At this point “What radicalized you?” is a much less interesting question to ask people than “Why aren’t you radicalized yet?”

Reading by Tim Foley:

“What radicalized you?”

I dunno man maybe it was all the wars based on lies or the corporate ecocide or the live-streamed genocide or the people sleeping on sidewalks while billionaires become trillionaires or the plundering of the global south or the mass surveillance or the police drones or the Israeli torture prisons or the IDF rape dogs or the starvation sanctions or the proxy wars or the acts of nuclear brinkmanship or the encircling of our planet with hundreds of US military bases or the CIA black sites or the Epstein files or the government secrecy or the increasing persecution of journalists and whistleblowers or the fact that the US just openly assassinates and kidnaps the leaders of sovereign nations or the internet censorship or the way all western media and all Silicon Valley tech platforms operate as propaganda services for the US empire or the aggressive push to outlaw pro-Palestine demonstrations or the legalized corruption of western governments or the way AI is being shoved down our throats while data centers choke our ecosystem or the thinly disguised rush to develop militarized robots for domestic use or the glaring plot holes in the official 9/11 story or the glaring plot holes in the official October 7 story or the complete impotence of electoral politics in an oligarchy where the rich get everything they want or the vanishing ice caps or the vanishing rainforests or the vanishing wildlife or the plummeting insect population or the ocean desertification or the giant continent of plastic in the North Atlantic or the microplastics in our brains and in our blood or the fact that we live under a globe-spanning empire that cannot exist without mass-scale violence and exploitation or the fact that younger generations are economically far worse off than their parents and grandparents or the fact that ordinary people are having to work harder and harder as everything gets more and more expensive while the capitalist class reaps record profits?

At this point “What radicalized you?” is a much less interesting question to ask people than “Why aren’t you radicalized yet? Seriously, how is that possible? How have you successfully managed to avoid conversion to a radical political worldview despite everything you are seeing right in front of your eyes?”

Because to the rest of us, that shit looks like a goddamn magic trick. It looks like a superhuman feat of willpower to continue believing everything’s basically okay and our leaders will sort this all out for us if we just vote for the correct plutocratic meat puppet in the next election. You’re just chilling out while everything burns, like that Buddhist monk sitting calmly in meditation after setting himself on fire. How are you even doing that?

__________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image by Jaber Jehad Badwan — Jaber Jehad Badwan, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=159482733

The post “What Radicalized You?” appeared first on Activist Post.

It took the US 200 years to reach its first $1 trillion in debt. It took 95 days to add its last.

After several weeks of build up, today the Treasury announced that total public debt surpassed $40 trillion for the first time, after jumping by over $60 billion in one day, and has now surged by $1 trillion in just over three months, and by a third of the total in less than five years, as US lawmakers continue to ignore calls to contend with historically wide fiscal deficits.

The largely expected news came just hours after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent unexpectedly announced the Treasury’s latest attempt to rein-in long-term borrowing costs from multi-year highs, the most important component of the growth in debt. The Treasury stunned the market when it said, just two weeks after the latest Refunding Announcement where it should have made this change, that it was ramping up the support for longer-dated securities by “increasing, by at least double, the size of liquidity support buyback operations for longer-dated nominal coupon securities (the 10-year to 20-year sector and the 20-year to 30-year sector).”

The announcement that sent yields plunging, if only for the time being. 

Remarkably, it was less than 5 years ago that US debt hit $30 trillion back in January 2022, illustrating the rapid growth in federal borrowing needs. And there’s no end in sight. 

As Bloomberg notes, “Republicans have long opposed revenue-raising tax increases,” while Democrats are best known for spending like drunken sailors to maximize socialist central planning, and both parties are loathe to sign on to politically toxic cuts to healthcare and retirement benefits for seniors. Many observers anticipate Congress and the administration of the day will only act if forced by a financial-market disruption.

That won’t stop them from talking about it all the time, though, as both parties at least pretend to understand that the US is on a catastrophic collision course should debt growth continue at this pace, and if the AI bet – which is now an all-in for virtually everyone – fails to dramatically boost productivity. Bessent, for one, said a key reason he got involved in politics was to help tackle deficits running at a pace unprecedented for times outside of major wars, pandemics or depressed job markets. So far he has failed catastrophically, and worse, he is doing precisely the kind of activist issuance “Twisting” for which he bashed his predecessor, Janet Yellen.

Economists, the Congressional Budget Office and Wall Street all see little or no progress in coming years for the deficit-to-gross domestic product ratio.

“Optically, I’m sure crossing thresholds like $40 trillion will focus attention on the issue in the near term,” said Matthew Luzzetti, chief US economist at Deutsche Bank AG. “But it does not represent a magical threshold for debt dynamics, and projections have anticipated this outcome for some time.”

More important, Luzzetti said, is the climb in US Treasury yields, which is steadily increasing the cost of servicing the record debt load. Last Thursday, the department’s latest 30-year bond auction resulted in the costliest such sale in a quarter century. A 10-year auction a day earlier drew the highest financing cost at that tenor since 2007, and only today’s announcement which sent yields tumbling prevent today’s 20Y Treasury auction from pricing at the highest yield on record. 

As buyers demand higher yields, that in turn drives up the Treasury’s borrowing needs. With two months left to go in the fiscal year, the government’s tally for interest costs so far for 2026 is $1.37 trillion – a 20% increase on the same period a year before. That in turn adds to the debt, potentially fueling further investor calls for higher rates, in a pattern known as a “doom loop.”

For a visual of said doom loop, consider that the Treasury paid out about $85 billion to bondholders in its semi-annual coupon payment on Monday, the largest on record. For comparison, the Treasury paid out $75 billion of interest at the mid-month settlement period in August 2025 and about $80 billion on Feb. 17.

Interest costs are now the third-largest part of the budget, surpassing healthcare and just behind Social Security. However, at $1.6 trillion, Social Security will be topped by gross interest no later than 2026.

It gets worse: thanks to the AI bubble – and specifically the AI debt bubble which we correctly spotted one year ago and which the market is only now starting to freak out about – the record debt issuance to fund capex is now starting to crowd out of demand for US paper. This means that very soon, the US government will have to decide: keeping the electorate happy, or funding data centers so they can buy the latest massively overpriced memory chips needed to run the latest chatbot. Incidentally, those soaring memory costs are now adding about 0.5% to core PCE, a number which the admin will soon realize is very politically unpopular, and will lead to a historic crackdown on hyperinflationary memory and semiconductor prices. 

