Politics Is Sticking To The Script While Pretending To Fight For Your Base

We all realize that Left v Right is outdated even as we use the terms.

I wonder if a better division among public intellectuals & commentators isn’t “on script” vs “off-script”.

If On-Script, it doesn’t matter how often you‘re wrong. Off-Script you can never be perfect enough.

— Eric Weinstein (@EricRWeinstein) November 12, 2020

mises  |   The 2020 election has revealed jaw-dropping levels of "liberal" or progressive bias in the media, from the increasing ascendance of woke language, enforced by the thought police, to deliberately ignored issues and information considered uncongenial to those dominating the agenda. To many, it seems as if the power being exercised against freedom of uncoerced and uncensored expression had metastasized full-blownout of almost nowhere. However, that ignores the fact that the bias extends beyond the media, to think tanks and “research” devoted to creating ammunition for the left/progressive conclusions the media loves to reach, and this bias has been around for a substantial period of time.

An excellent example of the production of the groundwork for the bias infusing media today is “research” published in 2003, in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin. Supported by $1.2 million in federal money, “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition” supposedly provided an “elegant and unifying explanation” for political conservatism. If you have been paying attention this year, some of its themes will seem familiar.

The authors found resistance to change and tolerance for inequality at the core of political conservatism. While proclaiming their findings to be nonjudgmental, they also concluded that conservatism was “significantly linked with mental rigidity and close-mindedness, increased dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity, decreased cognitive complexity, decreased openness to experience, uncertainty avoidance, personal needs for order and structure, need for cognitive closure, lowered self-esteem; fear, anger, and aggression; pessimism, disgust, and contempt.”

The researchers also equated Hitler and Mussolini with Ronald Reagan as “right-wing conservatives…because they all preached a return to an idealized past and favored or condoned inequality in some form.” And the types of inequality conservatives supposedly favored included the Indian caste system, South African apartheid, and segregation in the US.

Of course, according to the study, that “does not mean that conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false, irrational, or unprincipled.” But its authors certainly implied it.

Unfortunately, the hit-piece “research” overlooked crucial distinctions.

“Conservative” and “liberal,” as well as “progressive,” are adjectives that have been converted into nouns. But adjectives modify something else. That means the questions that must be addressed if bias is to be avoided include what it is someone is trying to conserve, in what ways whether we are liberal is to be judged, and what is to be considered progress.

NO ONE Is Above Woke Consensus Restraints On Thought And Speech!!!

slate |  On Thursday night, Justice Sam Alito delivered the keynote address at this year’s all-virtual Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention. The Federalist Society, a well-funded network of conservative attorneys, has come under unusual scrutiny after Donald Trump elevated scores of its members to the federal judiciary. Its leaders insist that it is a mere debate club, a nonpartisan forum for the exchange of legal ideas. But Alito abandoned any pretense of impartiality in his speech, a grievance-laden tirade against Democrats, the progressive movement, and the United States’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Alito’s targets included COVID-related restrictions, same-sex marriage, abortion, Plan B, the contraceptive mandate, LGBTQ nondiscrimination laws, and five sitting Democratic senators.

Ironically, Alito began his prerecorded address by condemning an effort by the U.S. Judicial Conference to forbid federal judges from being members of the Federalist Society. He then praised, by name, the four judges who spearheaded a successful effort to defeat the ban—or, as Alito put it, who “stood up to an attempt to hobble the debate that the Federalist Society fosters.” Alito warned that law school students who are members of the Federalist Society tell him they “face harassment and retaliation if they say anything that departs from the law school orthodoxy.”

These comments revealed early on that Alito would not be abiding by the usual ethics rules, which require judges to remain impartial and avoid any appearance of bias. The rest of his speech served as a burn book for many cases he has participated in, particularly those in which he dissented. Remarkably, Alito did not just grouse about the outcome of certain cases, but the political context of those decisions, and the broader cultural and political forces behind them. Although the justice accused several Democratic senators of being unprofessional, he himself defied the basic principles of judicial conduct.

For instance, the justice criticized state governors who’ve issued strict lockdown orders in response to COVID-19, referring to specific cases that came before the court. Alito said these “sweeping” and “previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty” have served as a “constitutional stress test,” with ominous results. The government’s response to COVID-19, Alito continued, has “highlighted disturbing trends that were already present before the virus struck.” He complained about lawmaking by an “elite group of appointed experts,” citing not just COVID rules but the entire regulatory framework of the federal government.

Alito also warned of a broader, ongoing assault on religious liberty. “In certain corners,” he alleged, “religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right.” Alito condemned the Obama administration’s “ protracted campaign” and “unrelenting attack” against the Little Sisters of the Poor, which refused to submit a form to the federal government opting out of the contraceptive mandate. The group alleged that submitting this notice burdened its religious exercise. Alito also disparaged Washington state for requiring pharmacies to provide emergency contraception—which, he claimed, “destroys an embryo after fertilization.” (That is false.) Finally, Alito rebuked Colorado for attempting to compel Jack Phillips to bake a cake for a same-sex couple.* He noted that the couple was given a free cake and supported by “celebrity chefs.”

 

The Alternative Is Internet Originalism - No Censorship

jonathanturley  |  We have been discussing the calls for top Democrats for increased private censorship on social media and the Internet.  President-elect Joe Biden has himself called for such censorship, including blocking President Donald Trump’s criticism of mail-in voting. Now, shortly after the election, one of Biden’s top aides is ramping up calls for a crackdown on Facebook for allowing Facebook users to read views that he considers misleading — users who signed up to hear from these individuals.  Bill Russo, a deputy communications director on Biden’s campaign press team, tweeted late Monday that Facebook “is shredding the fabric of our democracy” by allowing such views to be shared freely.

Russo tweeted that “If you thought disinformation on Facebook was a problem during our election, just wait until you see how it is shredding the fabric of our democracy in the days after.” Russo objected to the fact that, unlike Twitter, Facebook did not move against statements that he and the campaign viewed as “misleading.” He concluded. “We pleaded with Facebook for over a year to be serious about these problems. They have not. Our democracy is on the line. We need answers.”

For those of us in the free speech community, these threats are chilling. We saw incredible abuses before the election in Twitter barring access to a true story in the New York Post about Hunter Biden and his alleged global influence peddling scheme. Notably, no one in the Biden camp (including Biden himself) thought that it was a threat to our democracy to have Twitter block the story (while later admitting that it was a mistake).

