Tucker Carlson went on to Joe Rogan this last week, bringing together two of the most influential podcasters in America. The conversation touched upon many topics, and was certainly entertaining, and as one might expect it generated much interest and debate online. What I didn’t expect was that it would reawaken a 78-year-old controversy. Carlson brought up the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. He told Rogan, “I love by the way that people on my side … have spent the last 80 years defending dropping nuclear weapons on civilians. Like, are you joking? That’s just like prima facia evil.” Carlson added, “It’s wrong to drop nuclear weapons on people, and if you find yourself arguing that it’s a good thing to drop nuclear weapons on people then you are evil.” He went on to declare, “With that in mind, like, why would you want nuclear weapons. It’s like just a mindless, childish sort of intellectual exercise to justify”. Carlson’s assertions drew a sharp rebuke from Jeremy Boreing (the “god-king” of The Daily Wire), who tweeted “People who deny the moon landing or suggest America is evil for its use of atomic weapons against Imperial Japan or who say that George Bush was behind 9/11 actually hate this country.” Carlson’s comments struck me as flippant and naïve, and Boreing’s response struck me as myopic and absurd. Missing from both is an appreciation of the nuances of those two horrific events. It is absurd to suggest that Tucker Carlson hates America just because he believes it was wrong for the United States to drop nuclear bombs on civilian populations. In asserting this position, Carlson is in very good company. No doubt Boreing believes that dropping the bombs saved American lives, but two prominent military minds of the age, Admiral William D. Leahy and General Dwight Eisenhower, believed otherwise. Leahy served as President Truman’s Chief of Staff at the time, and he opposed the use of nuclear weapons. He was with President Truman on the USS Augusta when the Hiroshima bomb was dropped. Leahy stated, “It is my opinion that the use of the barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan… The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons”.  Leahy added, “My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.” Eisenhower, who served as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, opposed dropping the bombs, “first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'." Eisenhower was elected President of the United States in 1952, replacing Truman as President in 1953. He was re-elected in 1956. Are we to believe that these men hated their country? Top military minds in the United States believed that Japan was close to surrendering prior to Hiroshima. This rather undermines the classic argument that the bombs were necessary to end the war. However, what if these men were simply mistaken in their beliefs? What if they failed to fully appreciate the Japanese commitment to continue the war at all costs? I think Tucker Carlson is naïve because, like Eisenhower and Leahy, he presumes that Japanese military leaders would give up the struggle when it became obvious that victory wasn’t possible. I am dubious of this assertion because Japan’s inevitable defeat had become obvious well before August 1945, and because it does not align with what prominent Japanese military officers have themselves asserted. In 1959, Mitsuo Fuchida, the pilot that led the first wave against Pearl Harbor, meet with Colonel Paul Tibbets, the captain of the Enola Gay that dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima. Fuchida told Tibbets, “You did the right thing. You know the Japanese attitude at that time, how fanatic they were, they'd die for the Emperor ... Every man, woman, and child would have resisted that invasion with sticks and stones if necessary ... Can you imagine what a slaughter it would be to invade Japan? It would have been terrible. The Japanese people know more about that than the American public will ever know.” Fuchida doesn’t just suggest that dropping the bombs saved American lives; he suggests it spared the lives of potentially millions of Japanese soldiers and civilians. America’s leaders had an obligation to end the war while minimizing American casualties, and the dropping of the two atomic bombs achieved this goal.  The prospect of invading the main islands of Japan was daunting. Leahy estimated that more than 250,000 Americans would be killed or wounded on Kyushu alone, and Kyushu isn’t even the main island. An invasion of Honshu would have been worse by many magnitudes. Moreover, Japan was merely one arena where people were fighting and dying. Millions of Chinese, Vietnamese, Siamese, Burmese, Indonesians, and others were fighting Japan, and ending the war saved their lives as well.  Most of the lives spared in these arenas would have been civilian. If the bombs shortened the war by only one week, many more lives were saved than were lost, and the war might well have carried on for many more months. So much rests on whether Japan was willing to surrender in August 1945. The civilian leadership of Japan had made overtures, but civilian leaders did not have the authority to negotiate a surrender (or even a cease-fire).  Military leaders could veto cabinet decisions, and in August 1945, the cabinet was split between those advocating an end to war on one condition (Japan keeps its Emperor) and those insistent on three additional conditions (Japan controls its own disarmament, the Japanese government handles the punishment of war criminals, and that there would be no occupation of Japan, Korea or Formosa). The civilian leadership pushed for the one condition; Japan’s military leaders insisted on the other three. The Americans could never have accepted these other conditions. There was no chance that the Americans would have allowed Japan to remain an empire ruling over Korea and Formosa (Taiwan). Even a promise to keep the Emperor in place was problematic. Prior to the surrender the Americans could not know how cooperative Hirohito would be, or how much of Japan’s war crimes were truly his responsibility. Japanese honor abhorred the idea of surrender.  Military personnel had already demonstrated that they would rather die than surrender, and Japan had already produced the Kamikaze pilot and the Kaiten (manned) torpedo. On Saipan, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima, large numbers of Japanese troops committed suicide rather than surrender. Moreover, intercepts of Japanese Imperial Army and Navy communications disclosed without exception that Japan's armed forces were determined to fight in defense of their homeland, and Japan was devoting huge resources towards preparing their homeland for invasion.  They hoped to inflict many casualties on the Allies in the hopes of forcing the concessions desired by Japan’s military leadership. The American war effort was already claiming a tremendous number of civilian lives. One devastating attack was the bombing of Tokyo in March 1945. This two-day attack is believed to have killed 100,000 people, while leaving another million homeless. The casualties are comparable to Hiroshima. It was already obvious that Japan was going to lose the war, yet Japan didn’t surrender in March. By August 1945, the Americans had carpet bombed 67 Japanese cities, and estimates suggest that half-a-million Japanese civilians had died as a result. None of this was enough to convince Japan’s military leaders to surrender. The military leaders were not even persuaded by the dropping of the atomic bombs. The council was deadlocked on surrender, with the three civilian leaders voting for it, and the three military leaders voting against it. The Japanese Prime Minister then asked Emperor Hirohito to break the deadlock, which was unprecedented.  The Emperor had begun to involve himself in the peace process following his tour of the destruction in Tokyo, and in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he made the decision to surrender. Military leaders accepted surrender partly because of the Emperor’s intervention, and partly because the atomic bomb helped them to “save face” by rationalizing that they had not been defeated because of a lack of spiritual power or courage, but by science. The atomic bombs unleashed unimaginable horrors, so I understand why people would presume that the decision to use them was evil. However, the war that these weapons stopped was itself an unimaginable horror. No amount of film, no number of books, can truly capture the manifold tragedies of that war, and if the bombs weren’t dropped, no one can say with certainty how long it would have taken Japan to surrender on terms that the Americans could accept. Is it evil to employ a horror to prevent a greater horror? I honestly can’t say. Other men had to make these decisions and endure their consciences in the wake of the choices they made. Maybe it is simply that you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. And maybe that is why Carlson and Boreing can present such contrary opinions on this matter with neither being anywhere close to the truth. Rob Bogunovic serves as the editor at The Rubicon The Free Press Member Plan is now FREE! Free Press Members are able to write their own news and stories in the Community News. Be part of the solution!

On April 9th, 2024, Christian McGhee used the term “illegal alien” in his high school English class, and in short order the sixteen year old North Carolina student was suspended. The word “alien” appeared on the list of class vocabulary words assigned by McGhee’s English teacher, and McGhee sought clarification on the word’s intended use, asking, “Like space aliens or illegal aliens without green cards?” A Hispanic student took offense and threatened violence against McGhee, and the teacher called in the assistant principal who issued McGhee a three-day suspension because his question was deemed offensive and disrespectful. The student who threatened violence was not reprimanded. McGhee told reporters, “I didn’t make a statement directed towards anyone; I asked a question. I wasn’t speaking of Hispanics because everyone from other countries needs green cards, and the term ‘illegal alien’ is an actual term that I hear on the news and can find in the dictionary.” That may well be true, but McGhee obviously failed to appreciate the battle for labels that is currently gripping the culture. This battle sees whole groups pushing labels upon others whilst pushing back against the labels used against them. Political extremists love labelling their ideological rivals. When you pejoratively label someone, you get to malign them without actually providing evidence to support your accusation, and if the label sticks, your opponent is forever stained by it. Labelling allows you to reduce a person to a stereotype based on one’s affiliation. It appeals to the prejudicial opinions one may hold towards a group - and simultaneously deepens prejudicial attitudes against the group. Groups tend to be dynamic, with tremendous diversity amongst its members, yet labels presume uniformity and cause one’s awareness of the individual to vanish. You don’t need to consider the individual qualities of the person being labelled because their label imputes qualities upon them. It isn’t a morally defensible tactic, nor is it logical. It commits the ad hominem fallacy, and it usually bears false witness. When I see someone using the ad hominem in lieu of actual arguments, I always presume that the person must not have much of an argument - because if you have a coherent argument, why not use it? However, if one is empowering a whole movement populated by intellectually stunted individuals – and any movement will have its fair share of those - then the appeal of the ad hominem becomes obvious. Labelling can be devastatingly effective, especially when the labels are being shouted by a mob. McGhee ran afoul of the Overton window - the spectrum of ideas on public policy and social issues considered acceptable by the general public at any given time. Terms and opinion that fall outside the bounds of the Overton window will suffer harsh rebuke – even if the term or opinion lay within the window just a few weeks earlier. Politicos will make it costly to share certain thoughts. That’s what happened to McGhee. He used a term that was once accepted within the Overton window because both Democrats and Republicans opposed illegal immigration, but then the political climate shifted. Now one must avoid using the term “illegal alien”, adopting instead Democrat-prescribed terms like “undocumented migrants” and “dreamers”. The term “illegal alien” is now regarded as pejorative, and therefore discriminatory. Labelling has long been a tool used by people across the political spectrum, though it tends to be pendulum dependent. To be effective, one needs the culture to be on one’s side. During the Red Menace campaigns of the 20th century, liberals and socialists of various strips were often labelled as “Bolsheviks”, “commies”, and “pinkos”, and these labels could bring serious professional and social consequences.  Herbert Norman, a high-ranking Canadian diplomat, was smeared with the label “communist”, and he committed suicide in 1957 to escape a McCarthy witch hunt. Today, the pendulum has swung hard to the Left. Political correctness, which is overwhelmingly employed by the Left to malign voices in the center or on the Right, has become incredibly stifling. It is also increasingly vitriolic. Labelling your ideological rival a “Nazi” used to be taboo in the political parlance that occurred within polite society, but it has become increasingly mainstream since Donald Trump rode down that golden escalator. On social media such comparisons are so common that there’s long been a name for the phenomenon – Godwin’s Law. This “law” was named after Mike Godwin, a U.S. lawyer who observed in 1990 that all Usenet newsgroup debates ended up with one participant comparing another to Adolf Hitler or the Nazis. It was later applied to online debates in general. The actual name for this fallacy is reductio ad Hitlerum. Recent times have seen a disturbing polarization in our political discourse, which has been accompanied by an escalation in the use of defamatory terms. Labelling one’s rivals is no longer merely a tool employed by extremists. More and more, moderates are adopting the language – perhaps because the media itself has become quite extreme, and Godwin’s Law has become mainstream. One of the worst things you can be called these days is “racist”. Unlike the label “Nazi”, which is often so ludicrously inflammatory that people tend to just laugh it off, the term “racist” cuts to the core as it is almost impossible to casually dismiss. People tend to quickly stereotype those they meet; it is something our brains naturally do as part of risk assessment. Because of that, subconscious bias afflicts us, and that bias can easily manifest as racism. However much a person might revile racism, it is not so easy to simply laugh off the accusation that you are a “racist”. Because people tend to project their own faults onto others, it is easy to convince a mob to collectively render this accusation, and in the mob’s desperation to prove their own virtue, they can become unimaginably ruthless. If you are labelled a racist and the label sticks, its often game over for you, so the fear of being so labelled has people running scared. People self-censor for fear that someone will attack them for the opinions they hold. Individually, keeping silent is a good survival strategy – at least in the short term. However, when magnified across a whole society, this survival strategy becomes ruinous to a culture. It silences voices of reason. Aggressive radicals can shout their ideas from the rooftops because moderate voices have been bullied into silence. The effect en masse is that radical ideas gain power and dominance, and the political voices that champion these ideas gain influence and control. Polarization divides the populous, which becomes increasingly contemptuous of the other. If you insist on historical truth and refuse to buy into a radical revision of history, then you are labelled a “colonizer” or an “imperialist.” Facts don’t matter. Recognizing an historical truth that undermines extremist narratives and woke sentiments is enough to get you labelled. If you express admiration for western culture with its soaring cathedrals, its symphony orchestras, its scientific achievements and its rich philosophy and theology, then you’re labelled a “white nationalist”, or some other synonym of “racist”. If you are a Christian and a conservative, what you really are is a “Christo-fascist”. If you question any aspect of the “climate emergency” narrative, be it the role played by CO2, the likely severity of impacts, or the effectiveness of countermeasures being promoted to address this “existential crisis”, you’re a “climate denier”. The “denier” label is meant to associate you with those who deny the Holocaust. You’re also “anti-science”. If you dared to ask questions about the effectiveness of Covid-19 lockdown measures, or the effectiveness of mask mandates, or the ethics of promoting mRNA jabs when the long-term effects of this new medical technology are unknown, you’re a “Covidiot”. And you’re “anti-science”. Sixty jurisdictions across North America adopted sixty different approaches to the pandemic, and every jurisdiction claimed they were acting on the “science”, even though their actions did not align, and if you pointed this out you were told that you don’t believe in “science”. Studies of graphs showing the rise and fall of Covid cases and Covid deaths never seemed to correlate with any actions instituted by the various jurisdictional governments, and if you pointed that out, you were told you should “believe the science” by people who couldn’t take the time to look at a few simple graphs. If you merely questioned the wisdom of creating a medically defined apartheid state, you were “anti-science” and were labelled an “anti-vaxxer”. And in the minds of many, you deserved to be fired, to be marginalized, ostracized, denied medical care and your most fundamental rights as a citizen. Vaccine passports empowered the symbolization and discrimination stages of the government’s pandemic response, and polarization was achieved through the media narrative – the masses being inundated with ubiquitous fear-based messaging that somehow never urged people to take the basic steps necessary to safeguard one’s own health and well-being – eating right, exercising, reducing stress, Vitamin D, etc. I remember seeing a Twitter post that asked, “What would be the most ironic cure for Covid-19?”. This was a few months into the pandemic. My answer was “Hugs and sunshine.” Labels are a lot like the masks we were made to wear for months for no discernible reason. They do a lot of harm – especially socially. They hide the faces of people so we can’t recognize them and appreciate them for who they are. We can’t see their smirks or smiles, so they become barriers to our knowing them – our understanding them - and they’re voices are muffled, so we often can’t hear what they say. I don’t like masks, and I don’t like labels. Rob Bogunovic serves as the editor at The Rubicon The Free Press Member Plan is now FREE! Free Press Members are able to write their own news and stories in the Community News. Be part of the solution!

