Tag: news

As Valdis Dombrovskis complains to ESMA about the epic lapse by Germany’s Bonn-based financial regulator, BaFin, the German government is scrambling to save face. Not only are Chancellor Angela Markel and Finance Minister Olaf Scholz worried about scrutiny from Brussels, but a team of savvy litigators leading a major class-action lawsuit against the German government for failing to protect investors is also threatening to win an embarrassingly large settlement that could further erode the German government’s finances as it struggles to justify its break with the “frugal four”.

So, what is Berlin’s plan to try and improve oversight of public companies in the wake of the biggest accounting scandal in postwar German history? Well, it looks like the plan is to hand more power to BaFin, the regulator that’s largely responsible for dropping the ball in the first place. When the FT published whistleblowers’ claims alleging accounting fraud at the company’s Asian business, BaFin reacted by banning short-selling in Wirecard shares, and launching investigations into one of the FT reporters investigating Wirecard.

Instead of inviting a serious rethink of its regulatory framework, Berlin is trying to shift the blame for these failures entirely on to an industry group that had contracted with the German government, essentially allowing the major accounting firms auditing the biggest German companies to regulate themselves.

The government will terminate its contract with the country’s accounting watchdog, the Financial Reporting Enforcement Panel, as early as Monday, according to officials briefed on the matter. The power to launch investigations into companies’ financial reporting would then be handed to BaFin, Germany’s financial regulator, the officials said.

[…]

FREP, a private-sector body with quasi-official power, monitors the financial reporting of listed companies on behalf of the government. “What the Wirecard affair has shown is that…self-regulation by the auditors doesn’t work properly,” Jörg Kukies, Germany’s deputy finance minister told the Financial Times. “So we will inevitably have to question whether the bodies that currently regulate the industry should continue to do so in their current form.”

It begs the question: If Germany is so worried about the reputation of its financial services industry (which it certainly should be after suffering a collapse on par with Enron) why does it simply think handing even more power to BaFin will solve the problem? Not only are the top officials at the regulator still in control, they responded to the scandal with the boilerplate apologies and platitudes, but said little about actual reform, aside assuming more power to aggressively investigate companies after being alerted to potential wrongdoing.

The Wirecard affair has proved highly embarrassing for the German government, which fears it could damage the reputation of the country’s financial services industry. Through her spokesman, Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday described the case as “alarming”, while Olaf Scholz, finance minister, called it “a scandal which is almost unprecedented in the world of finance.”

“We should see the Wirecard story as a signal to address these problems, which have existed for quite a long time now, and to find radical solutions,” Mr Kukies said. “Only then can we contain the fallout from this affair.” Mr Kukies, a former Goldman Sachs banker who joined the finance ministry in 2018, said BaFin “currently has very limited powers” to oversee accountancy firms in Germany. “We have to think about how the regulatory regime should be changed,” he added.

Instead, Scholz has defended BaFin, claiming its decision to ban short selling in Wirecard shares was justified, and despite offering a “scathing criticism” of his own actions (per BBG) BaFin President Felix Hufeld remains in charge, and has no plans to resign. He largely blamed the failures on the auditors, despite BaFin’s very real actions to act as de facto lapdogs for Markus Braun and Wirecard management.

Germany’s galaxy brain plan to reform accounting oversight in the wake of the Wirecard fiasco: hand more power to BaFin. https://t.co/wMrGV63v6G

— Robert Smith (@BondHack) June 28, 2020

As one twitter wit joked, the German government might as well “cancel audits completely, ban short selling completely, and make negative opinions about German companies illegal.  BaFin can oversee the application of the rules, without oversight. Make Braun head of Bafin. Problem solved.”

😂

— Robert Smith (@BondHack) June 28, 2020

Famed short-seller Muddy Waters joked that the decision was tantamount to putting OJ Simpson in charge of Family Court.

That makes sense. While Germany is busy pursuing such sensible reforms, why don’t they appoint OJ Simpson to run their family court system?

— MuddyWatersResearch (@muddywatersre) June 28, 2020

For those who haven’t been following the scandal, here’s what happened: Via a complex shell game involving Wirecard’s parent entity in Germany its regional subsidiaries, the company was able to hide the missing ~$2 billion (€1.9 billion, technically speaking) from its auditor, Ernst & Young, for three years, as we explained a few days ago. Of course, it’s not like EY looked very hard; indeed, it never even bothered to check on the funds that Wirecard said were stashed in a special account in Singapore.

