As the System implodes, elites will do everything they can to keep us from realizing our true power
[NOTE: Wanted to share the good news: I was selected to present at TEDx Breckenridge on October 16! Thanks for all your good vibes and support!]
While all eyes are on Ukraine and the latest COVID variant (next up: the “Ninja” strain!), something is unfolding that governments and media aren’t drawing attention to.
The masses are getting restless.
The tiny island nation of Sri Lanka has been on the brink of chaos for months. The toll of pandemic lockdowns, skyrocketing inflation, and shortages triggered by the Ukraine war have forced the country into a death spiral. Two weeks ago, teachers, doctors, and medical staff who can no longer afford to buy gas took to the streets of the capital. In the words of one teachers union official: “Things have become unbearable for the common man.”
Tensions came to a head this weekend when thousands of protesters stormed the presidential palace and set it on fire, forcing President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to step down.
This isn’t just happening in Sri Lanka. All over the world — in Albania, Argentina, Panama, Kenya, and Ghana — the common man has reached a breaking point.
The fundamentals pushing these countries into crisis are also at play in the West. 70,000 Belgians brought Brussels to a standstill in cost-of-living demonstrations; Italians are staging “empty pan” rallies; and May Day rallies in France have drawn thousands to protest inflation. In the Netherlands, farmers are facing off with police over new environmental laws requiring them to reduce their livestock, which will further increase food prices.
Yet Americans remain eerily quiet.
It’s not because the “common man” in the U.S. is in much better shape. For decades, elites have been quietly siphoning wealth from the bottom 99.99% to the top .01%. But COVID-19 ushered in the final phase of wealth extraction. That’s when the looting went into overdrive.
After locking down the country for months, the government printed trillions of “stimulus” dollars to restart the economy. Incredibly, nearly 1/4 of all dollars in existence were created after the pandemic hit. The lion’s share of those trillions went to Wall Street and private equity firms that went on buying sprees, depleting housing inventories and sending prices to unaffordable levels.
Of course, Americans were too desperate to get back to “normal” to notice what was happening. But over the past year, reality has set in:
Inflation has hit 40-year highs. Beef has gotten so expensive that Walmart is locking ribeye steaks with locks and chains.
A scarcity of materials has made it almost impossible to make or repair essential items. General Motors has issued recalls for 682,000 vehicles but doesn’t have the parts to fix them. The microchip shortage has also hit the industry especially hard, driving the average price of a new car to nearly $50,000.
We’ve seen shortages in baby formula and tampons, and President Biden is warning that food is next.
Labor shortages have decimated small businesses and severely impacted the airline industry. Thousands of flights are routinely delayed and cancelled.
Gas is approaching $6 in many states, and J.P. Morgan expects oil to reach $380 a barrel (translation: $10 gas).
This is what a System looks like as it nears collapse, and it’s going to get worse — because the U.S. is bizarrely fixated on “winning” a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, even if it devastates the economy and sends Americans into starvation and poverty.
We’re witnessing orchestrated insanity, and Americans have every reason to be up in arms about it. Yet they remain eerily quiet.
The Greatest Existential Threat to Humanity is Upon Us
Across the globe, the .01% have gone full throttle in their efforts to consolidate power, wealth and resources. They own the media and Big Tech that can shape the narrative and silence us; they control the governments that can lock down economies and force us to accept digital passports; they own the infrastructure that controls communication and the distribution of food and energy.
A privileged few stand poised to control humanity on an unprecedented scale. Never before have billions of people faced a simultaneous, existential threat to their survival.
There’s just one hitch: the bid for global control can’t succeed if humanity awakens and unites.
Elites have always been able to deal with the occasional uprising, swiftly replacing failed dictators with new faces that are still beholden to their banking and corporate oligarchy. They’ve used a different strategy to keep western “democracies” in check, maintaining control through the illusion of elections: voters periodically eject politicians from the party that’s failed them and replace them with candidates from the "other" party (who, predictably, also fail them).
But what elites are attempting now is much trickier. Planetary domination requires the simultaneous suppression of a massive tide of anger and resentment. The key to this suppression lies in subduing the population in the only country that can possibly kickstart a global awakening: the United States.
Let’s face it: America was never “great.” A country built on the backs of slaves and the genocide of indigenous people can’t make this claim in good faith.
