(The Epoch Times) The Biden administration is planning to drastically expand the nation’s welfare statethrough increased child allowance grants quietly added into the latest stimulus, which some experts say is a move toward universal basic income.
As part of the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, the annual child tax credit was increased to $3,000 per child from ages 6 to 17, and $3,600 for children under 6. It will be made fully refundable, and payable in monthly installments of $300.
Before this, the maximum annual credit was $2,000 for every child under 17.
Notably, the program removed existing work requirements that would increase credit earned based on a person’s income from work. Now, all taxpayers earning under $200,000 with children aged 17 or under living with them at least half the year can claim the full credit. Tax experts have called the increase a “vast undertaking.”
Some experts describe the plan, if enacted permanently, as “the second-largest expansion of means-tested welfare entitlements in U.S. history,” one Feb. 10 Heritage report noted. The same report states that “in constant dollars, its annual cost would dwarf the initial costs of the Medicaid, food stamps, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children programs.”
Advocates of the credit increase say the expanded child tax credits will help reduce poverty for many Americans. One report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, claims it would lift9.9 million children out of poverty. But experts say this is based on faulty data, and on a false notion that the U.S. welfare system isn’t properly funded.
Robert Rector, senior research fellow of domestic policy studies at the Heritage Foundation and a leading authority on poverty and welfare programs, said the child credit program would cost the country about $80 billion a year in cash outlays and about another $40 billion in tax reduction.
The problem is that “it’s unnecessary, and it’s counterproductive,” he said.
“It’s $80 billion on top of a half a trillion dollars that the United States currently spends on cash, food, housing, and medical care for low-income Americans,” he told The Epoch Times. “And that half a trillion dollars is roughly six or seven times the amount needed to completely abolish child poverty in the United States.”
Most estimates say the cost of these expanded child tax credits will cost the country more than $100 billion, with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget identifying the cost at $143 billion annually. Although the current stimulus package notes this credit is only temporary and lasts for a year, experts say it paves the way to enacting a full-fledged, permanent policy.
‘Permanent Expansion’
During the 1990s, the U.S. welfare system was overhauled, shifting the focus away from giving cash unconditionally to one that focused on a work-oriented system. Rector noted that change slashed the poverty rate among children roughly in half while reducing dependence and increasing employment.
He says that what Biden is doing now is returning to a policy of unconditional aid that is “extremely expensive but also very harmful to the poor themselves, because when you do that you’re pushing them toward the social margin.”
Rector notes how experiments in these types of programs indicated that for roughly every $1,000 given, there is a loss of $660 in earnings. He said the child tax credit is “clearly intended” to move in the direction of enacting a universal basic income.
“They’re presenting this as if it’s a one-year change in response to the COVID crisis,” he told The Epoch Times. “But it’s clearly intended to be a permanent expansion.”
There is no possible sustainability in the child tax program, especially “when you factor in all the other social programs Democrats want to enact or are already enacted,” according to Nicholas Giordano, a professor of political science at Suffolk Community College in New York.
“Assuming that we don’t levy an increased tax burden, this program would cost nearly $1 trillion, and that’s if the program is only offered to those in poverty,” Giordano told The Epoch Times, referring to a universal basic income program. “Second, sooner or later, we are going to have to confront our enormous national debt that is growing exponentially.”
“With interest rates likely to increase due to inflation, servicing the debt will become a lot more expensive. This growing debt is unsustainable over the long term,” he added. “Thirdly, there is no fathomable way of implementing a program like this along with universal health care and education programs.”
In Finland and Canada, attempted pilot programs for universal basic income were terminated early due to the massive costs and the little benefit they provided, Giordano said.
Measuring Poverty
One issue related to the debate over welfare is how the United States measures poverty levels. The government, when it counts income, doesn’t count money taken from the half-trillion dollars in welfare as income, according to Rector.
“Our poverty statistics are kind of meaningless,” he said. “When these organizations run a calculation and say, ‘Look at how much this credit reduces poverty,’ the credit calculations are based on these ridiculous databases that exclude all of the current spending, or nearly all of it.”
“Now, they’re saying if we’re spending new money, we’re going to say that it’s income, but if it was money created in the previous welfare programs and so forth, that doesn’t exist.”
It’s important for a variety of reasons to have a working adult in a household, according to Rector, who notes that it initiates social contacts, creates role models for the children, and improves the psychological well-being of the individuals.
“It’s a huge cultural trap that you’re creating, by creating this artificial environment where the poorest people are kind of set aside and told, ‘You’re not expected to work or do anything,’” he said. “And in here, we’re going to give you a lot of money and they’re there. It’s not just this program, there are still a lot of old programs that already do this.”
