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Attacks on dissent have ramped up. The Organic Prepper was just downgraded, as Daisy wrote about recently. We’re not alone.
It’s not just alternative media sites like ZeroHedge or Mercola. Mainstream media turns on their own people the second they ask the wrong questions. For example, in 2020 and 2021, British nursing educator and YouTuber Dr. John Campbell spouted the official Covid narrative, assuring everyone that the shots were safe and effective. He was considered a trusted purveyor of health information. However, in 2021, he discussed data surrounding ivermectin usage and thought it showed promise. His Wikipedia page was immediately changed to label him a purveyor of misinformation.
Downgrading websites and professional humiliation have not been the only methods used to crush dissent.
Tucker Carlson just did a segment outlining the FBI’s attacks on Joe Biden’s political opponents.
Watch for yourself. Someone filmed Trump advisor John Eastman getting his phone confiscated by the FBI. He repeatedly asks them for a warrant, which they don’t give him until after taking his phone. He’s never been charged with anything. This is a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment.
But our current crop of politicians seems to find the Constitution outdated.
Right now, First Amendment rights are being violated on a massive scale. It’s getting more and more difficult to communicate online unless you adhere to specific narratives. As far as this site is concerned, most of our facts come from blue-checked sources or personal experiences. We just ask people to think about what’s being presented and how it may affect their day-to-day lives.
There should be nothing wrong with asking people to do their own research and think for themselves, but unfortunately, that’s been labeled “malinformation.” The Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council says, “Malinformation is based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
Well, who decides the official context? The entire definition is predicated on the notion that one context exists. Anything outside of that lumps you in with malicious actors.
So, what’s behind the current push to bury alternative news?
Maybe it’s because things are finally crashing. I think mainstream media wants us to stay mad at each other over abortion rights, gay rights, or whatever current thing will distract us. They don’t want us to pay attention to the real issues. Notice how NewsGuard tried to get Daisy to declare a side?
They want us to divide ourselves into camps. They do not want us sitting back, watching, thinking, and supporting each other in our various prepping endeavors.
Sure, there are plenty of people that still laugh at prepping. But time keeps proving the conspiracy theorists right. In November 2020, the OP published an article about so-called conspiracy theories that had come true that year. A lot of people are seeing that the narrative pressed by our government administration and major news outlets simply doesn’t match up with what they encounter in their day-to-day lives. The public is gradually becoming more open to alternative explanations, but the people currently holding power cling to it more and more tightly. They know they can’t win via reasoned debate, so they kick anyone they dislike off social media platforms or make it impossible for small, independent sites to make enough money to stay operational.
The public is becoming more open to alternative news because disaster signals are all around us. The OP has run multiple articles about food and energy crises, but honestly, they just get worse every minute. It’s not just American policies either. Politicians throughout the Western world, on the one hand, decry inflation and “price gouging,” but on the other, implement policies that throw fuel on the fire.
For example, on June 10, the Dutch government issued a plan to curb nitrogen emissions by between 12 and 70 percent. The government freely admitted that “There is not a future for all [Dutch] farmers within [this] approach.”
This defies reason.
The Netherlands is the world’s fifth-largest food exporter, and they’re forcing farmers out of business for the sake of “climate change” as people in Third World countries starve.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., our own government continues to make life harder and harder for farmers to do business. The Securities and Exchange Commission wants companies to disclose their carbon emissions throughout their entire supply chain.
The kind of legal and technical expertise that this kind of reporting requires will push small, independent companies, including farms, out of business.
The SEC is still finalizing plans regarding the implementation of its reporting requirements. Issues such as this greatly influence what food is available and how much we pay for it. But are we hearing about this from politicians? No, they’re too busy blaming Russia, and the above-referenced article is not front-page news.
The energy situation warrants our attention as well. President Biden has been blaming everyone from Russians to gas station owners for high prices, but what has he done this week?
On July 1, the Department of the Interior invited comments for its Proposed Five-Year Program for Offshore Oil and Gas Leasing.
Without getting overly technical, when we were energy independent during the Trump administration, the Draft Proposed Program proposed 47 lease sales for future oil and gas projects. The current administration is asking people to weigh in on whether we should have eleven or zero. What this means is that we will definitely be producing less energy. The only question is, how much less.
Our administration does not try to hide its agenda. Secretary Deb Haaland said, “From Day One, President Biden and I have made clear our commitment to transition to a clean energy economy. Today, we put forward an opportunity for the American people to consider and provide input on the future of offshore oil and gas leasing. The time for the public to weigh in on our future is now.”