“The federal budget is the enemy within,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and a former director of the CBO, wrote in a note Monday. “It is the greatest threat to the foundations of economic progress, U.S. international economic standing, and national security. The only reason for optimism should be material actions to rein in the sea of red ink. There are no such material actions.”

He is right, of course: the only time there can be material actions, is when the bond vigilantes crash the market, yet actions such as those by Bessent today assure that said day was just punted several weeks or months into the future, again and again.  

But wait, because there is even more: all of the above assumes no recession, no crises, no emergencies for the foreseeable future. Well, consider that US debt exploded higher during the most recent economic downturns tied to the global financial crisis and the Covid pandemic. During those periods, revenue slid as tax-paying workers lost jobs, and assistance payments jumped. One can only imagine where US debt will be after the next recession/pandemic/hot war.

Going back to Bessent, the current Treasury secretary came into office in 2025 touting a budget deficit target of around 3% of GDP by the end of President Donald Trump’s second term, which concludes in January 2029.  It’s not clear how that will possibly happen: as of July the ratio is 6% and rising… and will keep rising the longer the AI bubble drains demand for US long-dated paper.

Meanwhile, according to recent reports, Trump is seeking to galvanize support ahead of the November midterm elections, and is looking at new tax-cut promises in addition to increases in defense spending, both of which will supercharge the deficit and lead to even more debt. Meanwhile, the Elon Musk-led 2025 Department of Government Efficiency effort, which sought to slash discretionary spending including on contracts and government buildings, failed to cut outlays as much as DOGE’s own estimates projected. 

And then there is the next round of political theater: the current pace of debt accumulation…

… means that the government has about 4 or 5 months before it again hits the debt ceiling of $41.1 trillion. Hitting that marker is expected to trigger another in the series of partisan showdowns in Washington over the years to head off a potentially devastating US payments default.

“The government has not taken meaningful actions to address the large general government fiscal deficits,” Fitch said. “Spending pressures will mount over the next decade due to an aging population.” The country will be “vulnerable to future economic shocks” as debt levels increase, the rating company said.

For Fitch, talk is cheap: instead of downgrading the US credit rating, one week ago Fitch reaffirmed the US at AA+, assuring that absolutely no remedial step will be taken, and that the next debt crisis will be cataclysmic.

“Hitting this big round number will hopefully send a wake up call throughout Washington,” said Michael Peterson, who chairs the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a research group, in regard to the $40 trillion. “It will hurt everyday affordability across the country if we don’t get our debt under control,” he said.

He is wrong: everyone knows that the US is on a historic collision course with destiny. The only wake up call was for gold and bitcoin algos, both of which finally woke up from a bizarre slumber, sending both real and digital gold soaring.

The post “Doom Loop” Engaged: US Debt Hits $40 Trillion As Treasury Enters The Endgame appeared first on Activist Post.

I used to think the whole “debanking” panic was overblown. I really did. I’d roll my eyes at the Twitter threads and the think-pieces about how we’re all living in some dystopian soft-censorship nightmare. I’m a reasonable person, you know? I vote, I pay my taxes, I have a 401k that I check maybe twice a year when I’m feeling particularly masochistic. I thought the people screaming about being deplatformed or debanked were probably extremists, probably saying genuinely horrible stuff that any reasonable company would want to distance themselves from.

I was wrong about all of it, and I learned that lesson the hard way on a Tuesday morning that started like any other.

Let me tell you about March 14th, 2026. I remember the date because it was the day after my daughter’s seventh birthday, and we were still cleaning up wrapping paper and trying to find homes for the avalanche of plastic toys that had taken over our living room. I woke up, made coffee in the same black mug I always use, sat down at my desk to start the workday like I do every morning. I’m a freelance copywriter. Boring stuff. Product descriptions, email campaigns, the occasional blog post about software I don’t understand for companies I’ve never heard of. It pays the bills, or at least it used to before everything went sideways.

I tried to log into my Chase account to check if a client had paid an overdue invoice and got an error message. Weird, but not unheard of. I tried the app. Nothing. I called the number, waited through forty minutes of hold music that sounded like it was composed by an AI having an existential crisis, and finally got through to a human being who told me my accounts had been “restricted” and that I’d need to come into a branch with two forms of ID.

Restricted. That’s the word they used. Not frozen, not closed. Restricted. Like I was a teenager who’d hit their data limit.

So I drove to the branch during my lunch break, still thinking this was some kind of mistake, probably related to that time my card got skimmed at a gas station in 2019. I brought my passport, my driver”s license, a utility bill, my Social Security card, basically every piece of identification I’ve accumulated in my thirty-four years of existence. I sat down with a nice woman named Patricia who had the kind of patient smile that people develop after years of telling customers things they don’t want to hear. She typed for a while, her face slowly changing from professional neutrality to something more complicated, something that looked almost like embarrassment. Then she told me she couldn’t discuss the matter further and that I’d receive a letter explaining everything within ten business days.

Ten business days. I had maybe three hundred dollars in cash in my apartment, a mortgage payment due in five days, and a family that likes to eat food on a regular basis. I asked her what I was supposed to do until then, how I was supposed to pay for groceries or gas or the medication my wife takes for her migraines, and she just gave me that smile again and said she was sorry but there was nothing she could do.

The letter came six days later, after I’d already borrowed money from my brother-in-law and explained to my daughter why we couldn’t go to the trampoline park we’d promised her for spring break. It was three paragraphs of corporate legalese that boiled down to one sentence: my accounts had been flagged for “suspicious activity related to potential money laundering and the financing of extremist organizations.”

I read it three times sitting on my porch, feeling like I’d slipped into some alternate reality where I was a completely different person than the one I thought I was. I’m not an extremist. I’ve never been arrested. The most radical thing I’d done in the past year was argue with my HOA about whether I could plant tomatoes in my front yard. But then I got to the second page, and there it was: the specific transactions that had triggered their algorithms. A $500 transfer to a legal defense fund. A $200 donation to a nonprofit that I’d later learn had been added to some obscure watchlist. A subscription to a newsletter that apparently shared contributors with other newsletters that shared contributors with organizations that someone, somewhere, had decided were problematic.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about the modern financial system: it’s not really run by humans anymore, not in any meaningful sense. It’s run by algorithms and risk-assessment matrices and third-party vendors that sell “reputational intelligence” to banks who are terrified of bad press and regulatory scrutiny. Somewhere in a server farm in Virginia or maybe Bangalore, a piece of software had scraped my social media, cross-referenced my donations with databases I’d never heard of, and decided I was a risk factor. And because banks are incentivized to be paranoid, because the cost of a false positive is nothing compared to the cost of missing a real bad actor, there was no appeal process that mattered. I called the number on the letter and spoke to people who genuinely seemed to want to help but had no power to do anything. I escalated to supervisors who read from scripts that all ended with the same phrase: “The decision has been made in accordance with our risk management protocols.”

