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Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

Ignore the bureaucrats; listen to the free thinkers…

If the Trojan War were being fought today, the Greeks would not need to hide inside of a big, wooden horse and hope to be dragged inside Troy’s city gates.  They’d simply disseminate all kinds of lies on social media and wait for the Trojan people to fight each other.  Such is the power of corrosive ideas: They can destroy a civilization before its defenders understand that they are under attack.

Information warfare is the name of the game today.  It exists all around us.  Soundbites attack us from every phone, computer, tablet, and television screen.  Succinct messages ripple through social media platforms until people from opposite sides of the world repeat the same words without knowing why.

The most powerful bits of information are the ones that sound unquestionably true.  “Believe all women.”  “Black lives matter.”  “Build back better.”  Their simplicity assists their deception.  We certainly shouldn’t distrust women, right?  Who wants to argue that black lives mean nothing?  Surely nobody wishes to build something worse than it was before.  People hear the soundbites, nod their heads, and repeat those words to their friends and neighbors.  Some place signs in their yards with those three-word messages, as if they were brilliant expositions of fundamental truths.

Successful information warfare propagates ideas without triggering in those who receive the message any need for reflection.  Like the Greeks’ wooden horse, the communication is hollow.  It is intended to be just attractive enough that listeners drag the soundbite into their heads but sufficiently harmless in appearance to avoid real scrutiny.  Great propaganda does not conquer by force.  It seduces.  It knocks on the door, smiles, and charms its way into unsuspecting minds.  Then it waits — patiently — until the day arrives when it can do the most damage.

Effective propaganda, however, is inherently fragile.  Should anyone take the time to reflect on those three-word messages above, their magic spells are broken.  Once someone asks, “Don’t some women lie?” people remember that accusations matter less than evidentiary proof.  Once a person is shouted down for saying, “All lives matter,” it becomes clear that “diversity” and “equity” have nothing to do with equality and justice.  When anyone stops to ask, “What are we building, and why are we building it?” the World Economic Forum’s plans for a “new world order” stand naked and exposed.

In other words, thinking is the enemy of information warfare.  Those who engage in its dark arts see independent thinkers as missile shields that must be eliminated.  Reason and rational debate remain the most effective defenses against propaganda.  People who ask questions build forts for society with their minds.  The entrances to those forts are adorned with this sign: Come let us reason together.

Reasoned debate is not scary; on the contrary, it is the path upon which we walk toward enlightenment.  It is why people who demand complianceshould never be trusted.  Anyone who says, “The science is settled,” or, “Trust the experts,” seeks to deprive the listener not only of his capacity to reason but also of his prospect for salvation.  When we forsake the mental gifts that God has given us, we hobble our potential for spiritual growth.  Nobody has ever been redeemed for “just following orders.”  A good life comes from good choices, and good choices come from faithful contemplation.  In this way, attacks on free speech are attacks on our very souls.

When propagandists attack our souls from all directions, it is difficult to know who is waging war against us and why.  But there are telltale signs.  When groups and governments attempt to “cancel” individuals for their personal beliefs, they are waging war against individual conscience.

Sometimes acts of war are obvious, as when a British communist allegedly bludgeoned well-known conservative Ann Widdecombe to death with a hammer.  Other times, information warfare is more subtle, as when the British government banned Christian and Finnish politician Päivi Räsänen from flying through London’s Heathrow Airport because she boldly defends the Bible’s prohibition against sexual sin, something that both Finland and the United Kingdom have now officially criminalized as “hate speech.”  Along the same lines, the Polish government recently convicted a young, pregnant mother for the “crime” of speaking at a public rally against mass immigration.  Found guilty of “inciting hatred,” Oliwia Olejniczak has received a harsher punishment for expressing her opinion than many illegal immigrants have for committing rape.

When governments abuse their criminal justice systems to persecute Christians and mothers concerned about their families’ safety, the signs are clear: Those governments are at war with their own people.  When governments “cancel” citizens for their beliefs, politicians and bureaucrats identify for us which independent thinkers they most fear.  As is written in the Gospel of Matthew (5:10), “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”  When people stand up for moral truths — while bearing the brunt of their governments’ hatred — pay attention.  Those people are building forts for society with their minds.  Seek the shelter of those forts; then expand those forts to protect others.  This is the way to defeat government propaganda.