I have previously objected to such regulation of speech. What is most disturbing is how liberals have embraced censorship and even declared that “China was right” on Internet controls.

 

Collectivism Is The Manipulation Of The Many By The Few

outofthecave  |  Never before in history have we seen such fertile ground and incentives toward groupthink and mass histrionics as we have today with total saturation of social media. Once our mobile phones were converted into near Star Trek level tricorders, and WiFi became ubiquitous we found ourselves swimming in “The Spew”, without even realizing that we had become like fish in a digital aquarium.

While I would be loathe to dispute the benefits the advent of the Internet bestowed on humanity, those of us who have watched it evolve over the past few decades or even had a minor hand in shaping and building it can’t help but wonder if somewhere along the way, things took a bad turn.

The great enablers of digitized groupthink are the social media platforms.

All that time you spend on Facebook, arguing politics with people you’ll never meet or care about. It can take over your life and you end up having those same arguments with the  people who truly matter in your own life: your friends and family.

All of that time, all those threads, tweetstorms, pile-ons, trending hashtags, updating your avatar in conformance with the issue de jour, at some point you have to ask yourself why you are expending the bulk of your mental energy chiming in with your opinion on things that are for the most part completely out of your control and that you’ll never be able to impact in any meaningful way.

Whose ends are you serving by participating in that? Certainly not your own. You don’t actually gain anything from going along with this, and if you actually consider the opportunity cost you begin to see the possibilities of what you could accomplish in your own life, for yourself and your family, if you spent your time doing something else.

What is the difference?

Or, how can you tell the difference between participating in some online social movement that you are told benefits the greater good vs. acting in your own rational self interest?

When you click or “like” or share or block or comment  you are generating data for the platform and the platform is not the greater good. It is not the collective will of the people, it is aggregated data that can and will be manipulated by the few to move the many  in the direction that serves the aims of other people, not you.

You see this exposed when the platform overtly signals what it desires to be amplified versus what it seeks to attenuate. In a truly digital “collective” the will of the aggregate would simply be expressed in the unfiltered propagation of certain narratives over others.

But that doesn’t happen and in it not happening the veneer of legitimacy is removed from collectivism in totality, revealing it for what it really is.

Collectivism is not community, it is not the greater good, and it is not cooperation. There is only The Collective in the rhetorical or symbolic sense, but in reality Collectivism is the manipulation of the many by the few. That’s it. It’s basically marketing at the level of the psyche except the payload isn’t brand awareness as much as they are incentives for compliance and disincentives for wrongthink.

Epistemological Crisis...,

Propaganda works: As many democrats believe in Russiagate

Half the country was convinced Trump stole the election with rigged votes by Putin. https://t.co/O3hCbrdCvn

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) November 10, 2020

As Trump supporters believe this election was not conducted fairly...,

If you're wondering whether the president's strategy of alleging fraud and filing lawsuits is working, consider this @YouGov poll. About 80% of his supporters are not confident that the election he lost was "held fairly." pic.twitter.com/OddL8FVp7y

— Brad Heath (@bradheath) November 11, 2020

Shall We Pretend That Bill Barr Doesn't Understand The Iron Law, The Deep State, Or The PMC?

turcopolier  |  There are a lot of Trump supporters who are very frustrated, even angry, with the silence of Attorney General Bill Barr in the wake of last Tuesday’s attempted Democrat heist of the Presidential election. But there are indications that Barr, who understands what it takes to fight the entrenched bureaucracy that is aligned with a conspiracy that involves the media, tech companies and computer software companies supplying voting machines, is preparing to move in a dramatic, far reaching strike to expose this fraud.

I have a dear friend who knows Barr very well. Rarely does he show this kind of visceral anger. I find it difficult to believe that in the ensuing two months, Barr has decided to curl up into a fetal position and allow the Republic to be eviscerated.

Now look at the actions on Monday. Barr, following DOJ protocol, sent a letter authorizing federal prosecutors across the U.S. to pursue “substantial allegations” of voting irregularities. That same day, the DOJ official in charge of voter fraud investigations, Richard Pilger, resigned.

Pilger is a compromised deep stater. I believe his resignation was, at a minimum, encouraged by Barr.

No Indictments Because Durham And His Deputy Dannehy Are Deep State PMC...,

NYMag |  On September 10, Nora Dannehy resigned as the deputy to John Durham, the federal prosecutor investigating the government’s probe into the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. Dannehy left her post and the Justice Department in part because of Attorney General William Barr’s pressure on Durham to release a report on his investigation’s findings before Election Day, according to a person familiar with her thinking. Trump had long been hoping a report out this fall would damage Democrats, including Joe Biden, and help him win reelection. In Trump’s terminology, Durham’s report would reveal an “attempted overthrow” of his administration by Democratic insiders. But Justice Department guidelines restrict prosecutors from taking such actions within 60 days of an election because they might affect the outcome of the election. Both Durham and Dannehy believed that if they complied with Barr’s demands they would be violating this doctrine, according to two people familiar with their thinking.

Durham, who is the U.S. Attorney for Connecticut, and Dannehy were also troubled that Barr had purposely misrepresented their work in numerous public comments, the two people said. According to two sources familiar with the probe, there has been no evidence found, after 18 months of investigation, to support Barr’s claims that Trump was targeted by politically biased Obama officials to prevent his election. (The probe remains ongoing.) In fact, the sources said, the Durham investigation has so far uncovered no evidence of any wrongdoing by Biden or Barack Obama, or that they were even involved with the Russia investigation. There “was no evidence … not even remotely … indicating Obama or Biden did anything wrong,” as one person put it.

Shortly after the resignation of his prized deputy and with the election looming on the horizon, Durham phoned Barr. He forcefully told the attorney general that his office would not be releasing a report or taking any other significant public actions before Election Day, according to a person with knowledge of the phone call. Dannehy’s resignation constituted an implied but unspoken threat to Barr that Durham or others on his team might resign if the attorney general attempted to force the issue, according to a person familiar with Durham’s thinking.

After hearing from Durham in September, Barr informed the president and allies that there would be no October surprise, causing Trump to lash out. “Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes — the greatest political crimes in the history of our country — then we’re going to get little satisfaction unless I win,” he told Fox Business last month. “[These] people should be indicted, this was the greatest political crime in the history of our country. And that includes Obama and it includes Biden.”

 

Pelosi's Professional Managerial Gamesmanship Under The Iron Law Of Institutions

billmoyers  |  This is known as the Iron Law of Institutions: “The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself.” McConnell wants to retain power personally, and is thinking past the upcoming loss of power for the party. (I’ve noted how he’s setting up for a re-run of post-Obama Republican dominance as well.)