I spent the next three weeks living in a kind of financial limbo that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I couldn’t access my savings, which represented years of careful budgeting and sacrifice. My automatic payments started bouncing, which meant late fees and angry emails from creditors who didn’t care about my explanations. I had to ask my parents for a loan at thirty-four years old, which was humiliating in ways I can’t fully describe. My wife tried to be supportive, but I could see the worry in her eyes, the question she was too kind to ask: what if this doesn’t get fixed? What if this is just how things are now?

The Efficiency of the Surveillance Machine: Hard Data from 2026

Below are the official figures from FinCEN’s 2026 reporting cycle. These numbers tell their own story about the scale of financial monitoring and its actual effectiveness:

[Imagine tabel statistic aici – media_id: YcQcmxSxcW0Zc8.0]

A 0.001% success rate is not a law enforcement system. It is a mechanism of collective punishment designed to produce compliance through fear.

The part that really broke me wasn’t the practical stuff. It was the realization that someone, somewhere, had looked at my life and decided I was dangerous based on a handful of data points and association chains that I had no control over. I’ve always been politically engaged, sure. I post about local elections and environmental policy and sometimes I get into arguments in comment sections that I regret the next morning. But I’m not a radical. I’m a guy who likes to grill on weekends and worries about his kids’ education and thinks healthcare should be affordable. The donations that flagged me were to organizations that are completely legal, that have 501(c)(3) status, that operate in broad daylight. But someone had decided they didn’t like those organizations, or the people who run them, or the people who donate to them, and that dislike had cascaded through the system until it landed on me, sitting on my porch with a letter that made me feel like a criminal.

Eventually, after I hired a lawyer I couldn’t afford and threatened to go to the press, the bank reversed their decision. I got a call from someone in their “executive relations” department who explained that there had been a “misunderstanding” and that my accounts were being restored with a “goodwill credit” for the inconvenience. Just like that, after weeks of stress and shame and financial precarity, it was over. I was supposed to be grateful, I think. I was supposed to accept their apology and move on and be happy that I could pay my mortgage again. But I can’t shake the feeling that I got a glimpse behind the curtain, and what I saw there scares me more than I can articulate.

We talk a lot about free speech in this country, about the First Amendment and the marketplace of ideas, but we don’t talk as much about the infrastructure that makes participation in society possible. You need a bank account to get paid. You need a bank account to pay rent. You need a bank account to buy food, to access credit, to function in the modern economy. When that gets taken away, it doesn’t matter what rights you have on paper because you’re locked out of the systems that make those rights meaningful. And when the decision to exclude you is made by algorithms acting on criteria that are proprietary and secret, when you have no right to know who accused you or why, when the burden is on you to prove you’re not a bad person rather than on them to prove you are, that’s not freedom. That’s just a more sophisticated form of control.

I don’t know what the solution is. I’m not a policy expert. I just know that I’m different now than I was before March 14th. I self-censor more. I think twice before donating to causes I care about, before signing petitions, before posting opinions that might be controversial. I keep more cash in my safe. I’ve opened accounts at two different banks, trying to diversify my risk like I’m a portfolio instead of a person. My wife and I have talked about keeping more of our savings in physical assets, which feels paranoid until you remember that paranoia is just pattern recognition in people who’ve been burned before.

The worst part is the isolation. When this happened to me, I didn’t know who to talk to about it. I was ashamed, for one thing. There’s a stigma to having your accounts frozen that feels uncomfortably close to the stigma of being arrested, even though I hadn’t done anything wrong. And the people I did tell mostly didn’t understand. They’d say things like “just use a different bank” or “you must have done something suspicious” or “this is why I don’t mix politics and money.” They couldn’t grasp that the problem wasn’t one bank making a bad decision, it was a system that allows private companies to act as gatekeepers to economic participation based on secret criteria and political whim. They couldn’t see that this isn’t about me and my specific situation, it’s about what happens when we build a society where the infrastructure of daily life can be withdrawn as punishment for wrongthink.

I’m telling this story now because I think people need to understand that this is real, that it happens to normal people who aren’t extremists or criminals or threats to anyone. It happens to freelancers trying to pay their mortgages. It happens to parents saving for their kids’ college. It happens to people who thought they were safe because they follow the rules and stay in their lane. And once it happens, you don’t see the world the same way anymore. You realize how fragile your place in the economy really is, how conditional your participation in society has become, and how little it takes to transform a respectable citizen into a financial untouchable.

I got my accounts back, but I didn’t get my sense of security back. That disappeared somewhere between the hold music and the form letter, and I don’t think it’s coming back. I used to believe that if you were honest and worked hard and stayed out of trouble, the system would basically work for you. Now I know better. Now I know that the system works for whoever controls the algorithms, and the rest of us are just living at the mercy of their judgment. And that’s no way to live at all.

The post The Specter of Economic Death: Algorithmic Ostracism and the Dissolution of Financial Personhood in Late-Stage Surveillance Capitalism appeared first on Activist Post.

Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine showed abysmal efficacy in preventing hospitalization. It also showed a higher risk of adverse events, including death, compared with a non-mRNA standard-dose flu vaccine, according to a reanalysis of the FDA’s clinical data. The authors of the reanalysis, including Dr. Peter McCullough and Nicolas Hulscher, urged U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to halt distribution of the shots.

Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine should be immediately withdrawn from the market due to the shot’s huge risks and small benefits, according to a reanalysis of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) own data on the vaccine’s risk-benefit profile.

The authors — cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, epidemiologist Nicolas Hulscher and natural medicine physician John Catanzaro, Ph.D. — on Wednesday published their results on the preprint server Zenodo.

They reanalyzed clinical data on the safety and efficacy of Moderna’s mFLUSIVA (mRNA-1010) flu vaccine from an FDA briefing document that the FDA’s vaccine committee reviewed at its June 18 meeting. During that meeting, the committee unanimously voted to endorse Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine for people 50 and older.

The briefing document, which reported results from safety and efficacy studies conducted by Moderna, was prepared by the FDA’s Division of Clinical and Toxicology Review, part of the agency’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review.

