If you are a prepper or survivalist, keeping binoculars with you is a must. Read the article to understand more about binoculars and use them more frequently. When preparing for any survival situation, binoculars might not be often found on your equipment list. However, you need to seriously consider keeping one around as they are […]

This article was originally published by Mitch Nemeth at The Mises Institute. 

Over the past few decades, the executive branch of the federal government has taken an increasingly autocratic approach to governing. Past presidents have unilaterally attempted to bypass Congress due to partisan gridlock and the inevitable tug-of-war involved in governing a nation of 330 million people. President Joe Biden has governed in a similar fashion, regardless of progressive anger at him for not “doing something.”

The covid-19 pandemic prompted public acceptance of a similar phenomenon at the federal level and across a majority of the fifty states. Most state executive branches responded to the pandemic with unilateral action. The federal executive branch was constrained in its approach to the pandemic because states possess more power than the federal government in responding to declared emergencies. Congress could have passed laws granting explicit statutory authority to the president, but it has in recent decades preferred to defer its governing authority to the president.

Republican senator Ben Sasse summarized this phenomenon back in 2018: “The real reason [Congress] punts most of its power to executive agencies is because it is a convenient way to avoid responsibility for controversial and unpopular decisions. If your biggest long-term priority is your own re-election, then giving away your power is a pretty good strategy.” As Rich Lowry writes in National Review, Congress has been a complicit if not “eager participant in its own neutering.” This principle has been especially true throughout the pandemic.

Many of the federal government’s covid-19 pandemic measures could have been statutorily authorized by Congress. However, Congress has been eager to shift its responsibilities, and thus accountability, to the president. Congress has delegated authority to the executive branch for decades, but today’s Congress is plagued by loyalty to a political party over loyalty to the institution. As Lowry states, “What’s new is that partisanship has created a loyalty for members of Congress that transcends their attachment to Congress itself, while more and more members consider their office merely a platform to get attention.”

In keeping with the executive branch’s encroachment on legislative activities, the Biden administration directed numerous executive branch agencies to adopt contentious nationwide policies. Often, these directives stretched the various agencies’ statutory authority. Since President Biden’s inauguration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) have issued widely applicable edicts, most notably a sweeping eviction moratorium, vaccine mandates, and mask mandates. Many states and localities separately introduced their own measures to supplement federal policy. While many, if not most, of these covid restrictions have ended, it is important to understand how the executive branch lost these three major legal disputes.

The CDC’s Eviction Moratorium

In March 2020, Congress passed the CARES Act. The CARES Act provided aid to individuals and businesses adversely affected by covid-19, but buried within the bipartisan spending package was a 120-day moratorium on eviction filings. The Trump administration, however, did not allow the moratorium to expire. Instead, the administration’s CDC “instated on September 4 a moratorium on evictions for nonpayment of rent for tenants,” which was set to expire on January 1, 2021. The Biden administration continued to extend the CDC’s eviction moratorium until the Supreme Court ruled against the measure’s legality on August 26, 2021.

In criticizing the CDC’s legal authority, a majority of the Supreme Court asked, “Could the CDC, for example, mandate free grocery delivery to the homes of the sick or vulnerable?” The Supreme Court separately noted that the CDC’s temporarily expanded statutory authority “is a wafer-thin reed on which to rest such sweeping power.” The CDC’s eviction moratorium is just one example of an executive branch agency overstepping its statutory authority.

Vaccine-or-Test Mandates

Throughout the early months of the Biden administration, the administration and the corporate media pressured all eligible Americans to receive the covid-19 vaccines. As Americans ignored the Biden administration and public health “experts,” the White House became increasingly disdainful of those who were skeptical of the covid-19 vaccines. While a slim majority of eligible Americans opted to voluntarily receive the covid-19 vaccines, the minority was labeled as “anti-vax” despite their variety of reasons for not getting vaccinated, including medical conditions, vaccine hesitancy, and the lack of rigorous long-term study of the vaccines’ side effects. The Biden administration continued to grow enraged that nearly half of eligible Americans ignored their expertise.