Now, Wirecard CEO Markus Braun is out on bail, and the DAX 30 is one company short. But most importantly, the scandal showed that payments is just one more area of the European financial system that is poorly regulated, and easily exploited, not unlike its AML controls.

Authored by Raul Diego via MintPressNews.com,

COVI-PASS will determine whether you can go to a restaurant, if you need a medical test, or are due for a talking-to by authorities in a post-COVID world. Consent is voluntary, but enforcement will be compulsory.

Through the magic of Internet meme culture, most Millennials will be familiar with the famous opening scene of the 1942 film, “Casablanca,” where two policemen stop a civilian in the “old Moorish section” of Nazi-occupied French Morocco and ask him for his “papers.” The subject is taken away at once after failing to produce the required documents. The cinematic exchange has been used ever since as a popular reference to the ever-encroaching hand of the state, which is now on the verge of attaining a level of control over people’s movements that puts the crude Nazi methods to shame.

A British cybersecurity company, in partnership with several tech firms, is rolling out the COVI-PASS in 15 countries across the world; a “digital health passport” that will contain your COVID-19 test history and other “relevant health information.” According to the company website, the passport’s objective is “to safely return to work” and resume “social interactions” by providing authorities with “up-to-date and authenticated health information.”

These objectives mirror those that Bill Gates has been promoting since the start of the COVID-19 lockdown. In an essay written by Gates in April, the software geek-cum-philanthropist lays out his support for the draconian measures taken in response to the virus and, like an old-timey mob boss, suggests the solutions to this deliberately imposed problem. Ironically, Gates begins to make his case for the adoption of mass tracking and surveillance technology in the U.S. by saying that “For now, the United States can follow Germany’s example”; He then touts the advantages of the “voluntary adoption of digital tools” so we can “remember where [we] have been” and can “choose to share it with whoever comes to interview you about your contacts.”

COVI-Pass promises to work as digital health passport, allowing users deemed uninfected to attend public gatherings among other privileges

Gates goes on to predict that the ability to attend public events in the near future will depend on the discovery of an effective treatment. But he remains pessimistic that any such cure will be good enough in the short term to make people “feel safe to go out again.” These warnings by the multi-billionaire dovetail perfectly with the stated purposes of the aforementioned COVI-PASS, whose development is also being carried out in partnership with Redstrike Group – a sports marketing consultancy firm that is working with England’s Premier League and their Project Restart to parse ticket sales and only make them available to people who have tested negative for the virus.

VST Enterprises goes viral

VST Enterprises Ltd (VSTE) is led by 31-year old entrepreneur, Louis-James Davis, who very recently stepped down from a “science & technology ambassadorship” in the African nation of Zimbabwe to focus on the company’s role in the UN’s SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) Collaboratory initiative, comprising a series of “cyber technology projects across all 193 member states of the United Nations.”

These will use the same proprietary VCode and VPlatform technologies underpinning the COVI-PASS that will reportedly tackle issues such as illegal mining and counterfeiting. This “third generation” barcode technology overcomes the limitations of older “second generation” versions like QR-codes, according to Davis. “Data and sensitive information scanned or stored in either a QR code and barcode can be hacked and are inherently insecure,” Davis claims, “leaving data and personal details to be compromised.” These, and other flaws of the prevailing “proximity apps” were exploited by VST Enterprises to position itself to land large government and private sector contracts.

By all measures, the strategy has proven wildly successful and VST now enjoys strong favor in the highest circles of the UK government as evidenced by the ringing endorsement of former Prime Minister Theresa May, prominently displayed on the COVI-PASS website. More practically, VST now has a direct partnership with the UK government and has secured contracts to deploy its technology in 15 countries, including Italy, Portugal, France, India, the US, Canada, Sweden, Spain, South Africa, Mexico, United Arab Emirates and the Netherlands.

In May, VST signed a deal with international digital health technology firm and owner of COVI-PASS, Circle Pass Enterprises (CPE) to integrate VST’s VCode into the biometric RFID-enabled “passports” which can be accessed via mobile phone or a key fob will flash colored lights to denote if an individual has tested negative, positive or is to be denied entry to public locations. Awarded the ‘Seal of Excellence’ by the EU, VCode® technology will ensure that all of our most sensitive personal and health information can be accessed by authorities at a distance, dispensing with messy and potentially dangerous face-to-face encounters with police or other enforcement personnel.

