal promoters. Scaring the populace is not new. American writer H. L. Menken identified it way back in 1918.

Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

Scares give politicians relevance. They must know, at least in fleeting moments of self-reflection, that they have no usable skills or experience outside of the cloistered inbred political arena; or at least most don’t. Yet, in this climate age, they are dispensing earthly power and holding sway, with all eyes fixed upon them. Handing out billions to renewable-energy carpetbaggers; determining by how much businesses must cut their emissions; when coal power stations must shut down; the times when Mr. and Mrs. Smith can run their dishwasher, switch on their air conditioner, or plug in their new  electric car. A heady brew. Imagine going back to the days when it was only the economy, stupid. When anodyne economists hogged the headlines.

It's gonna take something big to disencumber politicians from "climate change"; otherwise we are headed for energy poverty and probably a Klaus Schwab wet dream – whatever perversion of capitalism and subversion of freedom that looks like. War with Russia or China could stop it. Neither is an inviting proposition. If there is another way out, it’s well hidden. Politics and big business are bound together in an unholy, mutually reinforcing alliance; the textbook definition of fascism. All for one and one for all, and losses all round.

Let the Great Covid Reckoning Begin

Readers of The Pipeline will be familiar with The Great Barrington Declaration, an early (October 2020) response to the Covid pandemic policies of various governments. Here are its conclusions:

The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.

Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals.

Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.

The authors of that declaration—stunningly correct in its conclusions and widely disparage by the totalitarian Left—have recently re-formed as the Norfolk Group with the mission of investigating Covid responses now widely seen as mistaken.

America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic failed on many levels of government and in many aspects. Certainly, deaths are unavoidable during a pandemic. However, too many U.S. policy makers concentrated efforts on ineffective or actively harmful and divisive measures such as school closures that generated enormous societal damage without significantly lowering COVID-19 mortality, while failing to protect high-risk Americans. As a result, Americans were hard hit both by the disease and by collateral damage generated by misguided pandemic strategies and decisions that ignored years of pandemic preparation guidance crafted by numerous public health agencies, nationally and internationally.

Written by experts in epidemiology, vaccine development, and biomedical statistics at leading medical institutions (Harvard, Oxford, Stanford), the Declaration was a statement of risk mitigation by scientists whose professional lives have been spent doing exactly that in the field of infectious disease. The Norfolk Group is making the reasonable point that, as we do for major catastrophes in every field, we must investigate what “went wrong” in our reaction to Covid. Nowhere in the literature, for example, were national lockdowns for respiratory diseases recommended prior to the outbreak of Covid-19. Even Anthony Fauci noted, in response to China’s lockdowns in early 2020, that, “…historically when you shut things down it doesn’t have a major effect.”

Unfortunately the Great Barrington recommendations were rejected out of hand, perhaps because they did not advance the objectives of the ruling classes. Consequently, thousands (millions?) of lives were ended unnecessarily, the economy was imperiled, suicide and drug overdose rates skyrocketed, and a generation of schoolchildren had their intellectual and social developments stunted by means of a useless masking and social distancing regime. The negative impacts of these policies are becoming increasingly clear, and will be with us for generations. It's time for some serious payback.

You asked for it.

Ultimately, the Centers for Disease Control begrudgingly and belatedly adopted many of the protocols: focus on the vulnerable, end the lockdowns, and allow those least at risk the freedom our government exists to protect. Masking is now recognized as ineffective (even by the New York Times!), school closures and social distancing of no value, and putting the world under house arrest did nothing to reduce the spread of the virus.

Had the authorities been interested in addressing the pandemic, the declaration at least would have been up for discussion when it was released. Instead, when it wasn't being ignored and its text censored, it was being ridiculed by our public health "authorities." This lack of transparency is among the most-criticized failures of the government's response to Covid. Transparency is at the heart of the mission of the Norfolk Group.

One must wonder whether, had the recommendations of the position paper been adopted, would the mandating of the vaccines that seem mainly to have led to illness, increased cases and deaths and suppressed immune systems, have been considered necessary? Had those not at a higher risk from Covid than they were from influenza been allowed to interact, would herd immunity (which mainstream health authorities are now admitting is superior) have occurred years ago, saving untold lives?

A Truth and Reconciliation Commission is urgently called for—minus the "reconciliation," of course. Fauci should be ignominiously stripped of his pensions, the hopelessly inept Rochelle Walensky of the CDC should be summarily fired. The state governors who willfully violated the First Amendment should be recalled (if not gone already) and disqualified from voting or ever holding public office again. But it will never happen.

Why? Because from the perspective of our cultural elites, nothing "went wrong" at all. You got what was coming to you. Now it's time to return the favor.

THE COLUMN: 'Vaccine Amnesty'? Not On Your Life

This really says it all: 

Nothing better encapsulates the Stalinist Left's ability to turn on a dime and argue the same set of facts both ways than its reaction to Covid. From the "scientifically" induced panic and hysteria over a fundamentally non-existent threat to the survival of humanity (something one would think the Left would welcome, and in fact they do and are even beginning to admit it) to a state of weaponized HIPPA was but a journey of two years. Beginning as an area of some mild public concern to a fascist boot stamping on a human face for what seemed like forever, the Hoax of the Century has become the Crime of the Century. Without the slightest bit of proof that Covid-19 was indeed a planetary menace, but merely the assertions and "projections" of hypocritical "scientists," cranky lunatics, and foaming totalitarians of every stripe, a near-worldwide lockdown was imposed upon an innocent and trusting populace.