According to the reanalysis by McCullough’s team, Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine showed abysmal efficacy in preventing hospitalization. It also showed a higher risk of adverse events, including death, compared with a non-mRNA standard-dose flu vaccine

For example, their analysis of data from one of the shot’s main trials revealed that, to prevent a single hospitalization, 5,017 adults had to receive the mRNA flu vaccine, the authors said.

Meanwhile, the mRNA shot had roughly 1,454 additional solicited adverse reactions, 233 additional Grade 3 systemic reactions severe enough to prevent normal daily activity, and approximately two excess unexplained deaths, compared to the non-mRNA shot.

Additionally, neither of the two main trials for the mRNA shot used a placebo or looked at whether the shot prevented flu-related deaths.

According to the report, “A vaccine licensed in large part to prevent severe influenza outcomes was never tested against influenza death; no influenza-mortality endpoint appears anywhere in its development program.”

The authors sent a letter about their findings to U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., calling on him to remove the shot from the market.

They asked Kennedy to “direct the appropriate HHS and FDA officials to reexamine this approval, initiate withdrawal proceedings, and halt distribution before widespread administration begins during the 2026-2027 season.”

Hulscher wrote on Substack, “The government has been given the data. It now has the responsibility to act.”

FDA claims shot has ‘superior’ efficacy and ‘acceptable’ number of adverse reactions

According to McCullough’s report, the FDA’s data on Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine showed that the shot’s risk-benefit profile is “extremely unfavorable.”

Yet the summarizing text of the FDA’s briefing document tells a different story. The document’s “Summary of Benefit-Risk” (page 27) states that the mRNA vaccine showed “superior” relative vaccine efficacy compared with the non-mRNA standard-dose vaccine.

For instance, in one trial, the mRNA shot was linked to 27% fewer confirmed flu cases than the current standard vaccine.

The summary acknowledged that the number of adverse reactions to the mRNA shot was “elevated” compared to the non-mRNA shot, but added that the number “appears acceptable.”

After the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee greenlit the vaccine, the FDA licensed it on Aug. 5.

Moderna’s mFLUSIVA is expected to be available for the 2026-2027 respiratory illness season, ABC News reported.

mRNA shots faster to produce — but carry higher safety and efficacy risks

Proponents of the mRNA version of the flu vaccine claim the mRNA platform allows vaccine makers to cut down development time from six months to six weeks. That could mean there’s a better match between the circulating flu strain and the vaccine developed by companies.

However, critics of the mRNA platform cite efficacy and safety concerns that outweigh the platform’s possible benefits.

In August 2025, Kennedy canceled nearly $500 million in contracts and grants to develop mRNA vaccines. In a press release, he cited data on mRNA vaccines showing they lack efficacy in protecting against upper respiratory infections like COVID-19 and the flu.

“We’re shifting that funding toward safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate,” Kennedy said.

FDA reverses course after refusing to review Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine

The FDA initially refused to consider Moderna’s application for its mRNA flu vaccine. In a Feb. 3 letter, Dr. Vinay Prasad, then-director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, told Moderna the FDA would not review the company’s application for mRNA-1010 because Moderna’s clinical trial wasn’t “adequate and well-controlled.”

Specifically, the clinical trial’s control group was not given the “best-available standard of care in the United States at the time of the study,” Prasad said.

Moderna officials were “shocked” at the FDA’s decision to not consider licensing its mRNA flu shot, The Washington Post reported.

Two weeks later, the FDA reversed course by accepting the company’s application for licensure of mRNA-1010.

Leadership shake-ups at the FDA soon followed. In March, Prasad resigned — for the second time in less than a year. On May 12, Dr. Marty Makary resigned his FDA commissioner post, following rumors that he would be fired.

On May 15, the FDA fired Tracy Beth Høeg, M.D., Ph.D., the agency’s top drug regulator and a staunch advocate for vaccine safety.

On Wednesday, President Trump nominated Dr. Heidi Overton, a White House domestic policy official, as the FDA’s next commissioner. She has yet to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

Also on Wednesday, Moderna announced “positive” results in its Phase 3 clinical trials for an mRNA cancer vaccine.

Related articles in The Defender

• Breaking: Moderna’s mRNA Flu Vaccine Gets Unanimous Thumbs-Up Despite Risks, Low Efficacy
• Moderna ‘Shocked’ After FDA Scuttles Review of New mRNA Flu Vaccine
• ‘Not Ready for Prime Time’? FDA Approves First mRNA Flu Vaccine Despite Safety Concerns
• ‘Step in the Right Direction’: RFK Jr. Cancels $500 Million in mRNA Vaccine Contracts

The post Doctors Call on RFK Jr. to Withdraw Moderna mRNA Flu Vaccine After Review of FDA Data Shows Risks Outweigh Benefits appeared first on Activist Post.

Twice a month Charlie Robinson and Ryan Cristián join forces to discuss the madness that is partisan politics, and the chaotic nature of the world today. They discuss current events, political machinations, foreign policy blunders, and just good old fashioned two-party illusion naivety. The conversations will be focused on whatever is most current in their minds as they do their best to decipher “what the hell is happening?”

Source Links:

What The Hell Is Happening? Archives – The Last American Vagabond

FDA Approves mRNA Flu Shot, Fauci Contempt Political Theater & The “Bacteriophage System” GoF

Home – Activist Post

(22) Macroaggressions Podcast with Charlie Robinson (@macroaggressio3) / X

New Tab

Trump Makes It Easier For Foreign Governments To Secretly Operate US Companies

Trump Creates State-Backed Private Cyberattack Force

Palantir Partners w/ Major News Orgs To Use Your Data As “Actionable Intelligence”

Detachment 201 (Technocracy In Uniform), Trump’s MAGA Divide & Israel’s Iran Regime Change Two-Step

New Tab

(22) RT on X: “US CONGRESSMAN RANDY FINE CAUGHT SNOOPING around HOME’S MAILBOX while CAMPAIGNING https://t.co/TABCBL2ul7” / X

New Tab

Former Trump official seeks to channel MAGA’s backlash to Iran war

MAGA Trump critics Carlson, Massie, Greene, Kent meet, tout ‘movement’

(22) HOT SPOT on X: “ President Trump says it’s okay for North Korea to have nuclear weapons because he likes Kim Jung Un: “The fact that I get along with him, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. He has 57 very powerful nuclear weapons. Should have never allowed it to happen. They should have https://t.co/OMO9ay2iiA” / X

New Tab

Compulsory moral bioenhancement should be covert – PubMed

Macroaggressions — MACROAGGRESSIONS

Bitcoin Donations Are Appreciated:
www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/bitcoin-donation
(3FSozj9gQ1UniHvEiRmkPnXzHSVMc68U9f)

The post What The Hell Is Happening w/ Charlie Robinson appeared first on Activist Post.