What’s been less understood is how the Iron Law of Institutions is affecting Nancy Pelosi’s decision-making as well.

Pelosi’s appearance with Wolf Blitzer was an absolute train wreck, with her blasting him for being a GOP “apologist” when all he said over and over again was “people are hurting, can’t you come to a deal?” When you get in a fight with someone so unintelligent that he broke the record for negative dollar amounts on Celebrity Jeopardy, and you lose that badly, something is wrong with your messaging. Yet Pelosi proudly displayed the transcript on her website anyway.

What was she really doing in that interview? She was defending her committee chairs, who she has put out front and center as objecting to this and that part of the White House’s $1.8 trillion counter-offer. Writ large, your macro-economic pundit might see the objections as pretty trivial. But I guarantee you they’re important to one committee or one sub-caucus or one bloc of Democrats. For example, money for child care, which Pelosi has consistently called to light, is critical for women of color, who make up a near-majority of providers. Things like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit (which Pelosi wants increased and made useful for the pandemic tax year) are pet projects of Ways and Means Committee members. These are things that Pelosi can point to and tell House Democrats that she’s fighting for their objectives.

Underlying that is the fact that this is a purely theoretical exercise. Pelosi taking or not taking the deal will not matter as to whether stimulus reaches the American people. McConnell is the roadblock, and the mission is doomed. So the only thing Pelosi needs to protect is her status among the Democratic caucus.

So far, practically nobody inside the caucus has disagreed with her position. One of the truly terrible after-effects of the pandemic has been the dissolution of Congress as a legislative body. All lawmaking has funneled up to the Speaker; the bulk of the House has been prevented from governing. There’s something darkly comic in progressives fighting so hard to upset incumbents and gain additional members of the Squad, so they can sit around too until Pelosi tells them to vote for something.

But it’s up to the caucus to be mad about that, not me. And all indications are that they’re not mad. Pelosi’s imperiousness may have been a problem at points during the pandemic. But people have short-term memories, and on this negotiation, Pelosi is trying pretty hard to show that the objections are caucus-wide, and picking out little provisions that likely matter to key members.

The other backdrop to all of this is that Pelosi wants one last term as Speaker with a Democratic trifecta, one last chance at a burst of policymaking. She made a deal in 2018 that earned her the Speaker’s gavel in this Congress, but only for two terms. And in that second term, she needs two-thirds support of the caucus to win the Speaker’s race. It took a lot of hustle for Pelosi to secure majority support in 2018. So, in keeping with the Iron Law of Institutions, she’s tending to her caucus as well.

Inexcusable Oxygen Theft By The Professional Managerial Class

The professional managerial class lives in an Atlassian/Tableau fantasy world (formerly Powerpoint and Excel) Their ability to ‘model’ and then ‘pitch’ (and fund) a decision (read, allocation of Other People’s Money), using an elaborate smokescreen of elementary finance and decision science that masks a few dumbed down operating assumptions (or worse, ‘benchmarks and kpi's’) carries a far higher paycheck and prestige than the hard work, expertise and experience required to discover real world inputs.

 

In fact, real world experience is actively harmful in PMC world. After all, it tends to result in ‘FUDs’ (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt), and therefore no greenlight and no remunerative follow on workstreams (see ‘Bu!!sh!t Jobs)

 

Having a degree does not make one a member of the PMC, it is being in an institutional or professional setting where you are subject to pressure about your work product and process, despite the appearance of some degree of autonomy by virtue of elite status. It most certainly is not just about credentials or pay. And you don’t have to be senior either. 

 

Increasingly, if you want to get and hang on to a PMC job, that job will involve dishonesty or exploitation of others in some way. Industries such as finance have seized and held onto larger and larger proportions of the economy.  The same disproportionate growth can be seen in financialised healthcare and finacialised education.

 

In other words, being a member of the PMC critically includes that you are sufficiently not in control of your work process or product that if you object to widespread practices (either in the industry or at your place of employment) that you find morally offensive, you can expect to suffer serious career or income costs. Most people believe they can’t afford that and so go along with the program.

nakedcapitalism  |  In the years 2016-2020:

1)The Professional Managerial Class (PMC) attained class consciousness.

2) The PMC was and is embubbled by a domestic psyop.

3) The press replaced reporting with advocacy.

4) Election legitimacy is determined by extra-Constitutional actors.

5) “Fascism” became an empty signifier, not an analytical tool.

Let us look at each of these claims.

1) The PMC attained class consciousness. As Thomas Frank has shown (Listen, Liberal!), the PMC has replaced the working class as the Democrat Party base[1]. During the period 2016-2020, the PMC, collectively, experienced Trump’s election as literal, actual trauma (as pain, as an energy suck, as constant stress, as depression, etc. Parents wept to tell their children, and so forth. That the burden of such trauma is — with respect to the post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by, say, soldiers. abuse victims, or the homeless — quite slight may lead some — well, me — to mock it (“How was brunch?”), but the trauma is deeply felt and real). Importantly, as Steve Randy Waldman has urged, the class position — and hence the class consciousness — of the PMC is marked by “predatory precarity“; the predation comes from what a professional must do to maintain their class position in a financialized economy driven by rent-seeking; the precarity comes from the fact that their class position is maintained, not by the ownership of capital, or the inheritance of a title, but by expensive “positional goods” like credentials. Trump’s right-wing populism, with its distrust of experts — the same meritorious experts whose Esq.s were on every foreclosure notice or dunning letter, and whose M.D.s were on every surprise medical bill — struck directly at both exposed nerves. Not only might they not be consulted on how best to rule, their very credentials might turn out to be worthless. Hence the rage, the fear, the hate, certainly universally expressed in the press, but also in such organizations as Indivisible, the Women’s March, etc. The PMC as a class came to consciousness screaming Make it stop!

2) The PMC was and is embubbled by a domestic psyop. Make it stop! was, however, followed hard upon by I didn’t do it! Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, in Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, describes how Robbie Mook deployed RussiaGate to delegitimize the newly elected President in a meeting with the rest of the defeated Clinton camp the day after Election Day 2016. RussiaGate became the Goebbelsian propaganda operation that it was — if there had been anything to it, Pelosi would have impeached Trump for it, Mueller Report or no[2] — through an unholy alliance of the Democrat Party apparatus, the intelligence community, and the press. All were variously motivated — “There in stately splendor, far removed from the squalid village below, they fight their petty battles over power and money” (Bob and Ray) — but the effect on the PMC was extraordinary: To this very day, any opposing or dissenting force to the liberal Democrat orthodoxy of the day can be dismissed with a one-liner about Putin! I’ve never seen anything like it.[3] Both (1) and (2) combined to drive turnout, voluntering, donations, and everything else. (That the Democrat base is too slim to rule on its own is another issue entirely.)