Reprinted with permission. CARL NELSON | FEB 12, 2024 Thomas Sowell has been forced to state, (repeatedly): “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” And the current trade-offs to the Biden Administrations catastrophic solutions have been a splendor of truths exposed. The less we seem able to counter them, the more flagrant and exposed their ‘truths’ become. For example, in calmer previous times I had great difficulty finding material to counter the overwhelming Progressive narrative. However, in today’s tumult, voices are whispering from the cracks everywhere. As the integrity of the professions begins to crack, so too does the censorship with which professions naturally gird themselves. Journalism having failed us, the actual news makers (the people who do things) have begun to speak out themselves in podcasts and substacks. In short, a plethora of revelations abound – right from the horse’s mouth (and, of course, in some cases from some asses’ rear ends). No longer is the truth lost in translation. From the point of view of a mind simply wanting to understand, this is the most flush of eras. The Emperor, feeling omnipotent, has lately been seen parading about nude. And of all the information available out there, here are some of the major finds I’ve scooped up and shaped up into my own prize confections: The first is from an observation made by Brett Weinstein early in his interview by Tucker Carlson regarding the illegal immigration through the Darien gap in Panama. It had occurred to him, while following current events, that a nation such as China needn’t declare war to defeat us. That, in fact, outright war is quite destructive and expensive. It is much simpler to simply buy control of us through corruption of our institutions. And this has been suspiciously the case, he indicates, as currently near all of our American institutions – academia, health, governmental departments across the board and the judiciary – have been turned as weapons against the citizen, with seemingly little corrective recourse. Given fraudulent elections, a politicized judiciary and corrupt politicians, the correctives have been nearly neutralized. The second truth which has come to mind is that the end result of widespread corruption is fascism. They follow like A to B, since corruption is what fascism is. Fascism comes from the image of a bundle entity, each member joined in union to serve the State. Corruption is a matter of, “you play the game, or you don’t play at all.”  In practice, they are identical designs and join like cogs of a wheel. With both, power is the only appeal to justice. The third truth is that onerous regulations, vague and ambiguous laws, and a plethora of both are breeding grounds for corruption. The rules and regulations enforced by government should be few, clear, and eminently reasonable. Wherever there is government, there are individuals empowered to dispense valuable favors. The less favors there are to dispense; the less corruption possible; the clearer and less ambiguous the laws and enforcement, the less room for chicanery, and less undergrowth within which for corruption to slither. There is a reason forts are enclosed within a widely cleared perimeter. So it is for good government. Hostiles will perpetually try to penetrate its perimeters. And a fourth truth sprouts from these three former: that is, you needn’t look any further than the TV streaming options to realize how much, and how deeply, the normal citizen despises and feels bullied by organizations and especially their government – unless, of course, they are a part of these malefactors. Action heroes are fighting off criminal, terrorist, and corrupt organizations all across the media viewing spectrum. Given all of this, in light of the situation the lone citizen finds himself currently, what’s to be done? The gut response is violence. Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995 – and destroyed one third of the structure itself. McVeigh saw it as a justified revenge for the Government’s actions at Ruby Ridge and Waco, and as an attack against a tyrannical government. He hated bullies and stated his belief that the United States Government was the ultimate bully. At the time of the attack, the Murrah Federal Building housed approximately 550 employees. And from photos, appears to have covered half of a city block. Ultimately, the General Services Administration broke ground on a replacement building in 2001 which was completed in 2003, constructed on a two-city-block site, one block north and west. I could not get information on the number of occupants in the new buildings – but judging from the footprint, there would be quite a few more of them nowadays than then. “The new building’s design maximized sustainable design and workplace productivity initiatives. Security design was paramount to the Federal employees and its neighbors. Secure design was achieved based on the GSA’s current standards for secure facilities including blast resistant glazing. Structural design resists progressive collapse. Building mass, glazing inside the courtyard, and bollards help to maintain a sense of openness and security. The art in architecture component of the building incorporates a water feature that acts as an additional security barrier.” – Wikipedia) (This represents a clear foreboding of Biden’s to “Build Back Better”, for sure.) If Timothy McVeigh hoped to decrease the size of government by blowing it up – his actions have had quite the opposite effect. Likewise, our fictional heroes are having not much greater success than Timothy McViegh. They are forced to hide among the crowd, or in a survivalist arrangement far off the grid e.g. Jason Borne. Snipers abound. Strike and disappear – that’s the achieved wisdom, so far. Be a very gifted person who can deploy a very rare set of skills. All of which is all not very practical, and very unsuccessful. Violent opposition to the State is largely a fantasy and a pipe dream. Even in fantasy land the very unique carry several passports, and often die valiantly. What’s to be done? My answer came from a seemingly odd source: “An Amazing Journey into the Psychotic Mind: Breaking the Spell of the Ivory Tower” by Marzinsky & Swiney. These psychiatric worker/authors maintained they were able to achieve rare success in treating paranoid schizophrenics by treating the debilitating voices as if they were evil spirits rather than disturbances of brain chemistry. They give reasons for this, but the gold was in the treatment they described. The treatment they recommended was not to engage with these spirits, but instead to distance them by simply telling them to leave and reciting the 23rd psalm. Their successes, they maintained, came from not feeding the demons. The victim’s pain was the demons’ food. Denied food, their demons eventually gave up, diminished, or left altogether. A like occurrence is told in the Bible of when Jesus spent his 40 days and nights being tempted by Satan. Jesus likewise didn’t allow the Devil to provoke Him. “Away from me Satan!” He proclaimed. Satan gave up; Jesus prevailed. Likewise, Jesus, when treating a man possessed by devils, drove the demons from the man and into a herd of pigs on the hillside, who then rushed down a step bank into the sea and were drowned. Magnificent things can happen near immediately, when we refuse to feed Evil. It is rather miraculous. I’m reminded of the response of the Harvard signers to the pro-Hamas petition, when prominent firms announced they would no longer hire anyone who was on that petition. The signatures were vacated asap. In Europe, farmers’ strikes seem also to be having a laudatory effect. They are literally threatening “no food” – and the European Union is backing down on its ‘Green’ Initiatives. If we consider, keeping the storm troopers from battering down your door at 3 AM, all that really needs done is to not pay them. The same goes for all of these members of the Deep State. No functionary performs without pay. They will literally vacate within a few fortnights. “Think about targeting now going in reverse, where WE THE PEOPLE now target the non-compliant system operators and/or politicians. A Senator or Congress person aligns against Trump’s interests, our interests, and instead of gnashing our teeth, we immediately begin a targeted work stoppage in/around the representative’s district. In this scenario we don’t need tens of millions to make an impact, only a few thousand can completely change the dynamic.” – writes the author of the site, “The Last Refuge” There seems an earlier Biblical parallel of our situation, which comes to mind. When God threw Satan down out of Heaven, why didn’t God just destroy Satan? Why was he kept around to perform his mischief among God’s flock? I would conjecture that there is some part of the human nature that is Satan’s – an Original Sin – and that God could not eliminate Satan without also eliminating His creation. Likewise, I have noticed that no matter how much we disparage the arguments of socialism, Marxism, fascism, communism, etc.. they nevertheless keep reappearing. They sprout in the universities, in the judiciary. And, in fact, they seem to spawn on argument. I would guess this is because they are a part of the human make-up, but that like our demon stomachs – they shouldn’t be fed too much. To keep them in line, we must keep ourselves in line. That is, adhere to a strict diet. No deficit financing; no fiat currency. If we live within our means, our means will suit us. - First Published in the Iconoclast (blog of the New English Review). --- Support barkingsquirrel (https://carln.substack.com/) By Carl Nelson · Launched around two months ago, maybe three. This a blog of the essayist/poet/publisher (of Magic Bean Books) Carl Nelson. More about Carl and his work may be found at magicbeanbooks.co.

