This Is Not A Drill - Part 2

The hard part

(This is the second part of “This is Not A Drill”. I highly recommend reading that piece first!)

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At the end of the last article, I promised to share some ideas about expanding our new community into ‘meatspace’, and that WILL be the bulk of this article. However, before we get there I want to touch on just a couple more real-life examples of how government doesn’t give a fuck about you.

Back in July, Joe Biden went to Saudi Arabia to discuss our worsening energy price situation and request more oil production. He was, of course, disappointed.

But there’s more to the story. After OPEC recently announced it was cutting oil production, Biden threatened ‘consequences’ to this decision. In response, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia threw Biden all the way under the bus by revealing that Biden had asked it to hold off on the production cut announcement until after the US midterms. (This story by itself deserves multiple articles — the fact it’s reduced to a simple link is informative of the speed of the current political landscape)

Biden knew this production cut was coming. He knew that Americans were going to have to react to this shift in energy production. But just like the Soviet ‘leaders’ demanding drawn shades on trains, he acted based on political goals and not based on the well-being of the people. Now Biden is threatening Saudi Arabia instead of admitting that his domestic energy policy is terrible. After all, if there’s anything we need right now it’s more enemies on the world stage!

Of course, energy prices are a big part of price inflation, because it takes energy to produce and ship goods across the world! (Big if true.) Combine a terrible monetary policy with a terrible energy policy and you’ve got another way government doesn’t give a fuck about you: out-of-control inflation.

I talk a lot about (and some might say yammer on about) inflation, but it is government’s most reliable method of attack: devaluing the value of your labor and savings via devaluing the dollar. (As an aside, check out how some media companies continue to cling to the narrative and run cover for the Biden administration:)

Uh….I guess that’s one way to say it!

Yet government continues to print up trillions of dollars and rain it down on the politically connected, because government doesn’t give a fuck about you.

Let’s shift gears to the cancelation of political enemies for a moment. Coming on the heels of the brain-busting $985M Alex Jones decision and potential Twitter-buyer Elon Musk being under federal investigation, Kanye West is getting de-banked. (At least he’s allowed to keep his money!)

As an added bonus to the story, yesterday Matt Taibbi pointed out that Chase retained Bernie Maddoff as a customer, even after knowing he was running a scam. More examples that when you speak out against the narrative, anything goes — even for the high-profile figures mentioned here. And it’s not tough to see where this ends up:

Strange how media can state TURKEY’S misinformation laws stifle speech!

We even have the founder of Rolling Stone advocating for government-determined censorship of the internet! What the heck is going on here?!??

We just need to find those people for whom absolute power will not corrupt absolutely! Easy!

Yet another avenue of attack comes from the medical community. This spring, paid-off world leaders failed to pass the dreadful WHO pandemic treaty, and it’s a good thing. The WHO lists ‘vaccine hesitancy’ as one of it’s 10 biggest threats to global health, and Canada has an answer for that (which is — for now — thankfully contained inside Canadian borders):

If we can’t jail you, we’ll just drug you up and provide some ‘re-education’. Soon you’ll realize that you’ve ALWAYS loved Big Brother!

Sweet! Free education AND free healthcare!

And nearly all of this stuff has just happened in the couple days since my last article! Even if we WANT to fight back, how are we supposed to possibly keep up with such an overwhelming task? The liars are entrenched, they are well-funded, they control the media, and they’re becoming increasingly brazen about flexing their muscles.

To steal a phrase from a dear commenter, it’s almost enough to have you wandering out on your ledge, pondering a graceful swan dive onto the pavement 20 stories below.

Don’t.

There’s a wonderful movie called “Cinderella Man” that tells the story of James Braddock, a boxer at the onset of the Great Depression. The first part of the movie is brutal. Braddock loses his home, his boxing license (thus his job), and eventually his wife sends his kids away to live with family. At rock bottom, Braddock has no choice but to beg for money.

Rock. Bottom. That might feel like where we’re at. We’ve been lied to, we’ve been threatened. We’ve been alienated and we’ve been banned. Many of us ‘lost’ close family members and close friends, and many more of us lost our jobs. Now many of us are losing our loved ones. The crooks are sitting in plain sight, still pulling the strings. Government has assumed the power to mask us all and are still masking our children — the people least able to fight back. (And once again - at near-zero risk of covid!) Already the same group of people who got filthy rich from the LAST pandemic are talking about the NEXT pandemic.

Rock. Bottom. Or is it?

Think back to those early days when you caught on to the lies and the lying liars who were telling them. I’ll relay my own story, which I’m betting sounds an awful like many of yours.