Result: madness. The elderly, dying imprisoned and alone. Families sundered. Children tortured. The rise of an internal, informal Stasi, as neighbor turned against neighbor and ratted him out. It was insane, but even worse: it was evil. Cold, calculated evil. And yet they—and you know who you are, Justin Trudeau, Jacinda Ardern, Joe Biden, and the rest of you nasty international socialists—now have the unmitigated gall to beg for mercy:

LET’S DECLARE A PANDEMIC AMNESTY

In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks.  Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”

These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.

Dementia meets malevolence.

Baloney. Of course, they did. Not only did they know, but they enjoyed it, in a way leftist sadists like those at the The Atlantic and their ilk always do. In a way that international moguls like Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum did in his book, Covid-19: The Great Reset. In the same way that all genuine Enemies of the People do, formerly secretly and, increasingly, openly.

Unabashed and unashamed, they have the chutzpah to throw themselves on the temporary mercies of their victims, most of whom still haven't realized that the Rubicon has been crossed, and that there is no going back for the antagonists of Western civilization. So ignore their pleas to "focus on the future." Like Satan himself, they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit. By their masks shall ye continue to know them.

Here's another amoral monster, feigning a quasi-mea culpa:

We didn't know. We didn't understand. We were just following orders. So, of course, we brought the entire apparatus of the state down on your heads in the name of "safety." It was for your own good, comrade.

Don't forget that, literarily, every Aristotelian drama can be told from two viewpoints: that of the hero and that of his opponent. Narrative storytelling has evolved into a constant clash of good and evil: the protagonist wants X (a woman, glory, power, money), while his opponent it trying to frustrate his goals and desires. Turn the story around, have the antagonist become the narrator, and you have the same story but with an entirely different outcome. In the Leftist narrative, they are the good guys trying to save the world while we, the inheritors and defenders of Western civilization are the villains, stubbornly and bitterly clinging to the old ways and trying to frustrate "progress."

Leftists, being Marxists of either the economic or cultural variety, are great believers in what they call the "arc of history," a kind of quasi-religious determinism that posits "iron laws" of history that must, eventually, result in their triumph. (Any resemblance to the narrative of the Bible, in which all promises of military triumph and spiritual salvation are conveniently located in the unspecified future, is entirely not coincidental.) As I wrote in The Devil's Pleasure Palace: 

Progressives like to throw around the phrases “the arc of history” and “the wrong side of history.” Martin Luther King Jr., quoting the abolitionist Theodore Parker, formulated it this way: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But when you stop to think about this, it’s simply a wishful assertion with no particular historical evidence to back it up. Such sloganeering emerges naturally from the Hegelian-Marxist conception of capital-H History. The only teleology they can allow has to do with abstract, ostensibly “moral” pronouncements of a chimerical, ever-receding horizon of perfect “justice.” The moral universe must not and will not ever admit of amelioration in our lifetimes, or indeed any lifetimes, they insist. It is a Faustian quest, at once admirable and yet a fool’s errand; no means will ever suffice to achieve the end.

As these things so often do, the determination to control the world at its most vulnerable and gullible point of entry, health, necessitated a coverup—Twitter and Facebook, take a bow! Overnight, our long-cherished notions of free speech, free expression, the right to "question authority," and even religious observance were overruled by a handful of crackpots aided and abetted by the social-media companies, working in cahoots with governments and the oligarchs of the World Economic Forum to create the Brave New World of the Great Reset. "The viper tongue of totalitarianism is most often bathed in palliatives before it strikes," I wrote in the introduction to our book on the subject. So also does it beg for "tolerance" when it is at its weakest. 

Against the Great Reset

Fight back.

Now that, once again, they have been exposed for what and who they really are, this is most definitely not the moment to treat them with kindness and empathy which, like "tolerance," is a destructive impulse masquerading as a virtue). Forgiveness, amnesty? Not on your life. Even now, they are plotting their next moves: "climate change" lockdowns, restricted mobility, vaccine-or-carbon tax passports, electric cars, digital currency, the destruction of the fossil fuel industries, artificial scarcity, and misery shared by everybody except themselves. 

Look at the picture at the top of this page, and ask yourselves: if they would do this to your children, what won't they do? And what kind of man are you if you let them get away with it?

 

Bride of Pfizerstein

The “vaccine” fable took a turn recently with Pfizer’s "Director of R & D – Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning" boasting that Pfizer is mutating coronaviruses to create new mRNA “vaccines.” As an R&D Director he is aware of the dangers in doing so:

You have to be very controlled to make sure that this virus [COVID] that you mutate doesn’t create something that just goes everywhere. Which, I suspect, is the way that the virus started in Wuhan, to be honest. It makes no sense that this virus popped out of nowhere... Covid is going to be a cash cow for us for a while going forward. Like obviously.”

Pfizer, which recently paid the largest-ever fine, $2.3 billion, for false claims, is calling these claims "false."

How could these two things not have been co-designed? That's the purpose of the synergistic pharmacological R&D Pfizer is doing. When you're Frankensteining a virus and a "vaccine," doing both at once increases efficiencies, allowing one to insist work is being done “at the speed of science.”

Die, humanity, die.

Why would government agencies spend time increasing the lethality of viruses? In addition to a $31-trillion national debt, America has unfunded future social welfare (Medicare, Social Security) liabilities over $180 trillion. Years ago Christopher Buckley published a light-hearted look at the future-liability problem in Boomsday. In his novel, the government promises to pay $1,000,000 to the estate of Baby Boomers willing to commit suicide before age 75, to reduce that liability. Is Covid Boomsday?

