Ants at the Picnic, Part One

Enough ants can kill an elephant . . . or a globalist conspiracy.

Guest post from Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

Bullets and blogs are the ants at the globalist picnic, and they may prove just as hard to eradicate. It’s a war between decentralized and centralized power, and it’s not a layup for the latter. At a picnic, you can spray pesticide to eradicate the ants, but it ruins the outing. Who wants to eat hamburgers and hot dogs that taste like Raid®? In like vein, globalist efforts to exterminate the ants may leave the world a smoking ruin.

At best, government is a protection racket that offers security to its citizens from external and internal violence and criminality at an acceptable cost. At worst, which is most of the time, the biggest threat of violence and criminality comes from government itself—extortion, fraud, theft, corruption, brutality, and murder.

Propelling Donald Trump’s insurgent candidacies in 2016 and 2020 was a critical mass of people who distrust and despise the Corruptocracy. That critical mass knows uniparty criminals are leading the country into a ditch and they threw a hand grenade into politics as usual.

What informed and fueled the critical mass? It wasn’t the legacy mainstream media, or MSM. Much has been made of Trump’s adept use of Twitter, and he certainly couldn’t have made his run without it. Less noted has been the role of the alternative media, or AM, although Trump wouldn’t have won without it, either. His election marked its ascendancy.

The overwhelming number of sites that let their political preferences be known favored Trump. The AM and his Twitter self-promotion gave him the only positive coverage he received. You certainly didn’t get the photos and videos of 70 or 80 thousand people at standing-room-only Trump rallies from your nightly news. Trump recognized the importance of the AM, plucking Steve Bannon from Breitbart to head his 2016 campaign.

As the counterweight to the MSM, it was natural for the AM to support the candidate they despised. Trump’s enemies were the AM’s enemies. The more vitriolic the entrenched elite and their media minions grew, the more vociferous became the AM’s support. There was an element of self-interest to it as well. Put Trump in the title of an article on your blog and it meant extra clicks and advertising dollars.

The AM’s influence reflects a lengthy evolution. Its genesis was the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. If there had been bloggers back then, as soon as it was announced that Allen Dulles—whom Kennedy had fired as head of the CIA after the Bay of Pigs disaster—would be on the Warren Commission, they would have been screaming that the fix was in. At the time, that realization escaped the general public. although the fix was definitely in. However, a small band of skeptics plowed through 26 volumes of testimony and evidence, shredded the commission’s final report, and refused to accept its one-gunman conclusion.

It took the public release of Abraham Zapruder’s home movie of the assassination, the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1976, and Oliver Stone’s movie JFK in 1991 before a significant number of Americans questioned the Warren Commission narrative. That, plus the public’s rejection of the Vietnam War and its propaganda marked an emerging phenomenon in American life: significant challenges to government narratives. Now, of course, that’s the mission statement of the AM, but these were watersheds back then.

There will always be people who believe whatever the government and servile media dish out, but a graph of those institutions’ credibility the past few decades looks like the stock chart of a once dominant company gone bankrupt. The AM deserves much of the credit for that.

In the 1990s, the nascent AM challenged the nonstop Clinton administration lies about Ruby Ridge, Waco, Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades—both consensual and nonconsensual—and the many accidents, suicides, and murders that befell so many Clinton adversaries.

The AM featured most of the few voices that in real time challenged the George W. Bush administration’s Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the weapons of mass destruction fabrication, the official 9/11 conclusions, and the Patriot Act.

It was AM lights who correctly predicted that Obamacare would be a fiasco that would go a long way towards destroying the U.S. medical system, who reported that Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama was just as bloodthirsty as his predecessor, and who challenged his administration’s wars in Libya and Syria and sponsorship of the 2014 coup in Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin has been the MSM’s go-to villain ever since he had the temerity to spoil Obama and Hillary Clinton’s plans for Syrian regime change in 2015. The MSM pushed the Russiagate storyline before, during, and after Trump’s presidency, even after doddering Robert Mueller conceded there was nothing there. The Durham report merely amplifies this news that hasn’t been news within the AM for years. When Hunter Biden’s laptop surfaced just before the 2020 presidential election, the mainstream ran with Biden campaign and intelligence community lies, now completely discredited, that it was Russian disinformation.. Those lies, and a healthy dose of election fraud, put Joe Biden in the White House.