Infusing the narrative

So far, the concerns over the digital health passport’s threat to freedom and privacy have been lukewarm at best and it seems as if the world has already accepted that full-fledged population control methods such as these will simply be a fact of life. While the coronavirus pandemic has certainly done much to bring the public over to this way of thinking, the campaign to normalize this sort of Orwellian power-grab has been ongoing for many years and Bill Gates – who many media outlets have whitewashed out of stories related to these measures – has been at the forefront of its promotion.

The Innovation for Uptake, Scale and Equity in Immunisation (INFUSE) project was launched in Davos, Switzerland in 2016. The program was developed by an organization funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation called GAVI (The Vaccine Alliance), which has been calling for a digital health ID for children along with partners in the broader !D2020 initiative like the Rockefeller Foundation and Microsoft.

In a recent interview, the deputy director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Hassan Damluji, derided the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic was in any way subsiding and even warned that, far from receding, the pandemic was “deep into wave three.” His remarks were specifically targeted to the very regions he oversees for the foundation, which include the Middle East and parts of Asia, which he stressed would be the focus of the next wave. Damluji was “most recently involved in a five-year fundraising cycle for GAVI,” an effort led by Saudi Arabia, whose investment he praised as a powerful “signal [that] others had an obligation to follow.”

Gates concludes his editorial with a comparison to World War II, stating that said conflict was a “defining moment of our parents’ generation” as the COVID-19 pandemic is to ours, implying that the changes taking place now are akin to the Allied forces’ defeat of the Third Reich. Except, of course, that immunity passports or digital health certificates sound exactly like what Hitler wished for the most. After all, wasn’t the idea of a superior race based on considerations of superior health and vitality over the ostensibly sick and unfit? Hard to argue against the idea that a universal health passport is nothing less than the ultimate fulfillment of that dystopian nightmare.

According to an open online survey with 40,000 participants from twelve countries, the use of party drugs like MDMA and also cocaine has decreased around the world as clubs and other events are on hiatus.

Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports that research project Global Drug Survey found that while the use of marijuana, alcohol and benzodiazepines (Xanax, Valium) was up during the pandemic, a net share of 19 percent of respondent said they were using less cocaine (share of people saying they used it more minus share of people saying they used it less). A net share of 29 percent said they were using less MDMA. To quantify drug use, the survey asked people if they had used the drugs in question on more or less days of the week than usual.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Out of the twelve countries included in the survey, around 22 percent of Irish people and around 21 percent of Brits and Kiwis said their alcohol consumption during COVID-19 had increased a lot – the highest in the survey. Ireland and New Zealand residents also admitted to binge drinking a lot more (15 and 14 percent said so, respectively), while 47 percent of UK residents indicated they had started to drink earlier than usual. The most common reasons respondents gave for the increase in alcohol consumption were “I have more time to drink” and “I am more bored”.

Marijuana use increased the most in Australia and the UK with 26 percent and 23 percent saying their consumption increased a lot. Among party drug users, Australian and French respondents were most likely to say their use of MDMA and cocaine decreased significantly.

Authored by Judith Bergman via The Gatestone Institute,

The news has been filled with reports about Black Lives Matter (BLM) supporters vandalizing and tearing down statues of slave traders, slave owners, and anyone who they perceive as having been historically involved with slavery. In Bristol, England, a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston was pulled down and thrown into the harbor. In Belgium, statues of King Leopold were defaced.

The actions have caused some local authorities to consider whether all statues perceived as offending current sensibilities should be removed. The London Mayor Sadiq Khan announced a commission to examine the future of landmarks, such as statues and street names, in the UK capital.

What is not apparent is how attacking old statues of people who have been long dead is supposed to help anyone, especially millions of black and non-black people, who are still enslaved today. It would appear that the woke activists of BLM and their many kneeling supporters do not care about the plight of modern slaves, of which there are an estimated whopping 40 million today. Evidently, it is far easier, and presumably more pleasurable, to destroy Western historical monuments than to embark on the difficult work of actually abolishing modern slavery.