In September 2021, the White House announced a “vaccine or test” requirement through legal maneuvering. The most wide-ranging requirement came from OSHA’s emergency temporary standard (ETS), which required employers to determine the vaccination status of each employee, obtain acceptable proof of vaccination status, and maintain records of each employee’s vaccination status. The ETS required each unvaccinated worker to test for covid-19 weekly. At that time, an unvaccinated worker was defined as an individual without two doses of the mRNA vaccines (Moderna and Pfizer) or one dose of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine; the ETS was purposefully silent on those who had natural immunity (immunity from previous exposure to the virus).

As expected, special interest groups immediately challenged the OSHA ETS in court. The legal challenges ended on January 13, 2022, with the Supreme Court ruling in favor of the National Federation of Independent Business over OSHA. The Supreme Court found that “permitting OSHA to regulate the hazards of daily life—simply because most Americans have jobs and face those same risks while on the clock—would significantly expand OSHA’s regulatory authority without clear congressional authorization.”

Mask Mandates

On January 21, 2021, President Biden issued Executive Order 13998, which directed executive branch officials to require individuals to wear masks while engaging in domestic and international travel. On February 3, 2021, the CDC published its mask mandate for domestic and international travel, bypassing the Administration Procedures Act notice and comment procedures. The CDC defended its actions by claiming “it would be impracticable and contrary to the public’s health” to delay the mandate.

In March 2022, the Senate voted 57–40 to “overturn a federal requirement that passengers on airplanes and other modes of public transportation wear masks.” However, the Senate failed to reach the sixty-vote requirement, so this measure failed. In April 2022, the CDC’s interstate travel masking requirement stood as the last visible relic of the federal government’s covid-19 regime. The Biden administration publicly supported the continued enforcement of this requirement and renewed the mandate for one more month on March 18.

On April 18, 2022, district judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle struck down the CDC’s mask mandate. Progressives were quick to deride Judge Mizelle and her ruling. Dr. Anthony Fauci’s criticism of this ruling resembled that of a high priest: “the principle of a court overruling a public health judgment by a qualified organization like the CDC is disturbing in the precedent that it might send.”

After two years of governance by public health “experts,” courts have finally found the courage to confront emergency power abuses at the federal level. As Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote, “Even if the Constitution has taken a holiday during this pandemic, it cannot become a sabbatical.”

Conclusion

After more than two years of a constitutional sabbatical, federal courts have overturned the most egregious abuses of covid-19 emergency power. Unfortunately, the president remains undeterred from implementing his party’s preferred policies through unilateral action. Progressives in Congress have pressured President Biden to unilaterally cancel student loan debt. His colleague Representative Jim Clyburn explained an approach that mirrors the Biden administration’s guiding legal principle: “So my whole thing is, use your executive authority and let the courts have at it.” President Barack Obama governed in a similar manner, “I refuse to take no for an answer…. When Congress refuses to act … I have an obligation as president to do what I can without them.”

Given the Biden administration’s legal track record, one would expect their legal approach to change; however, this seems unlikely, given the executive branch’s trajectory in recent decades. “Do what you want until the courts say it’s illegal” is not a legitimate or democratic governing principle in a twenty-first-century constitutional republic. The most obvious solution to this crisis of legitimacy is for Congress to regain its mantle as the legislative body and to accept accountability for contentious policy issues.

Unfortunately, there are no signs that Congress is willing to take any positive steps in that direction. Both major political parties have been vocal opponents of the imperial presidency, but “when the need to build a legislative consensus does come up, [presidential] candidates simply promise to [implement policy] themselves.” While the pandemic of covid-related executive overreach has come to an end, it is time for freedom advocates to tackle the greater legitimacy crisis at hand.