Well, with Biden’s historically low approval ratings, I’m pretty sure the public is weighing in.
The administration is just not listening.
And Europe keeps going from bad to worse. Protests over fuel prices have erupted. Spanish farmers are blocking highways, and Dutch fishermen are blocking ports. Dutch farmers have also been spraying their government buildings with manure to protest the climate regulations. The S is literally HTF in the Netherlands right now.
Norwegian oil workers are striking because their pay has not increased at a rate commensurate with inflation. This will hit the rest of Europe particularly hard because, after Russia, Norway is Europe’s biggest energy provider.
My 25-year-old idealistic self might have thought people are being greedy and that we should all band together for the sake of Ukraine, climate change, or whatever. But lower- and middle-income people worldwide are being asked to make huge sacrifices at the same time that the wealth of billionaires has exploded like never before. By 2020, the wealth of the world’s ten richest men increased from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion. Meanwhile, the rest of us are supposed to eat less meat and take fewer showers. Oh, and hundreds of millions of people in the Global South are at risk of starvation.
(It’s probably a good time to check out our free QUICKSTART Guide to how to starve the beast.)
The stable world in which most of us grew up is falling apart, and we have a right to know why.
We have a right to know what policies have led to such dramatic wealth transfers; why we were energy independent only three years ago and now are begging the Saudis for more oil; why young parents can’t find formula; why much of the U.S. no longer feels like a First World nation.
And we have the right to question the mainstream narrative. Whether you’re a trucker coping with $6/gal diesel or a medical technician short on laboratory supplies, problems surround us all. And yet we’re just being told to point fingers at Russia and corporate greed.
The ability to discuss problems publicly facilitates understanding and, hopefully, solutions.
The lockdowns during Covid had some unexpected effects. Look at remote schooling. On the one hand, it was miserable, particularly for lower-income children. However, it gave parents a chance to see what children are actually being taught in schools, which has led to parental pushback against divisive education programs
Parents became more informed and took action.
In my area, the already-stark divisions between urban and rural became more so. Driving downtown in the city for much of 2020, it was a ghost town; in the town where I get my animals processed, the only change was that I saw more children out and about. I saw kids riding shotgun as their parents hauled cattle trailers because the schools were closed and, well, you can’t process cattle remotely.
Many people holed up dutifully as we were all told to quarantine. For those of us that couldn’t, for one reason or another, we started talking a lot more.
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Klaus Schwab saw Covid as an opportunity to “reimagine” society.
You know what? I see it as a chance to reimagine things too. I see it as a chance for people in all parts of the economy to openly discuss what’s going on. If enough people from enough different walks of life can listen to each other, we may find some common solutions. The real division is not so much red vs. blue. It is people that just want to work, raise their kids, and leave everyone else alone vs. autocrats and those willing to game the system.
Authoritarian control and regulatory overreach are behind most of our current problems. We may get most emotional over Roe vs. Wade, or trans rights, or whatever, but the reasons why so many people cannot pay bills and are using their credit cards to buy gas are not “culture war”-type issues.
Our problems right now stem from decades of letting local control slip through our fingers. At this stage of the game, I’m not sure I see a way to fix our problems without a great deal of economic stress and uncertainty.
But, as preppers, we hope for the best and plan for the worst, and right now, increasing numbers of people want to plan for the worst. Sites like the OP are here for people that want to start planning.
Americans have a long history of making do.
Whether you want to become more self-sufficient by producing your own food, energy or even homeschooling your kids, we all have options to exercise a little more control over our own lives.
The Founding Fathers never envisioned the U.S. as a globe-spanning empire where everyone lives in a cushy suburb and has access to every possible convenience. The U.S. was simply supposed to be a country where, if you worked hard and were honest, you could keep the fruits of your labor. I would love it if, after the current upheavals, we could go back to that, but we have to make it through what our president has called this “incredible transition” first.
There are still a lot of resourceful, hardworking, independent people out there, people who can survive a lot. But we will all function better if we can communicate with each other, both for practical advice and emotional support. Collectively, we have a lot to share if we can avoid being divided and distracted.
What are your thoughts on this silencing of dissent? What do you believe it warns of? How do you plan to deal with this in the coming days? Share your opinions in the comments…while we still can.
About Marie Hawthorne
A lover of novels and cultivator of superb apple pie recipes, Marie spends her free time writing about the world around her.