China is the fastest-aging society on earth, with a fertility rate of 1.3. Italy has the fourth-lowest fertility among sovereign states – and the third-oldest population in the world. Who will pay for Italy’s and China’s aging populations? Which were the two countries hit hardest and first with Covid? Is the “vaccine” simply another weapon in the arsenal of globalists intent on reducing the global population to "sustainable" levels while ensuring that fewer people live to drain national treasuries as they age – a twofer? You decide.

Now that more injectees of the vax are dying from Covid than non-injectees, it seems those deciding against the “vaccine” have proved prescient.

Those aware that vaccines normally require over a decade of development and testing, that previous mRNA technology proved “difficult” (in some tests all the animals died), and that the creators had to be taken to court and forced not to hide their test results for the 75 years they demanded, were not surprised. Who hides success?

The Great Resetters next want to “vaccinate” our food supply (and ourselves) with toxic mRNA alchemy. Initially suggested with comments about putting mRNA into our salads, they’ve progressed to discussing mRNA concoctions in beef . Do we really want to take that risk?

Bye-Bye, Miss Kiwi Pie

Jacinda Ardern is leaving the political stage at the young age of 42. She has been prime minister of New Zealand since October 2017. A narrow victory in 2017 was followed by a landslide win in October 2020. It might seem strange now but her grossly overwrought response to Covid boosted her popularity. And, to be fair, also contributing to her popularity was her staunch and compassionate response to the awful killing of fifty-one people and the injuring of others at two mosques in Christchurch on 15 March 2019. Not surprising. Leaders tend to gather support if they are seen to handle a national tragedy well. Even George W. Bush was lauded for his response to 9/11.

She remains, of course, a paragon of feminine virtue to the international Woke brigade. That goes without saying. Opposing free speech at the U.N., sorry opposing “misinformation,” cemented her sainthood among globalists.

She says she wants to finally find the time to marry her fiancé, radio personality Clarke Gayford, with whom she has a young daughter, and no longer has “enough in the tank to do [the job] justice.” Most likely true. But it’s likely too that hers and her party’s sliding support in the polls played a part. As, no doubt, did the cognitive dissonance that besets socialists when their grand plans inevitably go wrong. They either resort to outright authoritarianism or, escape to a sanctuary.

Luckily for Kiwis, Ms. Ardern has chosen the escape route. Though it would be a mistake to think that Chris Hipkins, her replacement as prime minister, will be enlightened. As New Zealand's health overlord, he was complicit in outdoing the infamous Dan Andrews (premier of the Australian state of Victoria) in the extent and intensity of Covid lockdowns; he's also been serving as minister of education and police. Expect more of the same from him.  Big government. Green delusions. Sucking up to China. Have a look:

The centerpiece of Ms. Arden’s plans was to house the poor. Fittingly for the ex-president of the International Union of Socialist Youth, she put poverty and homelessness down to “a blatant failure of capitalism.” She promised in 2017 to build 100,000 new affordable houses for first-time home buyers over the decade ahead. KiwiBuild it is called. As I wrote of her plans in April 2018: “Nothing is more certain than that doses of socialism will make matters worse.” I’d like to claim credit for my prescience. But it comes under the category of the bleedingly obvious. Five years’ later only 1,366 homes had been built. Homelessness is worse than ever.

To boot, rising crime has become an election issue, inflation is up, interest rates are up, the economic outlook is unpromising, and more people are leaving the country than are coming in. Add to that a mindless undertaking to tax the emissions from both ends of cows and sheep in a country with the highest per capita population of sheep and second highest per capita of cattle. An odorous political misstep.

To put it gently, Ms Ardern has been less than successful. She leaves the country in worse shape than when she surprisingly ascended to power. Nevertheless, let’s wish her Godspeed in her future life – in which, hopefully, her naive socialist tendencies can do less harm.

The Media's Lying Lips

According to the U.K.’s Met Office, 2022 was the hottest year on record for the U.K. Take me back forty years or so and I would have taken this for gospel. The Met Office might get tomorrow’s weather wrong but you could rely on its expertise and objectivity when it came to reporting temperature records. A similar sentiment applied to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and, no doubt, to the National Weather Service in the U.S., and to other national weather bureaus. Recall, too, if your experience is anywhere near the same as mine, that numbers of mainstream newspapers and broadcasters provided the news in a more-or-less factual way; or, in any event, we thought that they did. And now?

Now, I don’t trust anything I read, hear or see. Sadly, I’m sorry to say, this does not so much reflect on the competence of various government and news organizations; but, instead, on their allegiance to the truth. I believe that they have no compunction about lying to bolster their agendas. This takes two forms. Burying inconvenient facts and presenting fiction as though it were fact. What’s going on?

You might say that lies have always infected the public square. True enough. But this caveat reminds me of passage from the novel No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. Sheriff Tom Bell contrasts the reported transgressions of schoolboys in the nineteen-thirties with those of his day (1980). It went from talking in class, chewing gum and running in the hallways to rape, arson, murder, drugs and suicide. He drolly reckons there’s a big difference between rapin' and murderin' people and chewin' gum. I reckon too that lying has taken a big uptick in its prevalence and audacity over recent decades.

The other day, I saw George Santos, the GOP’s congressman-elect for New York’s 3rd district being interviewed by Tulsi Gabbard on Fox News. He had lied egregiously about his background to voters. He squirmed and dissembled rather than admit it. Jason Whitlock, interviewed later, made (for me) the telling point that when God isn’t thought to be around, lying for advantage is no big deal. Various clips were shown of President Biden lying his head off. Simply making things up about his past life, without any apparent shame; bare-faced. This self-proclaimed Catholic clearly doesn’t believe God is listening. Neither today do most of the political, corporate and media class. That’s the world in which we live. It is tailor made for stoking climate change alarmism, as it for stoking Covid hysteria.