Those who engage in information warfare have a propensity for projecting their crimes onto the innocent.  This is why leftwing groups and governments accuse Christians of “hate speech,” while saying the most hateful things about Christians.  It is also why governments and NGOs insist on categorizing citizens’ dissenting speech as “disinformation” or “misinformation,” when governments and NGOs manufacture false information on an industrial scale.

There has never been a time in human history when self-appointed public censors turned out to be the “good guys.”  Communists, fascists, Nazis, and military dictators all believe in censoring public speech and rigging public debate.  The globalists, socialists, collectivists, and other Big Government parasites that have infiltrated and seized most national governments today likewise believe in censorship and the criminalization of dissent.  Information — whether true or false — does not belong to any one group of people.  Oligarchies are not filled with angels; they are filled with sinful human beings.

We saw how evil oligarchies can be during the COVID lockdowns.  Government bureaucrats and self-described “experts” told us explicitly, “Now is the time to do what you’re told.”  Western governments committed unforgivable crimes against their citizens in the name of “science.”  Australia rounded up people into “quarantine camps,” and we now know that pretend-President Joe Biden’s CDC was planning to do the same thing in the United States.

For eighty years, American schoolchildren have been taught that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII was an unconscionable violation of Americans’ constitutional rights that could never be permitted to happen again.  Yet it almost did happen again.  The U.S. government was preparing to imprison Americans who refused experimental pharmaceutical injections or expressed unapproved speech.  In January 2022, majorities of Democrats believed that “unvaccinated” Americans should be fined, locked in their homes, sent to quarantine camps, and imprisoned for questioning the effectiveness of the experimental injections.  A third of Democrats believed that the government should remove children from homes with “unvaccinated” parents.

How did we get so close to completely destroying the Bill of Rights?  Health bureaucrats and government authorities engaged in an all-out information war against the American people.  They pushed lies into American homes just as the Greeks pushed a wooden horse into Troy.  And their attack on the American people almost worked.  Americans hated each other more than ever before and nearly tore each other to shreds.  COVID was weaponized into the kind of irrational fear that destroys civilizations.

In the end, it was not the “experts” or government ministers who prevented Western civilization’s collapse.  It was the people who saw through the propaganda and refused to submit to tyranny.  The next time governments send a Trojan Horse, just light the damn thing on fire.

The FDA has finished tracing a multistate outbreak of Salmonella Javiana back to its source – a single grower in Sinaloa, Mexico, which entered the U.S. through Coast Citrus Distributors, a California importer that supplies restaurant customers.

The agency asked Coast Citrus to recall the product. The company says has done so, and is no longer buying from the grower.

The CDC has counted 345 confirmed infections in 27 states, including 36 hospitalizations and no deaths. Illnesses began between June 19 and July 20. The real number is likely higher: most people who get salmonella recover at home and are never tested.

The epidemiology was unusually clear. Whole-genome sequencing suggested the cases were coming from the same source, and restaurant histories pointed investigators in the same direction. Of 191 people interviewed, 177 – 93 percent – said they had eaten at a Mexican-style restaurant in the month ending July 14.

The restaurant chains, for their part, moved before the investigation became a national story. Chipotle changed jalapeño suppliers at affected restaurants on July 20. The company says its traceability system allowed it to identify the grower and lot involved, remove the peppers and replace them with product from other farms.

Qdoba took a broader approach and stopped serving jalapeños across the chain on July 28. Regulators now say neither chain represents a current ongoing risk.

Investors were less patient. Chipotle shares fell nearly 10% Tuesday and have kept sliding, closing Friday down almost 12% on the week. Sweetgreen, which uses jalapeños in only two of its fifteen dressings and removed them Thursday, fell 8% Friday and is down more than 16% on the week.

Of note, Sweetgreen had already seen July sales weaken amid concern over an unrelated cyclospora outbreak tied to iceberg lettuce – an ingredient the chain does not even serve. Once customers start worrying about contaminated produce, distinctions between one ingredient, one supplier and one restaurant brand tend to disappear quickly.