(The Daily Wire) In an interview with Inside Edition, Samantha Markle, 56, half-sister to Meghan Markle by way of their father, blasted some of the claims Meghan made in her interview with Oprah Winfrey, asserting, “The truth was totally ignored and omitted.”
In the interview, Oprah asked, “Samantha Markle, your half-sister on your father’s side, has written a supposedly ‘tell-all’ book about you. What is your relationship with her?”
“I think it would be very hard to ‘tell all’ when you don’t know me,” Markle replied. “I grew up as an only child.”
“I don’t know how she can say I don’t know her and she was an only child,” Samantha responded. “We’ve got photographs over a lifespan of us together. So how can she not know me?”
In the Winfrey interview, Meghan claimed, “The last time I saw her must have been at least 18, 19 years ago, and before that, ten years before that.”
But Inside Edition showed a picture of the two women at Samantha’s college graduation, saying, “But here they are at Samantha’s college graduation in 2008, 13 years ago.”
Meghan claimed her half-sister only changed her name back to Markle after Meghan’s relationship with Harry became public, saying, “She changed her last name back to Markle — I think she was in her early 50s at that time — only when I started dating Harry. So I think that says enough.”
But Samantha countered, “I was a Markle before she was. I thought that was kind of weird that she would say I only changed my name back when she met Harry. Markle has always been my name.”
“Samantha then showed Inside Edition her petition to change her name that was dated back to December 1997 and her college diploma, which says Samantha M. Markle,” The Daily Mail noted.
Town and Country Magazine reported in 2018, “Samantha, who is also known by the name Samantha Grant, is 17 years Meghan’s senior,” then quoted Samantha Markle saying, “Life is about cashing in. You take opportunities as they arise and hopefully you enjoy the ride and make it as positive as you can. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
Commenting on Meghan’s claim that she had contemplated suicide, Samantha, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2008 and uses a wheelchair, stated, “Depression is not an excuse for treating people like dishrags and disposing of them.”
The Daily Mail offered some examples of some questionable claims Meghan Markle made: Meghan claimed that she never researched Harry or the Royal Family before the relationship started, yet the couple’s biography, “Finding Freedom,” stated that prior to Meghan’s first date with Harry in 2016, “Naturally both participants in this blind date did their homework with a thorough Google search. Harry, who scoped out Meghan on social media, was interested.”
‘Every single influencer person on the planet can come there’
(New York Post) MyPillow founder and CEO Mike Lindell said that he’s been developing a social media application that would restore free speech to those who were banned by the mainstream tech platforms.
My Pillow founder Mike Lindell has made the grand claim that he is launching his own social media site — after he was booted from Twitter for spreading baseless claims about election fraud.
The pillow pusher said on conservative radio host Charlie Kirk’s podcast Friday that his Big Tech rival could even be live within a month, Business Insider reported.
“Every single influencer person on the planet can come there. You’re going to have a platform to speak out,” Lindell announced, adding that he has been working on the site for four years.
“It’s not just like a little Twitter platform,” said the businessman, who has claimed that he lost $65 million in revenue this year because of mass boycotts over his ongoing claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.
“They’re suppressing our voices,” Lindell railed on the show Friday.
“We’re launching this big platform so all the voices of our country can come back and start telling it like it is again,” he declared.
“You will not need YouTube. You won’t need these places … it will be where everything can be told, because we’ve got to get our voices back. People will be able to talk and not walk on eggshells.”
Lindell then discussed “cancel culture” and claimed his Wikipedia page had been “changed into something I’m not,” without elaborating.
“Google canceled me on some things, I can tell you,” he said in the podcast, explaining that he bought ads on the search engine giant so more people would see “evidence” of the alleged election fraud.
But he said Google took “tens of thousands of dollars” in ad revenue from him before shutting him down.
Lindell also complained that “even the bad stations” wouldn’t have him on their shows to talk about election fraud, the COVID-19 vaccine and Dominion Voting Systems, which recently filed a lawsuit accusing him of defamation.
The voting machine company is seeking more than $1.3 billion in damages on allegations that Lindell falsely accused it of “stealing millions of votes” in the federal election.
The My Pillow CEO said the site would launch in “four or five weeks,” but also that it could launch in “10 days,” adding that he couldn’t announce the platform’s name yet. No further details about the platform, including what it would look like or how it would function, were offered.
Private Facebook group cites optics of taking vacations during shutdown
The Los Angeles teachers’ union has voted against returning for in-person learning until its demands are met, but there’s nothing to stop instructors from partying over spring break, which could be a problem.