But America has always been unique because of its importance to the rest of the world. It has profound influence on geopolitics, it’s a linchpin of the global economy, and it's a cultural trendsetter. Virtually everything the U.S. does has an impact on most countries. While this is rapidly changing as economic, political, and military power shifts East, for the moment America still matters— a lot.
Elites know this, which is why they’ve laid the foundation to pacify and subdue Americans during this critical time of anger and unrest.
Americans Are Bred to Be Passive
Have you ever noticed that Europeans act out at the slightest provocation? Whether it’s to demand for higher wages, more holiday time, or resist vaccine passports, they never hesitate to strike or take to the streets in protests that often involve violent clashes with police and throw cities into chaos.
That’s not how we roll in the U.S.
Tens of millions of people poured into streets to protest the murder of black men at the hands of police. Americans staged marches against sexual harassment and to support abortion rights. The media widely-televised these efforts, and the government made no attempt to shut down them down.
But efforts to advocate for systemic changes that can improve the lives of all Americans? Those aren’t nearly as successful.
Occupy Wall Street, the movement to rally Americans against the predatory banking system in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis, fizzled in less than a year. Americans never plastered their lawns and cars with “Occupy” signage. Cities didn’t encourage street art that lambasted banks. The media virtually ignored the movement.
Why? Because Americans have been conditioned to believe that our right to protest is limited to social justice. We’ve forgotten that we have the right to protest anything, especially circumstances that threaten our collective ability to survive.
Americans Are Purposefully Divided
Selective protest isn’t the only reason why we don’t take to the streets.
Americans are profoundly divided by partisan politics, race, gender identity, vaccination status, and an assortment of labels that keep us fixated on our differences. The media and political Establishment amplify this division by focusing on fringe voices on the Right and the Left, ignoring the vast majority of sensible Americans in the center who agree on “big picture” problems and solutions.
When people are incessantly divided, they can’t recognize the source of their common misery and come together to address it. Divide. Subdue. Conquer.
We’ve seen what happens when a broad swath of Americans attempt to advocate for change on fundamental levels. Martin Luther King, Jr. was poised to lead a Poor People’s march on Washington, D.C. in May 1968, which would have been an unprecedented effort to unite Americans of all races to demand systemic, class-based economic reform.
Less than one month before the scheduled march, King was assassinated.
Whether by coincidence or design, King’s untimely death worked to the advantage of elites who rely on division to keep the masses from uniting to face a common existential threat. And as the System unravels, this division has increased exponentially.
The January 6 Effect on Protest
Against this backdrop, the events of January 6 can be seen in a different light.
I won’t defend those who participated in the Capitol riot. I won’t debate how many people were injured or killed; whether the perpetrators stormed the Capitol or security guards allowed them inside; whether MAGA-types were the only participants or if there were agents provocateur; whether they intended to seize control of the government or merely vent their frustration over election results.
And to be clear, I believe that any form of violence, for any reason, is unacceptable and must be punished because that’s what a civilized society demands.
The right to protest, however, should never be punished. Yet that’s what happened to many people who went to Washington, D.C. on Jan 6.
Just as thousands of Americans protested the results of the 2016 election, thousands protested the 2020 election. But the scope of violent protest on January 6 has been distorted: recently released classified documents show that 99% of the people who attended the rally protested peacefully. Only 1% entered the Capitol, and fewer than 15% of those were affiliated with any organized group.
In other words, the vast majority of 25,000 protesters lawfully exercised their constitutional rights. A handful of miscreants triggered the violent events that led to highly publicized hearings, vilifying and demonizing anyone who dared to go to Washington D.C. that day to peacefully express their discontent.
So intense was the effort to target protesters that the FBI arrested people who never entered the Capitol, ransacked their homes, and confiscated their devices. 69-year old Joseph Bolanos, a registered Democrat but “an independent at heart,” was one of those victims. The FBI raided his home after a neighbor reported hearing Bolanos “boast” about being at the Capitol (in fact, he was in a hotel room at the time). He’s suffered two strokes from the stress of an ordeal that’s destroyed his reputation.
In July 2021, black actor and conservative activist Siaka Massaquoi filed a class action suit against the FBI on behalf of protesters who were arrested, denied bail, and even sent to solitary confinement without probable cause.
Regardless of how you feel about what happened on January 6, our government has used this event to deliver a message: exercising our constitutional rights now carries significant risk. Even if we intend to peacefully protest, the actions of a small and violent group can ruin our lives.