The post The Pandemic of Executive Overreach Comes to an End. When Will the Next One Begin? first appeared on SHTF Plan – When It Hits The Fan, Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You.

As if 2022 wasn’t crazy enough, now it appears that we could be on the verge of another very deadly global pandemic.  As I write this, there are now 204 confirmed, probable or suspected cases of monkeypox in 17 different nations around the world.  By the time you read this, that total will probably be even higher.  In fact, the World Health Organization is specifically warning us to expect more cases.  Needless to say, this new outbreak has spawned a lot of really bizarre theories.  Some of these theories will end up being proven false, but at least some of these theories are likely to turn out to be accurate.  There is still so much we don’t know, but it certainly appears that this pandemic has the potential to become another major global crisis.

Let me start with the latest breaking news.  Just a little while ago, officials in Florida announced that there is a probable case of the monkeypox in Florida…

Health officials are investigating the state’s first presumptive positive case of monkeypox in South Florida.

The Florida Department of Health in Broward County announced Sunday that it and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are conducting epidemiological investigations to determine any possible exposures or offer post-exposure treatment.

If confirmed, it would be the third official case in the United States.  Already, there has been a confirmed case in Massachusetts and a confirmed case in New York.

As I discussed last week, monkeypox does not normally spread easily from person to person.

So something really strange seems to be going on.

At the World Health Organization, they have come up with a theory that monkeypox is being spread by sexual activity…

“What seems to be happening now is that it has got into the population as a sexual form, as a genital form, and is being spread as are sexually transmitted infections, which has amplified its transmission around the world,” WHO official David Heymann, an infectious disease specialist, told Reuters.

Of course sexual activity is not the only way that monkeypox can be spread.

Officials at the WHO need to make that very clear.

But so far authorities have identified two “superspreader events” which seem to have been catalysts for this global outbreak.  One was a pride festival in the Canary Islands…

The Canaria Pride festival, held in the town of Maspalomas between May 5 and 15, has become a hotspot for the monkeypox outbreak, reports El País.

The massive party was attended by over 80,000 people, including three Italian men who later tested positive for the virus.

A health source told the newspaper: “Among the 30 or so diagnosed in Madrid, there are several who attended the event, although it is not yet possible to know if one of them is patient zero of this outbreak or if they all got infected there.”

And the other was a fetish festival in Antwerp, Belgium…

Many of the patients who have come forward so far are gay men and Belgium’s three confirmed cases of monkeypox have been linked to a large-scale fetish festival in the port city of Antwerp. Kuipers said in his briefing that while a notable number of men who have sex with men are among the patients the virus is ‘not confined to them’. The virus can be spread via mucus membranes in the mouth, nose and eyes or via open wounds.

As we move into the summer months, the WHO is warning that similar events could cause the outbreak to accelerate even more…

Now the World Health Organization is warning that summer festivals and mass gatherings could accelerate the spread of monkeypox.

“As we enter the summer season in the European region, with mass gatherings, festivals and parties, I am concerned that transmission could accelerate, as the cases currently being detected are among those engaging in sexual activity, and the symptoms are unfamiliar to many,” said Dr Hans Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe.

But even if health authorities do a great job of explaining the dangers, will people avoid engaging in high risk activities?

Of course not.

Another very interesting thing that has come to light is the fact that an international biosecurity conference that was held in Munich in March 2021 actually simulated the type of scenario that we are facing now…

Elite media outlets around the world are on red alert over the world’s first-ever global outbreak of Monkeypox in mid-May 2022—just one year after an international biosecurity conference in Munich held a simulation of a “global pandemic involving an unusual strain of Monkeypox” beginning in mid-May 2022.

When I first heard about it, I thought that this was rather odd.  You can find an article about this simulation that was published last November by one of the participating organizations right here.

