Breakfast For The Brain: Weekend Edition

It’s the weekend Deplorables, enjoy it because time is fleeting…

 

The West’s Descent Into Cultural Revolution

By Charles Hugh Smith

The goal of the Cultural Revolution isn’t to persuade, it’s to enforce compliance.

A Cultural Revolution is a movement designed to preserve the political and financial power of a ruling elite by social rather than political or financial means. Thus the primary tools of a Cultural Revolution are not redistributing power via elections (politics) or financial reforms; the primary tools are public shaming and denouncements, purges of those in positions of authority, show trials, guilt-by-association, wholesale denouncements of entire classes and widespread accusations of anti-progressive (“counter-revolutionary”) tendencies in which guilt is defined by all-or-nothing litmus tests of one’s loyalties to the Cultural Revolution’s strict ideology.

You haven’t memorized Mao’s Little Red Book? Off to re-education camp you go. Or house arrest, banishment, beatings, imprisonment or if the mob’s blood lust demands it, execution.
The key dynamic of a Cultural Revolution is the oppressors appropriate the language of liberation as their favored tool of suppressing dissent, denouncing opponents and fueling widespread purges of anyone who might harbor the slightest potential to question the social suppression of dissent.

A Photographer’s Quest to Reverse China’s Historical Amnesia (New York Times)

Now, more than a half-century after the Cultural Revolution began, there is little public discussion of that period in China. What some have called the nation’s collective amnesia has only gotten worse in recent years as leaders have walked back efforts to reckon with the country’s modern history.

To those launching a Cultural Revolution, the solution to a diversity of opinion is to crush dissent and narratives that threaten the ruling elites’ power. This is of course the exact opposite of democracy and Enlightenment-era liberalism. But the point of a Cultural Revolution isn’t to broaden political enfranchisement or representation–the point of the anti-Deplorables / anti-Brexit / anti-yellow vest campaigns is to strip dissenters (those who disagree with the ruling neoliberal elites) of political and social representation.

The goal of the Cultural Revolution is to render all those who resist the ruling elites politically and socially invisible. The goal isn’t to play nice and share power and wealth with the losers of financialization-globalization; the goal is to liquidate their influence in politics and society via relentless negative stereotyping by the elite-controlled mass media and an Orwellian reversal of identity that makes the dissenters into threats to democracy while elevating the elitist oppressors into selfless guardians of democracy–the exact opposite of reality.

Read the entire article HERE.

Why Are These Professional War Peddlers Still Around?

By Tucker Carlson/The American Conservative

Pundits like Max Boot and Bill Kristol got everything after 9/11 wrong but are still considered “experts.”

One thing that every late-stage ruling class has in common is a high tolerance for mediocrity. Standards decline, the edges fray, but nobody in charge seems to notice. They’re happy in their sinecures and getting richer. In a culture like this, there’s no penalty for being wrong. The talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. It happened to the Ottomans. Max Boot is living proof that it’s happening in America.

Boot is a professional foreign policy expert, a job category that doesn’t exist outside of a select number of cities. Boot has degrees from Berkeley and Yale, and is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has written a number of books and countless newspaper columns on foreign affairs and military history. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, an influential British think tank, describes Boot as one of the “world’s leading authorities on armed conflict.”

None of this, it turns out, means anything. The professional requirements for being one ofthe world’s Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict do not include relevant experience with armed conflict. Leading authorities on the subject don’t need a track record of wise assessments or accurate predictions. All that’s required are the circular recommendations of fellow credential holders. If other Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict induct you into their ranks, you’re in. That’s good news for Max Boot.

Read the entire article HERE.

Amazon Blames Ocasio-Cortez For Canceling HQ Plan

Via Worldnet Daily

Amazon is blaming freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and other lawmakers by name for the online retail giant’s decision to cancel a plan to build a new headquarters in New York City with an estimated 25,000 jobs.

Amazon said in a statement that “a number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward with the project we and many others envisioned in Long Island City.”

Amazon spokeswoman Jodi Seth told NBC News it wasn’t “any one incident” that prompted the decision.

“It was that the environment over the course of the past three months had not got any better. There were some local and state elected officials who refused to meet with Amazon and criticized us day in and day out about the plan,” she said.

“If you talk to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, it’s ‘Never Amazon,’” Seth said. “If you talk to [Democratic New York City Councilman Jimmy] Van Bramer, it’s unions.”

Ocasio-Cortez and her allies objected to the $3 billion in incentives that New York was prepared to offer and claimed the plan would make area housing unaffordable for many.

Read the entire article HERE.