International Man: A $20 burrito has somehow become a national political issue. Is this just another silly internet controversy, or does it reveal something important about the state of the American economy?

Doug Casey: The bottom line is that $20 just isn’t worth that much anymore. Malcolm Forbes used to joke that his idea of social change was plenty of tens and twenties. If he were alive today, he’d have to say fifties and hundreds.

If it’s a good burrito, $20 might be quite reasonable. On Sunday, I ordered a breakfast burrito at an ordinary restaurant—it was $21, although accompanied by home-fried potatoes. I wasn’t outraged. When I was a kid in the 50s, a bottle of Coke was a nickel or a dime, and any candy bar was a nickel. And if you returned the bottle, you got 2 cents back.

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal last week talking about $100 hot dogs. They’re decked out with caviar and other exotic accouterments. But it’s still a $100 hot dog on a bun. It’s the type of thing future generations will tell stories about, as we do of the Romans eating sparrows’ tongues—the signs of degenerate civilizations which have lost all sense of value.

People are blaming burrito makers, or cattle farmers, or capitalism itself, for the existence of a $20 burrito. Few blame the government or the Federal Reserve for debasing the currency.

Idiotically, they’re looking for the government to make it better when the government itself is the problem. The election of the so-called Democratic Socialist Mamdani in New York to cure the problem is a sign that the situation is hopeless.

$20 burritos are the least of our problems.

International Man: Some say today’s high prices are simply capitalism at work—the market sets the price, and consumers can choose whether to pay it. It seems something is missing from that argument?

Doug Casey: High prices are not the fault of capitalism. In a pure free market capitalist system, prices of consumer goods would fall consistently. What Boobus Americanus doesn’t understand is that we don’t live in a real capitalist system. What we have in the U.S. is better described as state capitalism, which is a “partnership” between large corporations and the government. Mussolini described it as fascism—a term he coined. But that word has lost its original meaning.

Fascism has nothing to do with jackboots, military parades, and hating Jews. It’s an economic system where the means of production are privately owned but essentially controlled by the State.

International Man: One response to the affordability crisis has been essentially: stop complaining, eat cheaper food, get roommates, and lower your expectations. Are younger Americans actually entitled—or has their standard of living genuinely deteriorated compared with previous generations?

Doug Casey: The key to financial success is to produce more than you consume and save the difference. That’s become harder in recent years, because wages have not kept up with debasement of the currency. Even worse, the money that you do save is losing value faster than ever. Saving dollars has become a losing proposition, a fool’s game.

There is no question that each generation of Americans has become softer and more entitled than the previous generation. As technology increases the amount of leisure, and debt finances a higher standard of living, moral fiber diminishes. It’s perfectly natural, however unfortunate.

Little can be done to alter major trends in a civilization. All you can do is keep yourself from being corrupted and act as a good example.

International Man: Politicians inevitably respond to affordability problems with proposals for higher minimum wages, price controls, subsidies, tax credits, or other government programs. Why do these supposed solutions make the underlying problem worse?

Doug Casey: That’s because none of those things are solutions.

To start with, politicians are inevitably the worst type of people in a society. They’re professional busybodies who get into politics because they like to manipulate other people and impose their will on them. It’s foolish to hope what amounts to a professional criminal class will solve economic problems.

The average American knows nothing about economics. And what he thinks he knows is basically Keynesian economics. He’s easily convinced that there are political solutions to economic problems.

International Man: If the government continues running huge deficits and debasing the currency, where should people position their capital to protect themselves—and potentially profit from what comes next?

Doug Casey: There is no question but that the government will continue running huge deficits. The deficits are not just huge, but growing exponentially.

Those deficits can’t be financed from domestic savings, which are approximately zero. They’re not going to be financed by selling debt to foreigners, who have come to despise the US. The deficits will, therefore, be financed by selling debt to the Federal Reserve, which pays for them by printing dollars and depositing them in the government’s accounts in commercial banks.

The dollar will continue losing value, and at an accelerating rate. Although, because of all the debt that’s being created, we might suffer a deflationary credit collapse on the way to hyperinflation.

Americans are caught between a rock and a hard place. Or, as recent watchers of “The Odyssey” may have learned, between Scylla and Charybdis.

The bright side is that while the world is caught up in a super bubble centering around AI, it’s overlooked raw materials stocks. I’m personally very invested in commodities in general, and energy and mining in particular. Many of the stocks we recommend in Contrarian Insider and Crisis Investing show current yields of between 6% and 10%. That’s good, but not nearly as important as the fact that they’re very, very underpriced and have 10 to 1 upside from here.

Editor’s Note: If the dollar continues losing purchasing power while federal deficits keep growing, the real danger is not simply that everyday life becomes more expensive. It’s what governments may do when confidence in the currency and financial system begins to crack.

History shows that during serious monetary crises, governments can change the rules quickly—restricting the movement of capital, targeting private wealth, or making it harder to protect savings once panic has already begun.

Doug has put together a free report outlining three moves to consider before a dollar crisis becomes obvious to everyone else, including ways to protect both your wealth and your financial freedom.

Click here to get it now.

The post Doug Casey on the $20 Burrito, the Affordability Crisis, and What Comes Next appeared first on Activist Post.

Americans this century have moved away from supporting the loudly proclaimed exhortation that it is extremely important that children take a slew of shots states impose for school attendance in vaccine mandates. This changing sentiment is manifesting among parents in their increasingly, where able, opting their children out these shots mandates.

Mary Kekatos reported Monday at ABC News that new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicates that in the 2025-26 school year parents had obtained a vaccine exemption for a record high 4.2 percent of kindergarteners in America. While a small percent of students, this is a significant increase over the 3.6 percent of kindergarteners with a vaccine exemption the previous year and approaches double the 2.2 percent exemption rate in the 2020-21 school year.

For other parents, sidestepping vaccine mandates has been part of the reason, or even the entire reason, they have chosen that their children attend private schools in states where the mandates only apply to government schools, or attend homeschool. In these alternative schooling options parents can avoid shots for their children without obtaining exemptions.

While parents have been increasingly choosing not to have their children take all the pushed shots, states including California and New York have been changing the law to nearly eliminate the ability to opt out for children attending government and even private schools.

The post More Parents Obtain Shots Exemptions for their Children appeared first on Activist Post.