According to that article, leaders from four different continents were involved in the exercise…

In March 2021, NTI partnered with the Munich Security Conference to conduct a tabletop exercise on reducing high-consequence biological threats. The exercise examined gaps in national and international biosecurity and pandemic preparedness architectures—exploring opportunities to improve prevention and response capabilities for high-consequence biological events. Participants included 19 senior leaders and experts from across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe with decades of combined experience in public health, biotechnology industry, international security, and philanthropy.

And as you can see below, their simulation envisioned that there would be a monkeypox outbreak right in the middle of May 2022…

So is all of this just some sort of really bizarre coincidence?

Hopefully we will eventually get some answers.

Meanwhile, there has been some speculation that the strain of the monkeypox that is now circulating was originally developed in a lab.

ECDC source tells me that the preliminary analysis of monkeypox indicates that it is “a third lab strain with unknown characteristics” and that there is chatter about this being somehow related to Moscow’s charges against U.S. biological activities in Ukraine.

— Dr. Benjamin Braddock (@GraduatedBen) May 21, 2022

If this is even remotely close to the truth, we should all be deeply alarmed.

As I have repeatedly warned, scientists all over the globe are playing around with the deadliest bugs on the entire planet.

In many of those cases, they intend to make them even deadlier.

It is very foolish to conduct such research, but they are doing it anyway.

Speaking of foolish research, we have also learned that scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have apparently “assembled a monkeypox virus genome”…

The Wuhan Institute of Virology assembled a monkeypox virus genome, allowing the virus to be identified through PCR tests, using a method researchers flagged for potentially creating a “contagious pathogen,” The National Pulse can reveal.

The study was first published in February 2022, just months before the latest international outbreak of monkeypox cases which appear to have now reached the United States.

The paper, which was authored by nine Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers and published in the lab’s quarterly scientific journal Virologica Sinica, also follows the wide-scale use of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) tests to identify COVID-19-positive individuals.

Everything that I have shared with you so far is really weird.

But this story gets even weirder.

It turns out that the U.S. has just spent 119 million dollars on vaccines that would be used during a monkeypox pandemic…

Following confirmation that monkeypox has made its way to the U.S., the government ordered millions of doses of a vaccine that protects against the virus.

Bavarian Nordic, the biotech company that makes the vaccine, has announced a $119 million order placed by the U.S., with the option to buy $180 million more if it wants. Should that second option be exercised, it would work out to approximately 13 million doses.

If monkeypox is not a serious threat, why would our leaders spend so much money on these vaccines?

My hope is that this outbreak fizzles out quickly, because nobody wants another global pandemic.

It hurts my head just to imagine more lockdowns, more restrictions, more masks, more vaccines and more mandates.

But I am definitely concerned that this could become something really, really big.  In fact, those that follow my work on a regular basis know that I have been watching for this exact type of scenario for a couple of years.

As I keep warning, we have entered an era when great pestilences will become quite common.

Scientists are “playing God” in secretive labs all over the planet, and they think that there will never be any serious consequences.

But some of their deadly bugs inevitably escape from lab environments one way or another, and one of these days that could result in a pandemic that kills a substantial percentage of the global population.

***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available on Amazon.com.  In addition to my new book I have written five other books that are available on Amazon.com including  “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, “Get Prepared Now”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. (#CommissionsEarned)  When you purchase any of these books you help to support the work that I am doing, and one way that you can really help is by sending digital copies as gifts through Amazon to family and friends.  Time is short, and I need help getting these warnings into the hands of as many people as possible.  I have published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe.  I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but I also ask that they include this “About the Author” section with each article.  The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions.  I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook and Twitter, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help.  These are such troubled times, and people need hope.  John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”  If you have not already done so, I strongly urge you to ask Jesus to be your Lord and Savior today.

The post There Are A Lot Of Really Bizarre Theories About Monkeypox Going Around appeared first on End Of The American Dream.

What’s better, .223 or .308? AR-15 or AK47? What about 9mm vs .40 S&W? Shooters love debating this stuff. It’s…

This article %9mm vs .40 S&W – A Comprehensive Comparison% appeared first on %SHTF Blog – Modern Survival%.