Late March, 2020. Jay Inslee has just announced the first two week lockdown. I’m poring over covid data from everywhere that’s publishing it. But what I’m finding isn’t matching up AT ALL with what I’m seeing from the media. With a few notable exceptions, the people I know aren’t interested in listening OR discussing the need for a lockdown. This is when I first made a point that I would repeat over and over for the next 16 months that the state would remain in some sort of lockdown:

Given the extreme cost of lockdowns, they should only be employed if we know FOR SURE they are the difference between overwhelmed hospitals and a non-overwhelmed system.

This seemed like common sense to me. Lockdowns have extraordinary costs — and I’m not talking about financial costs — that we can’t even fathom, let alone attempt to measure. We stopped elderly patients from seeing their families. We removed support systems for groups like Alcoholics and Drug Anonymous. We pulled children out of school yet kept shuttling them through the system. Medical treatments were postponed or missed completely while we waited for a covid surge that never came. We had (and still have) NO IDEA the cost of these decisions. Given that these things are obvious even to an idiot like me, lockdowns should be a ‘last resort’ move.

I could see it all in front of me yet was unable to convince (almost) anybody else to listen. I watched helplessly as government assumed unprecedented powers and declared entire industries non-essential basically without a peep.

Again, nobody wanted to talk about this, not even the bleeding heart liberals so common in the Northwest who would talk about ‘disparate impact’ until your ears bleed (typically 4.2 seconds). At this point, all my discussions were on Facebook. It got so bad that I actually downloaded Twitter to see if there was ANYBODY who was seeing the same things that I was, because I was starting to think that I was crazy. Crazy and alone.

That, my friends, was rock bottom.

And “Cinderella Man” showed — once you’ve hit rock bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up. After Braddock begs for money to pay the bills, the very next shot of the movie:

Click!

The lights are on! The kids are home! (In typical kid fashion, they immediately turn on every light in the house. Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!) This signifies the transition to the next part of the movie, in which Braddock overcomes the obstacles in his path — even benefitting from the extra strength in his left arm gained from working on the docks while his right hand was injured. Spoiler alert: He eventually becomes the world heavyweight champion, defeating heavily favored Max Baer in 1935.

The lights are on! A simple thing. A thing mostly not even thought about at all, because we are so fabulously wealthy that we don’t even think about the lights NOT coming on. But it’s the key to everything that is still to come. The lights are on! We’re on the upswing!

And that is ACTUALLY where we are, right now. For too long we have ignored that “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few” — and to our extreme detriment. Like the wealthy who take the lights for granted, so did we take our freedoms for granted — only to notice the danger when they flickered in the face of tyranny’s mighty bellows. But now the lights have clicked on. The transition has started. We’re on the upswing. And now the work begins.

I waded through the Twitter cesspool for a few days before finding Alex Berenson and his covid data. Soon after I was turned onto Hold2 and Gummi Bear, followed by bad cat. From their threads I found more people (so many I don’t have the space to name!) and links to more information.

Nearly all of us have been banned from Twitter since — but it’s too late, the connections were made. The lights are on. And although Twitter was able to yank the rug from under us, the overwhelming consensus from those who have moved to Substack is that they won’t be caught off-guard again.

It’s been a long time (it feels like about 3 decades) since 2020. In that time, the connection circle has grown, adding well-known names such as Robert Malone and Naomi Wolf — as well as thousands (millions?) of ‘no-names’ much like myself. Personal hero Glenn Greenwald has been warning about creeping authoritarianism since the Bush days, and is now loudly sounding alarm bells.

This time has been important. We have learned who we can trust — and maybe more importantly who we can’t trust. We have seen leaders step into places where only real leadership would dare tread. Most of all, we have grown via sharing. We have shared our data, we have shared our stories, and alongside that we have shared our hopes and fears for this insane time in which we live. We have forged bonds that make us stronger together.

Our time has been spent expanding and developing this amazing network. The ‘big’ names I’ve mentioned have gained hundreds of thousands of serious readers. Substack provides a little blurb about what my new subscribers are also reading, so I can see a basic idea of the connections being made. It seems like every time I watch a Russel Brand video, he’s gained another MILLION subscribers. Joe Rogan hosts the biggest podcast on the planet. Like-minded people are out there. And now it’s time for the next phase of growth in this network. (Finally we’re talking about meatspace!)

Before we get into specific ideas, take a look at this video of AOC dealing with protestors during a recent Q&A:

This is where the battles are won. This is where we must make ourselves heard. As Dave Chappelle famously put it: “Twitter’s not a real place.” Online spaces have been invaluable while we finding one another and growing our network, and will continue to remain valuable in some form. But it is not where we should concentrate. AOC can ignore 100,000 angry tweets. Ignoring two angry people in a real-life crowd is more difficult.