In the UK itself, there is a shocking range of modern slavery, something that the local wokesters are happy to ignore as they bravely attack statues of stone and metal. According to the UK government’s 2019 Annual Report on Modern Slavery, there are at least 13,000 potential victims of slavery in the UK, although as that number dates back to 2014, it is questionable. According to the 2018 Global Slavery Index, there are an estimated 136,000 people living in modern slavery just in Britain.

Slavery in the UK takes the form of forced labor, and domestic and sexual exploitation. Albanians and Vietnamese are among the groups that constitute the majority of slaves. British news outlets have run several stories about the estimated thousands of Vietnamese, half under the age of 18, who are kidnapped and trafficked to the UK where they are forced to work as slaves on cannabis farms. There, they form a small part of the “vast criminal machine that supplies Britain’s £2.6bn cannabis black market”. Those who are not forced to work in the cannabis industry are enslaved in “nail bars, brothels and restaurants, or kept in domestic servitude behind the doors of private residences”. In January, BBC news ran a story about a Vietnamese boy named Ba, who was kidnapped by a Chinese gang and trafficked to the UK, where his Chinese boss starved him and beat him whenever one of the cannabis plants failed.

BLM may not care much about Vietnamese lives in the UK — after all, they are all about black lives, so how about black slaves in Africa? There are currently an estimated 9.2 million men, women and children living in modern slavery in Africa, according to the Global Slavery Index, which includes forced labor, forced sexual exploitation and forced marriage.

“According to the U.N.’s International Labor Organization (ILO), there are more than three times as many people in forced servitude today as were captured and sold during the 350-year span of the transatlantic slave trade”, Time Magazine reported in March 2019. According to the ILO, modern slavery has seen 25 million people in debt bondage and 15 million in forced marriage.

Modern slavery earns criminal networks an estimated $150 billion a year, just slightly less than drug smuggling and weapons trafficking. “Modern slavery is far and away more profitable now than at any point in human history,” Siddharth Kara, an economist at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, told Time. According to the 2018 Global Slavery Index, “G-20 countries import some $354 billion worth of products at risk of being produced by modern slavery every year”.

In 2017, shocking footage emerged from actual slave auctions in Libya: CNN documented an incident in which Arabic-speaking men sold off twelve Nigerians. In 2019, Time Magazine interviewed an African migrant, Iabarot, who had been sold into slavery on his way to Europe:

“When Iabarot reached Libya’s southern border, he met a seemingly friendly taxi driver who offered to drive him to the capital city, Tripoli, for free. Instead, he was sold to a ‘white Libyan,’ or Arab, for $200. He was forced to work off his ‘debt’ on a construction site, a pattern that repeated each time he was sold and resold.”

Sex trafficking forms a considerable part of modern slavery. The Nigerian mafia, for instance, according to a 2019 report by the Washington Post, is trafficking women by the tens of thousands:

“Some experts say that as many as 20,000 Nigerian women, some of them minors, arrived in Sicily between 2016 and 2018, trafficked in cooperation with Nigerians in Italy and back home.”

According to a July 2017 report by the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM):

“Over the past three years, IOM Italy has seen an almost 600 per cent increase in the number of potential sex trafficking victims arriving in Italy by sea. This upward trend has continued during the first six months of 2017, with most victims arriving from Nigeria”. In its report, IOM estimated that 80 per cent of girls, often minors, arriving from Nigeria — whose numbers soared dramatically from 1,454 in 2014 to 11,009 in 2016 — were “potential victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation”.

In parts of the African continent, especially in the Sahel, slavery is still ingrained in traditional culture, even though, officially, slavery has been outlawed. In countries such as Mali and Mauritania, so-called descent-based slavery or “caste-based” slavery — in which slavery is passed down from generation to generation, so that slaves are born into their predicament — is still practiced by some.

In 2013, it was estimated that around 250,000 people were living in slave-like conditions in Mali, where slavery is not illegal. One Malian slave, Raichatou, told the Guardian in 2013 that she became a slave at the age of seven when her mother, also a slave, died. “My father could only watch on helplessly as my mother’s master came to claim me and my brothers,” she said. She worked as a servant for the family without pay for nearly 20 years, and was forced into a marriage with another slave whom she didn’t know, so that she could supply her master with more slaves.