State And Local Governments About To Get A Self-Inflicted Shit-Hammering...,

jacobin |  Centrist Democrats are tacking hard right on the shaky premise that calls for Medicare for All and policing reform flattened the anticipated “blue wave.” And in statehouses, that wave proved less than a ripple: Republicans now control both legislatures in thirty states and have a “trifecta” stranglehold (claiming the governor’s office, too) in twenty-three of those.

All this will make it harder to address one of the starkest failures of the government’s response to the COVID-19 economic crisis: the sustained neglect of state and local finances. State and local governments are directly responsible for providing essential services, including education and public health. And they are an important source of (mostly) good jobs, employing almost 20 million people — or about one in eight workers — when the virus struck.

The CARES Act included $150 billion in aid to state and local governments, but with the proviso that it could only be used to defray the unanticipated costs of fighting the pandemic — not for any “regular” budgetary lines. In some states, governors either skirted these limits (using federal funds, for instance, to fill potholes) or made dubious decisions as to who to protect. Both Arizona and Iowa used large chunks of their CARES grants to backfill their unemployment insurance trust funds — shielding employers from future tax increases even as their workers lost access to extended or expanded unemployment benefits.

The only other assistance was an effort to financialize state and local desperation. The CARES Act authorized the Federal Reserve (through a new Municipal Liquidity Facility) to buy state and local bonds. This line of credit just kicked the crisis down the road. And the loan terms and costs were so onerous that, as the Center for Popular Democracy concluded in June, all but a handful of the jurisdictions that met the program’s population thresholds were “functionally excluded.”

As summer spilled into fall, it became clear that no further federal money was on the way. The Heroes Act earmarked more than $1 trillion for state and local aid for any pressing needs (including shoring up revenues) but the Republican response — not a penny for state and local governments and sweeping immunity for business from COVID-related lawsuits — ground negotiations to a halt.

Recessions always savage state and local budgets, but this one — given its suddenness and severity — has been especially rough.

Represent Constituents?!?!?! Silly Tlaib - We Have A Mandate From Paying Donors!!!

dailycaller |  “Despite an obvious preference by Democratic leadership to focus on the suburbs and former Republican voters rather than working-class communities of color, progressives like Stacey Abrams, Rep. Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib are showing us – through turnout results in their states and cities – where Democrats must invest to build the party,” the memo says.

“We’re not going to be successful if we’re silencing districts like mine,” Tlaib said, according to Politico. “Me not being able to speak on behalf of many of my neighbors right now, many of which are black neighbors, means me being silenced. I can’t be silent.” 

“We are not interested in unity that asks people to sacrifice their freedom and their rights any longer,” Tlaib continued. “And if we truly want to unify our country, we have to really respect every single voice. We say that so willingly when we talk about Trump supporters, but we don’t say that willingly for my Black and brown neighbors and from LGBTQ neighbors or marginalized people.”

Progressives are pushing for power in the Joe Biden administration, despite the criticism from moderate Democrats. Tlaib reportedly wants to see a public educator and labor advocates in top positions. Progressives and left-wing strategists don’t want Biden to work across the aisle with Republicans, although Biden has expressed his desire to create a sense of unity by doing so.

“If [voters] can walk past blighted homes and school closures and pollution to vote for Biden-Harris, when they feel like they don’t have anything else, they deserve to be heard,” Tlaib said, choking up as she expressed frustration near the end of an interview this week. “I can’t believe that people are asking them to be quiet.”

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is calling for an “unapologetic agenda” that is distinct from the GOP “instead of trying to play to notions of civility,” Politico reported. Specifically, Ocasio-Cortez wants the Democratic Party to establish a cohesive message on racism because “Democrats don’t want to talk about race.”

 

They'll Be Fooling No One And It Will Only Add To The Rage

straightlinelogic |  The idea of individual rights protected by the government was the foundation of the American experiment. It was and has been imperfectly realized; it is an ideal and humanity rarely attains its ideals. Government is and always will be the antithesis of that still revolutionary ideal. The US government’s massive expansion has been at the cost of the people’s liberty and has destroyed most of their rights. That destruction has been ongoing since the beginning of the republic and Trump has done nothing to stop or reverse i. Philosophical insight and consistency are not among his virtues.

Nevertheless, a Biden administration will be worse, much worse. The Democrats now openly aspire to the collectivist ideal—the complete subjugation of the individual to the state. We’ve gotten a preview of coming attractions with coronavirus totalitarianism, which has obliterated the few freedoms and joys left to Americans. For the millions of Americans who voted for him, including me, Trump represented the last, best hope for what we consider the American way of life.

There’s no going back, and the way forward is for those who cherish the American ideals of individual rights, freedom, limited government, the rule of law, and equality before that law to break away from Washington’s and it’s aligned states’ corruptocracy and sunder the ties that bind us. Nations and governments are not cast in stone for time and all eternity.

Certainly the bankrupt dis-United States and its government aren’t. The bill is coming due for the debt orgy and an unprecedented and catastrophic global economic cataclysm will take down whomever is unlucky enough to be the president. A defeated Trump would dodge that bullet. The resulting chaos will be unmanageable by a government that produces only debt, can steal little or nothing from a bankrupt economy, cannot borrow at anything but ruinous interest rates, and which must cover its soaring budget deficits with scrip it either prints or creates via computer entries, whether or not it outlaws real money (gold) or forces its increasingly worthless scrip to stay in the banking system.

At that time, an organized secession movement has a real chance. A house divided against itself cannot stand. Collapse will be freedom’s staunchest ally if the moment is seized. It won’t be easy and it won’t be without blood. Until it happens, prepare for the worst, it is assuredly coming and coming soon, but work towards a brighter future in a nation that does not yet exist.

For those who don’t want to wait, almost six years ago (January 7, 2015) I published “Revolution in America,” which presents a nonviolent way to take down the government by attacking it at its weakest point. It requires the collective action of millions of people and at that time I believed the recommended course of action would remain hypothetical. Things change. Although the hour is late, any significant fraction of Trump’s rightfully enraged 71 million voters could still put the plan into effect. The article merits a second look. Please pass it, and this article, on.