Last year, on Friday December 9, Australia recorded its lowest summer temperature on record. Minus 7⁰C in the Perisher Valley in the state of New South Wales. You had to dig out the info. I had to be told about it by a conservative friend. I asked others I know. None knew. Not surprising. It wasn’t emblazoned on the news. They’d all heard of a heat wave hitting the northern part of Australia. Most of my fellow churchgoers watch the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and read the Sydney Morning Herald. They definitely heard about the heatwave; which, of course, was associated with "climate change."

Suppressing inconvenient facts is one reason despots control the media. No need in the West. Enlightened, selective self-censorship dominates the media landscape. The role of the fourth estate to hold governments and the powerful to account is dead. Unless, that is, Donald Trump is in power; and no doubt (hopefully in 2025) Ron DeSantis. The fourth estate is now predominantly an arm of the leftist-green coalition of governments, activists and rent-seeking carpetbaggers. Selective censorship is complemented by the publication of artful misinformation.

Every extreme weather-related event – heatwaves, droughts, floods, cyclones, bushfires – is attributed to "climate change," even though those pushing this tendentious line must know that such events have invariably been equaled or exceeded in their intensity and frequency in the recorded past. Such information is readily available. They simply lie, and blatantly. In Australia, the lie stretches to the persistently-cultivated ludicrous proposition that the bush fires of 2019-20 and the recent floods are attributable to the previous government’s relative inaction on climate change. Yet, Australia could revert to prehistoric times tomorrow and those maniacally monitoring emissions wouldn’t notice.

The only disservice I can recall Ron DeSantis making to public debate was his assurance that there would be “no more noble lies” in the course of dealing with Covid. He was much, much too kind. The so-called noble lies were just plain old despicable lies. Lies about the effectiveness and safety of vaccines in the service of profits for Big Pharma and its lobbyists and hangers on. Lies which created the pretense that the disease put healthy children and people at material risk; and that useless lockdowns and masks were absolutely vital. All in the service of exerting power over populations and punishing dissidents. A practice run for the real plague of communists-cum-fascists who have infiltrated, permeated, saturated, wormed their way into governments, corporations and academia; and for their flag carrier, the World Economic Forum. Their lingua franca: newspeak.

Against the Great Reset

Now on sale.

I want to come back to Christianity. Do the climate and Covid liars feel comfortably lying because they don’t believe in God and therefore put their agenda above all ethical considerations. It must help. But is that all there is to it? A passage in Romans is apropos: Romans 1:28 (NASB version):

And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a depraved mind, to do those things that are not proper.

Don’t want to get too theistic. But, under what circumstances would those in positions of power and influence, who are intelligent, who have access to information, set out deliberately to deceive and appear not to have the least qualms about it? If a complete sociopathic absence of integrity is not a sign of abandonment by God, what exactly is it? How else can it be comprehended?

AGAINST THE GREAT RESET: The Great Reset and 'Stakeholderism'

For the next two weeks, The Pipeline is presenting the remaining excerpts from each of the essays contained in Against the Great Reset: 18 Theses Contra the New World Order, which was published on October 18 by Bombardier Books and distributed by Simon and Schuster, and available now at the links. 

 

Part V: THE PRACTICAL

Excerpt from "The Great Reset and 'Stakeholderism'," by Alberto Mingardi

Politics has always oscillated between Right and Left. After World War II, Western countries took many a step toward interventionism, regardless of warnings by a handful of intellectuals such as Friedrich Hayek and Michael Oakeshott. If the West went down the “road to serfdom,” that serfdom was bureaucratic, benevolent in its aims and generous with many. Yet in a few years, the consensus for growing interventionism was eroded, leading to the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. In recent years, at least since the financial crisis of 2007–2008, politics have moved in the opposite direction, aiming to put an end to whatever “neoliberal policies” (as they came to be known in the public debate) a country ever pursued.

Yet with the Covid-19 pandemic, this process accelerated. Rahm Emanuel’s advice regarding the usefulness of a good crisis had a profound impact on the Western ruling classes: in the U.S. (where unprecedented and previously unimaginable levels of public spending have been reached), in the European Union (where the alleged need for stimulus policies allowed for the first-ever emission of common debt), in the Western hemisphere (where Covid-19 inspired unimaginable restrictions on the freedom of movement of the citizens). Hence, right from its beginning, the Covid-19 pandemic has been considered something more and different than simply a health crisis, however profound and indeed dramatic it’s been. In the pandemic, governments found (and, perhaps, searched for) an opportunity to address other problems. The pandemic was soon compared to a war and it was assumed that after it, like after war, we should “rebuild.” But “rebuild differently.”

How differently? Intellectuals and experts soon realized that it was their business to answer the question. Though the world in 2019 could hardly be seen as a laissez-faire paradise, a common cry has been a call for different institutions to plan, more solidly, from the top down. Technological transitions of the sort that are now typically advocated for (from the “green” economy to central bank digital currencies) indeed presuppose experts picking a technology. Yet the prevailing view seems not to be content with only industrial policies. The very nature of the economic system should change, moving from “shareholder” to “stakeholder” capitalism.

One element that differentiates this approach from previous waves of interventionism is that it goes hand in hand with a genuine revision of the political vocabulary. Think of the very locution “the Great Reset,” which acquired currency thanks to Professor Klaus Schwab, the influential founder and president of the WEF. The very use of those words implied (a) that the world needed a rebooting after the pandemic; (b) that such a rebooting could be done; and (c) that it could come about thanks to a specific set of policies. The discussion over these two terms includes a considerable toying with words.