In Mauritania, it is estimated that up to 20% of the population is enslaved, even though slavery was officially outlawed in 1981. The slaves are mostly from the Haratine minority, who are black Africans, as opposed to the nearly half of the population who are Arabs or Berbers. According to a report by the Guardian from 2018:

“Slavery has a long history in this north African desert nation. For centuries, Arabic-speaking Moors raided African villages, resulting in a rigid caste system that still exists to this day, with darker-skinned inhabitants beholden to their lighter-skinned “masters”. Slave status is passed down from mother to child, and anti-slavery activists are regularly tortured and detained. Yet the government routinely denies that slavery exists in Mauritania, instead praising itself for eradicating the practice.”

The report also described a few of the horrific fates of the Haratine slaves:

“Aichetou Mint M’barack was a slave by descent in the Rosso area. Like her sister, she was taken away from her mother and then given to a member of the master’s family to be a servant. She got married in the home of her masters and had eight children, two of whom were taken away from her to be slaves in other families. In 2010, Aichetou’s older sister was able to free her… after she herself fled her masters when they poured hot embers over her baby, killing it.”

BLM and the many corporate executives, university professors, media, sports and cultural personalities who are bending their knees to the movement seem totally unconcerned by the fates of the likes of Aichetou. More likely than not, they have never heard of her or her many fellow sufferers. They are apparently black lives that do not matter — to anyone except the courageous people working in the local anti-slavery organizations.

Instead, BLM and its sycophants endlessly debate changing the names of streets and universities, and removing statues, all of which do not amount to anything more than infantile virtue signaling. They waste time debating whether people who were never themselves slaves, should receive reparations from people who never owned a slave.

To engage in all this posturing, while ignoring the staggering 40 million current victims of actual slavery, not only represents the immeasurable depths of woke hypocrisy, but constitutes an extreme insult to those who are suffering their slavery in silence, while slowly dying from the physical, sexual and emotional abuse that they are being forced to endure. If anything is “offensive,” it is that.

A St. Louis couple armed themselves and stood outside their mansion as a group of Black Lives Matter protesters who had broken into their gated community shuffled past while chanting.

A St. Louis couple defends their home with guns as protesters march through their neighborhood:pic.twitter.com/LqzvrBSREu

— Alex Salvi (@alexsalvinews) June 29, 2020

The couple, identified as attorneys Mark and Patricia McCloskey, engaged in a shouting match with the protesters, waving what appeared to be an AR-15 rifle and a pistol (albeit employing terrible muzzle and trigger discipline and without cover).

Residents bring out guns against peaceful marchers in St Louis, Mo #respectis #expectus #stlouis #lydakrewson pic.twitter.com/blBOtWjMWS

— Ryanzo Perez (@RyanzoPerez) June 29, 2020

As the Gateway Pundit‘s Cassandra Fairbanks notes, the BLM protesters can be clearly be seen entering a gate into the McCloskey’s private community.

In this livestream footage you can clearly see the STL black lives matter mob entered through the gate to a private community. This was not a public sidewalk. https://t.co/NeKHgTBWEu pic.twitter.com/UdYq3pGtlb

— Cassandra Fairbanks (@CassandraRules) June 29, 2020

“Private Street” pic.twitter.com/r7VMDo60sm

— Alex Salvi (@alexsalvinews) June 29, 2020

Following the incident people began calling for the McCloskeys to be doxed – resulting in at least one publication removing their address from a 2018 article detailing the extensive renovations they performed on the 1912 mansion.

Records show the McCloskeys have donated to both Republicans and Democrats over the years, including $4,000 to the Democratic party and at least $2,400 to the Trump campaign.

Records show he donated $4k to Democratic Party and also defended man against police brutality

— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) June 29, 2020

One of those calling for doxing the McCloskeys, ‘anti-racism executive coach‘ Kyle Dennis, restricted his Twitter account after he himself was doxed.  

The loser who called for the St. Louis hero couple to be doxed has now been doxed himself and locked his account. pic.twitter.com/7u9UkFldBU

— Cassandra Fairbanks (@CassandraRules) June 29, 2020

And now – watch the left try their hardest to cancel the McCloskeys for letting the protesters, who had broken into their gated community, that they would not be victims.