For shoppers on a budget: How do you take arguably the most popular pump shotgun on the market and cut the price in half (or better) without compromising quality or reliability? You follow Mossberg’s plan and introduce a model that is like the stripped-down version of a sports car. The Maverick 88 line from Mossberg…

The post Mossberg Maverick 88 Review appeared first on Survival Cache.

If you are a prepper or survivalist, keeping binoculars with you is a must. Read the article to understand more about binoculars and use them more frequently. When preparing for any survival situation, binoculars might not be often found on your equipment list. However, you need to seriously consider keeping one around as they are […]

This article was originally published by Ethan Huff at Natural News. 

David Beasley, the current head of the United Nations World Food Programme, is warning that a perfect storm of global economic collapse is rapidly forming.

Extreme weather, war, the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19), and financial failure are all simultaneously setting the stage for a “war-fueled” crisis of biblical proportions.

“If people can’t feed their children and their families, then the politics unsettles,” Beasley told CNN during a recent conference. (Related: India, the world’s second-largest wheat exporter, just cut off all wheat exports.)

The UN itself is now having to ration its food supplies due to high prices and supply disruptions. This is causing millions of people who rely on this sustenance to suffer.

“If we’re not there with a safety net program, then the political extremists or whatever the case may be, will exploit that,” Beasley said, noting that many hungry children are suffering.

“Next thing you know, you’ve got riots, famine, destabilization, and then mass migration by necessity.”

The biggest problem this year, according to Beasley, is food prices. Next year, it will morph into a food availability problem as supplies run dry due to various factors.

“In 2023, you’re going to have a food shortage problem,” Beasley says.

2022 will see the worst humanitarian crisis since WWII (and it’ll probably be much worse)

The entire world is feeling the pain of all this, but poorer countries are feeling it the worst. Beasley says that many African countries are already in a state of social unrest due to a lack of food or food becoming too expensive for families to afford.

“In the United States, some people might buy less Netflix, but you have enough money to buy the food you need,” he says. “It’s going to be tough on people, but nothing compared to Chad, Mali, and Ethiopia.”

Americans on fixed incomes and others on the poorer end of the economic spectrum are also facing tough times at the grocery store as well as at the gas pump. If things are already this bad here, imagine how they are elsewhere?

“You can imagine what the heck is happening in places like Chad, Malawi, and DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo),” Beasley says.

The war in Syria and the Arab Spring uprising in 2011 were both preceded by food inflation and supply issues. However, conditions now are already much, much worse with no end in sight.

Back in January, the UN warned that 2022 would face a humanitarian crisis not seen since World War II. It is already shaping up to be much worse than that, possibly resulting in World War III.

The UN said this before Russia invaded Ukraine, by the way, which makes the situation even more precarious.

Global trade is currently in the process of shutting down, it would seem. And with Ukraine being the “breadbasket” of Europe, the food crisis is absolutely going to get worse as the year progresses.

Under normal circumstances, Ukraine grows enough food to feed about 400 million people. With exports now cut off, many will starve.

“That’s pretty much going to be out of the equation for many, many months,” Beasley says about Ukraine’s now-shuttered food exports.

Critical Black Sea ports are also now offline because of the conflict, which is physically preventing goods from traveling to where they need to be.

“It’s going to be so much worse than you think,” Beasley stated ominously during his speech.

Billionaires could help the situation if they were not so greedy, Beasley added.

“I just need two days of your net worth increase,” he says to the upper crust. “Is that too much to ask?”

The post UN Says Social Unrest is Coming as a Consequence of “War-Fueled” Food Inflation first appeared on SHTF Plan – When It Hits The Fan, Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You.

This article was originally published by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead at the Rutherford Institute. 

“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech.”—Benjamin Franklin

Beware of those who want to monitor, muzzle, catalog, and censor speech.

Especially be on your guard when the reasons given for limiting your freedoms end up expanding the government’s powers.