• Communities nationwide are removing or pausing Flock license plate cameras over mass surveillance concerns.
• Lago Vista, Texas, voted to remove cameras after residents were never notified of their deployment.
• Apache Junction, Arizona, defends Flock use despite an officer resigning for tracking his wife.
• St. Paul, Minnesota, and Lynchburg, Virginia, are moving to end or pause contracts amid public pressure.
• Critics reject Flock’s one-week data limit, calling the technology a Fourth Amendment violation.

Communities across the United States are pushing back against Flock Safety’s automatic license plate recognition cameras, with critics calling the technology mass surveillance while police defend it as a crime-fighting necessity.

Towns and cities from Texas to Minnesota are now voting to remove, pause, or reconsider their contracts with the Atlanta-based company. Opponents cite concerns over data privacy, potential misuse by law enforcement, and the chilling effect of constant monitoring. Meanwhile, police departments argue the cameras have proven instrumental in solving violent crimes and locating missing persons.

Lago Vista votes to remove cameras after citizen backlash

In Lago Vista, Texas, residents were unaware the city had deployed three Flock cameras three or four years prior. Mayor Shane Saum said the lack of public discussion or notification fueled distrust. The Aug. 6 city council meeting where the issue was debated drew a packed room — the busiest session in Saum’s three years on council. Few supporters of the cameras attended.

Saum expressed skepticism about Flock’s data storage practices, noting the company houses information through Amazon Web Services. He questioned how data is shared, whether it is safe from hackers, and raised concerns about potential stalking or facial recognition misuse.

The ACLU of Texas welcomed the move. Nick Hudson, senior manager of policy and advocacy, argued the cameras allow the government to record every vehicle passing a given point without a warrant, raising the specter of tracking trips to political meetings, medical facilities, gun stores, and places of worship.

Arizona police defend program despite officer misconduct

Not all jurisdictions are retreating. Apache Junction, Arizona, continues to use Flock systems, with Lieutenant Wes Kelley stating the community remains largely supportive. Kelley said the technology recently helped track down a suspect who allegedly abducted a 13-year-old girl and locate several missing elderly residents.

Yet the department’s own record undercuts its defense of the program: officer Josh McDaniel resigned in April after using the license plate readers to find his wife. Police Chief Mike Pooley told ABC15 that while the act is not currently a crime, he believes it should be. Other Arizona departments in Goodyear, Chandler, and Surprise have also reported concerning misuse of Flock data, with some placing officers on leave.

St. Paul and Lynchburg bow to community pressure

St. Paul, Minnesota, is weighing whether to end its contracts with Flock. City Council President Rebecca Noecker introduced a resolution to terminate agreements with the city and Ramsey County, with Councilmember Saura Jost arguing that continued use erodes the public trust policing depends on. Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher pushed back, warning that removing the cameras would make St. Paul more dangerous and crediting the technology with solving carjackings, auto thefts, and homicides.

In Lynchburg, Virginia, police have temporarily paused use of 15 fixed Flock cameras within city rights-of-way while the department undergoes an independent third-party review of its policies and training. Captain Lisa Singleton described it as a deliberate, transparency-driven pause, though officials say no local misuse has been identified.

Critics say a one-week data limit won’t fix the problem

Jay Stanley of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project called the backlash unprecedented in his 25 years fighting mass surveillance, noting it crosses partisan lines from progressives to MAGA conservatives. His warning cuts to the heart of the issue: once a surveillance system exists, it rarely stays confined to its original purpose — pointing to ICE’s access of local Flock data as one example.

In response to the mounting criticism, Flock said Aug. 13 it would limit data retention to one week by default and require departments to log suspicious searches. DeFlock, which maps camera locations nationwide and counts more than 132,000 ALPR devices across the country, dismissed the change as insufficient, calling the technology a Fourth Amendment violation outright.

That skepticism may be the most durable takeaway here. A corporation quietly amassing a searchable map of Americans’ movements, then adjusting its privacy terms only after public outcry, is not exactly a model of accountability. Warrants exist for a reason — and no software update changes that.

Sources for this article include:

DailyCaller.com

NYTimes.com

KSTP.com

WSET.com

The post Surveillance backlash: Cities ditch Flock license plate cameras amid privacy fears appeared first on Activist Post.

The release of the Fauci diaries has filled in some missing pieces. They help elucidate how the years of hell unfolded in Fauci’s own mind. Working with military intelligence and pharmaceutical companies, Fauci and his colleagues eventually hatched an audacious plan to delay natural immunity for a full ten months as they awaited both the November election and the viable release of the injectable product called a vaccine – all in the hope that it would be given credit for fixing the problem they created in the first place. 

This scheme, however, was Fauci’s personal Plan B. 

Plan A is revealed in the diaries. It was to bury the existence and spread of the virus in question within a broader fabric of a bad flu season. This might have worked too. With the overwhelming fatality threat falling nearly entirely on the aged and infirm, the deaths from Covid in particular could have been overlooked completely. This was his preferred outcome, or, rather, the best that he could come up with given the panic of the first weeks of January 2020. 

The problems all began much earlier. Whenever the lab leak occurred, it had become apparent to military intelligence following the Military Olympics of October 18-27, 2019, held in Wuhan. In this high-profile event, 9,308 athletes from 109 countries competed in 329 events in 27 sports. It is highly likely that Covid was already known to be there, judging by how strict the Chinese authorities were in managing exposure. 

We have testimony from US participants that they came back with an unusual flu that US military authorities were keen to keep quiet with extended quarantines of the sick. 

Fauci was surely kept apprised of this through intelligence channels. He knew that he had a problem on his hands. It was only a matter of waiting to see whether news of this leak would go public. 

For him, the bad news arrived on January 3, 2020 when the diary entry reads: 

“Also 44 unusual cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, China over the past couple of days. Etiology still unknown. Said to be a “viral pneumonia’’of unknown etiology. Flu ruled out. Cases linked to a seafood market. No human-to-human transmission documented at this time.”

Just above that, however, we see the origins of Plan A. January 2 and 3 we find the first mention of a bad flu year. It was his first attempted cover story. 

“Did TV interview with Cox TV this year’s influenza situation. Interviewed by Samantha Manning.” And: “Jan. 3, 2020 – Influenza is heavy in the media. Did an interview with Elizabeth Cohen of CNN for her Blog. Also, did a live radio interview with John Catsimatidis for his ‘Cats Roundtable’ from NYC.” 