Reprinted from December 17, 2023 The following is a reprint of a rant on Facebook. My rant. " Okay... okay. Okay! Somehow this lunacy has been creeping into my newsfeed and therefore, my headspace. And my head doesn't have the space to entertain this kind of nonsense. So it's time to declare my side of the proverbial fence on the matter. The conservative personality is anchored in logic, not emotion. Keep in mind that as an academic, I am fully capable of stepping into someone else's universe and its own rules to have a debate in that person's backyard within their ruleset. A simulation, per se. But I have a reasonable expectation that the debater will use actual logic, real information, and the truth in their arguments. Hell, I don't even need their sources and citations. I can well enough assemble their picture myself. I can test it in my mind. I can turn it and operate it. I can see what is true and what is false in an argument. Even rocket science is not rocket science. King Solomon said, "There is nothing new under the sun". As I perceive the world I see that there are no secrets, only surprises. Perhaps someone will surprise me. So, surprise me. Furthermore, even if I entirely disagree with someone, I can put up with a host of bizarre overly grand conspiracy theories as long as they can actually respect the principles and the spirit of debate, maintain a cool head to avoid emotion-driven presentations, and assemble even the vapour of a logical argument. Just be honest. Seek knowledge, and even camaraderie, in the exchange. It is an exchange, after all. But sometimes it goes too far. Some folk get their own interpretation of the immutable laws of nature jammed upsidedownwise into their amygdala, and their emotional commitment to being right - to the unwavering role of the dissenter and recurring martyr - does all the talking, as though they are some religious zealot with a self-fulfilling epiphany but no actual grasp of the subject matter. The need to be right induces tunnel vision. The ego is blind to its own limitations. Tinfoil works both ways, eh? It is as if seeing the northern lights for the first time in a brochure photo they could expound on the myriad causes and effects of the phenomena while having no knowledge whatsoever other than what they gleaned from a cherry-picked photo and a few carefully crafted words in a marketing device. Once, perhaps, I was sufficiently egotistically invested enough to entertain these fanciful flights of unreality. Word plays. Word acrobatics. Word salad. Just words. Clanging gongs. Vain babbling. Keep in mind that I am an active promoter of free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, etc, etc, etc. This news magazine is proof of my commitment to these. I understand that it is human to wield incomprehensible logic to support an incomprehensible opinion as true and fact-based, and no one should stop another from participating in these features of their person. But, oh my... Much less now. In this conscious madness, I have lost interest. In fact on the following subject, I have no interest at all. But I digress... And so it is time to trim the Fakebook interwebs frenemy list. The next two statements should start the purge. 1. Earth is not flat. 2. Earth is a sphere. And. And. And if anyone disagrees with either one the two numbered statements above then that person is "flat wrong". And in this matter, we are not aligned. Not. Aligned. Sorry. Not sorry. Lastly, the trap is laid for the flat earth faithful (well, any bizarro world conspiracy theorist really). If any of them responds with emotionally driven amygdala-powered vitriol, that person has proven my initial point: the conservative personality is anchored in logic, not emotion. I'm not censoring them. Even now I have not gone through my list looking to remove "offenders". It is theirs to speak as they see fit. It is their right. I just don't have to be subject to it in my feed anymore. And that is my right. Right? Right! " --- Timothy Knight is a co-founder of The Rubicon Free Press, a wholly-owned subsidiary of ridire.org.

Reprinted with permission. ELIZABETH NICKSON APR 06, 2024 Politics is Downstream From Culture The lessons of covid are profound. The most important lesson of Covid is that without knowing the game, we outfoxed them and their narrative collapsed.  People now know the shots were very dangerous, and there were contributing factors like Vitamin D that people, apparently obsessed by their safety, never bothered to tell them about. How did people get wise to the fact given that this “thing” owns every major broadcast network, every newspaper? As powerful as this force was, it wasn’t especially smart, it didn’t understand us. - Bret Weinstein The revolution is happening all over the socials, especially in videos. And the disgust is palpable. If I were in strategy in left-wing politics, I would be panicking. James Carville, that wizened dwarfish hate-filled creep, is panicking and I for one, cannot stop watching him. Biden is staying. There’s no replacing him with anyone. He is sane enough to know that the minute he goes, he is in a world of pain, as every single member of his family lands in prosecutorial hot water. He’s a crook, his family are crooks, and furthermore they sold out the country to its enemies. I challenge any Democrat voter to read Peter Schweizer’s book on the Bidens and not view them covered in bugs and feces. That’s how awful they are. They are cadavers, the walking dead; they have sold their souls so many times, the drug addled pedophile Hunter is their appropriate face. Disgust is the prevailing emotion. I tried watching Disney’s Balenciaga, because I think I might have interviewed him, a gentle, elegant, cultivated man in his last years who took me through his archives, his stitching, his studio. Can’t remember, it might have been Givenchy. But twenty minutes in, the actor playing him and his partner engage in violent gay sex. GAAAA! I shouted and turned it off. My premium TV feeds are filled with shows where I manage to last five minutes before they prove so revolting, violent or dishonest (by which I mean woke) that I have to turn them off. We’re talking twenty or thirty or forty shows in my ‘continue watching feeds’ while I’m searching for somewhere to park my tired brain. Media Stronghold Falling I’ve given up. I watch videos made by actual non-lizard humans, they are playful and fun, and informative and exciting. They are positive. They are the future. I can watch a deep dive on the Vatican Library, or a specific period of history without the drawn out self-importance of ‘a prize-winning documentary’. It is a huge trend, vis below chart. “Young people” spend three minutes a day on Netflix, like me searching for something to watch and not finding it. They spend two hours on tiktok, 20 minutes on Youtube, 1 minute on Facebook. I do not know what has happened to Hollywood. Or rather I do. Cultural Marxism happened. The woman who got me my first job in journalism for the LA Weekly; was the daughter of communists and made a fine living writing scripts that were never greenlit, also two books about the fabulosity of Castro. I’m sure even she thinks the current mess is appalling; she has retreated to Santa Barbara where she no doubt volunteers at the local food bank (not). Liberal Strongholds Falling “This is not what we meant”, shrieks every liberal in the world. “It’s not our fault!” Met a prominent Canadian Liberal at the grocery store Tuesday. “Take me back to Jean Cretien!” she wailed. When I was friends with filmmakers, they would approve of a show by saying it is dark, transgressive, exciting. Within a decade, film has migrated to demonic, insanely violent, filled with hate, every character ugly and base. That’s the trouble with liberalism. It has no limits. A Yale law professor, Samuel Moyn, tries to rescue it in his latest book, but there no rescue possible. As Moyn says while promoting his book on a podcast with some perennial-grad-student-acolyte, ‘if we lose liberalism all those lovely things we enjoy, all the permission to do what you want, will vanish.” One more step to the Luciferian: Do What Thou Wilt. You should drop in on the interview to hear the elite drawl, the vocal fry, the supreme self-confidence, self-satisfaction. I want to slap them. Hollywood Stronghold Falling We want those permissions to vanish. “Liberalism” has become permission for the clever and amoral to loot the treasure of other people. They have all kinds of reasons that they needed some of that $33 trillion in public debt. Liberalism has become permission for producers on Nickelodeon to rape children and everyone in Hollywood knows about it and does nothing. Quiet on Set, a series running now, describes how Nickelodeon employed five men convicted of child sex abuse. Socials are running wild about the Nickelodeon pedophile rings. SAG and ACTRA knew what was happening. Their agents knew, their parents knew. They cashed in. Look at the brokenness of Justin Bieber, that pretty, sad character, who trails around looking lost. He hates his parents, rightly. Or McCauley Culkin, the kid who played in Home Alone. Also hates his parents, looks like a tormented ghost. Or Serena Gomez, who lives in a welter of pain. Or Lindsay Lohan, an incandescent talent who went off the rails for twenty years. Or Usher. Or Britney. They are all not doing well, failing adulthood. They were all raped over and over again in their climb up the ladder. P. Diddy raped Usher, Usher raped Justin. Justin quit music, and they force-married him and stuck him in Hillsong Church, itself a hotbed of theft and rape. Last week, P. Diddy’s estates were raided. He was another one of the monsters that the CIA and Deep State use to compromise people. Read the testimony of his long-time partner, Cassie. What he did to her will turn your stomach. I can barely type his name. He settled the day after the lawsuit was filed. P.Diddy might turn out to be Jeffrey Epstein on steroids, hacking his way through the black community, destroying at will, trafficking boys and girls to powerful men in Hollywood and beyond. Pretend you see the vomit emoji here. Illuminati Stronghold Falling I watched a video series last night about the Luciferian cults that snake through the top of every profession. The interview subject was a U.S. army chaplin, raised as a member of the Illuminati, who has the Illuminati seal on her birth certificate and and trained to become the Queen Mother of Darkness in the Last Days, of all the preposterous silly things. She was in a trainee cohort that included Justin Trudeau and Matthew Perry. Soros is reputed to be a key figure, a major player in the cult, which admit, makes a lot of sense. Gloria Vanderbilt was one of the Five Mothers of Darkness, there being five in existence at any one time. Jesse Czebotar is full-on Christian Kingdom Living now. You can judge for yourself her credibility. I loathe the occult and think it is stupid, venal, ridiculous and stupid. No one survives it, all die horribly and suffer horribly for the power it apparently confers. But it exists. And everyone knows about it, by which I mean, normals under 40 who don’t follow politics. I won’t even get into the Royal Family, but the stories about them, what they are doing to Kate, are coruscating, terrifying. I don’t know if they are true, but they could be; Glamis castle, the seat of the old Queen Mother’s family, is reputed to be the locus of their particular occult cult. Not My King protests greet every single public announcement Charles makes. Revulsion for the family grows by the month. And don’t forget Charles was buddy-buddy with Jimmy Savile, widely thought to be highly placed in the skeezy ridiculous disgusting Luciferian cult that dominates power in Britain. There is so much documentation about pedophilia at Westminster, it’s hardly a story any more. The censors hide it but everyone knows. In fact, the whole Illuminati rigamarole elicits complete contempt. If they exist, their strongholds must be pulled down. And thankfully, thanks to real humans, it is happening. It’s not happening in an organized fashion, which makes it impossible to stop. People run mad in groups and return to sanity one at a time, and that is what is occurring. Individuals stepping up in their specific field and saying no. We’re passing this law, suing this person, standing on this border, ripping down these barriers. Above all, the spell cast by Hollywood is fading. This is so significant, in that Hollywood soaks up so much attention and energy. Without that entrainment, people are freed, hours of time and energy reclaimed. Gen Z wholesale rejects celebrity. Normals who don’t follow politics are taking delight in pulling down the famous. Last week was an all-seasons-pass on Jennifer Lopez. Her dancers, staff and the women who actually voice her songs released awful stories about her vicious behaviour to underlings, and then ran videos, where she is pretending to sing and in fact is just off-key whispery singing the words, panting wildly as she contorts her 50 year old body like a teen. It. Is. Hilarious. And pathetic. This is a good thing. This is excellent. No Bureau of Misinformation will squelch this - people are having way too much fun. Every secret in every profession is being revealed in 3 or 5 or ten minute videos with tens, hundreds, thousands, millions of views. It’s all-pervasive, tearing through every medium; stop it in one place, it flowers stronger in the next. Like the worst invasive weed on the planet, truth grows like stink. Democrat Strongholds Falling All this means the face of the electorate is changing. Rich Baris, the People’s Pundit, points out the electorate never really stays the same, and we are in the midst of a giant shift. Baris polls on a micro-level, unlike anyone else. In the north east, he says, Republicanism is now populist conservatism. And in Philadelphia, the shift of Hispanics and Blacks to the Republican party is beyond significant, he says. Trump is polling high among under 35’s, in fact; an alarm went out from the Democrat Party to stop registering kids to vote, because they are trending Republican. Republicans are up 13-20 points in Philadelphia, which is “insane for a Republican”, Baris said on Real America’s Voice this week. Trump is gaining in the ‘burbs around Philly, up to forty points in Allegheny county, a blue stronghold, and in Pittsburgh. The Republican Party is polling lower than Trump in every single jurisdiction. Trump is beating Biden in every single battleground state, except Wisconsin where it is tied. The “people” have spoken and are saying to RINOs, a pox on all your houses. Furthermore, Baris says, there is the Southern strategy, where Trump doesn’t even need the rust belt, but barring industrial level theft, he has it. And this time, everyone knows about the potential theft. What happens if Trump wins? If we manage to sneak him in despite the foul machinations of Mark Elias and the Obama/Soros/Clinton team? Well, let’s look at Georgia Meloni’s Italy, a state mired in corruption for the last 100 years, stumbling along, victim of a thousand corrupt and frankly evil bankers, politicians and gangs. It is now the fastest growing economy in Europe, thank you very much. German MEP Christine Anderson says the EU is in panic mode as millions are awakening. “They are frightened,” she says. “They realize they are not serving the best interests of the people.” Corrupt Judiciary Falling Citizen journalists, former engineers, housewives, auditors, accountants and military are doing the job of both the Republican party and the media. We know, for instance, that Fani Willis and Leticia James in New York are wealthy women courtesy of shady real estate deals where they got preference. Trump’s attackers are paid, to do what they do. Judge Merchan on Tuesday was caught profiting off Democrats, upped his ante, shoved his case into Federal court. He and his daughter were caught by Julie Kelly. Judge Merchan’s daughter’s PR firm averages six figures a month. She is 34 years old and started in 2019. She made $600K in January of 2020 alone. Adam Schiff, Mr. Russia Hoax, paid her $2,000,000. Declassified with Julie Kelly Ties Between Judge Merchan's "Child" and Adam Schiff Represent Major Conflict in Hush Money Trial At the end of 2019, Representative Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was leading the first impeachment effort against President Donald Trump. After months of making accusations and conducting Congressional inquiries related to Trump’s July 2019 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—a… Seizing the Culture You have to see this as scattershot. Individuals in every profession expressing courage and outrage, like ultra-liberal actor/comedian Michael Rapaport abandoning Biden: Coleman Hughes calls for the end of race politics on The View. Trump’s wealth soars to $8 