Mexican health authorities have opened a separate inquiry, meanwhile. Officials visited a packing facility this week in Nuevo Leon, which is in a different state from the grower identified by U.S. investigators.

Authored by Chris Macintosh via InternationalMan.com,

The Fourth Turning does not end with a return to the prior equilibrium. It ends with a new order – better or worse, depending on which forces prevail in the decisive battles of the crisis era.

Those battles are being fought now, across domains: monetary (the BRICS challenge to dollar hegemony, the rise of non-dollar settlement, the emergence of digital currencies), geopolitical (the realignment of the Middle East, the unravelling of the post-Cold War security architecture), and epistemic (the collapse of institutional trust, the fragmentation of shared information environments, the re-emergence of heterodox analysis as a credible alternative to official consensus).

What distinguishes the people who navigate Fourth Turnings successfully is not superior prediction — the future is genuinely unknowable in its specifics — but superior optionality. They hold assets in multiple forms and jurisdictions. They maintain relationships across multiple networks. They retain the cognitive independence to update their models when evidence demands it. And they have not surrendered the most fundamental asset of all: the capacity to act on their own judgement.

Agency is what the propaganda apparatus is designed to extinguish. The entire architecture of manufactured consent — from the captured universities to the curated information feeds to the credit-financed comfort — is designed to produce a population that does not exercise independent judgement because it has been conditioned not to trust its own. The Covid episode was the proof of concept: even people who did not fully believe the narrative could be induced to act as though they did.

The restoration of agency is therefore not merely a personal project; it is the foundational political act of the current historical moment. And the regulatory arbitrage it enables — moving capital, business, and oneself to jurisdictions where the apparatus has not yet fully captured the population’s trust — is not tax evasion or political cynicism.

It is the restatement, in the language of economic action, of the oldest principle of political economy: that free people, in control of their own affairs, are more productive, more innovative, and ultimately more ungovernable than any administrative apparatus can tolerate.

The Argentine farmer, the Czech entrepreneur, the Singapore manufacturer, and the Dubai trader are not united by politics or culture. They are united by a single attribute: they have not forgotten how to say no.

The Turnings theory does not predict what the new order will look like. But it does predict that the people who enter the resolution phase with real assets, genuine skills, multiple jurisdictions, and uncompromised mental models will be disproportionately represented in whatever comes next.

The compliant will have managed their risk by surrendering to the system. The independent will have managed their risk by retaining the capacity to leave it.

History will record, as it always does, that the real crisis was not the one that triggered the Fourth Turning but the one that preceded it: the slow, comfortable, credit-financed surrender of agency that made populations incapable of resisting when resistance mattered most.

*  *  *

Preserving your agency starts with understanding the forces working to limit it. Our free report reveals the economic, political, and cultural shifts now unfolding, what they could mean for your wealth and personal freedom, and how a contrarian investor is positioning to stay one step ahead. Get your free report.

Update (1800ET): WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert sent a memo to teams that addresses ongoing discussions around transgender athletes in women’s basketball.

“I know many of you have received questions in recent weeks regarding transgender athlete participation in women’s basketball, and I expect this topic will continue to receive significant attention,” Engelbert wrote in the memo, which was sent Friday afternoon and obtained by The Associated Press and ESPN.

“I wanted to reach out to share how we are approaching these conversations at the league office and to thank those of you who have responded to questions from the media with thoughtfulness and professionalism.”

The memo said the topic will be discussed further by a task force of team presidents and general managers at a previously scheduled meeting next week.

The league’s collective bargaining agreement states that “only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA,” but it does not include any more specific language about gender identity or sex assigned at birth. 

“We recognize that this is a complex and nuanced topic, and we will continue to have important conversations with all of you and the Players Association in the weeks and months ahead,” Engelbert said in the memo.

“We also plan to convene additional discussions and offer listening sessions for any team leaders who would like to participate. Your perspectives and feedback are invaluable, and I appreciate those who have already reached out to share their thoughts.”

The Women’s National Basketball Players Association released a statement on social media Friday that emphasized diversity and inclusion while saying the group “will not be used as political pawns.”