Given this risk, how many Americans will be willing to speak out in the future? If we can’t afford to eat or put gas in our car, is it worth protesting if the government can destroy our life?
How To Fight Back in a Broken System?
Americans have been conditioned to be quiet with our voices and polite with our resistance. We’re encouraged to sign petitions, send letters to our congressmen, and vote for our “preferred” candidates. We’re taught that the best way to “fix” a country that’s going off the rails is by working within the System.
But we never bother to ask ourselves the obvious question: what do we do when the System is so broken that it won’t allow us to “fix” things?
What do we do when politicians in both parties are beholden to 158 families who dominate funding of viable candidates?
What do we do when the media marginalize independent candidates, ensuring they never get enough visibility to become viable?
What do we do when the agencies who regulate our food, drugs, and other essentials are shamelessly beholden to the industries they’re supposed to regulate?
What do we do when our government prints as much money as it wants, gives us a small slice, hands the rest to elites, and drives inflation to dizzying levels?
What do we do when the people who are supposed to represent us clearly don’t give a damn anymore?
These are questions we need to ask ourselves NOW because we’re running out of time to answer them.
We, the People, Have the REAL Power
Ultimately, most of us don’t raise our voices because we think it’s futile. We believe we’re powerless. But like so many aspects of our world, this is only an illusion. We have far more power than we realize.
Our reality has been distorted to convince us that a few hundred people can control hundreds of millions of us and that there’s nothing we can do to stop them. This distorted reality keeps us from seeing that power belongs to those who have the greatest numbers and understand what they can do with their numbers.
This short video illustrates the illusion of power held by a few.
Once we decide to stop playing along with this illusion, everything changes. That’s when we can position ourselves to make meaningful, fundamental changes to the System.
The Power of Numbers
Think about it: It’s easy to target a few thousand protesters and make examples of them. But if millions of Americans took to the streets to protest inflation and the government’s handling of the economy — like people are doing in Sri Lanka, Belgium, and a dozen other countries — it would be impossible to punish more than a fraction of us. We couldn’t be silenced.
Our power lies in our numbers.
To be very clear, I am not encouraging violence; I am advocating lawful and peaceful protest on a mass scale. Black Lives Matter showed us what’s possible when Americans are outraged by injustices against a minority; surely we can summon the same passion for injustices against an entire nation.
But peaceful protest isn’t the only tool at our disposal. We have other means of resistance and advocacy.
Western governments have shown their power to lock down economies, flood them with money, cut the supply of oil, and mire us in a war that destroys supply chains. But the masses have power, too.
Essential workers like truckers, postal workers, and other federal employees can stage strikes (good luck forcing anyone to work these days). We can withhold payments on mortgages (good luck foreclosing on tens of millions of homeowners). We have the power to stage a debt jubilee and refuse to pay credit cards or any other debt. (Don’t forget that banks rely on our cooperation. As the old adage goes, when you owe the bank $100,000, the bank owns you; when you owe the bank $100 million, you own the bank).
Yes, these actions will make it harder for us to live and hasten our collapse. But the reality is that the System is coming down, one way or another — and when it does, most of us will suffer. The question is whether this happens on our terms and timetable, or ones that elites have set?
The people steering us off a cliff intend to seize planetary control by “resetting” the global economy and transitioning us to System 2.0. They’re arrogantly broadcasting their intentions because they believe they’re inches from victory.
But if we can overcome our fear and unite, we can send a clear message to elites who are busy plotting our future: We will not comply. We will not cooperate in rebuilding what you have torn down unless you do it on our terms.
We have it in our power to begin the world over again
We live in challenging and unprecedented times, my friends. The age of quiescence is over, and an age of uncertainty is upon us.
But these times also present enormous opportunity for positive change. As humanity awakens to the deceit and corruption of a privileged few, it can harness its collective power to level the playing field. If we have the courage to resist, we can create a sustainable and equitable future for ourselves and those who follow us. In the words of Thomas Paine, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
But it will be up to us to take action.
At some point, we’ll need to decide whether it’s better to play it “safe” and sit on the sidelines, or lock arms with other Americans and our brethren around the world. We’ll have to choose between following people who have led us to the precipice of disaster, or forging a new path on our own.
So when the opportunity presents itself, when you have the chance to push back against those who hold the illusion of power, please don’t stand down.
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