So What Will The Deplorables Do?

Asia Times |  US intel is very much aware of well-documented instances of election fraud. Among them: NSA software that infiltrates any network, as previously detailed by Edward Snowden, and capable of altering vote counts; the Hammer supercomputer and its Scorecard app that hacks computers at the transfer points of state election computer systems and outside third party election data vaults; the Dominion software system, known to have serious security issues since 2000, but still used in 30 states, including every swing state; those by now famous vertical jumps to Biden in both Michigan and Wisconsin at 4am on November 4 (AFP unconvincingly tried to debunk Wisconsin and didn’t even try with Michigan); multiple instances of Dead Men Do Vote.

The key actor is the Deep State, which decides what happens next. They have weighed the pros and cons of placing as candidate a senile, stage 2 dementia, neocon warmonger and possible extorsionist (along with son) as “leader of the free world”, campaigning from a basement, incapable of filling a parking lot in hs rallies, and seconded by someone with so little support in the Dem primaries that she was the first to drop out.

The optics, especially seen from vast swathes of the imperial-interfered Global South, may be somewhat terrible. Dodgy elections are a prerogative of Bolivia and Belarus. Yet only the Empire is able to legitimize a dodgy election – especially in its own backyard.

Welcome to the New Resistance

The GOP is in a very comfortable position. They hold the Senate and may end up picking up as may as 12 seats in the House. They also know that any attempt by Biden-Harris to legislate via Executive Orders will have…consequences.

The Fox News/ New York Post angle is particularly enticing. Why are they suddenly supporting Biden? Way beyond internal family squabbles worthy of the Succession saga, Rupert Murdoch made it very clear, via the laptop from hell caper, that he has all sorts of kompromat on the Biden family. So they will do whatever he wants. Murdoch does not need Trump anymore.

Nor, in theory, does the GOP. Former CIA insiders assure of serious backroom shenanigans going on between GOP honchos and the Biden-Harris gang. Trade-offs bypassing Trump – which most of the GOP hates with a vengeance. The most important man in Washington will be in fact GOP Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.

Still, to clear any lingering doubts, a vote recount would be absolutely necessary in all 6 contested states – WI, MI, PA, GA, NV and AZ. Through hand counting. One by one. The DoJ would need to act on it, immediately. Not gonna happen. Recounts cost a ton of money. There’s no evidence Team Trump – on top of it short of funds and manpower – will be able to convince Daddy Bush asset William Barr to go for it.

While relentlessly demonizing Trump for spreading “a torrent of misinformation” and “trying to undermine the legitimacy of the US election”, mainstream media and Big Tech have declared a winner – a classic case of pre-programming the sheep multitudes.

This Is Not About Biden, It's About The Crime Syndicate Behind Him

theautomaticearth |  With Biden you don’t get Biden, you get the entire cabal that went after Trump, the Democratic Party, the media, the intelligence agencies. And yes, Biden was and is very much part of that cabal. How people do not find that a whole lot scarier than Donald Trump is beyond me.

If -and no that is not when- Joe Biden is inaugurated on January 20 2021, that cabal will take over the country. And we’ve seen plenty indications that they intend to make it impossible for the Republicans to ever get one of their own elected as president again. Moreover they will not be investigated for what they concocted over the past 4-5 years.

How the Hillary campaign and the DNC leaked things to the FBI, and the FBI to the MSM, how they lied in courtrooms to get FISA applications on Trump campaign people like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. How they set up Lt.-Gen. Michael Flynn so he wouldn’t be Trump’s National Security Adviser, because Flynn knew too much.

It’s a scheme so full of illegal actions that it will be devastating for the entire American political system if it is never investigated, or even if it isn’t investigated very very thoroughly, by an impartial party. And it won’t be if Biden becomes president.

The cabal wants you to think this is about Trump, and any given way to get rid of him is justifiable no matter what, but that is a very dangerous way of thinking. If crimes have been committed, they must be brought into daylight and before a court.

Problem is, of course, that at least half the nation has no idea of what’s been going on. Because they get their news and information from those media that are in on the whole deal. They won’t know that the DNC paid for the Steele Dossier, or that is was just a bunch of lies, or that the FBI knew this even before Rosenstein appointed Mueller as Special Counsel. All that has been kept away from them.

And yes, 4 years ago Trump said he would fight the swamp, but landed right in the middle of it. Early in his presidency he found himself surrounded by the likes of McMaster, John Kelly, Tillerson, and many other swamp creatures, and today he still has people like Mike Pompeo. But at least Trump is an outsider, and if anything can ever be done to drain the swamp, it will have to come from an outsider. That it may take more than 4 years is something we have to take for granted.

The swamp has fought back, and they may yet win. Joe Biden is the face of that. But people who celebrate that victory should think again, whether they like Trump or not. The swamp is not good for you, and it’s not good for your country, your rights, your freedoms. Its entire MO is to take all these away from you. This is not a partisan thing; the fat ass of the swamp easily fits and sits across the divide.

 

$15 - $25 Trillion? The True Wild-Assed Guess Cost Of Transitioning To Renewables

oilprice |  This is the amount of money to be invested in new power capacity globally over the next three decades. Most of this—80 percent—will be poured into renewables. This certainly makes the energy transition far from cheap, but no one—at least no one reputable—ever said going green would be cheap. Yet the amount of investments to be directed towards expanding wind, solar, and associated systems will not be the only costs to be borne during the transition. There may well be steep environmental costs as well.

BloombergnNEF, which conducted the analysis that resulted in the investment estimate for the next 30 years in energy, also said that between 2020 and 2050, another $14 trillion will be invested in the grid, likely to adapt it for a surge in solar and renewable power deployments, which, according to the analysis, will constitute 56 percent of total global generation capacity by 2050. And it will have spurred a mini golden age in mining.

Wind power, like solar power, requires a lot of metals and other minerals to produce essential components for the installations. Therefore, as the demand for wind turbines and blades jumps, so will the demand for the metals they are made of. It’s the same with the metals and minerals necessary for the production of a solar panel.

Here’s just one example that could perhaps illustrate the trend: according to a 2017 report by the World Bank, demand for silver could soar from the then-current 24,000 tons annually to more than 400,000 tons. And that’s under a best-case scenario that features a greater penetration of silver-free thin-film PV panels in the energy mix, at the expense of crystalline silicon panels that use silver. Under a worst-case scenario, demand for silver could top 700,000 tons.