billion in Truth Social public launch. Posts largest ever bond: $175 million. Dozens of University of Texas, Austin employees in DEI-related roles to be laid off. In Scotland, the Muslim-Fascist the Scots, elected in some sort of humiliation ritual, is going down. Tennesee is outlawing MRNA in vegetables, classing them as pharmaceuticals. Tennessee is also in the process of banning geoengineering. Last week, as a result of a lawsuit brought in the Texas Southern District federal court, the FDA agreed to finally take down the social media messages it had put up to lawlessly block the use of ivermectin. Remember the mocking tweet: “You’re not a horse, you’re not a cow, come on y’all.” In the Netherlands people have just started their own biological food coop bypassing the supermarkets and buying directly from the farms. A Mexican rancher increased his revenues by 350% across his 30,000 desert acres, which receives ten inches of a rain a year by using regenerative agriculture. Don’t need Pharma’s poisons to grow food. 100 tractor convoy descends on London. Here is the new Greta, a young British farmer. RNC launches website called bidenbloodbath about migrant crimes across the U.S. Angry Muslim-Americans in Dearborn and angry black men in Georgia are greeting Democrat door knockers. Kayla Pollock, paralyzed after Covid-19 booster, files a $45 million lawsuit against Moderna. In Brussels, farmers drove their tractors through police barriers outside EU headquarters. De Santis removes squatters claim, strengthens property rights. Idaho Governor signs bill banning transgender operations use of Medicaid and state insurance Medicare. FBI turns up at woman’s door over memes criticizing Joe Biden, she refuses to show ID. Christians are rising in The Netherlands. Christians gather to pray at the Lincoln Memorial. Florida bans social media accounts for children. Louisiana Senate bans WEF, UN Sustainability Goals, WHO UN or WEF regs, taxes and mandates. Massive protests against EU in Poland. List of names released in P Diddy’s sex trafficking case. Tracking of Jeffrey Epstein’s visitors shows predators leaving their ultra-posh neighborhoods all over the States to go to his island, and victims leaving their derelict neighborhoods to try to make some money for their desperate families. Ship that crashed into Baltimore bridge is missing two minutes of Black Box data. Most people think it is a deliberate attack by the Luciferians to cause more chaos. No one believes officialdom. Homesteading movement is growing as millennials give up corporate life. Epstein victims sue the FBI. Nun states that if Donald Trump is elected it’s an act of God: “we are in a WAR between Good and Evil”. BlackRock launches a fund on the Ethereum blockchain; all the assets on the blockchain will be trackable, everything they do will be traceable. JK Rowling dares police to arrest her for misgendering under Scotlands New Hate Speech laws. Newhouse Family Members Resign from Warner Bros Discovery board amid antitrust investigation. Blackrock received “Cease and Desist” order for allegedly misleading investors on ESG funds. Truckers stage a massive protest along the Nova Scotia-New Brunswick border, temporarily shutting parts of it down, and demanding Trudeau ends the carbon tax. Carbon tax protests in Calgary face an army of police. Mayor Gondek not sure if she’ll run for mayor of Calgary again – brutally booed at Calgary Flames home game. Imran Khan and his wife had 14 year prison sentences for graft suspended by a Pakistan high court on Monday. Erdogan-backed candidate defeated in Istanbul’s Mayor election. Erdogan set for shock defeat in Turkey’s municipal elections. Buttigieg: “I don’t know if I’ll run for office again or not.” A federal judge in Missouri placed a restraining order on the Biden administration prohibiting them from pressuring social medis companies into censorship. And in the Cry Me A River category: D.C. federal Judge Reggie Walton is facing an ethics complaint after he publicly voiced approval of New York Judge Juan Merchan's decision to issue a gag order on former President Donald Trump, who is set to go to trial in Manhattan this month on hush money charges. "Judge Walton must have known his interview was highly prejudicial to President Trump," the Article III Project, a conservative legal watchdog group, wrote in a complaint filed Tuesday with D.C. Court of Appeals Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan. Since airing last week, Walton's CNN interview has garnered millions of views, and with Trump set to go on trial in Manhattan, Washington, D.C., Georgia and Florida, the group argued that the interview may have polluted every potential jury pool for all trials. Walton, an appointee of George W. Bush who has been threatened alongside his family, said during his interview last week: "I think it is an attack, on the rule of law, when judges are threatened, and particularly when their family is threatened. And it's something that's wrong, and should not happen." I am falling over laughing at that one, Judge. Jeff Childers of the excellent, very funny Coffee and Covid Substack reports that The National Institutes of Health has slapped BioNTech with a notice of default over alleged royalty payments the biotech owes the agency, related to sales of its Pfizer-partnered COVID-19 vaccine Comirnaty, according to the company’s SEC filing. “What’s new about this sordid story is it was the last bit of confirmation of the original root source of the mRNA tech: every bit of it was excreted by that massive government health agency, the wellspring of mRNA, the National Institutes of Health. The article showed, as we’d long presumed, that neither Pfizer nor BioNTech were smart enough to whip up a brand-new vaccine technology and turn it into a covid vaccine in just a few weeks. “It was always a government project. “So let’s play follow the money. Recall that, under a weird loophole, NIH scientists may earn money from patents obtained from their government work, and need not turn that money over, or even disclose any royalties they earn. It’s likely that both Fauci and Collins, for example, have made millions from the covid jabs—but they are not required to tell whether they have, or how much they’ve earned (and they have both repeatedly declined to say). “Here’s my primitive attempt to describe the complex, interlocking parts of this wonderful public-private partnership and what may have happened:” I don’t know about you, but I am falling over laughing. Gallows humor, but nevertheless. They are so caught. As usual and as necessary, please consider a very cheap annual subscription. I know I scared the pants off some of you with the election fraud series but the more we know, the less likely will they be able to get away with it. I have huge hope for 2025, I think the world will explode with creativity and prosperity, and our world will emerge from this dark dark spell. In any case, the next ten months are going to be fascinating. Also, I contributed an essay to Against the Corporate Media: Forty-two Ways the Press Hates You, by Michael Walsh, which will be published this fall. You can pre-order it here. The more pre-orders, the larger the printing. --- [ED: This article comes with several visual aids that are remarked on in this reprinting. These images can be found at the source: https://elizabethnickson.substack.com/p/strongholds-falling-populists-seize] Elizabeth Nickson was trained at the London Bureau of Time Magazine, spending seven years there, ending as European Bureau Chief of LIFE Magazine. She published a novel, The Monkey Puzzle Tree with Knopf and Bloomsbury. She has written for the Telegraph, the Globe and Mail, Harper’s Magazine, the Sunday Times Magazine, British Vogue, the Independent, the Guardian, and the Observer. Elizabeth has moonlighted writing for the Daily Mail (fun!) and covered the collections in Paris and London for the Toronto Sun and the LA Weekly. She is currently making an impact at https://elizabethnickson.substack.com. "Absurdistan is supported by readers only. We are fully independent. I loathe having to ask for money but it is unfortunately a necessity. If you have been here a while consider becoming an annual subscriber." ~ E Nickson

While sharing his thoughts regarding Candace Owens’ departure from The Daily Wire, Andrew Klavan spent ninety seconds attempting to articulate his thoughts regarding salvation and his friends, Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, and since then a whole lot of people have called Klavan a heretic. I don’t think Andrew Klavan is a heretic, though I can appreciate why his words invoked this reaction. Andrew Klavan converted to Christianity when he was fifty; prior to that he was a secular Jew making a lot of money as a novelist and screen writer. Klavan is an Anglican Catholic who believes every word of the Nicene Creed. In 2016 Klavan published The Great Good Thing:  A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ, which tells the tale of his conversion. Klavan’s commentary mostly concerns issues of politics and culture, but he has never shied away from blending faith into his commentary. I’ve always found Klavan to be a thoughtful voice on issues of theology. At about the 30 minute mark of an episode titled Because Christ Really Is King, Klavan says, “All of you who love Ben [Shapiro] – and I love Ben and Jordan Peterson – you all want to see them find Jesus because you know the joy and freedom that gave you, and you certainly feel that it alters your relationship with God – but when I think about this, to be honest with you … and I know some people will disagree with this, but I – life is not a game show where you guess the name of God and you get to go to heaven. Honk, you know, yes, the name is Jesus. I look at Ben’s life and I think if Ben were to embrace Jesus Christ it would cause devastation to his family, to the people who love him, to the people who listen to him, to his position in the world. I just have this feeling that God has put this guy where he wants him to do what he wants him to do. And as you know I feel that – you know – the Jews were not abandoned by God. I feel the same way about Jordan. Jordan struggles with this stuff and I feel like I have an inkling of why he has to struggle with it, but his struggle is inspiring to other people. And I think God wants his boys where he’s got them, and there’s no thought in my mind that he is going to send these guys into battle and then turn his back on them when they come marching home. It’s not a game show, you know. Christ is love. Christ is truth. Christ is the logos of the moral order. If you follow love, you follow truth, you follow the moral order, you will find yourself ultimately at Jesus Christ’s door. I don’t worry about Ben and Jordan Peterson one little bit.” So – was this heresy? Some have suggested that Klavan excuses Shapiro rejection of Christ as King because the cost of conversion would be high – which would be problematic if that was what Klavan was saying. It is suggested that Klavan’s contradicting Matthew 16:25, which says, “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” Some claim Klavan is here spitting on the face of the Christian martyrs who suffered and died for their faith. I can’t bring myself to agree with these harsh judgments – mostly because when I try to make sense of another person’s words, be it the red-letter words of the gospels or a YouTube monologue, context is king. In context, Klavan has never suggested that one should only become a Christian when it is easy or safe. He has often discussed what becoming a Christian cost him – and how little he has regretted that decision. In context, Klavan is saying that when he considers the journey these men are on and the good work they are doing, he feels these men are where God has placed them to be, and he sees them ending up in a good place. Many have responded to Klavan by quoting John 14:6: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”. They see this statement as definitive, and maybe it is, but I think it contains a lot of potential nuances, and Christians certainly have a lot of different ideas regarding God’s judgment. There have been fierce debates over concepts like predestination, the limits of atonement, the importance of baptism, the existence of purgatory and hell, and the need for grace, sanctification, and repentance – and what these words even mean. I reflect on James 4:6 and 1 Peter 5:5, both of which declare that “God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble”. Peter and James were quoting Proverbs 3:34, and I note the lack of additional caveats. Klavan is cautiously skeptical when dealing with things that cannot be known. Recently, in discussing the Netflix show “Three Body Problem” and its opening scene (which concerns the Cultural Revolution 1966-76), Klavan said, “Ignorance and self-certainty go together. You’re very sure of yourself when you don’t know anything. All you have to do is go on Twitter (or X) and you’ll see the people who are screaming the loudest are the people who are the most ignorant. And once you get some experience, you start to be unsure. You know, you should be unsure. You should understand the world is full of gray areas and we really should all just be a little nicer to each other, no matter who we are, because we don’t ever know completely that we’re absolutely certainly right.” He applies that same standard to some of the most contentious issues of faith. While he believes every word of the Nicene Creed, he’s less dogmatic when it comes to “pious beliefs” – which are doctrinal positions that are not part of the Catholic Churches universal ordinary teachings. For example, he does not believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary, but says that “In the end, I don’t really care. I don’t think it’s going to be on the final exam.” This approach isn’t especially unbiblical. The Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 14 that we are to “Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable matters” (verse 1), and he asks “Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To their own master, servants stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand” (verse 4). Paul applies this to the disputable matters of his day: dietary rules and what days (if any) are to be regarded as sacred. Paul goes on to ask, “You, then, why do you judge your brother or sister? Or why do you treat them with contempt? For we will all stand before God’s judgment seat” (verse 10). Paul then urges us, “Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another. Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in the way of a brother or sister” (verse 13). Now, of course, Paul is talking about the competing beliefs of fellow Christians, and Klavan is talking about two gentlemen who aren’t Christians. Is Klavan a heretic because he hesitates to presume eternal condemnation for non-Christians he regards as servants of righteousness doing God’s work? Can someone even be a righteous servant of God if they don’t recognize Jesus as Lord? Klavan thinks maybe. He references Matthew 25, the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, where the King says to those He deems as righteous, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” The righteous answer, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?” The King replied, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me”. In this parable, those deemed righteous didn’t know they were serving the King even as they did His good will. Jesus then addresses the unrighteous, telling them, “Depart from me, you who are cursed”, for they failed to do all the things that were in accordance with the King’s good will. These cry out, “When did we see you …”, and the King answers whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” When revisiting what he had articulated in those ninety seconds, and what may have been miscommunicated, Klavan said, “I believe in doing my job and … trusting God to do His.” He adds, “I don’t have firm opinions on who will be saved on the Last Day, because no one is going to ask my opinion. I get no vote. All that I know is that it is going to be perfect. God will be perfect. His justice will be perfect. His mercy will be perfect. I don’t judge where other people will spend eternity. Not my job.” Then he elaborates, “I’ve got one job as I see it, which is to come before God every day and submit myself to be changed, to tell God the truth, to open myself up to Him and let Him make the changes in me that he wants to make. When I do think of judgment … I believe that I don’t know. I’m absolutely positive that I don’t know.” I don’t know either, and I’m perfectly content to leave it there. Rob Bogunovic serves as the editor at The Rubicon If you like our content, please consider subscribing and supporting our efforts.