In the wake of a mass shooting in Buffalo, NY, carried out by an 18-year-old gunman in military gear allegedly motivated by fears that the white race is in danger of being replaced, there have been renewed calls for social media monitoring, censorship of flagged content that could be construed as dangerous or hateful, and limitations on free speech activities, particularly online.

As expected, those who want safety at all costs will clamor for more gun control measures (if not an outright ban on weapons for non-military, non-police personnel), widespread mental health screening of the general population and greater scrutiny of military veterans, more threat assessments and behavioral sensing warnings, more surveillance cameras with facial recognition capabilities, more “See Something, Say Something” programs aimed at turning Americans into snitches and spies, more metal detectors and whole-body imaging devices at soft targets, more roaming squads of militarized police empowered to do random bag searches, more fusion centers to centralize and disseminate information to law enforcement agencies, and more surveillance of what Americans say and do, where they go, what they buy and how they spend their time.

All of these measures play into the government’s hands.

As we have learned the hard way, the phantom promise of safety in exchange for restricted or regulated liberty is a false, misguided doctrine that serves only to give the government greater authority to crack down, lockdown, and institute even more totalitarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

Add the Department of Homeland Security’s “Disinformation Governance Board” to that mix, empower it to monitor online activity and police so-called “disinformation,” and you have the makings of a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

After all, it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing the truth.

Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

It’s been a long time since free speech was actually free.

On paper—at least according to the U.S. Constitution—we are technically free to speak.

In reality, however, we are only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

That’s not a whole lot of freedom, especially if you’re inclined to voice opinions that may be construed as conspiratorial or dangerous.

This steady, pervasive censorship creep clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness and inflicted on us by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) is technofascism, and it does not tolerate dissent.

These internet censors are not acting in our best interests to protect us from dangerous, disinformation campaigns. They’re laying the groundwork now to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

The internet, hailed as a super-information highway, is increasingly becoming the police state’s secret weapon. This “policing of the mind” is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of what will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”

What we are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them.

Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts, and expressions that challenge their authority.

Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all—we have nowhere left to go and nothing left to say that cannot be misconstrued and used to muzzle us.

Yet what a lot of people fail to understand, however, is that it’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted.

We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matters.

With every passing day, we’re being moved further down the road towards a totalitarian society characterized by government censorship, violence, corruption, hypocrisy, and intolerance, all packaged for our supposed benefit in the Orwellian doublespeak of national security, tolerance, and so-called “government speech.”

Little by little, Americans have been conditioned to accept routine incursions on their freedoms.

This is how oppression becomes systemic, what is referred to as creeping normality, or death by a thousand cuts.

It’s a concept invoked by Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist Jared Diamond to describe how major changes if implemented slowly in small stages over time, can be accepted as normal without the shock and resistance that might greet a sudden upheaval.

Diamond’s concerns related to Easter Island’s now-vanished civilization and the societal decline and environmental degradation that contributed to it, but it’s a powerful analogy for the steady erosion of our freedoms and decline of our country right under our noses.

As Diamond explains, “In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism… Why didn’t they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?”

His answer: “I suspect that the disaster happened not with a bang but with a whimper.”

Much like America’s own colonists, Easter Island’s early colonists discovered a new world—“a pristine paradise”—teeming with life. Yet almost 2000 years after its first settlers arrived, Easter Island was reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they failed to preserve paradise for future generations.

The same could be said of America today: it, too, is being reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they are failing to preserve freedom for future generations.

In Easter Island’s case, as Diamond speculates:

“The forest…vanished slowly, over decades. Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams; perhaps by the time the carvers had finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime, any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation… The changes in forest cover from year to year would have been hard to detect… Only older people, recollecting their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference. Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.”

Sound painfully familiar yet?