Meanwhile, the memes didn’t take long:

pic.twitter.com/Yh9OFC8cyf

— Vaiv (@Vaiv71738794) June 29, 2020

pic.twitter.com/xSZrugNvSW

— John Noonan (@JohnPNoonan) June 29, 2020

#antifaFilms presents: pic.twitter.com/F4kzyprwZP

— ProjectM@yh3m (@Wotansson) June 29, 2020

pic.twitter.com/t1sfGiVY9u

— You smell that? (@DonChavez17) June 29, 2020

Authored by Wayne Allenswroth via vdare.com,

“Then who do we shoot?” Like Muley Graves the sharecropper, John Steinbeck’s evocative Okie everyman in John Ford’s 1940 film, many Americans are bewildered by a tidal wave of forces that seem beyond their control. The answer is not easy. But increasingly it seems likely to involve geographical partition.

Facing eviction from his dust-bowl farm, Muley confronts a man on a bulldozer who has come to demolish the shack Muley and his family live in. The sharecropper is determined not to give in and threatens the bulldozer operator with a shotgun—only to discover he is a local man, one of Muley’s own people. The bulldozer driver explains it’s not his fault, it’s just a job that he was hired to do. If Muley shoots him, then someone else will come to do the job and Muley will land in jail.

“Then who do we shoot?” asks Muley. The banker? The people back East who own the bank? Morally disarmed and demoralized, Muley can only watch as the bulldozer man destroys his home.

Patriotic Americans understand Muley. Our people, our culture, our history, everything we hold dear, is under relentless attack by the Main Stream Media, politicians, “activists,” and kritarchs in the courts, aided and abetted by enemies within, often our own kith and kin, who have internalized the blood-libel Leftist narrative of an irredeemably “racist” America that must be razed to the ground.

“If you know your enemy,” wrote Sun Tzu, “and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”

Our enemy, in this case is the globalist Blob and its militant would-be Che Guevaras and LARPing Leninists, the MSM, the bureaucracy, the courts, the big corporations, and the education establishment.

Yet, for the most part, until recently, the Blob has not confronted the Historic American Nation head-on. The Blob has been patient, killing us by the death of a thousand cuts, taking ground steadily through subversion, using propaganda and misinformation, censorship via Tech Totalitarians, and the slow encroachment of what the late Sam Francis called “anarcho-tyranny,” with mass immigration (“the Great Replacement”) as its weapon of mass destruction.

The Blob is amorphous, a slippery, slimy thing that probes and gropes its way into whatever social-economic-political cracks it can exploit, eventually engulfing its prey like quicksand.

It is also using “hybrid warfare” tactics that have been used before but have gelled with the expansion of mass communications and can quickly conjure up “flash mobs” and distribute “fake news.”[ Explainer: what is ‘hybrid warfare’ and what is meant by the ‘grey zone’?, The Conversation, June 17, 2019] The scare quote, creative editing, and constant repetition of bald-faced lies, magnified by social media, engulf us in a tidal wave of words and images. We live in a bizarre Twilight Zone that lacks depth and context.

Give credit where credit is due. Hybrid warfare has worked. The Blob infiltrated and subverted American institutions by exploiting our American sense of Fair Play and decency that made whites a relatively easy mark. As the Blob seeped into our lives, we gradually adjusted to a “new normal” each and every day.

Then Donald Trump was elected president. The Blob was shocked. Orange Man Bad seemed to threaten its plans to finish off the Historic American Nation. And so, ever since November 8, 2016, the MSM have kept the country in hysterics with one manufactured crisis after another. Fake news via a social media, a hybrid warfare tactic, kicked into high gear: Russiagate, Ukrainegate, the Chinese Virus panic and ensuing lockdown and economic crash, and now the myth of St. George Floyd and blacks being “hunted” by whites that catalyzed the mobs that have looted and burned American cities.

Using the Chinese Virus and Floyd riots as cover, the Blob and its militant wing—Antifa and Black Lives Matter—ratcheted up anarcho-tyranny to new heights.

In some American cities, Muley’s question—who do we shoot—has an answer, at least in an immediate sense.

So what next? Where do we go from here?

America faces three scenarios.

• One: Trump is re-elected on a wave of anger over the looting and anarchy unleashed by the “I-Can’t-Breathe” narrative. Trump sends Javanka packing, dispatches the troops to restore order, extends the immigration moratorium, finally builds the wall, and begins mass deportations as the White House protects the dissident Right from deplatforming by the Tech Totalitarians.

That scenario is most likely a fantasy.