Over the last few months, I have been blessed to participate it what is known as a traditional land use study within my homeland. This also became a traditional knowledge study, as the environmental service provider wants to make sure that the ecosystem in a new development region will be respected. The nice staff arranged to interview me for a few hours, asking me to talk about the migratory patterns of the birds and animals, and to discuss how we Nlaka'Pamux people used the trees, plants and roots throughout our history. In my culture, we are storytellers. As you can imagine, my ancestors did not have classrooms, textbooks, or libraries full of reference books. Children learned about life by listening to their elders speak and by watching them as they hunted and gathered. There were no cookbooks with recipes or YouTube videos to teach us how to tan hides and no CBC to teach us that CO2 is bad for plants. I asked the nice interviewers if I could just tell a story about my childhood in the Anderson River Valley. To my surprise, they said yes! Here is one quick tale from my youth that I shared with them: Years ago in the Northern Cascade mountains of British Columbia, I was lucky enough to embark on a week-long hunting expedition with my grandpa Chapman. It was a rite of passage for me, and I eagerly absorbed every lesson my grandfather showed me. As the days passed, my grandpa and I discovered that I was a natural hunter. I was quickly learning to track smaller animals and even a mountain goat with stealth and precision. With each successful hunt, my confidence grew, and my bond with nature deepened. One evening, as we sat around the crackling fire after a bountiful day of hunting, I turned to my grandfather and asked, "Can you teach me how to say a thank-you prayer for the animals we hunt?" My grandad, who I loved dearly, smiled warmly at my request. "Of course, Wunfeather!! But remember, the words you speak are not as important as the intention behind them. Let your thankfulness flow from your heart, and the spirits will hear you." With undivided attention, I listened as the old timer guided me through the prayer, teaching me the traditional words in our Nlaka'Pamux dialect. Though the syllables felt unfamiliar on my tongue, I recited them with earnestness, eager to honor the spirits of the land. I was afraid that I was really messing up the prayer, and so I tried even harder to get it right. I felt this big hand on my shoulder as grandpa gently interrupted me. "Relax Wunfeather. Speak from your heart. Let the gratitude within you guide your words." Taking the old hunter's words to heart, I remember how I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, allowing the emotion to take over my entire body. Using a mixture of my own language and English, I gave thanks for the bounty of the land, the animals who provided sustenance, and the wisdom passed down through generations. After I finished, I looked up at my grandfather, unsure if my prayer had been acceptable. The old man's eyes were shining with pride. "That was perfect, my boy. Your appreciation was genuine, and that is all that matters." With a newfound understanding, ever since that day, I have continued to honor the land and its creatures with heartfelt prayers throughout every journey. As we returned home, in my heart, I knew that the lessons learned in the wilderness would stay with me forever. Prayers from the heart have guided me and my girls on our path as hunters, fishers, trappers, and stewards of the land. The ladies conducting the interview with me laughed as they said that they liked my story, and then they reminded me that we had better get on with the TLU. .... Those of you who visit us old native people might laugh at this because... Well, if you know, you know... Don't let us get distracted! Lord knows I have a lot of stories to tell about the Northern Cascade Mountains. You just need to keep me focused. Wun Feather _ Wun Feather is an old Indian trapper and teller of truths This article was originally published on April 7, 2024 His other articles can be accessed at https://www.facebook.com/wunann.ozirbart

Notes from unprecedented suppression on the inside: "This paper has been encouraging Covid vaccination for everyone." The COVID-19 emergency has at last come to an end as even the most restrictive countries — the United States, most recently — have lifted draconian Covid mandates. Freedom has been restored, but the pandemic has left an indelible mark on the bedrock institutions of our society. The corruption of the FDA, CDC, the White House, Big Pharma has been undeniably exposed — a topic I have exhaustively covered for over a year. Notably, journalism — the filter through which ordinary people living busy lives come to understand the complex matrix of power, money, and influence — has also been exposed for its bizarre servility to public health decrees and pharmaceutical companies. Writing for the most prominent journalistic outlets since 2020, I saw the decay from the inside. Though I have been hesitant to share my experiences of colliding with the inner machinery of media — for my reputational and financial security — I now feel galvanized to lay it on the table after starting this new Substack with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. One of the reasons I unexpectedly found myself in the journalism industry was the real possibility of speaking truth to power, presenting radically novel perspectives, and challenging institutional orthodoxy. My first major forays into the industry were on topics such as how my experiences with racism from childhood inform my view of race relations, how white guilt and identity politics corrupts our discourse, and how 2020 Black Lives Matter riots wreaked havoc in poor, minority communities. Pieces that I’m perhaps most proud of are the explosion of inner-city violence in Minneapolis in the aftermath of George Floyd and the new phenomenon of Asian women out-earning white men in the U.S. My heterodoxy and unwavering commitment to the truth — whether that made me look right-wing, left-wing, or just an artsy weirdo (at times) — didn’t land me a weekly New York Times column, but it did grant me spots in a number of top liberal and conservative-leaning outlets, such as The New York Post, The Globe and Mail, Foreign Policy Magazine, The Grammys (yes, the music awards — their online vertical), and others. Until it didn’t. Having taken the heretical line on race, gender, policing, I thought I was immunized from editorial censorship. But, as the pandemic became increasingly politicized through 2021 and 2022 with the roll-out of vaccines and public mandates, our society seemed to plunge into further collective psychosis, as spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle has perspicaciously observed. For the first year-and-a-half of the pandemic, I didn’t take any public stance on what was a complex epidemiological issue requiring legitimate expertise to navigate. Besides, I was regularly writing about race, BLM, and policing in the summer of 2020. Then, in the summer of 2021 Justin Trudeau and provincial leaders announced vaccine mandates across the country. Suddenly, going to the gym, restaurants, and large gatherings was conditional on taking a novel mRNA vaccine for a virus that posed less than a 0.003% mortality risk for people my age. I started to examine whether this was the right medical decision for my health. Upon close scrutiny of the best available data, I came away thinking it was not. I didn’t think the Covid vaccine would be an instant death sentence for me, but I didn’t see clear evidence of benefit for healthy people in their 20s. It also just happened to be the case that I fell in the very demographic that was most at-risk of developing a serious vaccine side effect — myocarditis or pericarditis (cardiac inflammation). Among the most rigorous, comprehensive data we have on vaccine myocarditis is from Dr. Katie Sharff who analyzed a database from Kaiser Permanente. She found a 1/1,862 rate of myocarditis after the second dose in young men ages 18 - 24. For boys ages 12 - 17, the rate was 1/2,650. Active surveillance monitoring in Hong Kong shows virtually identical figures. Confused and looking for clarity, I reached out to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya — who was among the most sensible public health policy advocates throughout the pandemic — and he validated my serious concerns of vaccine safety and draconian public health policy more broadly. Frustrated by the government coercing me into taking a medical procedure that was not in my best interest, I resolved to write about this injustice in the several outlets who had previously published my work. Right away, I faced tremendous resistance of the kind that I never expected. The rejection I experienced when pitching a wide variety of pieces on Covid mandates — reported, opinionated, based on the views of credentialed scientific experts etc — was unprecedented. Even editors who I deemed as allies — publishing polarizing pieces such as the “fallacies of white privilege” or why Robin DiAngelo’s last popular racism guide-book promotes a “dehumanizing form of condescension towards racial minorities” — were averse to my work questioning scientifically dubious vaccine mandate policies on the grounds of bodily autonomy and medical freedom. Many editors explicitly stated their outlets were “pro-vaccine” and didn’t want to run anything that may promote an iota of “vaccine hesitancy” — even in young, healthy groups for which we still have no data on reduction in severe disease or death. One editor responded to my pitch on the lack of epidemiological basis for vaccine mandates with the following: “This paper has been encouraging Covid vaccination for everyone. We don’t want to promote vaccine hesitancy that will get people seriously ill and killed. Journalists need to be responsible in not sowing distrust in public health guidelines that are meant to keep us safe.” Another editor made it painfully clear after a handful of unsuccessful pitches that the publication as a whole was not keen on publishing anything that deviated from the CDC and FDA’s universal vaccine advisory (vigorously critiqued by the likes of Vinay Prasad and Tracy Beth Høeg M.D., Ph.D.): “I'm going to pass. As I've said many times before, we are a pro-vaccination newspaper, and personally I just wish everyone would get vaccinated already. While I respect your decision not to do so (and I agree jail time for those who don't is overkill), I'm not keen on op-eds that even appear like they're arguing against vaccination for Covid or anything else.” Trying to figure out a way to capitalize on a hot news story — as every freelancer learns how to do — I started sending pitches on viral stories of athletes being barred from competition due to their personal choice not to get vaccinated. In response to my proposal on tennis star Novak Djokovic’s debacle, one editor expressed his utter contempt for Djokovic: “In no way do I want a piece supporting people who refuse to get vaccinated. In my opinion, people such as Djokovic, who refuse to get vaxxed, make their own beds and should lie in it. They are not heroes.” On my pitch about NBA star Kyrie Irving, who had to sit out several games for the Brooklyn Nets because of some undefined risk he posed to society as an unvaccinated player, an editor I was very close with made her profound disagreement undoubtedly clear: “Sorry Rav, but I vehemently disagree with you on this issue. Feel free to pitch elsewhere. Kyrie Irving refused to help the public get out of the pandemic and now he’s suffering the consequences. It’s on him.” On a couple of occasions, I attempted to cover the perpetually escalating Joe Rogan Covid controversy. In my several pitches, I took various angles such as how many credentialed scientific experts — such as Bhattacharya, Makary, Prasad, and others — were more in line with Rogan’s anti-mandate views than the government and public health agencies were. Here are two editor responses I received when pitching a story on the bizarre controversy of Rogan’s comments that young people in their 20s didn’t need to take the Covid vaccine (May 2021): “Rav, we are not interested in running stories like this. I think Rogan is actively endangering the lives of children and young adults with his anti-vaccine propaganda — and you need to be more responsible in your coverage as a journalist.” “I'm not interested in the Rogan story. It could too easily be construed as anti-vaccine and we want to steer well clear of that. I don't want any ambiguity on the issue.” One publication, whose whole mission has been from the start to expose and dismantle institutional orthodoxy, uncritically took the mainstream view on vaccine recommendations as gospel. This editor, who had “platformed” my work explaining the oft-justifiability of police shootings of highly violent, threatening suspects — which , again, was in line with their anti-mainstream view —opposed any view critical of vaccine mandates. In response to one of my pitches on the downplayed risk of vaccine-induced myocarditis in young men, he responded: “Rav, sorry but we’re not going to run any anti-vaccine pieces. I think the risk is totally overblown and amplified by right-wing pundits who have no concern for public health. These are the safest vaccines we’ve ever had and virtually everyone seeks to benefit.” None of this was based on rigorous scientific analysis — it was all premised on a naive trust in public health authorities and pharmaceutical companies. As it turns out, the mRNA vaccines are, by all current accounts, the most dangerous government-promoted pharmaceutical products in history. Fraiman and colleagues’ independent analysis of Pfizer and Moderna's safety data in the medical journal Vaccine shows that mRNA covid vaccines are associated with a 1 in 800 adverse event rate — substantially higher than other vaccines on the market (typically in the range of 1 in a million adverse event rates). [Note: this study does not negate the effectiveness of mRNA vaccines in reducing death and severe disease in elderly populations (for which we have good data). I personally recommended my grandparents to get vaccinated and was happy they followed through.] Due to the increasing censorship I faced, I ended up self-publishing my vaccine-myocarditis investigations, including one story on how a 38-year-old law enforcement member in my area who almost died from acute vaccine-induced myocarditis after he was forced to get double-jabbed against his will. At a time when government officials and public health bureaucrats are actively misleading the public, it is the media’s crucial responsibility to hold them accountable. Unchecked power — when unrecognized