This is quite an increase that will require a major expansion in mining and mining is an energy-intensive, not particularly environmentally friendly way of getting finite resources out of the ground, as investor Sam Kovacs writes in an article for Seeking Alpha addressing the challenges of the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables. Now add to silver a host of other metals used in renewable energy installations, and the mining expansion becomes even more substantial, adding economic, social, and environmental costs to the transition.

Then there is energy storage. Without it, the transition will simply not happen. In fact, some are questioning whether it could happen given the current stage of development of energy storage technology. Two years ago, an article by James Temple for the Massachusetts Technology Review questioned the viability of the energy transition precisely because of energy storage, which, Temple argued, was still prohibitively expensive in light of the scale, to which such storage would need to be developed.

 

Go To Sleep Little Sheep - The World You Know Is Ending...,

theguardian  |  Normalcy and the restoration of a modicum of decorum to the White House: that is what many elite supporters of Joe Biden hope for now that he has won the election. But the rest of us are turned off by this meagre ambition. Voters who loathe Trump celebrate his loss, but the majority rue the return to what used to pass as normal or ethical.

When Trump contracted Covid-19, his opponents feared he might benefit from a sympathy vote. But Trump is not a normal president seeking voters’ sympathy. He doesn’t do sympathy. He neither needs nor banks on it. Trump trades on anger, weaponises hatred and meticulously cultivates the dread with which the majority of Americans have been living after the financial bubble burst in 2008. Obscenities and contempt for the rules of polite society were his means of connecting with a large section of American society.

The reason 2008 was a momentous year wasn’t just because of the magnitude of the crisis, but because it was the year when normality was shattered once-and-for-all. The original postwar social contract broke in the early 1970s, yielding permanent real median earnings stagnation. It was replaced by a promise to America’s working class of another route to prosperity: rising house prices and financialised pension schemes. When Wall Street’s house of cards collapsed in 2008, so did this postwar social contract between America’s working class and its rulers.

After the crash of 2008, big business deployed the central bank money that refloated Wall Street to buy back their own shares, sending share prices (and, naturally, their directors’ bonuses) through the stratosphere while starving Main Street of serious investment in good-quality jobs. A majority of Americans were thus treated, in quick succession, to negative equity, home repossessions, collapsing pension kitties and casualised work – all that against the spectacle of watching wealth and power concentrate in the hands of so few.

By 2016, the majority of Americans were deeply frustrated. On the one hand, they lived with the private anguish caused by the permanent austerity to which their communities had been immersed since 2008. And, on the other, they could see a ruling class whose losses were socialised by the government, which defined the response to the crash.

Donald Trump simply took advantage of that frustration. And he did so with tactics that, to this day, keep his liberal opponents in disarray. Democrats protested that Trump was a nobody, and thus unfit to be president. That did not work in a society shaped by media which for years elevated inconsequential celebrities.

Even worse for Trump’s opponents, portraying him as incompetent is an own goal: Donald J Trump is not merely incompetent. George W Bush was incompetent. No, Trump is much worse than that. Trump combines gross incompetence with rare competence. On the one hand, he cannot string two decent sentences together to make a point, and has failed spectacularly to protect millions of Americans from Covid-19. But, on the other hand, he tore up Nafta, the North American Free Trade Agreement that took decades to put together. Remarkably, he replaced it swiftly with one that is certainly not worse – at least from the perspective of American blue-collar workers or, even, Mexican factory workers who now enjoy an hourly wage considerably greater than before.

Moreover, despite his belligerent posturing, Trump not only kept his promise to not start new wars but, additionally, he withdrew American troops from a variety of theatres where their presence had caused considerable misery with no tangible benefits for peace or, indeed, American influence.

 

 

Peak Oil: Why The Narrative Can't Keep Up With The Facts Under The Ground

consciousnessofsheep |  The geology of US oil might have been straightforward; the economics was a little trickier.  In the course of the Second World War, the USA supplied six out of every seven barrels of oil consumed.  Venezuela accounted for most of the seventh barrel; with small contributions from British Persia and the Soviet Caucasus.  Germany’s oil sources had been inadequate to power its civilian economy; and its failure to capture and bring online the Caucasus oil in 1942 is the primary reason why it lost the war.

The war-torn economies which emerged from the ashes of war in 1945, then, were almost entirely dependent upon oil from the USA.  And this allowed an internal American oil cartel – the Texas Railroad Commission – to extend its price fixing to the entire world.  So long as US oil made up a large part of global oil production, and so long as US oil fields had excess capacity, the TRC could regulate the global oil price.  If prices began to rise too high, the TRC would order companies to produce more oil.  If prices sank too low, the TRC would order production cuts.  As a result, throughout the boom years 1953 to 1973, the world oil price remained stable at around $25 per barrel (at today’s prices).

When the US conventional oil fields peaked in 1970, the TRC lost its ability to prevent prices from rising by expanding production.  This was a boon for Middle East and North African producers whose production costs were higher than those in the USA.  And although the first – 1973 – oil shock was in part a response to western support for Israel in the Arab-Israeli war, sooner or later the newly empowered OPEC was going to cut supply to drive up prices.

It is an irony that a capitalist system which claims to be built upon competition and free markets has proved stable only in those periods when its source of value – energy – has been controlled by cartels.  Once OPEC-led price stability was regained in the mid-1980s, the stage was set for the global debt-boom of the 1990s and early 2000s.  And with the fall of the Soviet Union and the apparent conversion of China to state capitalism, for a brief moment the world seemed content.

Peak oil had not, though, gone away; it had merely been postponed.  Britain discovered this the hard way after its North Sea deposits – which had once produced more oil than Kuwait – peaked in 1999.  By 2005 – the year global conventional oil extraction peaked – Britain had become a net importer of oil and gas.  Today, Britain’s North Sea deposits produce 60 percent less oil than in 1999; and the projected price of the remaining oil is not enough to cover the decommissioning costs.

By 2005 though, had we but known it at the time, we had bigger problems to deal with.  The experience of the oil shocks of the 1970s convinced many peak oilers that once the peak of global oil extraction had been reached, prices would rise remorselessly as a consequence of supply and demand imbalance.  This, indeed, is what appeared to happen after the 2005 peak was reached:

By 2012, Michael Kumhof and  Dirk V Muir from the International Monetary Fund were anticipating global oil prices of more than $200 per barrel by 2020.  But that isn’t what happened.  Instead, from 2014 the oil price slumped and has been on a steadily downward trend ever since.  The reason is because there is more to peak oil than geology and engineering.