Biden’s been a nonstop disaster and the worst is yet to come. Not a day goes by in the AM without stories and memes about Biden’s comportment, gaffes, fetishes, falsehoods, and corruption. He’s a front for dark and sinister forces, but those forces’ minions in the MSM don’t try to explain or justify the president. They spare themselves the embarrassment, simply ignoring the bad stuff..

Meanwhile, the country’s slide down the drain has been well covered by the AM. There is no border with Mexico. Trump’s Operation Warp Speed and lockdowns to flatten the curve became the Biden administrations medical totalitarianism, anti-science Science, and death jabs, cures far deadlier than the disease. Democrat-run cities are urban hellholes of filth, homelessness, drug abuse, and criminality. The Biden family is a criminal enterprise. The Democrats’ only prosecutorial vigor is reserved for the January 6 defendants, anyone they can call “right wing,” Julian Assange, and Donald Trump.

The Biden brain trust, led by unrepentant neocons, picked a fight via proxy, but not with some second-tier Southeastern Asia or Middle Eastern foe of the caliber they’ve previously been unable to defeat. Rather, they’re waging what’s called hybrid war against the big boys, Russia and China. Hybrid war can be loosely defined as war waged by means other than direct combat with bullets and bombs.

So, the brain trusters imposed sanctions on Russia that worked well—for Russia—but left European consumers and industries bereft of energy and many natural resources at reasonable prices. They’ve sent over $100 billion in money and arms to the corrupt Ukrainian proxy regime. (Ukrainian soldiers are the ones dying in direct combat with bullets and bombs.) Much of the cash found its way into Ukrainian pockets and much of the weaponry found its way into black markets. The brain trusters thought the world would rally to NATO and the Ukrainian cause. Other than the U.S. and its satrapies (the “Golden Billion”), most of the countries representing the other seven billion either declared their neutrality or joined the Russia-China axis.

Even the satrapies must be having second thoughts after the U.S. took out the Nord Stream 2 pipelines. Sabotaging allies’ essential and expensive infrastructure is not the hallmark of a steadfast partner. Maybe all those Russian-Chinese loans, infrastructure projects, and trade initiatives are gift horses into whose mouths their recipients should peer, but they must look a darn sight better than the U.S.’s: “Shut up and do as we say or we’ll regime change your government and lay waste to your country.” Only the brain trusters have difficulty figuring out why that may be the case.

Other than disarm the American people, there is nothing the brain trusters would like more than to shut down the AM. Burgeoning anti-Ukraine war sentiments are being nurtured exclusively by the AM and social media heretics, notwithstanding barrages of mainstream propaganda, legions of hyperactive “fact” checkers, and  suppression of any news from Russian sources. How are you going to run a unipolar empire when a multipolar AM keeps questioning the narrative, revealing unwelcome facts, and providing non-fatuous analyses?

People against their governments is an enduring historical conflict. The world is cranking up for the latest and what may be its climactic iteration. One of the opening battles has been the AM versus the MSM, and the AM has won, decisively. That conclusion stems not solely from the numbers, which have been trending up for the AM and down for the MSM for years. While viral articles and memes get viewership that’s a multiple of the most viewed material from the MSM, mere numbers don’t convey the full impart of what’s going on out there.

People have turned to the AM because from its roiling cauldron of chaos, clashing opinions, tireless researchers, incisive analysts, idiosyncratic styles, competitive jockeying, backbiting, obnoxious self-promotion, and unwavering irreverence, truth tends to emerge. The AM can be likened to the ferment of true science (science didn’t used to have to have a true in front of it): assertions proposed, tested, rejected, accepted, refined, but never deemed ultimate truth.