Even if Trump is re-elected, his past record of bluster and little to no action speaks for itself. The Blob and its executive arm, the Deep State, have boxed him in. Trump and his “team,” if one can call it that, are as easily disarmed by the antiracists as Conservative, Inc.’s operatives. Their immediate and reflexive condemnation of the police after Floyd’s death, like the Beltway Right’s compulsion to apologize for even existing, tells the tale.

Of course vote for Trump in November. But don’t expect too much. Trump has been, at best, a speedbump, not a roadblock, in the Blob’s path.

America has survived unrest before, but that was a different country. It had a white, Christian super-majority and a shared history. It had at least a theoretical chance of working out a modus vivendi with its black minority. The language was English and, most of the time, we played by a set of rules to which everyone—liberal conservative, Democrat or Republican—agreed. Elections were not winner-take-all apocalyptic events. Nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court did not occasion brutal, partisan, ideological war. No longer.

If we bank solely on electoral politics, we will lose, especially as the demographic ring closes. The winners will show no quarter.

Political life as we knew it in America is over. Again, the America we grew up in and loved is dead. Elections are a holding action at best. It seems highly unlikely that Trump (or anyone else, for that matter) can, for instance, deport and encourage to self-deport tens of millions of illegal aliens, even assuming a desire to do so.

What’s more, a substantial portion of the dwindling white majority has disavowed its identity—the “flight from white,” as Steve Sailer calls it. Meanwhile, the Blob controls the Deep State and its bureaucracy not only on the federal level but also in too many swing states and major metropolitan areas.

• Two: Trump loses, and the Blob and its allies triumph. But because this is a country now and not a nation, with no shared sense of common identity and agreed-upon history, culture, beliefs, or language, only a full-blown police state can hold it together.

Even that might not ensure order in a chaotic post-America, and the diminishing number of whites will surely not enjoy the protection of the state. At some point, white Americans might well be living like white South Africans, ever in fear for their lives.

If order breaks down, vigilante groups, even criminal gangs, will step into the void, as vigilantes have done in Mexico and Hispanic gangs have done to protect their neighborhoods during the Floyd riots.

The good news: white men have followed suit when mobs threatened their homes and history. The boys in Fishtown in metropolitan Philadelphia who protected a police station, the heroes who surrounded and protected a statue of Christopher Columbus, and a group of armed Texans who gathered to protect the Alamo,are just three examples.

Meanwhile, following the “higher number than usual” of Atlanta police officers calling in sick when one of their own was charged with felony murder in the shootingof Rayshard Brooks, Seth Cohen at Forbes wondered whether the “Blue flu” would be “America’s next pandemic.” [As Atlanta Police Protest, Is “Blue Flu” The Next Pandemic? , June 18, 2020]. As calls to “defund the police” mount, that’s a good question.

And it raises another: what happens if America’s truckers decide not to deliver to cities with no police protection?

So far, resistance to the Blob is scattered and uncoordinated, but that could change as the American systemic crisis deepens.

• Three: The country breaks apart, and the Historic American people establish enclaves for themselves and others who love and fondly remember the old America.

The breakup, indeed, is underway. Blue states and Leftist kritarchs nullify laws they don’t like. Sanctuary cities and even sanctuary states defy immigration laws. Meanwhile, American patriots have answered with Second Amendment sanctuarycounties and even states. Americans in inland California talk of seceding from the “Left coast.” The Left has floated secession talk as well: anarchists have seized and established their own “autonomous zone” in Seattle. West Virginia’s governor, Jim Justice, invited conservative counties in Virginia to secede and join the Mountain State. [West Virginia Republicans encourage conservative Virginia counties to ‘Vexit’ by Kelly Mena, CNN, Sun February 9, 2020] .

States, counties, and cities that sided with or surrendered to the mob, and the Blob’s intensification of anarcho-tyranny during the recent coronavirus lock down, seem to have sparked a sharp reaction from the American remnant that could provide the bare bones of a Middle American defense movement.

Someday, “blue” and “red” enclaves, even whole states, might evolve into new polities.

American patriots are developing their own hybrid warfare with media of their own, effectively following the Left’s example of nullification and internal secession, as well as organizing an alternative cultural network that publishes its own books, educates its children, and tries to carry on despite the threat of Deep State suppression.

My guess for the future: combination of scenarios two and three. The managerial state tightens its grip, the result on November 3 regardless, but devolution continues.

The Blob won’t let up. The riots we recently witnessed will continue even if Trump sends in the troops now.

When that happens, we won’t need to ask Muley’s question.