Indeed, many peak oilers make the same mistake as economists in treating oil – and energy in general – as being just another relatively low-cost factor of production.  The wage bill, for example, is always far higher than the energy costs of running a business.  But as economist Steve Keen explains; “capital without energy is a statue, labour without energy is a corpse.”  Or as engineering professor Jean-Marc Jancovici explains: “energy is what quantifies change.”  Nothing happens in the world without energy.  And when the cost of the world’s biggest primary energy source – oil – begins to spike upward, the impacts are felt in every area of our lives.

The story of the 2008 crash is usually told in financial terms; and is used to blame the victims.  The cause of the crisis, we are told, was so-called sub-prime borrowers taking on mortgages that they couldn’t possibly pay back.  Except, of course, prior to 2008 they had been paying them back.  So what happened to change their circumstances so that they could no longer repay debts?  The answer is interest rate rises.  The banks had based their lending on the assumption that the economy was stable; that inflation would grow at around two percent; and that interest rates would remain relatively low.  With house prices supposedly guaranteed to keep rising, and having securitised the risks, banks – with the assistance of governments – could extend home ownership to the masses.  But from 2006, central banks had been raising interest rates; tipping borrowers into default.

Why had the central banks been raising interest rates?  Because from 2005, inflation began to break out of the 1 to 3 percent band that they were charged with maintaining.  According to all of the textbooks they had been brought up on, the central bankers had been taught that the way to bring inflation back under control was to raise interest rates.  But they – and the economics textbooks – were wrong.  What they believed to be inflation – too much currency chasing too few goods – was actually an economy adjusting to its first supply-side shock since the 1970s.

 

Take Care Not To Perform Righteous Deeds In Order That People May See Them....,

 c-span  |  I DON'T PUSH BACK, I WITNESS, I OBSERVED, I THINK IT'S REALLY IMPORTANT THAT WE BECOME OBSERVERS OF OUR EMOTIONS, FEELINGS, EXPERIENCES, THE MORE THAT YOU CAN OBSERVE EVEN THE PART OF SHAME AND GUILT IS TO NOT NOT WANTING TO LOOK AT IT, NOT WANTING TO SEE IT BUT THE MOMENT THAT YOU TAKE TIME TO OBSERVE THE IMPACT, EVERYTHING THAT IT IS HAD ON YOU AND GIVE SPACE OBSERVING NOT JUST SHAME AND JOY NOT TO SHAME AND GUILT BUT JOY AND LOVE, WE SOMETIMES ASSUME THAT WE CAN FULLY FEEL LOVED AND JOY BUT SOMETIMES THERE'S SO PRACTICE IN SHAME AND GUILT THAT EVEN WHEN LOVE AND JOY COMES OUR WAY WE CANNOT RECOGNIZE IT AND SO I'M A BIG FIRM BELIEVER OF OBSERVING OUR FEELINGS, OUR EMOTIONS, OUR BEHAVIORS GIVING THEM SPACE SO YOU CAN HAVE MORE LANGUAGE AROUND WHAT IS HAPPENING, I PRACTICE WHAT IS CALLED GENERATIVE FOAM ONYX, MANY OF US IN THEIR MOVEMENT HAVE BEEN TRAINED IN IT OR HAVE GONE THROUGH THAT TRAINING AND IT'S REALLY AN OBSERVATION OF THE BODY AND EVERYTHING WERE GOING THROUGH A FINAL SWEEP IT SLEEP ENOUGH MY EYEBALL TWITCHES, I'M NOT TAKING ENOUGH WATER AND IF WE JUST TAKE A MOMENT TO OBSERVE INTO NOTICE, WE COULD HAVE MORE LANGUAGE ABOUT OUR NEEDS, OUR DESIRES, WHAT IS GOING TO WORK FOR US AND I THINK ABOUT THAT, THAT IS THE INDIVIDUAL LEVEL, IMAGINE IF WE COULD COLLECTIVELY UNDERSTAND OUR NEEDS AND DESIRES, I THINK THAT'S WHY BLACK LIVES MATTER WAS SO PROFOUND FOR BLACK PEOPLE BECAUSE IT BECAME A THING THAT WE DID NOT REALIZE THAT WE NEEDED AS A COLLECTIVE TO GALVANIZE AROUND, THE MORE THAT WE CAN COLLECTIVELY UNDERSTAND OUR TRAUMA, THE MORE THAT WE CAN COLLECTIVELY UNDERSTAND OUR RESILIENCE, WE CAN COLLECTIVELY UNDERSTAND OUR NEEDS, OUR DESIRES AND THE CLOSER WE CAN GET TO FREEDOM.

YOU WILL BE SHOCKED HOW MUCH YOU REMEMBER AS YOUR PROBED AND ASKED QUESTIONS. I REALLY SAT AND SAID LET'S START FROM THE BEGINNING AND WE WERE PRETTY MUCH IN CONVERSATION ON A DAILY BASIS LIKE AT THE CRACK OF DAWN AND SOME OF THE STORIES IT WAS BECAUSE I WAS TALKING TO GET TO THE NEXT STORY, A CHAPTER ON MY MIDDLE SCHOOL YEARS CALLED 12 WHERE I TALK ABOUT THE FIRST TIME I AM ARRESTED, THAT WAS NOT SOMETHING I PLANNED ON PUTTING IN THE BOOK I WAS NOT EVEN THINKING ABOUT THAT BUT I WAS TALKING A LOT TO KIND OF EXPLAIN THE DIFFERENCES IN THE SCHOOL THAT I WENT TO, WHEN I WENT TO SUMMER SCHOOL, MY HOMESCHOOL, THE HOMESCHOOL MY NEIGHBORHOOD AND A COP CAME AND ARRESTED ME AND WAS LIKE WAIT A SECOND, WHAT HAPPENED AND I WAS LIKE 0 YEAH WHEN I WAS 12 I GOT ARRESTED AT SCHOOL AND SHE WAS LIKE OKAY THAT NEEDS TO GO IN THE BOOK, YOU'VE TALKED SO MUCH ABOUT YOUR SIBLINGS AND THE BOYS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD BUT YOU WERE ALSO CRIMINALIZED IN THE CRIMINALIZATION OF BLACK GIRLS AND WE HOLD ALL THE STORIES, WE STORE THEM, THEY DON'T LEAVE OUR BODIES, THEIR IN THERE SOMEWHERE AND WHEN THEIR UNLOCKED, I THINK THEY CREATE A LOT OF THINGS, OPPORTUNITY, SOMETIMES TOO MUCH FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE SURVIVORS ESPECIALLY OF SEXUAL ASSAULT AND VIOLENCE, SOMETIMES YOU LOCK AWAY THE MEMORIES FOR SURVIVAL AND SAFETY AND OF THOSE ARE UNLOCKED WITHOUT GETTING THE SUPPORT CAN REALLY CAUSE A LOT OF HARM, I SAY THAT BECAUSE I'M NOT ROMANTICIZING THE MEMORY THAT I HAVE AND WHAT I UNLOCKED, I VERY MUCH GO TO THERAPY, I DO THERAPY TWICE A WEEK, I TRY MY HARDEST TO REALLY TAKE CARE OF MY EMOTIONAL HEALTH EVEN MY OWN HISTORY WITH COMPLEX PTSD, GIVEN WHAT I'VE GROWN UP WITH AND WITNESSED, THIS BOOK BUILDING OF THIS MEMOIR DID REMIND ME THAT WHAT HAPPENED TO ME AND MY FAMILY WAS REALLY, REALLY UNACCEPTABLE AND VERY DISTURBING INCREDIBLY TRAUMATIC AND I WILL PROBABLY NEED TO BE, NOT IN A JUDGMENTAL WAVE AND LIFELONG THERAPY BECAUSE OF IT, I WAS JUST TEXTING WITH MY MOM, DO YOU WANT TO GO TO THERAPY.