His flu-themed Plan A continued and stepped up over the coming days. Keep in mind that the China situation was not yet public. He knew, but the public was not alert to it. There was still a chance that it could be kept under wraps. 

Jan. 7, 2020: “Did TV interview with Canadian TV (CTV) on the viral outbreak in Wuhan, China. Did interview (print) with HealthDay on the influenza season.”

Jan. 10, 2020 (Friday): “Influenza is hot and heavy. Vaccine match is OK for H1N1, but not so good for B and H3N2. Did WUSA local TV on flu as well as interview with Elizabeth Cohen of CNN that went on her blog with multiple references to our conversation.”

That same day, Fauci writes in bold print, alarmed and now newly aware that his scheme might not work:

“Chinese publish sequence of the virus on public data base.”

Now, it is the weekend. Fauci reports the following: “Barney Graham ordered the constructs using credit cards,” meaning he bought the sequence. 

Who is Barney Graham? He is the professor of microbiology at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, home of the CDC. He is formerly the deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center (VRC), part of Fauci’s NIAID. Graham is holder of 38 patents related to immunization, in particular US10960070B2, “Prefusion coronavirus spike proteins and their use” granted in 2017. He worked with Moderna from very early, with the blessing of Fauci.

Fauci later confirmed this weekend frenzy, reporting that he got “his team” together on January 10 and they started working with Moderna. 

Then comes the diary entry, again in bold. 

“Jan. 14, 2020 – Barney Graham’s team starts work on GMP vaccine in collaboration with Moderna”

Here was the birth of Plan B: prepare the population for the shot for which he would get the credit. It would take 10 months, during which time endemicity needed to be delayed. There were the slogans “15 days to slow the spread,” “Flatten the curve,” and so on, alongside a variety of schemes to keep seroprevalence levels as low as possible by banning meetings and pushing social distancing. 

The plan came just in time because the CDC was starting to get annoyed that Fauci had been going around warning of a bad flu season of which there was zero evidence. 

From January 14, Fauci reports of a private meeting at CDC to which he was not invited. Here they were apparently completely confused as to why Fauci was going on this way. Puzzled gossip in private. 

“Apparently, CDC is upset because I am saying that this is on a course to be as bad a year as 2017-2018 and 2014-2015. In fact, the flu infection ‘numbers’ are exactly on track with those years. However, there are less total deaths and hospitalizations…. I say it is a bad season and CDC says no. There was a discussion between Azar and Nancy Messonnier of CDC about this and about my statements, but no one thought of getting me on the conference call. Not good. Typical CDC!”

Fauci continued to experiment with his flu idea over the coming several days. But the cat was already out of the bag. It took him time finally to admit that it was going to be Plan B all the way down. January 21 was one turning point: the virus had been discovered in the US. 

“CDC announced today that the first case of n-CoV has been identified in Seattle.” 

But what really sealed the deal was the news of the lockdowns in China. There was to be no going back. The mythical and wholly fabricated bad flu season was at an end and the Covid plot began. 

A week later he writes the following without any real explanation:

“Jan. 26, 2020 – GAME ON!!!”

What was that game? He would become the leading spokesman for several experiments without precedent in history, all designed to cover up his and others’ culpability for the leak of the new virus they had manufactured through gain-of-function research. 

Number one, he would need to crush the nasty rumors that this was a lab-created virus. That was easily accomplished by getting some compliant scientists to write a flimflam paper to be distributed to all the scientific journals. That was already in play within a week. 

Number two, he would arrange a junket to Wuhan for any necessary clean up, sending his emissary Clifford Lane along with officials from around the globe, under the auspices of the World Health Organization. The WHO would generate a report blessing China’s response to the virus as the way to go. 

Number three, he would attempt coercion on a mass scale, just like China, to slow population immunity to the new virus as a means of keeping seroprevalence levels as low as possible. Otherwise, the vaccine would arrive too late to make any real difference. He proposed sending a team to China to learn from them. At his first meeting with Trump, he pushed for Trump to ask permission of Xi Jinping. 

Number four, he would attempt to bring the injected inoculation to the population in record time, something that had never been done before on grounds that doing so would normally be considered exceedingly risky. Plus, it has never been true that a shot could outrun mutations for a respiratory virus. 

Number five, he would shepherd the first-ever deployment of a vaccine that focused entirely on the spike protein, essentially reverse-engineering the virus, using modified mRNA technology delivered via lipid nanoparticles. The tech had never been approved by the FDA in normal times but emergency use authorization could make it possible. This was the only method by which the shot could win the race against time. 

This was the game to which he referred. He sought to slow down mutations by lowering the infection rate through social engineering so that the shot would actually work before the variants came along. It was a perversely brilliant strategy so long as one doesn’t mind violating the rights of citizens all over the country and provoking copycats the world over. 

In short, he would have to appoint himself the master of the microbial kingdom and get everyone to go along with his scheme. 

From his point of view, this was the least bad option but keep in mind the objective. The point of this wild dance was not to protect the health of the population. It was to create an alibi so that he would not personally be blamed for funding the creation of the virus in the first place. 

The goal was to turn his villainy into valor, to use brutality of lockdowns to inspire his own beatification worthy of a healer, to enable a migration from sadist to saint with one magic shot. 

We know how this story ends. Seroprevalence levels rose despite every attempt to keep them down. It is highly likely that the endemic stage of this pandemic had already arrived by the time the shots were ready to be shipped (a point I can explain in a different article). 

The first person to reveal this was Jay Bhattacharya. A community-based seroprevalence survey of Santa Clara County was conducted on April 3-4, 2020. It found ten times the expected levels, even in a community where there was no real evidence of community spread. The implications were that the infection fatality rate (IFR) was far lower than advertised and that lockdowns would do nothing to stop population immunity gained by natural exposure. 

Bhattacharya’s study was greeted with ferocious opposition, as one might imagine, and he was smeared far and wide including by BuzzFeed which outright accused Jay of financial corruption. He was an early victim of such attacks but there would be many more in the coming months and years. 

One can see, then, how the information warfare unfolded during the whole of 2020. Anything that contradicted the Fauci et al. Plan B was deemed disinformation, while anything that backed the scheme was regarded as responsible public-health messaging. Frantic efforts involving all major tech platforms and media venues worked to censor anyone who was calling this out. This of course hit the Great Barrington Declaration, which had the temerity to advocate normalcy before the shot could be deployed. 

Evidence that the scheme had completely failed arrived the following year just as shots were being delivered. On January 9, 2021, virologist David Ho sent Fauci the note that he dreaded most. The Delta variant was replacing Alpha so the shots were rapidly losing effectiveness. A week later, he told Fauci that they would be largely useless. 