Against the Great Reset

Now on sale.

The Great Reset and the Stakeholder Model

Professor Klaus Schwab is a German-born economist that most people know as a highly successful entrepreneur: he is the founder and president of the WEF, a not-for-profit foundation headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. The WEF is most famous for its conferences, beginning with its annual Davos meeting, where business and political leaders reconvene to enjoy the company of some public intellectuals and ponder the world’s future. The WEF success put Davos on the map, and made the village—ten thousand in population, in the Swiss canton of Graubünden—a household name. In 2004, Samuel P. Huntington christened the participants “Davos men… a (then) new global elite… empowered by new notions of global connectedness.” They “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations.”

In media accounts and in public perception, “Davos men” were at times seen as advocates of neo-liberalism, of globalization, of unfettered competition. This was a common misconception: equating the interest of companies and its moneyed classes with deregulation and competition, which most of the time, they dread. In one way, this was also quite naïve, even disingenuous: “crony capitalism,” meaning a system in which private companies and the government collude, is the greenhouse of the global elites. In fact, the spirit of the Davos meeting was always to bring all “stakeholders” around the table.

In Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy that Works for Progress, People and the Planet (written with Peter Vanham), Schwab, who coined the locution “the Great Reset,” suggested that we should “use the post-Covid-19 recovery to enact stakeholder capitalism at home, and a more sustainable goal economic system all around the world.” Why? And, in particular, why now? One would expect the aftermath of Covid-19 to see us all busy in getting back to what used to be “normalcy.” The time for reform should come later, not now.

Klaus Schwab: "you will own nothing and be happy."

The idea of “stakeholderism” isn’t new. Schwab himself has been advocating some version of it since the 1970s and is happy to provide an account of his own intellectual enterprise as a struggle against Milton Friedman. An important body of literature grew up around the theme, particularly in the field of business economics and corporate governance. Why should stakeholder capitalism be important in the wake of the pandemic? Why should we all go for it, particularly now? Why has the discussion about it moved out of the circles of experts, to include wider sections of society?

In part, these discussions were rejuvenated by the anniversary of an article published by Milton Friedman in the New York Times Magazine. Fifty years later, in the midst of a pandemic that saw an enormous growth of public spending, Friedman’s piece seemed the ideal starting point to launch a discussion regarding the future of business in the world’s economies. But this would have been a more academic, less heated discussion. Instead, important public figures like Schwab emerged to say that “free markets, trade, and competition create so much wealth that in theory they could make everyone better off… But this is not the reality we’re living in today.”

Schwab is a capable intellectual entrepreneur and a sharp mind. If he believes that “there are reasons to believe a more inclusive and virtuous economic system is possible—and it could be just around the corner,” this means that for him, the rethinking of the capitalist system is not necessarily more urgent because of the pandemic crisis, but such “reimagining” becomes easier, more within reach thanks to the growing role that governments have taken on during the lockdowns and other “emergency” measures. In other words, let’s not let a good crisis go to waste...

Next week: an excerpt from "History under the Great Reset," by Jeremy Black. 

Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Gloving

Ten a.m. is not generally the time I find myself at a bar but I’m being photographed at The Kensington for having won the World Economic Forum’s New Champions Award. I’m actually quite happy about being featured… anything to take the focus off the disastrous United Nations Climate Change Conference (Cop27). It was bad enough that the media made a big deal out of the 100 private jets, but beyond that it showed that we did not progress commitments, or show evidence of improvement. So when they suggested shooting me in Stella McCartney, Armani, and Fendi, I was all in.

I also didn’t mind the early hour as the Kensington is just three miles from my childhood home in St John’s Wood, where I’ve been staying off-and-on since lockdowns. 

We’re on a short break because I guess it’s what one does post-Covid and the wardrobe mistress needed to explain to the photographer why my gloves don’t fit and why she can’t get another pair. So I made a call to my assistant—no answer. Then I rang my father who told me perfection is the enemy of good but agreed to fetch a pair of gloves from mummy’s wardrobe.

Stella, saving the world one glove at a time.

‘Are you sure?’ Daddy asked.

‘Yes of course I’m sure!’ I said. ‘The ones they gave me could fit The Hulk’.

‘No, I just meant are you sure, because my coming to you adds to the carbon footprint of your eco-award’.

UGH! ‘See you soon,’ I said, and rang off. 

Just then my assistant strolled in, latte in hand and apologising for not being available all day yesterday. I hadn’t even known she was out-of-pocket yesterday too, but now that I think about it she was supposed to prepare some climate numbers for my interview. Instead she wanted me to go over some appropriate gifts for my Christmas swag bag. ‘Socks that Plant Trees' was the first suggestion. I nixed it because they actually don’t plant trees — though purportedly someone somewhere, is more likely to be able to plant trees since he bought these socks. Hard pass.

Next up Bees Wrap Food Wrap—it's waxed paper that I have to wash (without soap) and re-use—no thanks. Next up ‘Grow Cocktails’. How could that be bad? Except it's just an egg carton that grows herbs. And not even juniper berries. Then there were robes made from repurposed saris. Double hard pass. First I don’t accept there are that many saris waiting to be repurposed and when I look back to a week in the life of a sari—no thank you. This wasn’t working, but just then Daddy had arrived with several of Judith’s gloves—and they fit—just like a glove.

The 19-something male model they hired to pose behind me had just arrived in London and all but admitted he was working without a visa. Maybe he thought I’d see this as a reason to help him along but I needed to think about the upcoming interview. This was, after all, about recognising my contribution to the planet. Daddy stuck around to run questions with me…

‘So…The Africa Cop…’ He began. 