We’ve already torn down the rich forest of liberties established by our founders. It has vanished slowly, over the decades. Those who warned against the dangers posed by too many laws, invasive surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids and the like have been silenced and ignored. They stopped teaching about freedom in the schools. Few Americans know their history. And even fewer seem to care that their fellow Americans are being jailed, muzzled, shot, tasered, and treated as if they have no rights at all.

The erosion of our freedoms happened so incrementally, no one seemed to notice. Only the older generations, remembering what true freedom was like, recognized the difference. Gradually, the freedoms enjoyed by the citizenry became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last freedom falls, no one will know the difference.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls: with a thousand cuts, each one justified or ignored or shrugged over as inconsequential enough by itself to bother, but they add up.

Each cut, each attempt to undermine our freedoms, each loss of some critical right—to think freely, to assemble, to speak without fear of being shamed or censored, to raise our children as we see fit, to worship or not worship as our conscience dictates, to eat what we want and love who we want, to live as we want—they add up to an immeasurable failure on the part of each and every one of us to stop the descent down that slippery slope.

We are on that downward slope now.

The contagion of fear that has been spread with the help of government agencies, corporations, and the power elite is poisoning the well, whitewashing our history, turning citizen against citizen, and stripping us of our rights.

America is approaching another reckoning right now, one that will pit our commitment to freedom principles against a level of fear-mongering that is being used to wreak havoc on everything in its path.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, while we squabble over which side is winning this losing battle, a tsunami approaches.

The post Get Ready to Be Muzzled: The Coming War on So-Called Hate Speech first appeared on SHTF Plan – When It Hits The Fan, Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You.

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The post Mr. Manners: Let’s Have an Open Discussion on Open Carry appeared first on Ballistic Magazine.

If you’ve ever wondered what’s on psychopath Hunter Biden’s laptop, you can at least have a look at his emails. Over 120,000 emails have been uploaded to a searchable database.

You may want to jump on this quickly, however, the ruling class may not like this information being public for very long.

A former Trump White House staffer has uploaded more than 120,000 emails found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop to a searchable database this week, which can be found at the (slowly loading) website: BidenLaptopEmails.com. In addition to searching, visitors can download the emails as well.

According to a report by ZeroHedge, the website was set up by former Peter Navarro aide Garrett Ziegler, who worked in the Trump administration Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, the emails contain infamous hits such as the “10 for the big guy,” in which Hunter Biden’s business partner James Gillar suggested he should hold 10% of a multi-million-dollar deal with the Chinese. Ziegler posted the emails through his organization, Marco Polo.

Another email in the database, previously published by DailyMail.com, shows Hunter describing an extraordinary apparent quid pro quo with a Mexican billionaire’s son, outlining how he got him into the White House and inauguration, and thanking him for visits to his villa.

Some messages did not appear to be included in the database. One email published by DailyMail.com shows Hunter inviting his foreign business partners and associates to a 2015 dinner at Washington DC restaurant Café Milano.

In the email he reveals that his father will secretly be joining – and says that the dinner is ‘ostensibly to discuss food security’. The White House at first denied the then-vice president was there, but eventually admitted it when photographs emerged from the event.-Daily Mail

“Here are the 128k emails from the Biden Laptop, which is a modern Rosetta Stone of white and blue-collar crime under the patina of “the Delaware Way,”” reads the website, referring to a term frequently used by Joe Biden. “Prior to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, a number of ancient languages were mere gibberish and hash marks. Similarly, the emails on the Biden Laptop illuminated previously convoluted webs of the people you see leading the charge for global governance; truly, the emails can be considered a translation tool for Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) gathering.”

Have a look if you’d like, but we wouldn’t expect this website to stay up long. It has been noted that the uploading speed is incredibly slow, so it could take a while to even get any information. But if we ever want to be free, we need to be able to understand how those who think they have the right to be masters over others perceive the world we share.

 

The post What’s On Hunter’s Laptop? Over 120,000 Hunter Biden Emails Uploaded To Searchable Database first appeared on SHTF Plan – When It Hits The Fan, Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You.