by the masses — metastasizes and devolves into tyrannical control. This is how you get the FDA approving and recommending the new “bivalent” booster shot to all Americans — as young as 6 months old — based on lab-testing in eight mice (with the White House recklessly advertising on their behalf). When the media fails, civilization begins to unwind. The powerful get away with more corruption and media homogeneity solidifies, congeals, and becomes increasingly treacherous to question. This has been my experience over the past two years. An industry already compromised in the age of Trump and wokism completely fell apart during a global pandemic. My collisions with this inner machinery are not merely a story of left-wing media bias (a given fact for decades), but — as I alluded to several times — people working in even alternative and right-leaning media spaces refusing to air any form of refutation of authoritarian public health mandates. This is why traditional left-versus-right paradigms are obsolete. Many “conservatives” bought the public health propaganda wholesale while a number of traditionally progressive thinkers — such as Russell Brand, Matt Taibbi, Jimmy Dore, and Glenn Greenwald (regardless of their personal medical decisions) — vigorously objected to Covid mandates on the basis of foundational, societal principles. I have largely abstained from sharing my visceral feelings on the demoralizing rejection (and financial loss) I faced for two years as a previously welcomed journalist in major outlets, but suffice it to say I felt incredibly trapped, helpless, vexed, and lost. Some of the aforementioned editors recommended I stick to stories on “cancel culture,” “identity politics,” “race", and the rest. While all those issues remain deeply concerning, the proposition of being pigeonholed in one specific topic while being censored in another that is far more alarming on a societal level (“take the jab, or lose your job”) was repugnant to me. I refuse to be censored. I won’t perpetually write stories about wokeism spiralling out of control in liberal sectors of society in order to gain clicks and a steady pay-check on conservative websites who want to feed their readers only one narrative. Today, I am no longer indignant and hopeless, waiting for one of my previous editors to offer me an opportunity again. I have now started my new, independent venture on this platform — The Illusion of Consensus — and am looking forward to bringing new, exciting content to my readers. Thank you to those who helped share and amplify the several stories I independently wrote on my personal Substack (with a small audience and minimal financial gain) such as Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and Glenn Greenwald. As I progress in my ever-evolving journalistic path to expose the truth, I hope you will continue to support my work. Rav Arora _ _ _ Rav Arora is an independent journalist. This article was originally published on May 13, 2023 To access this and other articles by Rav Arora and support his work, please consider subscribing to  https://illusionconcensus.com

Chilliwack BC, April 4, 2024 The Rubicon Free Press is officially operational. With only a few elements remaining to clean up we are satisfied to launch a new approach to journalism and community news publication in an online news magazine and social media platform. Of particular note is a modification to the premium plans to make them more accessible to groups and business persons who want to enter this medium but are not yet prepared to commit to the top-tier products. The flagship Vendor, Realtor, and Restaurant plans now have two options each: Core and Plus. Like the various "Group & Club" plans, the newly-added Vendors Core, Realtors Core, and Restauranteurs Core plans comprise a Directory listing with basic information, participation in the Free Press Members social media channel, and may submit their news and stories to the Community News for $9.87/mo. Yes, $9.87/month. Additionally, there is a newly minted Referral Program that sweetens the pot with a 25% discount for newly referred accounts. And the referring plan holder receives a 25% discount on their next Store purchase. Our flagship Plus plans feature a highlighted Directory listing with more information and a comprehensive Profile page consisting of eight (8) "tiles". These tiles include Member Profile, Featured Sale, Spotlight Gallery, Video Highlight (in development), Social Media (3), News Feed (in development), File Cabinet, and Contact Map. Like the Core plans, Community News submissions are included. The Plus plan is priced at $98.76/mo. The Plus plans are effectively an all-inclusive one-page website. This novel approach to marketing focuses on encouraging and supporting the advertiser who wants to actively participate as a peer community contributor to local news. Plus plan managers are no longer "advertising", as is the obsolete practice in print and online news. You write your news - your stories - whether you are at your desk or on your deck. You are both the creator and the customer. Your voice may be heard fresh every time you post a customer appreciation day in the Community News or finalize that sale in your secure client Social Media Channel or collaborate with a local non-profit on a mutually beneficial opportunity. You restore journalistic integrity. You build an authentic community. We encourage supporter and public feedback and insight as we finally approach a launch date. Please consider a Premium Member plan for your business. And share this news... magazine... with others. Selected participants will receive a 25% discount coupon for their first year of a Vendor Plus Plan, Realtor Plus Plan, or Restauranteur Plus Plan as our Thank You for taking the initiative to support The Rubicon Free Press as we bring journalistic integrity and authentic community back to our towns and local neighbourhoods. The Rubicon Free Press asks you one question, "Got news?"

(Reprinted with permission) ELIZABETH NICKSON | MAR 09, 2024 Absurdistan anticipates a surge of power, passion. and commitment to life world-wide. One of the more unnerving revelations of January ’24, was that the vaccine and the virus attack the pineal gland, the seat of the soul, if eastern mystics are to be believed. It is through the pineal gland that God’s voice can be heard by the pure of heart, and sometimes the impure. Added to 5G, wireless, glyphosate and other chemicals, we are in a world of trouble. To be more precise and less New Age, according to Dr Michael Nehls, the men and women who designed the virus and vaccine, created the spike to specifically attack that part of the brain where our individuality, creativity, curiosity and fearlessness are to be found. They want to murder our souls, to eliminate the possibility of this: The Instructions of the Lord are perfect, reviving the soul. Dr. Nehl’s book, forwarded by Naomi Wolf, goes into excruciating detail about the spike cleaving to the S1/S2 site in the brain, in which sits the index of our memory, and thereby shuts down adult neogenesis, the ability of the human mind to create, and thus to grow. To shut down the mental immune system, erasing, in point of fact, part of our souls. The vaccine he claims, looks like an attempt to shut down the drive to take risks, to go out into the world and take it on, shift it. The specific “cluster of differentiation”, they attempted to destroy is TLR4. The spike of the virus and vaccine crosses the blood brain barrier and cleaves to this cluster, the cluster which holds our history. If you are new to Absurdistan, you probably don’t know that my mother was used in one of MKUltra’s mind control experiments in the 50’s and 60’s – specifically Subproject 68. My mother’s first day of college There were 150 subprojects, many located in California near the military bases and the Stanford Research Institute, many of those exploiting the ferment of the flower children revolution, but also all through the U.S., and no doubt the world. It was the CIA who seeded the counter-culture with LSD. It is believed that Charles Manson and the Unibomber were subjects of MKUltra. The Grateful Dead, John Phillips and countless others were witting or unwitting collaborators in the CIA’s effort to break the minds of those kids who wanted no more war, and a more compassionate America, with drugs. These books here and here investigate the claim. My senior academic cousins took acid with Owsley, when they were teaching at Berkley in the early 60’s. Owsley wasn’t a “reclusive acid impressario”, he was CIA. This was the beginning of the CIA’s pushing drugs into the American mainstream. This wasn’t a ‘natural” evolution, it was meticulously planned and executed to create a culture of death, of necrophilia, of despair. That way we wouldn’t create a new world where the powerful would be eclipsed, their fortunes eviscerated. Heartily endorsed by the left, because they believed the only way to create a socialist revolution in the U.S., was to destroy hope and civic peace. You can look at liberals or Democrats or Republicans or RINOs as natural enemies; you can also look at them, as victims and agents of an one hundred year push to destroy the hope of the world. Every thought they have has been given to them to think. The left particularly, is entirely the creation of the CIA and Tavistock with the affirmation and support of corporate America and Socialist Internationale. Subproject 68 was established as fact through a series of lawsuits, some via suing the CIA, the hospital, the university, the Canadian government, and the bloody evil and corrupt Rockefeller foundation which should be shut down and its wealth distributed to its many many victims. It is the apex predator foundation, and purely evil. Through discovery, and some really solid reporting from journalists like Anne Collins, we know a lot of what they were doing. Which was essentially bust the human back to infantile status and rebuild her. They used curare, insulin shock, massive repeated abusive ECT’s called Page-Russells, and a lotta drugs, including speed, LSD and sodium pentothol used together with methamphetamine in their interrogations of my mother, to discover whether she had taken on board her new installed memories. If not, they would put her to sleep, mask her senses and using a football helmet rigged with speakers, repeat hundreds of thousands of times, her new memories. This was called psychic driving. I have my mother’s psychiatric records because of those law suits. They are truncated but in fact, tell the story. My mother’s first child died, which triggered post-partum depression. Basically she went into the Allan Memorial for two weeks to treat her paralyzing anxiety and within a few years, as the CIA required, was diagnosed as having severe paranoid schizophrenia. The CIA needed people who were only mildly ill, which they could mis-diagnose. Every time she tried to escape - she tried three times - they upped her diagnosis. She was not a paranoid schizophrenic, but she (and we) carried that curse for decades. I didn’t have any more children because of that curse. When she was let out the second time, she had lost her memory. I was six, and it terrified me. Her personality – vibrant, sharp intelligence, funny – had been replaced by someone very very gentle and somewhat confused. Someone fragile who needed to be looked after. Again, I was six, and the oldest and that is what I saw. “Who’s that?” she’d whisper when the housekeeper came into the sitting room. “Hello, dear, who are you?” to my best friend who lived across the street and whom she’d seen every day for three years. Most of subproject 68’s subjects didn’t recover and there is a direct action lawsuit from the children who lost a parent and gained a lifelong charge, losing their innocence, their sense of safety, their strength, and replacing it with weakness and disarray. My mother did recover and I’ll tell you how; it is instructive to everyone who had Covid, and who was vaccinated. Who has been poisoned, their brain altered without their permission. You can rebuild and more; you can thrive. But what happened to me, when I discovered this at the age of 39, is also instructive. I had always been oriented towards a spiritual path, a seeker, a compulsive reader and studier. Around the age of 17, I was in a study group with the smartest boys at the school across the street, and we compulsively read and argued every religious classic published, late into the night for two years. That investigation continued throughout my life. At the time I found out what had happened to her, I was interviewing torture victims and the falsely imprisoned in the Mideast and Africa for Time Inc. Courtesy of MKUltra I am an empath, a child who learned to read emotions in order to survive. I felt the agony of these men and women, I absorbed the stories into my body. My world view shattered. I no longer saw the developing world as something filled with gentle people and hope. I saw it as a torture chamber, where people had no rights, and were subject to the will of Leviathan every single day. And hovering over it was the knowledge that my mother had experienced the same thing. Trapped in a hospital, drugged, shocked, and shocked again for days, then weeks. For no reason but to give who, I wondered, data about how to break us. I collapsed. I developed severe headaches, so blinding no painkiller could touch them. Three days a week, I’d lie on the floor of my mews house off the Portobello Road, whimpering in pain. My dog wanted a divorce from me. I wanted a divorce from me. The Dark Night of the Soul, which is what I was experiencing, is supposed to only last 1000 days. It felt like ten years. Andrew Harvey, a living Christian mystic, believes the whole world is experiencing a Dark Night of the Soul right now. Harvey’s politics are uninformed to the point of ignorance, but this brief video explains his theory, and I think in this at least he is right. Also, his first book, here, blew me away. This describes to the moment what I experienced during my grim awakening: What the human race is experiencing is a comprehensive overwhelming dark night process in which all the illusions and all the institutions and all the concepts and all the dogmas that we have created our identity around are being systematically demolished and destroyed by the divine. And when you hear that from the ego by which I mean from Sam or Jonathan or Christa’s ego, it’s terrifying, you are terrified. But when you go into the depths of the mystic tradition and when you understand beyond thought that what the dark night is, is a potential birth canal for a wholly new level of evolutionary power. presence and passion and compassion and commitment to life. sacredearthactivism