‘Well, technically it was slated as “Cop27” but yes, the focus was Africa…’ I said.

‘Right, so Africa… to highlight innovation? Progress?’

‘NO Daddy, because Africa needs $2.4 trillion due to its vulnerability to climate change’.

‘…And they are more vulnerable because they lack resources and manpower?’

‘No…okay, admittedly they are a mess, and they don’t do anything well, but if we want them to be better caretakers of the planet we have to pay for it’.

What "white savior" complex?

‘OK so we have to pay. And in order to find this $2.4 trillion we have to be more productive—but somehow productive in a way that doesn’t also use more energy or resources? Did I get that right?’ he asked.

‘Well, yes’. I said, ‘But otherwise we can just give our extra money—money we already have!’ 

‘I see. Our extra money. The money we don't really need. So your plan is we make ourselves poorer so that the most resource-abundant continent on earth can manage their resources the way we tell them to’.

UGH! ’Yes, if you have to put it that way… YES!’

Daddy got up, gave me a kiss on the cheek and said, ‘Well, you look lovely, kitten, and I’ve brought you three pair from which to choose… kidskin, silk, and poly-satin. This way you can choose whom to offend’.

That’s Daddy. But I was grateful for the delivery, and honestly the silk ones were divine. I doubted I could find these in any store today.

My assistant was back with another set of options. Reusable paper towels? No on every level. Plant your pencil? A pencil that when finished is pushed into the ground and actually contains seeds. No. Reusable make-up remover pads… I could just see me leaving them in every hotel bin… NO.

‘What about a counter-top trash composter?’ she asked.

‘NO! And NO!’ I said. ‘I’ve had very bad luck with composters as gifts’. I told her the story, briefly reliving my previous embarrassment.

‘But this one is a living composter…you put in food scraps, and worms and…’

‘WORMS? Worms on a kitchen counter?' I shrieked. ‘NO!’

Readily available!

I sent her to chat with junior James Bond and opened my laptop to look for gifts. I landed on the Citizen Eco Watch. PERFECTION! I quickly sent a link to my father and rang to ask his opinion.

‘Well?? It’s eco. Right?’ I asked.

‘It uses FEWER batteries, Jennifer, it runs on light sources, but a back-up battery will still need to be changed about every ten years’.

‘But less is more, right? I asked. 

‘But why not a self-winding watch? No battery at all?’

‘Cause it doen’t SAY eco-watch. This one is named "The Citizen Eco Watch"—perception is everything!’

He had no argument. And as he very well knows… perfection is the enemy of good.

Bishop Klaus and the Reset Religion

Under the mastery of a global elite, the World Economic Forum is out to remake the world. To this end, as I have previously noted, its 1973 Manifesto is a tad less ambitious than is its 2020 Manifesto. No doubt any future manifesto will be bolder still. Unnerving? Indeed. For context, though not for peace of mind, turn to a quite different manifesto: A Christian Manifesto by Francis Schaeffer. I doubt Schaeffer had Klaus Schwab in mind when writing his manifesto, first published in 1981. The Great Reset had not come of age. On the other hand, as a matter of pure speculation, I wonder whether perhaps Schwab has read Schaeffer.

As humanism supplants Christianity, Shaeffer writes, the freedoms and prosperity which Western civilization owes to Christianity are taken for granted. True enough. Among many in the increasingly secular West you’ll find a hangover of lots of Christian moral precepts, with little accompanying insight into whence they came. Needless to say, anchorless precepts are disposable as circumstances dictate. Then it’s a lottery as to what comes next.

Humanism can create any number of moral orders. It’s a bootstraps creed, susceptible to the politics of the day. Things can go badly wrong. We don’t have to go to the brutal excesses of history; say, to the French revolutionary Reign of Terror or the Holocaust or Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Not comparing, but how about the wanton killing of millions of healthy unborn babies or the (demonic) chemical and physical maiming of mentally-disturbed teenagers, confused about their sexual identity. Evidently, today’s humanist moral order finds this not just acceptable but righteous. Humanism is truly a flexible creed. Who knows where it will land tomorrow.

What would Erasmus do?

Shaeffer “guesses” that whatever flavor it takes, it will likely end in some form of “elite authoritarianism.” He is eerily prescient about the form such authoritarianism will take. He points particularly to the emergence of what he calls a “technocratic elite.” And approvingly quotes American physicist and science historian Gerard Holton.

More and more frequently, major decisions that profoundly affect our daily lives have a large scientific or technological content…if the laymen cannot participate in decision making, he will have to turn himself over, essentially blind, to a hermetic elite, Margaret Mead wrote about scientists elevated to the status of priests… now there’s a name for this elevation… From the point of view of John Locke, the name is slavery.

And haven’t we effectively become vassals, if not already slaves? When it’s claimed that ninety-seven percent of climate scientists say that the science is settled— a science we can’t begin to understand—then what choice do we have but to fall into line? Sure, it’s not nearly ninety-seven percent, but it is the received wisdom. And it has the unqualified support of almost all politicians; all media hacks; the majority of corporate big-wigs; and, to boot, activists of pedigree aplenty: Hollywood stars; King Charles; David Attenborough; Al Gore; Bill Gates; Klaus Schwab; Greta Thunberg; and many others. Ask your next-door neighbors about the cumulative greenhouse effect of CO2 and of its radiative forcing. Blank look. Ask them whether climate change is a serious even existential problem. Chances are they’ll be onboard.