A private Facebook page for Unified Teachers of Los Angeles members warned its followers against posting vacation photos, citing the optics of traveling for fun while refusing to travel to the classroom, as shown on a screenshot obtained by FOX 11 in Los Angeles.
“Friendly reminder: If you are planning any trips for Spring Break, please keep that off of Social Media,” said the post on “UTLA FB GROUP – Members Only.” “It is hard to argue that it is unsafe for in-person instruction, if parents and the public see vacation photos and international travel.”
The warning on the Facebook page, which has 5,600 followers, came days after the union announced that 91% of its ballot-casting members voted March 1-5 against returning for in-person instruction over novel coronavirus concerns.
The vote came in favor of resisting a “premature and unsafe physical return to school sites” until “safety conditions are in place,” including daily cleaning and improved ventilation; staff are fully vaccinated or have access to full vaccinations, and Los Angeles County “is out of the purple tier,” the most restrictive level.
“This vote signals that in these most trying times, our members will not accept a rushed return that would endanger the safety of educators, students, and families,” UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz said in a Friday statement.
The union responded that it was not responsible for Facebook posts by teachers or private groups.
“We have a diverse membership and they are able to post their views on personal Facebook pages and in this Facebook group – however UTLA does not monitor nor is responsible for the content,” the UTLA told Fox 11. “We do not want to discourage a robust dialogue for members in the public square of opinion.”
The Chicago Teachers Union came under fire in January after Sarah Chambers, an executive board member, posted a photo Dec. 31 showing her lounging poolside in Puerto Rico with the caption “pool life” as the union fought reopenings.
NEW: In a leaked post from a private Facebook group for UTLA union members only, teachers are warned not to post on social media if they go on spring break vacations because the optics would be bad for them while UTLA is refusing to return to "unsafe" in-person schooling @FOXLApic.twitter.com/KxQc7k450T
The Biden administration insists there is no crisis
The Department of Homeland Security is asking staff to volunteer to help manage the “overwhelming” number of migrants causing a crisis at the U.S. border, according to a new report.
Fox News reported Tuesday that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas sent an email to DHS staff requesting volunteers to help with “managing property, preparing meals, doing supply runs, prescription medicine runs, housekeeping, and assisting in control rooms.
“Today, I activated the Volunteer Force to support Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as they face a surge in migration along the Southwest Border,” Mayorkas reportedly said.
“You have likely seen the news about the overwhelming numbers of migrants seeking access to this country along the Southwest Border,” he continued. “President Biden and I are committed to ensuring our Nation has a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system while continuing to balance all of the other critical DHS missions.”
This volunteer force, which was previously activated in 2019 during the border crisis in the spring and summer, will act in a non-law enforcement capacity to provide humanitarian relief.
“In 2019, over 900 volunteers deployed to support their CBP colleagues during a similar migration surge,” Mayorkas said. “Please consider joining the Volunteer Force to again provide needed humanitarian support along the Southwest Border and relief for our CBP colleagues.”
Thousands of migrant children are overwhelming detention facilities at the U.S. border even as the Biden administration refuses to acknowledge there is a crisis on its hands.
According to the New York Times, the number of migrant children detained at the border has tripled in the past two weeks, swelling to more than 3,250. Federal law requires that children detained by Customs and Border Protection be turned over to shelters managed by the Department of Health and Human Services, but COVID-19 safety protocols have limited the space available to house these children. Last week, the CDC had to issue guidelines permitting the administration to operate shelters at 100% capacity to fit all these kids, acknowledging these facilities “should plan for and expect to have COVID-19 cases.”
But it’s not just children. Border agents encountered a migrant at the border about 78,000 times in January, double the number of encounters from the same time one year ago and the highest rate of any January in a decade.
“Immigration authorities are expected to announce this week that there were close to 100,000 apprehensions, including encounters at port entries, in February,” the Times reports. “An additional 19,000 migrants, including adults and children, have been caught by border agents since March 1.”
The current border surge is drawing comparisons to the 2019 crisis when there were as many as 140,000 border apprehensions in a month at its height.
There are several “push” and “pull” factors that are driving migrants to attempt to come to the U.S.
Natural disasters in Central America, poverty, hunger, and gang violence are among the push factors motivating people in South and Central America to flee their homeland for the United States. Hurricanes have left thousands of people homeless in Honduras. There is famine in Latin America caused by the storms destroying crop yields and exacerbated by the pandemic. And gang violence and widespread government corruption are convincing many, many people to leave in search of a better life in America.