I AM VERY TRANSPARENT, I'M IN THERAPY HOPING SHALL BE LIKE MAYBE I'LL DO IT TO, WE DESERVE HEALING FROM WHAT IS HAPPENED TO US IN WHAT CONTINUES TO HAPPEN, WE DESERVE THE TIME AND SPACE, MY BIG DEMAND ON MY LAST BOOK TO HER I WAS SAYING IN EVERY CONVERSATION FIRST OF ALL I BELIEVE IN REPARATION BUT I THINK THERE SHOULD BE A WHOLE SECTION WHEN WE CREATE OUR REPARATION IMPACTED ENTER PACKAGE ON HEALING JUSTICE, EVERY SINGLE BLACK PERSON IN THEIR FAMILY SHOULD HAVE A DESIGNATED WHO CAN SUPPORT THEM UP WITH THEM THROUGH THE HISTORY OF TRAUMA THAT WE HAVE GONE THROUGH TO GET US CLOSER TO BEING WHOLE HUMAN BEINGS, WHEN YOU'RE TRAUMATIZED, YOU'RE NOT A WHOLE HUMAN BEING, YOUR ACTING FROM YOUR TRAUMA PLACE, WE DESERVE TO BE FULLY REALIZED HUMAN BEINGS, I THINK REPARATIONS WILL GET US THAT AN ACTIVE THERAPY, A LOT OF OTHER THINGS AS WELL THE ACTIVE THERAPY AS WELL.

Van Jones..., SMDH - Jes Dayyum...,

RT |  CNN host Van Jones is being hauled over the coals on social media, facing accusations of hypocrisy for tearfully heralding the end of Donald Trump’s presidency despite working with his administration.

After Democrat Joe Biden was projected to have won the election on Saturday, the CNN commentator launched into an emotional speech about how “it’s easier to be a parent this morning.” 

“It’s easier to be a dad this morning. It’s easier to tell your kids, ‘Character matters, being a good person matters,’” he said.

The pundit then broke down into tears and continued: “And it’s easier for a whole lot of people. If you’re Muslim in this country, you don’t have to worry that the president doesn’t want you here. If you’re an immigrant, you don’t have to worry if the president is going to be  happier to have babies snatched away or send dreamers back for no reason.”  

The clip was widely shared on social media and many people, including NBA star LeBron James and actor Mark Ruffalo, applauded Jones for his words.

However, thousands of others noted that Jones’ remarks were markedly different from comments he previously made about what Trump had done for the black community and the fact that he worked with the administration.

Photos of Jones, who was an official in the Obama White House, alongside members of the Trump administration and family racked up thousands of likes on Twitter. News articles about Jones’ comments and his ties to the administration were also widely shared.

Indeed, just over two weeks ago Jones said that Trump doesn’t get enough credit for his actions to help black people.

“I think it's really unfortunate because Donald Trump, and I get beat up by liberals every time I say it but I keep saying it, he has done good stuff for the black community,” Jones said on CNN.

“Opportunity Zone stuff, black college stuff, I worked with him on criminal stuff, I saw Donald Trump have African American people, formerly incarcerated, in the White House, embraced them, treated them well. There is a side to Donald Trump that I think he does not get enough credit for,” he added.

Black Teens Create More Online Content Than Any Other Group

suntimes  |   In the book, Stuart cites a University of Chicago study that says Black teens create more online content than any other racial group. In February, the Sun-Times reported that less than 5 percent of workers at Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are Black.

Drill also crosses paths with hip-hop’s “Blog Era’ — a period where local artists such as The Cool Kids and Kidz in the Hall made names for themselves by releasing new content via music blogs instead of relying on music industry gatekeepers, along with rappers with strong, national DIY followings such as Wiz Khalifa, Mac Miller, Curren$y, and Gary, Indiana, native Freddie Gibbs, among others. 

“These guys all blew up and had all these videos with millions of plays, and all this notoriety and songs and mixtapes getting downloaded,” said Andrew Barber, owner/creator of “Fake Shore Drive,” a Chicago music blog. “But none of it counted toward the new certifications that the RIAA has in place or the Billboard charts.”

Due to the subgenre’s reputation, many record companies refused to sign drill artists; their music was banned by venues.

“I just thought you need to have these ridiculous bar guarantees and rental fees, and later in life I find out that was just a Black thing, or a risk assessment type of thing, even though there was never a risk,” said concert promoter and Complex Studios co-founder Marques “Merk” Elliston, who says he partnered with Hologram USA to have Chief Keef’s hologram perform at a Hammond, Indiana, venue before local police shut it down citing safety issues. “That’s why you see the lack of remorse for a lot of these people [venues].”

Due to those fears, some of the genre’s artists are opting to move away from the drama. 

“It was a part of our lives; we saw it as normal,” said Bronzeville native Sasha Go Hard, who is featured in the theme song for the Comedy Central series “South Side.” “It became a trend to start dissing people. … These are not just songs that people are making; it’s really happening. It was easy for me to branch away from drill. I went a different route by touring overseas and making EDM songs.” Fist tap Big Don