Among laymen, it’s only an incorrigible few (of us) "deniers" who have the temerity to question "the science." The rest simply follow the script. And so be it; if that means replacing reliable and affordable sources of energy with intermittent and costly forms of energy; and, soon -- wait for it -- having smart meters compulsorily installed in our homes, giving the authorities the ability to monitor our power usage and cut us off at will. I’d say that degree of servility is close enough to slavery. However, it needed another group of scientists, in this case medical scientists, to close out the game.

A disease threatening only a relatively small cohort—those (generally aged) with multiple serious co-morbidities—became universally deadly in the mouths of public health experts. In turn, this allowed authorities to close businesses; to lock us in our homes; to prevent us visiting our sick or dying relatives; to prevent us attending church services; to pepper spray, fire rubber bullets and arrest us if we dared protest; to make us wear face masks; and to make us accept experimental vaccinations, by otherwise preventing us from travelling, participating in civil society, and from working. So extraordinary was it that it’s hard to believe it happened. But happen it did.

Hail, victory!

Would Shaeffer have been incredulous? Perhaps not. He foresaw tyrannous outcomes when societies turn away from God-given inalienable rights and adopt bespoke humanistic values in their stead.

"Scientists" called the tune for your neighbors. They aren't epidemiologists. Each day medical experts were rolled out to present the grim news of hospitalizations, deaths, and the virulent, ever-mutating, "deadly" virus. Each day they were told that disobeying senseless diktats would result in hospitals being overrun; would put themselves at grave risk and, cruelly, their friends and neighbors and their aging parents or grandparents.

The lesson that Schwab and his elite Davos co-conspirators have learnt, if they were in any doubt, is that science can be wielded to push common people around and control them. And they need to be controlled for their own good. Moreover, if indeed the elites (or some of them) have read Shaeffer then they know that the absence of Christianity serves their cause. The more humanism dominates societies, the easier it will be to impose a set of values and moral code to suit the political agenda of liege lords. Serfdom revisited. Saving the planet and warding off diseases will require fealty.

Will science play ball? These days science is for sale. Research dollars call the tune. The billions upon billions spent on researching the state of the Great Barrier Reef is an exemplar. The Reef is in rude good health. That won’t do. That won’t bring in the money. It’s threatened by climate change? Got it in one.

Your Papers Please, Comrade

We are seeing the beginning of the end - or is it the end of the beginning? – of the CCP (the Climate Covid Party) "emergencies." For those who may have doubted these were linked, I give you the G20 summit. It seems the G have decided that Covid digital passports are to be required to move freely about the planet. For those who wondered what Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab were doing speaking this week to a meeting of national leadership: now we know.

Because the G20, with the exception of China, are at least putative democracies, an objective observer would assume this is the result of what the people wanted. One would be wrong. No one voted for or against this; it's never been presented for the approval of the representative governments, or citizens or subjects of the G20, or the people of any other nations.

We know these passports have nothing to do with the spread of this manufactured virus. Just last month BigPharma testified to the European Parliament that these injections were never tested for their ability to repress or stop the transmission of Covid-19. If an injection won't stop transmission, which has been the stance of the CDC for months, the purpose of getting a "vaccine" to travel, would be... what, exactly?

Yup.

At the same time as G20 is COP27, the annual boondoggle of those so worried about the climate that they all take private jets from around the planet (spewing millions of tons of "greenhouse gasses" along the way) to consume vast quantities of exotic foods (flown in from around the planet) cooked (with GHG) and served to them as they meet in air-conditioned ballrooms to discuss how we, the workers and families of the world—the productive classes—are destroying the planet with our transportation, stoves, and HVAC.

As we've discussed here before, this virus was most likely man-made. No trace has been found of it or a progenitor in nature in well over two years of investigation or the testing of over 50,000 animal subjects. Once Dr. Fauci admitted the “possibility” of its creation in a lab and covering emails began showing up, that jig was up. The "vaccine" was created and patented ten days after the first sequence of the Covid genome. This simply is not possible unless both were concurrently designed and manufactured. And, yes, the "vaccine" was designed; it is not from an inactivated virus, as all other,genuine vaccines have been in medical history. It's an artificially-created DNA map.

Various studies based on governmental databases of adverse events show that these "vaccines" may have killed as many as 600,000 Americans, and perhaps, millions, worldwide. While these numbers may or may not be high, the numbers of adverse events are so high that many countries are recommending against vaccinating people under 30, and Big Pharma, belatedly, has decided to investigate whether their injections are causing myocarditis, a term in common use today of which few of us were aware in the Before Times.

Which brings us to Klaus Schwab. Herr Schwab, of course, leads his WEF creation, a cohort believing that the global population must be reduced to under one billion souls from the current eight-plus billion. “We just don’t need the vast majority of the population,” in the words of WEF Advisor/Historian Yuval Noah Harari, because most of us, evidently, are “useless eaters.” An invented virus that kills millions, an injection killing millions more and inducing infertility to reduce future populations are but two steps on the road to the goal of our elites, those running the Covid & Climate scams.

[The accuracy of the documentary linked above, which has been of course banned by YouTube, has been questioned by the usual suspects in academe, the medical establishment, and the media. A sample:

Members of the anti-vaccination movement and of its media arm excel at portraying themselves as “those who care.” The rest of us—scientists, doctors, politicians, journalists—are represented as either apathetic or simply evil. The latest “documentary” to emerge from this movement, Died Suddenly, is an exercise in reframing compassion. It also represents the apogee of conspiritualist ideas, where grand conspiracy theories surrounding vaccines are painted on a canvas so large, they involve a Biblical war between the forces of absolute good and those of pure evil.