Then there are the pull factors. The Biden administration has reversed several of President Donald Trump’s policies: Ending Migrant Protection Protocols, the “Remain in Mexico” policy which had migrants wait for their hearings outside the U.S.; halting construction of the border wall; and reinstating “catch and release;” and imposing a moratorium on deportations for most classes of illegal immigrants. Also, Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the new administration has developed a policy that will permit noncitizens to contest their deportation.
The softer tone Biden has set on immigration — and his promise to support legislation granting amnesty and citizenship to 11 million illegal immigrants — are encouraging people to travel to the U.S. in the hopes of finding a warm welcome from the United States government.
Biden’s “humanitarian” immigration policy has consequences. In addition to migrant housing facilities now being overwhelmed, violence and criminal activity is rising on the border as drug cartels, smugglers, human traffickers, and gangs are taking advantage of the situation.
The details of Biden’s bloated spending package are so damning that even liberal-leaning fact-checkers have no choice but to agree with conservative criticisms.
The budget-busting legislation, sold as emergency COVID response and “stimulus,” passed the Senate over the weekend. But even the liberal-leaning fact-checking website PolitiFact is pointing out that almost all of the bill’s spending is unrelated to the health effects of COVID-19.
“Total spending directly on COVID-19’s health impacts ranges from $100 billion to $160 billion,” fact-checker Jon Greenberg writes. “At the high end, direct COVID-19 spending represents about 8.5% of the bill’s $1.9 trillion cost.”
Of the bill’s nearly $2 trillion in spending, PolitiFact reports that just $14 to $20 billion goes to vaccine distribution and vaccine-related efforts. This is a tiny fraction, a mere 1-2 percent. Overall, the spending that actually goes to health-related matters pales in comparison to the hundreds of billions doled out for partisan priorities.
For example, at least $350 billion goes to bailing out state and local governments—despite most not actually experiencing predicted COVID-19 tax revenue shortfalls. That means Biden’s bill spends more than twice as much lining the pockets of bankrupt blue states than it does actually addressing public health.
State and local budgets are not in crisis.—Bureau of Economic Analysis data show that state and local tax revenues are rising nationwide, not falling. There is no need for more federal aid to the states. https://t.co/NNiUUDzpC2#CatoEcon#CatoCOVIDpic.twitter.com/zEG5nAHvR4
Legislators also included a completely unrelated $86 billion bailout for union pension plans. And the bill pours $128 billion into public education. Despite what advocates claim, it’s not actually money to “reopen schools.” A whopping 95 percent of the money will be spent after 2021.
These are just a few of the big-ticket spending items that are unrelated to COVID-19. But slipped into the bill’s 600+ pages are literally countless smaller allocations of millions in taxpayer money. Many of these carve-outs are for waste like billions for racial justice programs for farmers or politician’s pet projects like $1.5 million for a bridge in New York that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wants built.
It’s not surprising that Republican elected officials are blasting the package as wasteful and bloated.
$45 billion expansion of Obamacare, including new subsidies for people with six figure incomes.
$270 million to the National Endowments of the Arts and Humanities.
This isn’t about COVID relief. It’s about using a health crisis as an excuse to ram through a left wing wishlist. pic.twitter.com/6bgmkymuvo
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell decried the inclusion of “All kinds of liberal wish list items that would do nothing to help American families put COVID behind them” in Biden’s bill.
“This isn’t about COVID relief,” Republican Senator Pat Toomey, a long-time fiscal conservative, said. “It’s about using a health crisis as an excuse to ram through a left wing wishlist.”
Indeed, the details of Biden’s bloated spending package are so damning that even liberal-leaning fact-checkers have no choice but to agree with conservative criticisms.
In a 1958 television interview, Aldous Huxley predicted the technological capability to bypass reason and manipulate behavior through subliminal means. Today, social media platforms and search engines use sophisticated artificial-intelligence algorithms to control the information we see.
Story at-a-glance:
Aldous Huxley wrote “Brave New World,” a nightmarish vision of a future society known as the “World State,” ruled by science and efficiency, where emotions and individuality have been eradicated and personal relationships are few.
When Huxley wrote the book, optimism about technological advancements were high and there was widespread belief that technology would solve many of the world’s problems. “Brave New World” demonstrates the naiveté of such hopes by showing what can happen when technology is taken to its extreme.
Huxley predicted the technological capability to bypass reason and manipulate behavior through subliminal means. Today, social media platforms and search engines use sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms to push certain kinds of information in front of us.