At this point, however, there was no going back. Fauci had to press on because this was the choice he had made, the game he had chosen to play. 

He eventually suggested all of the above publicly. It happened on April 14, 2022 during an interview on MSNBC: “You use lockdowns to get people vaccinated so that when you open up, you won’t have a surge of infections, because you are dealing with an immunologically naive population to the virus, because they’ve not really been exposed because of the lockdown.”

All of this is today coming unraveled at a rapid pace. 

Here is the bitter irony. If Fauci had gotten away with Plan A, we would have been much better off. We would have used known methods for getting well like off-the-shelf therapeutics, and been spared the horror of what happened with Plan B (the game). It would have come and gone without a great deal of notice rather than becoming a turning point in our lives. 

We look back in astonishment at the carnage caused by the game: the millions of destroyed businesses, the learning losses, the broken families, the injured by the shot and the dead, and the sweeping loss of trust in all the commanding heights of society, leading to the current population-wide incredulity in essentially everything. Another hugely bitter irony is the rise of vaccine resistance like we’ve not seen in living memory, all brought about by the game. 

Meanwhile, and thanks to the efforts of the intrepid Senators Rand Paul and Ron Johnson, and many others working outside captured channels, the truth is coming out, even as Fauci has a new-found love for the Bill of Rights and its 5th amendment’s right to remain silent. 

The post What Did Fauci Mean by “Game On”? appeared first on Activist Post.

Great Britain, where I live, once prided itself on eccentricity, irreverence, and the right to say unpopular things. Today, people living in my country have been arrested over social media posts and other digital communications. Some have been imprisoned. Online censorship has become more sophisticated, surveillance technology continues to advance, and cancel culture has taught millions of people that expressing the wrong opinion can carry severe consequences. As a result, people are self-censoring out of fear of reprisals.

Books have a particular role to play here. They give people permission to explore ideas away from the noise and intimidation of social media. A reader can encounter something privately, consider it, question it, disagree with it, return to it, and perhaps find the confidence to openly express an opinion they had previously been afraid to voice.

This is why my publishing house, Free Speech Press, is launching with a reprint of George Orwell’s 1984.

For this special edition, I asked the British writer and broadcaster Neil Oliver to write a new prologue. Neil travelled back, intellectually and geographically, to the circumstances in which Orwell created his final novel.

What follows is an extract from that prologue:

George Orwell was dying when he wrote 1984. Like the setting sun, he had travelled into the west: to Jura, the Deer Island in the Inner Hebrides off Scotland’s west coast. George Orwell was his nom de plume – Eric Arthur Blair is on the stone over his clay in the churchyard of All Saints’ Church in Sutton Courtenay, in Oxfordshire – and 1984 would be his swan song. As well as dying (he did not know it then) he was grieving the loss of his wife. It was with his sister Avril then, that he arrived at the lonely farmhouse of Barnhill in the north of the island in May of 1946. Eileen Orwell had died the year before, during a hysterectomy, and the couple’s son Richard joined father and aunt, along with housekeeper Susan Watson later that summer.

Barnhill was remote and on the point of being reclaimed by the elements, until the infusion of life, lives saddened, and from an unlikely source. Jura can be hard to love. Sparsely populated then as now, a place of blanket bog and bare rock. Getting to Barnhill was a matter of two ferries – first to Islay, second to Jura – then 20 miles by motor vehicle until the road dwindled and the last four had to be covered on foot. Food, fuel and the rest had to be carried along with everything else required. “Extremely un-get-atable” is how Orwell described their billet, and he loved it. He was middle-class – a literary type, obviously – and while he had written about the travails of the workers – including the degraded and degrading lives of coal miners and their families in Lancashire and Yorkshire in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) – and had put in time in self-inflicted poverty as a Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) – by 1946 he still hankered after the hardship of other men’s lives, and the possibilities of a life lived far from the madding crowd.

If it sounds as though I am being unkind, it is not my intention. 1984 was a book I was given to read at school and along with many I have had reasons to think about George Orwell over and over in the years since. Most recently, when it has seemed for all the world as though his last novel is received and used less as dire warning of totalitarianism and more a must have How To handbook for would-be dictators everywhere, I have learned to see the author as nothing less than a seer.

That he was drawn to the Deer Island for the writing of it says to me that his last months and years were ordained for a vision, or a dreary dream the telling of which was nothing less than a calling, or perhaps a penance. It is Highland tradition that deer, the Red Deer, are portents of death. When the deer come down out of the hills and walk the streets of human habitations, their fleur-de-lis hooves clipping through the quiet dark, it is deep sadness they are foretelling. Dying of Tuberculosis still undiagnosed, though it had him coughing red blood while he wrote and wrote within the white walls of Barnhill, he and the world around him were also grieving all that had been lost in the World War just past. It was a shell-shocked world, and Orwell no stranger to its ways. Homage to Catalonia (1938) had been the product of his time fighting Fascism in the Spanish Civil War, and there he had been shot through the throat by a sniper, the wounding leaving him with a voice rendered faint. 

Made gaunt anyway by war’s privations, broken hearted, during that harsh cradling on Jura he saw the future as clear as any Highlander gifted or cursed with the Second Sight. The future he saw was populated by citizens denied hope, made hopeless. Everything shaped to grind souls to lifeless matter. Tasteless food, ill-made and ill-fitting clothes. War everywhere and forever, pointlessly consuming whatever the proles made in soul-sapping factories. No privacy. Big Brother watching over all. The world of 1984 is as familiar to my generation as a half-remembered dream and yet for so many of us the last handful of years have had us sense its version of reality not as a dream but as an inevitability. Big Brother is made real in the apparatus of panopticon surveillance and those we are expected to call leaders foment war after war. 

(the prologue continues in the book)

More than 75 years after Orwell wrote 1984, his vocabulary remains part of our political language: Big Brother, Thought Police, doublethink, Newspeak, and the memory hole. The technologies have changed beyond anything Orwell could have imagined, while his central questions about power, surveillance, language, and the control of information have acquired an uncomfortable new relevance.

Orwell gave my countrymen and women a warning. Neil Oliver’s prologue reminds us how clearly that warning was sounded, and how much closer some of its themes now feel. The question is what we do with it. Do we continue to retreat into silence, with careful language and whispered conversations, or will independent thinkers in Britain recover the courage to stand up and speak openly again?

You can purchase this edition here. 

The post George Orwell’s Warning to Britain appeared first on Activist Post.