“We embrace justice equity, diversity, and inclusion,” the players’ union said.

Inclusion?

Perhaps the WNBA will finally be the first group to actually define “what is a woman?”

*  *  *

As Robert Spencer reported earlier for PJMedia.com, every person who is tired of the left forcing its delusions and fantasies on the rest of us, and shaming, deplatforming, and silencing us if we refuse to go along, ought to be applauding Royce White and Enes Kanter Freedom for standing up to the madness, and showing the world just how absurd it really is.

White and Freedom have declared that they’re women, at least for the purposes of professional basketball, and so they’re declaring for the 2027 WNBA draft. This is hilarious, but it’s no joke. It’s an unanswerable response to the left’s fashionable gender delusions, which have recently become a source of controversy within the WNBA, which ought to be called the WWNBA, the Woke Women’s National Basketball Association.

It all started when WNBA star Sophie Cunningham stated that she was not in favor of men pretending to be women playing women’s sports.

This sparked the usual spittle-flecked fury from the left. The WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve, among others, came out in favor of delusional men competing against women. 

The WNBA players’ union issued a weaselly statement denouncing “Hate, abuse, and demonization of any person or group of people, including transgender people.”

Nobody had engaged in any of that, but that’s how leftists always characterize disagreement with the views they want everyone to hold.

Meanwhile, there has been talk of a WNBA team signing French basketball player Julie Tétart, who is a dude.

And so if Julie Tétart can do it, why can’t Royce White and Enes Kanter Freedom? They are just as female as Tétart is. Fox News reported Friday that White said: “I’m transgender. I’m a woman. I identify as sometimes identifying as a woman for purpose of basketball, professional basketball, so I’ll be declaring for the WNBA draft in 2027 as well,” that is, in addition to Enes Kanter Freedom.

White added a correct assessment of how well a male professional would do in the WNBA: “I think I’d be unstoppable. But I’m a team-first guy. I’m a pass-first kind of player. I do the little things. I led my team in all five major stat categories at Iowa State University, so I do a little bit of everything. I’ll do whatever the coach needs me to do. I’ll do whatever the girls need me to do… I think it’s only fair.”

White noted that the WNBA, for all its declarations of how much it rejects “hatred” of men who claim to be women, hasn’t said explicitly that men could play in the WNBA. Maybe WNBA top dogs hope that the whole thing will just go away, but it won’t.

“I think the WNBA could come out,” White said, “and make a definitive statement about guys with a pair of balls playing in the Women’s Association.”

Asked if he would declare for the WNBA draft unless the league said that men could not play in the league, White responded: “Oh, no, I’m declaring. And I don’t want to be discriminated against. I want fair treatment. I’m a young, black, hopefully United States Senator that would like a fair chance to participate as a sometimes-identifying-as-a-transgender-woman athlete.” White is on the ballot for the senate in Minnesota in the Republican primary; the election is coming up next Tuesday.

What if the WNBA calls White’s bluff and no team opts to sign him?

“I have to file a discrimination lawsuit, right?,” White said.

“I mean, that’s, that’s ridiculous. We’re gonna have to have a huge legal battle about discrimination if I can’t play.” White says he would like to play for Cheryl Reeve: “It’s got to be the Minnesota Lynx, and I hear the coach loves a good transgender, so we’ll all be in perfect harmony.”

White expressed confidence that he would be drafted:

“How you gonna pass up on a 6-foot-8, 270-pound point forward? That’s ridiculous. I’m 260 pounds, 265 pounds, 6-foot-8, can palm a basketball — can palm a men’s basketball probably as easily as any player in history. I think I had the third-biggest hands in the modern NBA Draft Combine. So, yeah, I’m sure the women’s basketball is going to fare even easier to palm, which is a huge advantage. They’re going to have nightmares, and they should. I really feel like I’m going to be dominant.”

He’s right.

If a WNBA team signs Julie Tétart or any other delusional man, the Minnesota Lynx or any other WNBA team would be foolish to pass on Royce White.

And then other teams will follow suit, until there are no women players left at all, and the WNBA is entirely filled with men and becomes a junior NBA. That will be true gender justice, won’t it, Ms. Reeve?