Huxley’s ideas appear to have influenced the technocracy’s planning. The World Economic Forum’s 2030 agenda includes the strangely ominous dictum that “you will own nothing and be happy.”
Huxley argues that in order to create the dystopian future presented in his book, you have to centralize wealth, power and control. Hence, the way to protect against it is to insist on decentralization.
The video above features a 1958 interview of Aldous Huxley with Mike Wallace. It really is a great glimpse from the past. Wallace was smoking on the set, but that was natural back then, and Rod Serling, who produced the “Twilight Zone,” did the same. Interestingly, they both developed lung cancer.
You might recall that Huxley wrote the classic novel “Brave New World,” in which he presents a dystopian vision of a future society known as the “World State,” a society ruled by science and efficiency, where emotions and individuality have been eradicated and personal relationships are few.
Children are cloned and bred in “hatcheries,” where they are conditioned for their role in society from an early age. There are no mothers and fathers as natural procreation is outlawed. There are no family units.
Embryos are sorted and given hormonal treatments based on their destined societal classification, which from highest to lowest are Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon. The Alphas are bred and conditioned to be leaders while the Epsilons are designed for menial labor, free of higher intellectual capacities.
At the time Huxley wrote the book in 1931 (it was published the year after), optimism about technological advancements were high and there was widespread belief that technology would solve many of the world’s problems. “Brave New World” demonstrates the naiveté of such hopes by showing what can happen when technocracy is taken to its extreme.
Huxley believed his world of horror was right around the corner and, today, just shy of 60 years later, we’re starting to see Huxley’s “World State” closing in around us in the form of the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s transhumanist agenda and the Great Reset, designed to trap us inside a net of constant surveillance and external control.
Enemies of freedom
Huxley also penned a series of essays called “Enemies of Freedom,” which he discusses in the featured interview. The series outlines “impersonal forces” that are “pushing in the direction of progressively less freedom,” and “technological devices” that can be used to accelerate the process by imposing ever greater control of the population.
Huxley points out that as technology becomes more complex and complicated, it becomes increasingly necessary to form more elaborate hierarchical organizations to manage it all.
Technology also allows for more effective propaganda machines that can be managed through those same control hierarchies.
Huxley cites the success of Hitler, noting that aside from Hitler’s effective use of terror and brute force, “he also used a very efficient form of propaganda. He had the radio, which he used to the fullest extent, and was able to impose his will on an immense mass of people.”
With the advent of television, Huxley foresaw how an authoritarian leadership could become a source of “a one-pointed drumming” of a single idea, effectively brainwashing the public.
Beyond that, Huxley predicted the technological capability to “bypass the rational side of man” and manipulate behavior by influencing people on a subconscious level. This is precisely what we’re faced with today.
Google, but also to a large extent Facebook, has been collecting data on you for nearly two decades. They have created massive server farms that are capable of analyzing this data with deep learning and artificial intelligence software to mine information and generate incredibly precise details on just what type of propaganda and narrative is required to surreptitiously manipulate you into the behavior they are seeking.
Huxley also points out the dangers inherent in advertising, especially as it pertains to marketing of political ideas and ideologies:
“Democracy depends on the individual voter making an intelligent and rational choice for what he regards as his enlightened self-interest in any given circumstance but …
“There are particular purposes for selling goods, and [what] the dictatorial propagandists are doing is to try to bypass the rational side of men and to appeal directly to these unconscious forces below the surface so that you are in a way making nonsense of the whole democratic procedure, which is based on conscious choice or on rational ground …
“Children are quite clearly much more suggestible than the average grownup and, again, suppose that for one reason or another all the propaganda was in the hands of one or very few agencies, you would have an extraordinarily powerful force playing on these children who are going to grow up and be adults …
“You can read in the trade journal the most critical accounts of how necessary it is to get hold of the children, because then they will be loyal brand buyers later on. Translate this into political terms, the dictator says they will be loyal ideology buyers when they’re grown up.”
Decentralization protects freedom. Centralization robs it.
Huxley argues that in order to create the dystopian future presented in his book, you have to centralize wealth, power and control. Hence, the way to protect against it is to insist on decentralization. It’s surprising that even 60 years ago Huxley was wise enough to understand this profoundly important principle.
I believe that it is the decentralization of the internet that is required to prevent censorship and manipulation in the future. This means that websites and platforms are not stored in one central place that can easily be controlled and manipulated but, rather, widely distributed to thousands, if not millions, of computers all over the world. It would work because if there is no central storage it can’t be removed.