7 Big Takeaways From Andrew McCabe’s Planned Coup

Via The Federalist

If Washington, D.C. were a better place, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe would be swiftly run out of town. He was fired last year for lying to the FBI’s inspector general at least four times regarding serious questions about multiple abuses that occurred while McCabe sat in a powerful and unelected office.

These abuses included working with former FBI director James Comey to set up former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus for obstruction charges, slow-walking and sabotaging the investigation of yet unseen Hillary Clinton emails found on Anthony Weiner’s computer just before the 2016 election, and failing to report a clear conflict of interest where his wife received a political donation from a close Hillary Clinton ally while he was tasked with investigating Hillary Clinton.

Among other things, McCabe also took part in spying on the Trump campaign through a secret warrant granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court. This spying allowed obedient anti-Trump media figures to report, right before the 2016 election, that the FBI was investigating President Trump—which legitimized the Hillary Clinton campaign’s talking points about Trump and Russia.

Read the entire article HERE.

How Mueller Has Been Silencing Whistleblowers To Set Up Fake Special Counsels For Years

Via Big League Politics

During his twelve-year reign as FBI Director, Robert Mueller not only protected his criminal friends by silencing those who could expose their bad acts, he projected his friends’ crimes onto others in order to fraudulently appoint a Special Counsel. And the FISA court judge Reggie Walton — who was hacked by Obama officials John Brennan and James Clapper, according to whistleblower evidence — has been involved in more than one of these plots.

There is no better Deep State tool for punishing your enemies than a fraudulent Special Counsel (who is not accountable to anyone) with an unlimited budget and no deadline. Mueller is responsible for two such Special Counsel appointments.

First, there is Uranium One – the only genuine Russian Collusion case.

Whistleblower William Douglas Campbell, an American businessman, infiltrated Russia’s State Nuclear Energy Corporation, Rosatom, where he posed as a consultant while working undercover for the FBI to gather and document criminal activity in the Russian plot to control twenty percent of the known U.S. uranium reserve.

William Campbell has a story to tell, but, to date, only a closed-door Congressional committee has heard it. Why? Because then FBI Director Mueller forbid Campbell from going public with his story. And Attorney General Lynch backed Mueller’s play by threatening Campbell’s liberty if he did go public. In other words, Mueller was successful in gagging the whistleblower.

Read the entire article HERE.

A Metaphor For America: 700 Pound Man Plans To Eat And Play Video Games While Naked Until He Dies

Via The Economic Collapse blog

34-year-old Casey King is so obese that he can’t work, he has to bathe outside in a trough like a pig, and he has to rely on his father to constantly take care of him. He now weighs more than 700 pounds, but he just keeps on eating massive amounts of unhealthy food. Just like America as a whole, he has absolutely no self-discipline and absolutely no desire to turn his life around. On some level he understands that he is literally killing himself with his destructive behavior, but he does not have a desire to change. Instead, he told TLC that he “will just eat until I am dead”…

Featuring in a TLC TV series called Family by the Ton, Casey said: “I will just eat until I am dead, probably.

“I wake up around 12, figure out something I’m going to eat immediately [then it’s] TV, video games, bed — it’s not a lot of activity.”

Because of the hot weather in Georgia he prefers to skip clothes, wearing only a headset through which he uses to chat to other gamers playing online.

It is easy to criticize Casey for his lack of activity, but he is really not too different from most other Americans.

As I have written about before, the average American spends approximately five hours a day watching television. We are willingly plugging ourselves into “the propaganda matrix” for thousands upon thousands of hours, and of course that is going to greatly affect our outlook on life and how we see the world.

But of course most Americans don’t watch television and play video games while naked. But for Casey, clothes have become too restricting and so he just sits on his bed naked all day long…

Read the entire article HERE.

French Schools Replace “Mother” And “Father” With “Parent 1” And “Parent 2”

Via Zero Hedge

In the latest example of political correctness run amok in Europe, the French National Assembly this week passed an education reform bill which included a controversial amendment to replace all instances of the words ‘mother’ and ‘father’ on official school-related paperwork with the ‘gender neutral’ phrases “Parent 1” and “Parent 2”.

The bill, which was championed by President Emmanuel Macron’s party, will also make school attendance mandatory for all three-year-olds.

“This amendment aims to root in law children’s family diversity in administrative forms submitted in school,” said REM minister Valérie Petit.

models. For us, this article is a measurement of social equality.”

While the changes were made ostensibly to stop discrimination against same-sex parents, according to the Christian Post, the measure has been attacked by conservatives and liberals alike. Even the French education minister opposed the amendment.

In a sign of just how fraught with controversy this provision has become, even the president of the French association for same-sex parents has criticized the decision, arguing that it could create a “parental hierarchy”.

Read the entire article HERE.

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