We are at the Brink

While Harris/Walz is gearing up to fight off Trump/Vance, voters are missing the big picture.

Every four years the country takes a hard look at where we were at the beginning of the last election cycle. Except this time.

Have we forgotten where we were in August 2020?

We were in our domiciles waiting to be told it was safe to go out again. We were preparing our children to be “educated” through our only connection to the outside world—the internet. Mom and Pop shops closed down, their income streams dammed off by temporary stay home orders that kept getting extended week by week. We survived the panic of a toilet paper shortage only to realize that we had much bigger problems. When would life ever return to normal?

(For your entertainment, here is the very first video I created for my YouTube channel on the Toilet Paper “Crisis”:)

Then came the light at the end of the tunnel. A vaccine was in the works. Without any information on its efficacy or safety, the airwaves were already saturated with the fantasy that it would work— if enough of us bought into it.

But those on the front-lines would only be eligible at first. The rest of us would have to do our civic duty and wait our turn. People began capturing their moment of liberation at pharmacies and vaccine clinics and sharing the event on social media. “I’m Vaccinated!” icons appeared on Facebook pages. Krispy-Kreme doughnuts were distributed.

Not everyone was buying it though. After four years of a Trump presidency that divided us along political lines, we now had a deeper chasm that separated us: The vax-antivax issue.

The unvaccinated were thrown into the deplorable category. They weren’t just Trumpers and Qanon devotees. They posed a threat to everyone’s safety. Of course they needed to be excluded from social events. Of course they shouldn’t be allowed to continue working. Of course they needed to wear masks while the vaccinated could breathe air unfiltered by bandanas.

Why should doctors even bother to treat the unvaccinated? Why even entertain questions from the unjabbed? Questions like these:

If the vaccine is protective, why are the unvaccinated a threat?

If I have already had covid, why do I need to be vaccinated?

If the vaccine targets a single antigen on the virus, what will happen when a new strain emerges?

Why would I get a preventive therapy to avoid a disease that had a very little chance of hurting me, especially when vaccine manufacturers are indemnified from any liability their product might cause?

How do we know the shots are really helping if the CDC isn’t releasing any data on outcomes based on vaccination status? Instead we are being fed stories like this one:

Isn’t worthwhile to note that most of Colorado’s population in the first half of 2021 were unvaccinated to begin with?

(Note to readers: I downloaded Colorado’s state data myself. Simple calculations proved that if the shots had zero benefit, 83% of the hospitalizations and deaths would have been in the unvaccinated).

Once it was known that the shots did not reduce viral load and did little to prevent infections but only mitigated symptoms, didn’t that mean we were creating a huge population of superspreaders—people who didn’t know they had Covid but were still capable of transmitting the disease?

How will this technology affect my health one, two or ten years from now?

The country was told that engaging with people who had questions like these would only lead to vaccine hesitancy. It would be best to Trust the Science and exclude them from Thanksgiving dinner.

But some of them held out and lost their jobs, their friends and in the case of some medical experts and physicians, their institutional affiliations, medical licenses and any further credibility on the matter. Oh well…

Both #45 and #46 are responsible for the egregious pandemic response. Trump still regards the mRNA shots as one of his “UGE” accomplishments. Biden shoved it down our throats by demanding that large employers make their workers accept the novel technology and continuing to promise that if you got “these vaccines” you wouldn’t get Covid-19, long after we knew it wasn’t true.

This is why the pandemic has been memory-holed. It was barely mentioned in the June “debate” between the two Presidents and why Elon Musk, in his recent interview with DJT on his platform X, never asked about it.

I’m astonished by how quickly the public can get distracted. It’s not their fault though. The last four years have made us even more comfortable with our faithful partner throughout our isolation. We check our feed before we pee in the morning and after we pee at night. It almost seems like it knows exactly what we need to hear at any given time…

But in the last month, we have been inundated with stories that should prompt us to take pause. Now questions like these go unanswered:

Why was a Presidential debate held a full two months before the Democratic National Convention?

Did Joe Biden magnanimously step down, or was he threatened? Sy Hersh reported that his inside source confirmed that Barack Obama informed the President that VP Kamala Harris was prepared to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office because of his incapacity to fulfill his role as Commander in Chief if he didn’t step down. Biden complied that morning.

If he was unable to carry out the duties of President last month, why is he able to now?

Of course Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Hersh did not reveal his source. But who do you trust more, Hersh or the Democratic Party insiders?

Was the assassination attempt on Trump really due to a failure of the Secret Service?

How could (now former) Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle be so unprepared at the Congressional hearing last month? She couldn’t verify a timeline of events. She didn’t know how Thomas Matthew Crooks could have wandered into the scene with a ladder, range finder and a loaded rifle and not be noticed by her team even though throngs of bystanders pointed, waved and screamed at authorities to take notice.

She didn’t have a response when asked why the perimeter of her oversight didn’t extend beyond the range of the “most popular” weapon used by mass-shooters, the AR-15.

She got off easy. No congressperson asked her about the clear evidence of multiple shooters at the event (take just a few seconds to listen to the unedited audio recordings from that afternoon in Butler. It’s clear that at least two different weapons were being fired before the counter sniper neutralized the patsy would-be assassin).

We apparently have moved on from this event as well.

Around the same time this was going down, Israeli PM BB Netanyahu addressed a wildly supportive joint session of Congress, encouraging our own government that we will win the war against Hamas.

We? Are we unable to see what’s really happening here? This is a classic example of the tail wagging the dog. And it’s playing out on a massive scale. To me it’s obvious that we aren’t going to choose the leader of the free world on November 5; we are effectively going to be choosing Israeli’s next Defense minister.

I was prompted to put this all out there today because of a four minute piece on NPR (National Propaganda Radio). David Folkenflik interviewed strategic studies professor Phillips O’Brien of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland about the significance of Ukraine’s military incursion into Russia.

O’Brien believes that the recent Ukrainian incursion into Russian territory may be a bit destabilizing, but it could prove to be a strategic move as it will force the Russian army to reorganize. It will also make dictator Putin look bad, so that’s a win for the good guys.

First, why go all the way to Scotland to get an opinion?

Second, is this guy out of his mind??

Has NPR veteran correspondent and the Scottish strategic studies professor forgotten that Russia is a nuclear superpower that is fighting a war with conventional weapons on their own border? Yes, Putin is a dictator. And he also believes (for good reason) that our country meddled in Ukrainian politics which ultimately led to the ousting of Russian friendly Ukrainian President Yanukovich who rejected an invitation to join the EU ten years ago.

What do you think we would do if the same drama was playing out on our own border with Canada? Do people really think that Putin, the dictator who doesn’t want to be seen as weak, is going to back down now that his own country has been invaded?

It scares me to realize that NPR listeners might actually believe that this O’Brien character is being reasonable. These are the same folks who chant the “Trump is a threat to Democracy” mantra while their party insiders choose their candidate for them without a primary debate or a single vote being cast.

And all this while we have President Joe Biden at the helm. A man his own party cruelly exposed as unfit to lead in front of a national audience.

We need to talk people. Please leave your comments.