Decentralized platforms allow the majority of power to reside with the individual. Technologies that can be easily misused to control the public narrative must also remain largely decentralized, so that no one person or agency ends up with too much power to manipulate and influence the public. Our modern-day social media monopolies are a perfect example of what Huxley warned us about.
The same goes for economic institutions too. Today, we can see how the role of the central bank (in the U.S. known as the Federal Reserve) — a privately-owned entity with the power to break entire countries apart for profit — is forcing us toward a new global economic system that will impoverish and quite literally enslave everyone, with the exception of the technocratic social bankers themselves and their globalist allies.
Our Orwellian present
A contemporary and student of Huxley was George Orwell (real name Eric Blair), who wrote another dystopian classic — “1984” — published in 1949. The two books — “1984” and “Brave New World” — share the commonality that they both depict a future devoid of the very things that we associate with having a healthy, free, creative, purposeful and enjoyable life.
In “1984,” the context is a society where an all-knowing, all-seeing “Big Brother” rules with an iron fist. Citizens are under constant watch. Privacy is nonexistent, and language is twisted to justify and glorify oppression.
Some of the spectacles of 2020 could have easily been ripped straight out of the pages of “1984,” as riots were described by cheery news anchors as “mostly peaceful protests,” even as city blocks were engulfed in flames behind them and people were bleeding to death in the streets. For those familiar with the book, such scenes were difficult to watch without being reminded of 1984s “double-think.”
Orwell versus Huxley
There are differences between the two works, however. While Orwell foresees people being forcefully enslaved by an external agency, and kept in that state by the same, Huxley’s vision is one in which people have been so thoroughly conditioned that they come to love their servitude. At that point, no external authoritarian ruler is actually required.
If you think about it, I’m sure you will agree that this is clearly the most efficient strategy to take control of the population. Moore’s law and the exponential improvement in computer processing capacity has exponentially accelerated the global elites’ ability to precisely identify how to implement peaceful control that will have the majority virtually begging for tyranny.
In Huxley’s “Brave New World,” people have fallen in love with the very technologies that prevent them from thinking and acting of their free will, so the enslaved maintain their own control structure.
As noted by Neil Postman in his book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business,” in which he compares and contrasts the futures presented by Huxley and Orwell:
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
“Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.
“As Huxley remarked in ‘Brave New World Revisited,’ the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’
“In ‘1984,’ Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In ‘Brave New World,’ they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”
The promise of the Great Reset
One can argue about who predicted the future best, Orwell or Huxley, but in the final analysis, I think we’re looking at a mixture of both, although it seems obvious to me that Huxley was more prescient and he was actually Orwell’s mentor. Huxley’s concerns are far more serious as the programming is essentially silent, and it is patently evident that the technocrats have been highly successful in implementing this strategy in the past year.
That said, we’re facing both the threat of externally imposed authoritarianism and control predicted by Orwell, and the subversive, subliminal programming through mindless entertainment and the lure of convenience proposed by Huxley.
Undoubtedly, the combination is a powerful one, and likely far more effective than either control strategy by itself. I’ve already touched on how Orwell’s work is playing out in the real world through the “double-think” mental gymnastics we get from the controlled, tightly centralized mainstream media these days.
For an example of how Huxley’s ideas have influenced the technocracy’s planning, look no further than the globalists’ call to “build back better” and the World Economic Forum’s 2030 agenda (below), which includes the strangely ominous dictum that you will own nothing and be happy.
The unstated implication is that the world’s resources will be owned and controlled by the technocratic elite, and you’ll have to pay for the temporary use of absolutely everything. Nothing will actually belong to you. All items and resources are to be used by the collective, while actual ownership is restricted to an upper stratum of social class.
Just how will this imposed serfdom make you happy? Again, the unstated implication is that lack of ownership is a marvelous convenience. Rent a pot and then return it. You don’t need storage space! Imagine the freedom! They even promise the convenience of automatic drone delivery straight to your door.
Artificial intelligence — which is siphoning your data about every aspect of your existence through nearly every piece of technology and appliance you own — will run your life, predicting your every mood and desire, catering to your every whim. Ah, the luxury of not having to make any decisions!
This is the mindset they’re trying to program into you, and for most, it appears to be working. For others who can see the propaganda for what it is, these promises look and feel like proverbial mouse traps. Once you bite the cheese, you’ll be stuck, robbed of your freedom forevermore. And, as Huxley told Wallace, individual freedom is really a prerequisite for a genuinely productive society:
“Life of man is ultimately impossible without a considerable measure of individual freedom. Initiative and creativity — all these things that we value, and I think value properly, are impossible without a large measure of freedom.”