A post shared by @sacredearthactivism That is where we are going. We just have to grit our way through this and try to enjoy it. We will, finally, throw off our chains. Somewhat like the excessive ECT and drugs used to destroy my mother’s memory, the vaccine and the virus were designed to shatter what Nehl’s calls the index of our memory. They mean to destroy those memories with fear. Hence the non-stop manufactured terrors inflicted on us. As Nehl’s explains, at the end of a normal day, our egos are tired, defences are down, and at that time, during the nightly news, or while watching the unrestrained violence courtesy of Netflix, Disney, Prime, Apple, HBO, the shock of this crap overrides our daily memories, some of which were probably pretty nice, pleasant, and replaces them with fear and panic and depression and the knowledge of deceit and evil. If assaulted when you are tired, the index of your memory will decant the memory, say, of your birthday party in 2013, and replace it with the ghastly murder of a character you have come to identify with on Netflix, or the memory of the twin towers falling, last summer’s catastrophic forest fires, October 7th, the Ukraine war. All ginned up to scare us into our small weak selves. Slowly erasing our personhood, our cultural and ethnic identity, our ancestral memory. And it is working. Sociologists and psychologists report that Gen Z is the weakest, most frightened generation in history. They can’t get anything done. They have plans, but they never effect them, and are in constant need of reassuring. Their emotional affect, how they feel about anything at a given time, is paramount. The purpose? Nehl’s describes: Instead, the Grosse Umbruch,2 (Great Upheaval) as Schwab himself aptly translates it in his native German, will abolish much of what fundamentally defines us as human beings—our culture and the established rules of coexistence—and replace it with a straitjacket that no human being would voluntarily allow him-or herself to be forced into. I followed my mother’s footsteps to recovery. What she did, finally, was exercise, excessively at first, by which I mean skiing through a blizzard on the local 9 hole golf course, then picking up golf and becoming ladies champion year after year. She had studied piano as a girl, and picked it up too, enrolling at the McGill School of Music, taking a degree. She practised when I was a child, six hours a day. furiously, classical music only, Christmas carols at Christmas. She rebuilt her brain. And her body. When she was older, she took up tennis and with the same focus and discipline became Ladies Senior Champion at her club. She had suffered the worst that can be inflicted on a modern middle-class woman and refused to give up, and sit in a dark room for the rest of her life, as her fellow patients did. She became fearless. She had faced the worst and triumphed. She became, in a way, meta-human. She became what we are all becoming, aware of our programming, aware of our freedom, and aware of our power to take it (expletive deleted) back. Please note this happening yesterday. Note too that most of the participants are young men, stepping up and refusing to be mashed into numbness and fear, feminized. And they are thrilling to the enduring spirit of the American Republic, the one thing the evil of this world have hated for the past three hundred years. --- [ED: This article comes with several visual aids that can be found at the source: https://elizabethnickson.substack.com/p/all-species-are-thriving-but-man] Elizabeth Nickson was trained at the London Bureau of Time Magazine, spending seven years there, ending as European Bureau Chief of LIFE Magazine. She published a novel, The Monkey Puzzle Tree with Knopf and Bloomsbury. She has written for the Telegraph, the Globe and Mail, Harper’s Magazine, the Sunday Times Magazine, British Vogue, the Independent, the Guardian, and the Observer. Elizabeth has moonlighted writing for the Daily Mail (fun!) and covered the collections in Paris and London for the Toronto Sun and the LA Weekly. She is currently making an impact at https://elizabethnickson.substack.com. "Absurdistan is supported by readers only. We are fully independent. I loathe having to ask for money but it is unfortunately a necessity. If you have been here a while consider becoming an annual subscriber." ~ E Nickson

On March 22, 2024, Jeremy Boreing announced that the “Daily Wire and Candace Owens have ended their relationship.” That same day, Andrew Klavan built his show around his thoughts concerning Candace Owens and her departure, and by day’s end “Christ is King” was trending. Candace Owens has been one of The Daily Wire’s top talents since 2020. Owens used to be a liberal. In 2015 she was blogging about the “bat-shit-crazy antics of the Republican Tea Party”, and in 2016 she launched SocialAutopsy.com, a website that sought to expose Internet bullies by doxing people and violating their privacy. She faced resistance from conservatives and progressives, and blamed progressives for doxing her. Candace Owens became a convert to conservatism in 2017 when she realized “that liberals were actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls.” Following her political conversion, she made waves with her harsh criticism of BLM and her promotion of BLEXIT (a portmanteau of the words “black” and “exit”, which urges people of color to leave the Democratic Party). She also became friends with Kanye West after he tweeted in April 2018, “I love the way Candace Owens thinks.” She tweeted back, “I’m freaking out. @kanywest …please take a meeting with me. I tell every single person that everything that I have been inspired to do, was written in your music. I am my own biggest fan because you made it okay. I need you to help wake up the black community.” Her departure from The Daily Wire isn’t surprising. In the wake of October 7th and the Israel-Hamas War, Owens found herself in the crosshairs of The Daily Wire’s co-founder, Ben Shapiro. In a speech Shapiro called Owens’ response to the war “disgraceful”, and Owens retort appeared to come by way of a tweet that read, “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” She followed that tweet with another that simply read, “Christ is King.” Shapiro tweeted back, “Candace, if you feel that taking money from The Daily Wire somehow comes between you and God, by all means quit.” On the day that Jeremy Boreing announced that they were parting ways with Candace Owens, Andrew Klavan devoted his show to discussing her departure. To insert a bit of levity, Klavan read a tweet that said, “Candace Owens is gone, so now Andrew Klavan is the only black woman at The Daily Wire”. Klavan joked that this was “obviously true, so I feel a certain responsibility to talk about this”. Racially Jewish, Klavan converted to Christianity when he was fifty, and in 2016 he published The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ. Being both racially Jewish and a late-convert to Christianity, Klavan brought a unique perspective to a quarrel that has both political and religious dimensions. Regarding Owens’ departure, and the reaction that would occur, Klavan warned that it was “going to be an absolute crap storm, obviously.” And he wasn’t wrong. The episode is titled “Because Christ Really is King”, and Klavan affirmed that this really is his belief. He expressed his support for Jeremy Boreing and the decision he had made, saying that in the wake of the decision “I personally felt a weight taken off my shoulders and I’m grateful to him”. While many have interpreted Candace Owens departure as an act of censorship by The Daily Wire, Klavan dismisses that allegation, affirming that he is “a free speech advocate”, and emphasizing that The Daily Wire didn’t “cancel” Owens. However, The Daily Wire stands for certain things, and apparently Owens had come into conflict with at least one of the things The Daily Wire stands for – its opposition to “race hatred”. Klavan sees “race hatred” as spreading a “smear of hate” over the “nuanced, difficult, detailed things that you have to think about”. He points out that “people can use truth to mask wickedness”, and offers up the example of the Devil quoting scripture when he came to tempt Jesus, speaking truth to mask evil. The War in Gaza represents a nuanced issue that is poorly understood by people on both sides of the conflict, resulting in many blanket judgments and condemnations. Some people seem to think any criticism of Israel is an expression of anti-Semitism, while others don’t recognize that criticism of Israel – even when valid - often masks anti-Semitism. Klavan’s perspective is that Candace Owens was promoting anti-Semitism. First there was Owens’ defense of her friend, Ye (Kanye West), who was expressing anti-Semitism well before the October 7th attack. Then there are the “dog whistles” that Klavan sees as deeply problematic. In politics, “dog whistles” involve coded or suggestive language that hides its intention, allowing one to convey controversial messages on issues without provoking controversy. Klavan thinks Owens has been using them – either wittingly or unwittingly. The first dog whistle Klavan identifies was Owens’ suggestion that a lot of the books that Nazis burned in the 1930s were bad books that probably needed to be burned. The second was Owen’s decision to retweet a post saying a Jew was drunk on Christian blood. Klavan said, “When you start to refer in this kind-of clever way to certain groups in Hollywood corrupting Blacks and killing Michael Jackson … you’re messing with us, and no one is fooled except those people who want to pretend to be fooled because they hate the Jews.” “The truth that hid wickedness that I thought was the most wicked truth to use was the truth that Christ is King”, Klavan exclaimed, implying that this phrase is also a “dog whistle”. Klavan said, “It is almost exactly twenty years since I acknowledged the Kingship of Christ in my life”. Some people had warned Klavan that he would not be accepted by Christians because he’s racially Jewish, but Klavan said “Christians have welcomed me with open arms - except this Christ the King anti-Semitic crowd.” The anti-Semitic crowd Klavan is talking about includes Groypers like Nick Fuentes, a well-known white nationalist, far-right political commentator. Later in the episode, Klavan refers to Fuentes specifically, taking issue with Fuentes’ claim that “the Jew’s religion is based on rejecting Christ.” One does not require six degrees of separation to link Candace Owens to Nick Fuentes. Owens and Ye are friends, and Owens defended Ye when he was being called out for his anti-Semitism. Fuentes and Ye are friends, and when Donald Trump agreed to have Ye over for dinner at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022, Ye brought three friends along, Nick Fuentes included. Trump received a lot a criticism for that, though he posted to Truth Social that he knew nothing about Ye’s intention of bringing Fuentes, and he didn’t know Fuentes. Many prominent Groypers openly supported Ye’s 2022-23 short-lived presidential campaign. Klavan declared, “Christ is the King … but when you use that phrase to mean that God has abandoned his Chosen People, the Jews, through whom He came into this world incarnate, and that He’s broken his promises, his covenant, with the Jews, you are quoting scripture like Satan does … you are quoting scripture to your purposes, and that to me is specifically wicked.” Klavan then spends 90 seconds presenting thoughts so complex that they’ll have to be the subject of a separate article, but in reference to other Daily Wire talents – Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson - Klavan says, “When you spit Christ the King at them … that just doesn’t sit with me in the least.” A lot of commentators weighed in on the suggestion that “Christ is King” was a dog whistle, and much of what I saw dismissed the suggestion as absurd. I’m not sure if these commentators really grasped the nuance of what Klavan was saying, or the way the phrase has been used. Phrases can convey meanings that often go beyond the words themselves. Subtext gets read into them. The phrase “Black Lives Matter” is a perfect example of this. No sensible person would argue against the literal meaning of this phrase, yet the words represent a broader movement and message that many can dispute or refute. The founders of Black Lives Matter were Marxists trained to sell Marxism to the masses, and they used a slogan that no one could object to in order to shield themselves from criticism. When people started using the phrase “All Lives Matter”, BLM activists argued that this similarly unobjectionable phrase was racist because it took away from their message. The slogan “Love is Love”, popularized by LGBTQ+ activists, literally says nothing, yet it conveys a lot through subtext. Sometimes one has to understand the context behind a phrase in order to appreciate the message that it sends. “Let’s Go Brandon” is a prime example of this. Groypers and others have been blasting the phrase “Christ is King” at Jews as a sort of taunt, and when Jews take offense, that offense gets labelled as prejudice. A lot of people are insisting that there isn’t anything wrong with the phrase because they don’t see how the phrase is being used, or by whom. Andrew Tate has used the phrase in a recent post. Sneako has done likewise. Both men are Muslims highly critical and dismissive of Christianity. When these men say “Christ is King”, they means something other than what the phrase literally conveys. Klavan’s central contention is that “Jew hatred is Christ hatred in disguise”. Returning to the parting of ways, Klavan states, “So when Jeremy Boreing, a Christian man, has to sign a check – a big check – to pay someone to talk about Hitler wasn’t so bad in burning books, or a Jew is choking on Christian blood, or Christ is King, when Jeremy Boreing has to sign that check he’s doing something that he cannot abide”. He adds, “This level of hatred of Jews is a hatred of God – a hatred of Christ.” Klavan then explains, “When I, who have given my life to Christ, who have bowed to Christ as I have bowed to nothing else on this planet, who bends the knee to Christ the King, and I come onto this outlet … this outlet that I love … and I know that such things are being said under the aegis of The Daily Wire, it has to end. It has to stop.” Then Klavan exclaims, “If Candace wants to say those things about the Jews, about Hitler, no matter how she dodges and weaves, she has to leave The Daily Wire. She has to leave for one reason above every other … because Christ is King.” Rob Bogunovic serves as the editor at The Rubicon If you like our content, please consider subscribing and supporting our efforts.