I’m sure many of you are familiar with this meme in some form or another:

Here’s the thing, though — the lions we’ve been waiting for are in the mirror. There we see the lions who have been willing to delve beyond the paid-off propaganda peddlers and presstitutes. In the mirror we find the lions who stood up to the most intense peer pressure in the history of the world. The lions who were the first to stand up and ask what can be done to remedy our maladies. You’re the lions, and from what I gather you’re pissed off. You want justice. But you’re going to need help, and increasingly you’re going to have to reach the ‘sheep’ who see what’s going on but don’t yet have the courage to speak out against it.

Live view of your mirror

(The following is even more opinion than normal and should be considered accordingly. It’s certainly possible all these things are already happening and it’s only my own ignorance that stops me from knowing it.)

One of problems with ‘online’ movements is that they’re, well, online. A group of 100,000 people may be a large one online, but when these people attempt to make real-world change, they tend to find they are actually quite spread out. This is something we discovered during the Ron Paul years, and something that Bernie supporters faced during his election runs.

So goal #1 in moving a movement from online into meatspace is finding meatsuits in your area. It sounds simple, but without this step nothing else matters. Connecting with like-minded people in person not only grows the support network, it’s also incredibly cathartic after a couple years of being forced apart and bullied by our peers!

Some people are doing networking like this as we speak. Robert Malone is constantly running around giving talks and meeting with local groups, as is Steve Kirsch. But it’s time we all made a concerted effort to ‘take the next step’ and form real-life bonds with those in (or out of!) our area.

The form this will take is likely to be different for everybody, because everybody has different circles. Some of you may find allies in church or your already-existing monkeysphere. Maybe you can dust off the contacts of those old Ron Paul buddies. Perhaps you play beer league softball or are in a pool league or sewing circle or a million other groups that give humans a reason to gather. And although your outreach is likely to be unique, at this stage, I believe the like-minded people we’ll find fall mostly into one of two categories:

1) People who are already fighting and don’t know we exist
and
2) People who agree with us but don’t yet have the courage to stand up

In group 1 we have frustrated parents fighting to get masks off their children, college students fighting to get booster mandates rescinded, employees struggling to get vaccine exemptions, the vax injured, etc. These people can and should be ‘plugged in’ to our network as soon as possible so we can direct resources to the battles they’re already fighting.

Group 2 is all around us. Naomi Wolf said it brilliantly:

For a year and a half now, after it became clear that this crisis was never about “the virus” but rather about a global bid to kill off our free world and suppress all of our freedoms — since I and many others have been publicly vocal about this danger and doing all we can to alert our community — that is to say, humanity — I’ve been getting direct messages (“DMs”). And they are all kind of similar. And they gross me out. Here’s why.

In the DMs, people whom I know socially or professionally — people from journalism, from politics, from medicine, from science (most of them upper-middle- class ‘men in suits’) — say something like: “Naomi, I really respect your actions right now. I totally agree with what you are saying. But of course I can’t say anything publicly because [fill in the nonsensical, craven reason].”

The nonsensical and craven reason that follows this shameful message is typically something along the lines of, “My boss will get mad at me” or “My professional peers will have a problem with my speaking up.” It’s never even, “I have bills to pay.”

Your boss will get mad at you, O you who DM?

Do you understand what is at stake? If you continue to comply and collude with what has become a tyrannical oligopoly, your kids will live as slaves and as serfs forever.

These people are potential allies, but will only speak up when their voices will be lost in an overwhelming sea of similar voices. (And thus they can stay clear of major consequences.) And while knowing that they’re out there but unwilling to speak is frustrating right now, these are the people who will need to be convinced to speak up to complete the tidal wave that’s necessary to wash the swamp clean.

So step 1 is to find the nearby allies who haven’t yet joined the network. I think the most powerful message at this point to those people is: YOU ARE NOT ALONE. There ARE like-minded people who are out there. You’re not crazy.

As an example, let’s say one group wants to get the word out about vaccine injuries. Obviously stories of the injured would never air on the MSM (brought to you by Pfizer), so we must re-route around them. Imagine blanketing a busy street with a set of QR code posters, each linking to a 15-30 second video of a person injured by the vaccine speaking in their own words. Or instead linking to videos of ‘experts’ saying extremely damning things like “I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection” or “We never tested to stop transmission”.

Once we make contact with real-life allies (or start to, as it’s an ongoing process), we take the first step toward political victories: We show up. This is what (mostly Muslim) protestors in Dearborn, Michigan did, and it led to this hilarious (to me, anyway) headline:

Don’t you just hate it when one of your favored marginalized groups speaks out against another of your favored marginalized groups? Why, that could lead to the whole movement eating itself! (“Muslims are right wing” was NOT on my 2022 media bingo card.)