When Wallace challenges Huxley on this by pointing out that the Soviet Union was successfully developing both militarily and artistically, despite being a tightly controlled regime, Huxley counters by saying that those doing that creative work, especially scientists, were also granted far greater personal freedom and prosperity than everyone else.
As long as they kept their noses out of politics, they were brought into the upper echelon and given a great deal of freedom, and without this freedom, they would not have been able to be as creative and inventive, Huxley says.
The threat of the new normal
This anti-human “new normal” that world leaders are now urging us to accept and embrace is the trap of all traps. Unless your most cherished dream is to lie in bed for the rest of your life, your body atrophying away, with a pair of VR goggles permanently strapped to your face, you must resist and oppose the “new normal” every day going forward.
As noted by Spiked editor Brendan O’Neill in his Feb. 5, 2021, article, while the first lockdown was marked by a sense of camaraderie and the promise of it being a temporary measure that we can get through if we just address the problem together, by the third round, all forms of social connection have vanished, as has the anticipation of a return to normality.
“In the first lockdown, the dream of normality was what kept people going; it was actively encouraged by some politicians and even some in the doom-laden media. This time, dreams of normality are treated as ‘dysfunction’, as a species of ‘denial,’” O’Neill writes.
Make no mistake. The media’s rebuke of a return to normalcy as a nonsensical pipedream is dangerous propaganda territory. The reality is we could easily open everything back up and go back to business as usual, and nothing out of the ordinary, in terms of sickness and death, would occur.
People die every year. It’s an inevitable reality of life and, up until the last two weeks of 2020, there actually were no greater number of deaths recorded than the year prior, and the year prior to that, and the one before that.
What’s more, we now have effective prophylactics and treatments that ensure the loss of life due to COVID-19 can be radically minimized. Yet, our leaders don’t want you to think in those terms. They want you to remain fearful because they have a deep appreciation of the value of fear in catalyzing the precise type of capitulation and surrender they need in order to implement the Great Reset.
Tragically, many citizens have so embraced the fear culture, they don’t even need an authoritarian figure to tell them to comply with rules that have no medical benefit anymore. They’ll happily act as the designated COVID police, making sure everyone around them complies.
Hell hath no fury like one caught in the unsound belief that they will die if you don’t wear a mask. This is no way to live. It’s not sane and it’s not healthy, and the prophetic works of Huxley and Orwell illustrate where it will all end if we don’t push back.
Never surrender to the new normal
In closing, I’d like you to ponder some portions from O’Neill’s article, in which he warns us about the threat posed by the culture of fear itself, which is just as dangerous and damaging as any virus:
“[Spiked] argued that COVID-19 … would be refracted through the culture of fear, potentially harming our ability to understand and deal with this novel danger. This has come to pass. The shift from paying lip service to social solidarity to encouraging the populace to think of itself as diseased represents a victory for the degraded view of humanity gifted to us by the culture of fear.
“The government’s early move from encouraging people to take responsibility for limiting their social interactions to using older methods of terror to ensure compliance with lockdown measures confirmed the culture of fear’s reduction of people from citizens to be engaged with problems to be managed.
“The failure to sustain the education of the next generation spoke to the exhaustion of bourgeois confidence, of the state itself, that underpins the culture of fear.
“And the current threat of a New Normal — of a forever post-pandemic dystopia of distanced, masked pseudo-interaction — demonstrates that our future will be shaped at least in part by the ideologies and forces of the culture of fear …
“Yes, the New Normal being talked up by the political and cultural elites will partially be informed by the experience of Covid-19 and the necessity of being prepared for a future virus. But it will also be shaped by … the culture of fear and its attendant anti-human, anti-progress ideologies …
“Soon the practical task of minimizing and managing the impact of Covid-19 will have been largely completed, leaving us with the far larger humanist task of combating this culture and making the case for a freer, more dynamic, dazzling future of growth, knowledge and engagement.
“Those who underestimate the culture of fear will be ill-prepared for these future battles. They will have a tendency to surrender to the New Normal. The rest of us should stand firm, even in the face of smears and willful misrepresentations, and continue to recognize and confront the real and debilitating consequences that fear has on everyday life and on humanity’s future.”
Who says President Biden isn’t great for the economy?
Sure, he is crippling America’s energy independence with a full-scale assault on domestic oil and gas production. And, yes, he killed thousands of good jobs with a flick of a pen when he nixed the Keystone Pipeline and halted completion of the border wall.
And behind the scenes today, there is no telling the miles and miles of red tape his administration is unrolling to strangle American small businesses and the innovation that will quietly cost our economy billions of dollars for years and decades to come.