Who are portrayed as ringing the alarm for Armageddon in Died Suddenly? Embalmers... The problem is that embalmers and funeral directors are not medical professionals. Don’t take it from me, but from the National Funeral Directors Association in the United States, whose representative told me as much, and from Ben Schmidt, a funeral director and embalmer with a bachelor’s degree in natural science. Schmidt wrote a detailed explanation of what is happening here. Clots can easily form after death, as the liquid and solid parts of blood separate and as formaldehyde and calcium-containing water used in the embalming process catalyze clotting. Refrigeration can also be to blame, especially when a rapid influx of bodies due to COVID necessitates longer stays in the cooler as embalmers make their way through their backlog.

[Watch it and decide for yourself.]

Another step down the road to perdition is digital "money." If I must have a digital passport to travel, why not just digitize my money as an added convenience? And since Schwab has told us we "all" will be chipped one day, coding "our" money and vaccine passport into an injected chip that automatically access “our” “money” at the Fed (banks will be useless and so closed; think of the taxing advantages!) and provides our "vaccination" status to a digital reader, perhaps even as we just walk past a sensor entering a store or airport or transit station, would be convenient, no? Hello, Bill Gates.

President Biden has decreed via executive order, without presentation to representative government or to the citizens of the United States (perhaps it is now "subjects") for our approval, that the Federal Reserve explore the creation of a “Central Bank Digital Currency,” “CBDC,” or digital “dollar,” and MIT is working it out.

President Biden will sign an Executive Order outlining the first ever, whole-of-government approach to addressing the risks and harnessing the potential benefits of digital assets and their underlying technology. The Order lays out a national policy for digital assets across six key priorities: consumer and investor protection; financial stability; illicit finance; U.S. leadership in the global financial system and economic competitiveness; financial inclusion; and responsible innovation. Specifically, the Executive Order calls for measures to:

  • Protect U.S. Consumers, Investors, and Businesses by directing the Department of the Treasury and other agency partners to assess and develop policy recommendations to address the implications of the growing digital asset sector and changes in financial markets for consumers, investors, businesses, and equitable economic growth. The Order also encourages regulators to ensure sufficient oversight and safeguard against any systemic financial risks posed by digital assets.
  • Protect U.S. and Global Financial Stability and Mitigate Systemic Risk by encouraging the Financial Stability Oversight Council to identify and mitigate economy-wide (i.e., systemic) financial risks posed by digital assets and to develop appropriate policy recommendations to address any regulatory gaps.
  • Mitigate the Illicit Finance and National Security Risks Posed by the Illicit Use of Digital Assets by directing an unprecedented focus of coordinated action across all relevant U.S. Government agencies to mitigate these risks. It also directs agencies to work with our allies and partners to ensure international frameworks, capabilities, and partnerships are aligned and responsive to risks.
  • Promote U.S. Leadership in Technology and Economic Competitiveness to Reinforce U.S. Leadership in the Global Financial System by directing the Department of Commerce to work across the U.S. Government in establishing a framework to drive U.S. competitiveness and leadership in, and leveraging of digital asset technologies. This framework will serve as a foundation for agencies and integrate this as a priority into their policy, research and development, and operational approaches to digital assets.
  • Promote Equitable Access to Safe and Affordable Financial Services by affirming the critical need for safe, affordable, and accessible financial services as a U.S. national interest that must inform our approach to digital asset innovation, including disparate impact risk. Such safe access is especially important for communities that have long had insufficient access to financial services.  The Secretary of the Treasury, working with all relevant agencies, will produce a report on the future of money and payment systems, to include implications for economic growth, financial growth and inclusion, national security, and the extent to which technological innovation may influence that future.
  • Support Technological Advances and Ensure Responsible Development and Use of Digital Assets by directing the U.S. Government to take concrete steps to study and support technological advances in the responsible development, design, and implementation of digital asset systems while prioritizing privacy, security, combating illicit exploitation, and reducing negative climate impacts.
  • Explore a U.S. Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) by placing urgency on research and development of a potential United States CBDC, should issuance be deemed in the national interest. The Order directs the U.S. Government to assess the technological infrastructure and capacity needs for a potential U.S. CBDC in a manner that protects Americans’ interests. The Order also encourages the Federal Reserve to continue its research, development, and assessment efforts for a U.S. CBDC, including development of a plan for broader U.S. Government action in support of their work. This effort prioritizes U.S. participation in multi-country experimentation, and ensures U.S. leadership internationally to promote CBDC development that is consistent with U.S. priorities and democratic values.

Which now brings the climate scam into the discussion. What has digital money to do with climate? Lots.

If I've consumed my "climate allotment" of gasoline this month I could be prevented from using “my” digital “money,” to fill my tank. You didn't think a "climate lockdown" would be voluntary, did you? The jet set wouldn't trust us to stay home, even after so many millions of us voluntarily did so for "two weeks to flatten the curve," wore one mask or two, and agitated against, and sometimes attacked, our fellow human beings for not going along with the crowd.

So you were on your way to Yellowstone and now neither can continue nor return home with the kids? Sorry! Buy a steak for supper tonight? But you had one two weeks ago! Your commute uses so much gasoline you'll need to move to an apartment near a mass transit station in the inner city? It's for the common good. You run a feedlot and can't buy feed for your hundreds of heads of cattle? Oh, well. You need to restock your ammunition? LOL.

They're coming for us, too. Once we all are chipped and our travel and spending controlled, the “emergencies” will be over. None of this has ever been about a virus or the weather. It's always been about destroying the middle class, our representative governments, and the liberty have convinced ourselves we have. We don't.

"Papers, please!" to travel our world, and needing the government's permission to spend our own money—the fruits of our own labor—are but the end of the beginning of global totalitarianism. These are why we are, and why you should be, Against the Great Reset.