Reprinted with permission. | CARL NELSON | MAR 24, 2024 “Those who tell the stories rule society.” - either Plato or a Native American attribution. My research has made it a coin toss. We live in a very encumbered age. We are encumbered by our wealth, our technology, our leisure, regulations, laws, social strictures, by the Deep State for sure… but most of all, I would think, by narrative. What are rules and regulations but ripened narratives with consequences? And we certainly have enough of them. And there is certainly a price to be paid for breaching them. All of them are touted as solutions. But, unfortunately… “The chief cause of problems is solutions.” - Sevaried’s Law We are metaphorically bathed in cautionary tales from dawn to dusk and then far into the night. The morning news wakes us. The evening news and a myriad of TV shows put us to bed. In between, there’s all that you heard throughout the day, all pitched in the best story form manageable, often cloaked in fear - so that you would listen, attend. These are the American society’s equivalent to Mao portraits. Really, it’s easy to suspect that the only thing you might be valued for is your attention - as all these narratives require acquiescent participants. “Desire generates narrative, causing narrative’s inherent prejudice.” - Bill Soames Dr. Michael Nehls is a molecular geneticist, physician, and author, most recently of “The Indoctrinated Brain: How to Successfully Fend Off the Global Attack on Your Mental Freedom”. In a recent interview he discussed how the general human hippocampus size has been shrinking versus its general expansion in past times. The hippocampus is the clearinghouse of learning. When our hippocampal index of new neurons is positive, we are able to incorporate new information with what we know of the past; we individuate. We particularize as individuals. And when we encounter new knowledge, we first vet it for red flags as regards our current measure of wisdom. When the hippocampal index is zero or negative, the newer knowledge no longer individuates but rather simply overwrites what is there. This is how indoctrination takes root and perpetuates itself. Fear and inflammation will prevent hippocampal neuron growth as resources are shifted elsewhere. As Dr. Nehls describes, this is how indoctrination occurs: the fear of the message prohibits neural growth, so that the present propaganda overwrites our historical memory of the past. Without a strong mental immune system (hippocampal index) which can resist fearful propagandas by comparing it with our already acquired wisdom - we are slaves to the current message. I think it is reality which forces Conservatives to swim against this increasingly relentless modernist current. And the reality is that the human essence is poetic and not narrative. The current legacy media is conducting a continual 24/7 bombardment of the foundational ethos against a populace who are hunkered down within their shrinking mandates trying to live their lives in a natural harmony with the world around them - that is, ‘poetically’. All the while, harassing narratives seek to restrict their movements, restrict their use of energy, restrict their use of labor saving appliances, restrict their use of language and free expression, restrict the use of assembly, restrict their use of representation, restrict their use of their lawful rights, restrict, restrict, restrict… this is what narrative fear accomplishes. But it isn’t only fear which drives this, to my mind, but the confining nature of narrative itself, as the only thing narrative naturally allows is its control; like a superhighway narrative exists only to get you from here to THERE. Currently, the poetry - the give and take, discussion, and the expansion of understanding - of our cultural life is barely surviving beneath a blitz of narrative attack: the CO2 creates global warming narrative, the 1619 Project narrative concerning the founding of the United States, the Covid-19 narrative and successive pandemic scare narratives, the Black Lives Matter narrative of systemic racism, the Feminist narrative of oppressive patriarchy, the LGBTQ narrative of sexual identity, … All of these insurgent narratives (and a host of others generated daily) are conducting strikes across what has become a wasteland of the American tradition and the poetry of the American dream. Poetry feels impotent, but it’s an impotence with the singular clarity of awe. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” Matthew 11:15. We’re all going to die, and our placements eventually be for naught. Within this framework, Conservatives hold that the ancestral parents of our traditions lived and found out things making their lives more bearable and easier, which are the treasures contained within our traditions. Others do not think this, and furthermore think it deplorable to do so, because they worship the new. What is the ‘new’ in their minds, has superseded all that was the past in the long evolutionary struggle to be the fittest and survive. (Reminiscent of Dr. Nehls’, vulnerable hippocampus, in which the new has overwritten all.) They certainly espouse the most dire of tooth and claw tests for all received wisdom. And yet, they act as if their own, next, untested notions were Athenas sprung direct from the forehead of Zeus. They would rather sweep uncomfortable truths, such as the “human condition” and bits of painful reality - long encountered throughout history - right under the rug, or send it off to the gulag along with history itself. Doubt for them is a structural frailty, to which their newest, just upgraded narrative poses the solution - with an aphrodisiacal, whip cream plus cherry like topping of power and control. The nature of narrative is certainty. One thing leads to the next. And then it runs into a counter narrative and dispute. And then the best strategy wins, supposedly. But wins what? It wins control. It says how things are. This is the winner which over-writes history. Narrative is stasis, while appearing to be its opposite. If the frozen-in-aspic nature of our current national conversation playing in the legacy media hasn’t convinced you of this… well, I will, nevertheless, lay its future out: The underdog and upper dog will tag team as ‘round and ‘round they contend, the upper dog versus the controlled opposition. We are currently in an actual war between nothing ever happening ever again - which continually reappears with too much velocity to grasp - and the exercise of our free will and speech which currently present as an exhausting isometric exercise, resembling poetry. Narrative thrives in novelty and hubris, while poetry grows with humility and repetition. “A child kicks his leg rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding fatality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say “Do it again”/ and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.” - G.K. Chesterton All of this is illustrated by the famous Dunning-Kruger graph of subjective confidence versus the accumulation of objective experience. Higher learning greatly fuels the initial start of the Dunning-Kruger effect graph, which is where the narrative confidence most peaks, while reality begins dissolving narrative confidence with a descending curve near soon as experience begins. And with experience, monotony begins to extinguish the blush of the new. So that even on the rebound -at the level of greatest expertise and most experience - narrative never achieves the confidence of its first blushing birth. Indeed, the Dunning-Kruger curve is a graphic representation of Yeat’s “Second Coming” wherein… The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. But let’s hear about the spiritual problem posed by this from another perspective, in fact, from the Progressive’s demi-god, Charles Darwin: “My mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond, poetry of many kinds… gave me great pleasure… But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry… My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive… The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness.” - Charles Darwin Implicit and Explicit Memory According to Jonathan Gottschall, “The Storytelling Animal”, “There are two kinds of memory: implicit and explicit.” In the simulation model, as we acquire implicit memory, our brains are re-wired, so that though we have no memory of the activity or event which caused us to develop an ability, the ability persists. So, for example, you may not remember the very subtle sequences of choices by which you determined how to ride your bike without training wheels or (more advanced) how to roll a derby hat across your back from one hand to the other - but the skill persists, nevertheless. We have acquired ‘implicit’ memory. Explicit memory requires no such explanation but is the one most on display whenever we use whatever we can “bring to mind” to tell a story, craft an argument, or endeavor to either to win or to direct a discussion. Implict memory is what a poem resurrects. People dance, or perform, paint or sing… like a dream resurrects hidden feelings and knowledge. Implicit memory is the thing that raises those red flags when we hear what we think might be a wrong account, but we haven’t the facts yet to challenge it. We do not remember much of our dreaming, and yet the implicit memory of it helps us in our waking hours of problem solving. How many creative people remark upon finding the answer to a very difficult problem following a night’s very fertile dream? Isn’t it common knowledge that a productive way of solving a seemingly intractable problem is to “sleep on it”? Woody Allen once joked, showing off the handsome watch he’d acquired: “My uncle sold me this on his deathbed.” Our implicit understanding that there were more pressing matters at that point in Woody’s Uncle’s life, but that his Uncle is still in the day-to-day world of explicit existence supplies this joke’s humor. At one time in my life I was a medical student riding in the Medical Aid Ambulance as part of my training. One night we stopped at a home in an upscale neighborhood to pick up a very elderly woman from where she had been living with the daughter. The elderly woman was bleeding from both ends, and quite faint, but as we rushed her to the hospital she pulled at my sleeve with something urgent to say. It was quite noisy what with the sirens, motor noises, CB radios and such so I bent down close to hear, as I thought this very well might be her last words. “I want a private room,” she said. Implicit memory might declare to our hospital bound woman, that she had much more important matters to address then than whether or not she was to acquire a private room. But this would depend upon what sort of life she practiced. For to complicate matters even more, modern life, in which our experiences are more and more secondhand or even mimicked - has polluted the implicit memory we build from our experiences in the natural world. That is mimicking a social status had implicitly become more important to this woman than her very survival, or at least it was uppermost in her mind. An endless flotsam and jetsam of media driven narrative, plus interactions from the fabulous fictional, political and social worlds distort our implicit memory, sometimes beyond all common sense. We walk about as simulacrums of ourselves, derived from media concentrates, something like how the orange juice flavored liquids now offered have replaced the orange. Perhaps only the pulp (flesh) of our real existence is left, as a crutch to authenticity. (To go even further down this rabbit hole, I would recommend Aaron Ames essay, “Darwin, Bureucrtese, and the Decline of Poetry. https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2024/01/darwin-bureaucratese-decline-poetry-aaron-ames.html?utm_source=The+Imaginative+Conservative+Newsletter&utm_campaign=7f3afd8e16-Weekly+Newsletter_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6c8d563f42-7f3afd8e16-132552253&mc_cid=7f3afd8e16) I have memories of the theatre world, sitting within our group of playwrights and listening as another (politically active) playwright’s work was given a reading. She was a sound playwright, but her characters were made of plywood, assembled from glued chips of correct thinking, but which, it seemed were the production of her implicit memories of a politically reconstituted, human character was. How does a person get this across to another person. I remember on one occasion, I chanced to suggest that “what this play needs is a Republican. You simply cannot reach the epiphany - nor a sound denouement - with the characters you have assembled”. I was already the group ‘alien’, so the remark got more laughs than the usual mystification my observations typically produced. I was simply trying to suggest that any real solution to a problem cannot be reached without introducing reality. This should seem plain enough. Nevertheless, it seems currently that this woman playwright’s problem has gotten much worse, and in fact metastasized to afflict our entire society, our culture and our institutions.. The party of this woman’s reality is not our reality; in fact, it is not even real. [ED: this piece is an abridged version of a more ambitious essay, “The Underdog is Just a Dog” published in the March 2024 edition of the New English Review] Support barkingsquirrel (https://carln.substack.com/) By Carl Nelson · Launched around two months ago, maybe three. This a blog of the essayist/poet/publisher (of Magic Bean Books) Carl Nelson. More about Carl and his work may be found at magicbeanbooks.co.