And when we show up, we have to be effective. In my (limited) experience, there are a few cardinal rules when it comes to effective politics:

1) Know your stuff. If the battle of the day is a school district meeting discussing masks on children, come prepared with the goods showing the utter failure of masks to make a dent on covid outcomes, AS WELL AS the goods showing that children are at near-zero risk from covid in the first place. (If you don’t know where to find this information, utilize the network!) And once you’ve mastered the data for your particular battle, master the freedom-based principles that render the specific efficacy of masks irrelevant to the larger question of “Can my government even force me to wear a mask in the first place?” After all, you don’t know which particular argument will the the most effective, so it’s best to be prepared to use all of them.

2) Always be polite. Political conversations have been heated since there have been politics. You will run into people who will say terrible things. Vile, disgusting things that you can’t even believe that one human being can say to the face of another human being. You must stay polite anyway.

Can you be this woman? Can you sit calmly while an idiot gets in your face and yells about how you’re being antagonistic? Can you stay calm and recite your arguments (Rule #1!) while dealing with people whose logic ceiling is “Shut up, you’re stupid”? That’s what’s required, so if not, it’s time to get to work on that!

3) Film/Record Everything. From multiple angles. Smartphones are ubiquitous at this point. There’s really no reason not to have multiple people designated to record tense political encounters, if only to have irrefutable evidence of what actually happened. Additionally, if you believe (as I do) that sooner or later people show you who they are, you’re going to want to have those recording devices handy. After all, the answer to bad speech isn’t to ban that speech, it’s to give the idiots a microphone in the crowded town square. Finally, remember that your goal isn’t to convince the woman who’s screaming at you OR the woman who’s saying to let you get raped; the goal is convincing the silent majority spectating the goings-on, be they in person or watching online later.

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Edit 12:27 PM: This response to the LA council scandal is just too good not to add. Watch how they desperately cling to their narrative.

So much for racism being a relic of the past once we get minorities into positions of power. And since the left doesn’t see people as individuals, they must now decry everybody in the group. So…….welcome to the right-wing, latino white supremacists?

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One of the things that the modern left gets correct is that diversity is our strength. They screw up the rest of the idea, though, because the left generally sees people as an extension of their group and……..strongly encourages…….samethink within the larger group. When people break out of their ‘assigned’ groups, the left gets extremely angry — because those people were never ‘real’ people to the left to begin with.

No, the reason that diversity is our strength is because of the diversity of ideas that come with a diversity of backgrounds and a diversity of interests and a diversity of abilities. As incredible unique humans with unique experiences, we ALL have something different to offer. From just what we see on Substack, it’s evident this network contains talented speakers, data sleuths, brilliant writers, brave doctors, tenacious litigators, protective mothers, and loads of other amazing people. I have no doubt that in our midst we’ll find web developers who can create a way to organize our online strength into real-life groups. I’m completely certain that born leaders of people are already with us, ready to guide a herd of individualists toward a common goal of freedom. Among us we are sure to have amazing artists who can create signs, and perhaps even some people who dabble in malign creativity. Still others will be happiest when feeding everybody else (luckily, those people are usually the best at it!) And no doubt there are people who are thinking about solving problems I haven’t even considered. We all have a way to best contribute, and we’re in the best position to understand what that way is. This is our strength.

Make no mistake, this battle will not be easy. Rot has seeped into nearly all of our institutions, the media, and all levels of government. They can also see the writing on the wall and will fight back with everything they have. There are certain to be ‘casualties’ along the way. Some people will be fired, some will be ‘debanked’, some will be set upon by the Twitter mob, along with stuff I can’t even dream of. Now is the time to create the lasting bonds that will allow us to weather those blows. Voluntary cooperation is the most powerful force on the planet, and we’ve got it in spades.

But this isn’t Cinderella Man, where the hero wins the title and everything is guaranteed to turn out wonderful at the end. The swamp is pervasive and it’s certainly a possibility that we will fall into tyranny just as so many humans have done before us. Perhaps it’s even a certainty that we will lose. Yet even if we’re sure to lose, that’s not a reason to concede without doing everything possible to prevent a loss. Not to sound like your high school sports coach, but — this is the moment of truth. Do you want to look back and know that you could have done more? Do you want to be the modern-day Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, lamenting about how you didn’t love freedom enough? Hopefully we’re a long way from what he went through, but if we’re NOT, we’re going to want some sort of support system for the ostracized and persecuted. This is the time to build those systems.

So, lions, let’s turn those avatar guessing games into meetings where we can see smiles and share hugs and discuss (and advocate for) important ideas that the country was based upon. Maybe afterward we can kick back with an adult beverage or two. The time for lion gathering has passed, now it’s time for the lions to roar.

First round’s on me.

If you like this post, share all or part of it! You’ve got your own networks, let’s use ‘em!