The MSM promotes the approved propaganda and lies. Nowadays it doesn’t even try to hide its fealty to the “narrative.” A 2021 Reuters Institute survey found that only 29 percent of Americans trusted the news media. That figure is undoubtedly lower now. Why it’s still called the mainstream media is a mystery. Twenty-nine percent isn’t mainstream anything. There is no mainstream in the AM, just that roiling cauldron of chaos. That is how the intellectual marketplace is supposed to work. It’s akin to the turn of the twentieth century, when most major cities had at least four or five major newspapers and more minor ones. Snowflakes and other fragilities need not apply.

The MSM has no credibility. Millions have figured it out, they’re tired of being lied to, and they’ve gone searching for alternatives. Once found, they don’t go back to the MSM. Demographics are working against the MSM as well. Its patrons are primarily Baby Boomers. The younger generations have gotten their news and views from the Internet their entire lives, and the MSM is irrelevant. Most of it is slated for extinction with the Boomers. What remains will be a few organs kept alive by deep pockets like Jeff Bezos.

Many AM commentators hyperventilate on the sins of the MSM, particularly the New York Times and The Washington Post. Neither paper’s daily circulation amounts to 1 percent of the U.S. population,but they are supposedly “influential.” They are influential solely with their ruling class audience because they are preaching to the choir. That’s not so much influence as confirmation.

The AM’s readership is ahead of the actual AM on this one. I have found that having the MSM organs in the title of articles posted on SLL virtually guarantees sparse readership. (CNN and MSNBC are particularly deadly.) It took me awhile to realize that SLL’s readership already knows those organs peddle propaganda and lies. Why read yet another AM article decrying the same?

Occasionally we get official “confirmation” of AM stories that have percolated for months or years. A government body, quasi-government agency, or august MSM outlet now reports that masks, social distancing, lockdowns, Remdesivir, ventilators and vaccines are neither safe nor effective? Or that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are? Old news. The Durham report “reveals” that Russiagate was a concoction put out by the FBI and CIA, based on false documentation provided by the Clinton campaign, approved by Obama and Biden, and designed to destroy the Trump presidency? Yawn—the AM had most of that treasonous yarn shredded by the end of 2017. And the conclusion now being voiced that nobody will be prosecuted for it isn’t exactly novel, either.

The time it takes for MSM and officialdom to grudgingly “shift” the narrative seems directly related to the time and resources devoted to the original lie. Covid propaganda was weapons grade, so it’s taken over three years for the backtracking, ass covering, and the “nobody could have known that at the time” disclaimers (although plenty of people did know it at the time). The longest running scam, climate change, has been going on since the late 1970s, so don’t look for any half-hearted acknowledgements without apologies until at least 2050.

The usual pattern is that the AM catches on to the latest depredation and generates myriad stories while the MSM says nothing. In what’s become an annoying AM cliché, someone will note the MSM’s lack of coverage with the exasperated lament: “. . . and the MSM’s reaction, crickets!” This is not something the AM should decry, but relish. It leaves the playing field wide open for the AM. People turn to it because they are disgusted both by what they are (lies) and are not getting (the truth) from the MSM. The AM doesn’t need MSM validation.

If anyone doubts that these AM ants have overrun the mainstream picnic, consider the 2024 election. There is a nontrivial possibility that if both men can avoid assassination, it will be Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. versus Donald Trump. It would present the Corruptocracy with a hilarious dilemma: for whom do they rig an election when they despise both candidates? Neither one—for whom the MSM has nary a kind word—would have a prayer of running for president without the AM.

It’s time for the AM to turn its guns away from the MSM and train them on the real enemy: the globalists for whom the MSM is merely the propaganda and prevarication front. That will be a real war, not just a battle, and as it goes kinetic, the AM will naturally ally with that other ant colony at the picnic—those who keep and bear arms. Much more about that in Part Two.

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