But when it comes to human smuggling, these are heady go-go days that Enron could have only dreamed about on Wall Street.
Children! Women! Families! Step right up and meet your local coyote who for a cool $8,000 will take you on an all-expenses-paid Biden excursion through the dangerous deserts of Mexico and across the swift waters of the Rio Grande!
In just the first few months of Mr. Biden’s presidency, he has nearly managed to double the number of migrants thronging our borders. And there is no indication that the increases will slow any time soon.
Not only has Mr. Biden ushered in boom times for the ruthless coyotes who smuggle people across the border, he has single-handedly sparked an industry-wide boom for all the lawless actors in the illegal-immigration industry.
Mr. Biden is making it rain for drug cartels who watch the border, coordinate smuggling and reap massive paydays thanks to lax American border enforcement. Drivers, lookouts and scouts are making a bundle off Mr. Biden, too.
Any examination of the cottage industry booming under Mr. Biden’s lawless border policies would be incomplete without considering who benefits as well inside the United States. Big businesses desperate for cheap labor make out like bandits. So do wealthy Americans seeking cheap landscapers and nannies.
The Americans who pay the steepest price, as always, are America’s poor and working folks. But who cares? They don’t have any annoying lobbyists in Washington.
It’s like the tree that falls in the woods. If an American citizen complains but they don’t have a lobbyist in Washington, do they really have a complaint?
But nobody pays a greater price for Mr. Biden’s human smuggling racket than the poor souls who fall prey to coyote slavery.
President Donald Trump managed to do more in four years to fix the border than any president or any Congress in a half-century. Mr. Biden immediately scrapped everything that was working.
Back is “catch and release,” which automatically guarantees illegals a foothold in the U.S. as soon as they illegally set foot in the county.
Gone are deportations.
Scrapped is Mr. Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy for asylum cases, which brought so much order — and deterrence — at the border.
Also back are the cages that were first invented the last time Mr. Biden was in the White House.
Perhaps most insidious of all is that back in Central and South America, the message is clear. America is back open for lawlessness.
That ensures that the waves and waves of migrants making the treacherous trek will continue. And the slavers and coyotes and drug cartels will continue to prosper.
(Reuters) – Shares of GameStop jumped on Tuesday for the fifth straight day, as the meme stock rally that began earlier this year got more juice on news about the video game retailer’s e-commerce strategy and speculation that small investors will pour stimulus check funds into stock markets.
GameStop shares were up 23.5% to $239.80 in early trading, a day after the company entrusted leadership of its online sales efforts to board member and major shareholder Ryan Cohen, co-founder of online pet retailer Chewy Inc.
The resurgent rally lifted other stocks favored by retail investors on forums such as Reddit’s WallStreetBets. Market watchers have cited the U.S. Senate’s passage of a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill including $1,400 direct payments to Americans as one catalyst.
Once the aid bill is finalized and signed into law, the U.S. government should be able to start delivering $1,400 checks quickly, tax experts said.
Since January, GameStop shares have had several wild swings, one of the hottest meme stocks followed on social media.
Shares of AMC Entertainment another popular bet among retail investors, were recently up around 5%, headphone maker Koss Corp climbed 1% and Blackberry Ltd rose by around 2%.
Cohen, a major shareholder who has pushed Gametop’s move away from its brick-and-mortar model, joined the board in January shortly before a social media frenzy drove a meteoric rise in which GameStop shares surged more than 1,600%.
The flurry of buying drove hedge funds that had bet against the stock to unwind their short positions, a situation known as a “short squeeze.” GameStop pared most of those gains the following month.
Some analysts believe another short squeeze may be adding to the recent gains. Short interest in GameStop was valued at $2.58 billion, or 24.3% of the stock’s float on Tuesday, compared to $1.80 billion, 32.6% in late February, according to data from financial analytics firm S3 Partners.
The number of shares sold short has dropped by about 25% since February 26 to 13.3 million shares, data from S3 Partners showed.
In Washington, the U.S. Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee planned a remote hearing titled “Who Wins on Wall Street? GameStop, Robinhood, and the State of Retail Investing.”
In an official statement, Donald J. Trump voiced his support for the Republican Party while slamming fake Republicans: “it is not their right to use my likeness or image to raise funds.”
Read the full statement below:
‘RINO’ is an acrostic that stands for “Republican In Name Only.” It is used as a pejorative label for Republicans who do not consistently represent Republican Party values.
Trump immediately followed up with another statement in which he criticized the Biden administration’s handling of the crisis at the U.S. southern border:
