Dominoes Falling As Biden Admin Deals With Twin Energy Crisis In Russia, Middle East 

Dominoes Falling As Biden Admin Deals With Twin Energy Crisis In Russia, Middle East 

A twin crisis is unfolding for the Biden administration as the US tax-payer-funded Ukrainian military bombs key crude refineries deep within Russian territory with suicide drones. The administration has pleaded with the Ukranians to halt strikes on Russian energy infrastructure as this will only contribute to tightening global supplies and push energy prices higher, as well as inflation in the US, hurting Biden’s re-election odds. 

Now for the other crisis that’s unfolding in the Middle East: US Vice President Kamala Harris told ABC’s “This Week” that a major attack on the Gazan city of Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians have sought refuge, “would be a huge mistake.” 

“We have been clear in multiple conversations and in every way that any major military operation in Rafah would be a huge mistake,” Harris said.

She added: “I have studied the maps – there’s nowhere for those folks to go. And we’re looking at about a million and a half people in Rafah who are there because they were told to go there.”

Harris was asked whether there would be “consequences” from the US on an Israeli counteroffensive in Rafah. She responded, “I am ruling out nothing.”

This comes as The Jerusalem Post said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior officials say an operation into the southern Gazan city is “imminent.” 

Bloomberg quoted Israeli intelligence that estimate about 5,000 to 8,000 Hamas fighters are in Rafah. 

As we’ve explained before, in the note titled Terrified” Joe Biden Demands Ukraine Halt Strikes On Russian Refiners As It Is Sending Oil Prices Surging,” Biden’s foreign policy has been and always been about crude markets. 

So, of course, the administration would march the clueless VP onto ABC yesterday to give Irasel a public warning about the consequences of launching a counteroffensive against Hamas in Rafah, because it’s not entirely about the poor Palestinians, but the prospect of a much wider conflict that could send crude prices into parabolic trajectories, thus reigniting US inflation and continuing to weigh on re-election odds. 

Rapidan Energy Group wrote in a recent note that the “Axis of Resistance” (Iranian proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen) is “likely to intensify its attacks as Israel moves forward with the ground offensive in Rafah.”  

“Israel would likely wait until the IDF consolidates control over Rafah and the Philadelphia corridor before risking a major confrontation with Hezbollah,” Rapidan noted. 

An invasion of Rafah could be the beginning of a series of dominoes that spark several powder kegs in the region that would put US troops at risk once again. Recall when three US Army troops were killed and more than 30 injured in a drone attack in Jordan earlier this year. A restart of these types of attacks is at high risk after Israel attacks Rafah. 

Last month, Rapidan raised its odds of a major Israeli military offensive in Lebanon from 30% to 40%. However, they “expect overall Israel-Hezbollah tensions will remain contained and that a diplomatic agreement will avert a major conflict.” 

Given these mounting uncertainties in the Middle East and Russia, it’s only a matter of time before traders focus their attention on the Saudi Aramco Abqaiq Plants (read: “The Weaponization Of Crude Could Trigger The Next Financial Shock”), the largest crude stabilization plant in the world, as it could be in the crosshairs of Iran-backed Houthis. 

Crude markets are starting to pay attention as war risk premiums are being priced in. 

Tyler Durden
Tue, 03/26/2024 – 06:55

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Church Of England Archdeacon Openly Calls For “Anti-Whiteness”

Church Of England Archdeacon Openly Calls For “Anti-Whiteness”

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

A Church of England archdeacon has been labelled racist after openly calling for “anti-whiteness.”

The Ven Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, Archdeacon of Liverpool wrote on X “I went to a conference on whiteness last autumn. It was very good, very interesting and made me realise: whiteness is to race as patriarchy is to gender.”

Threlfall-Holmes, who is white, added “So yes, let’s have anti-whiteness, and let’s smash the patriarchy. That’s not anti-white, or anti-men, it’s anti-oppression.”

I went to a conference on whiteness last autumn. It was very good, very interesting and made me realise: whiteness is to race as patriarchy is to gender.
So yes, let’s have anti whiteness, & let’s smash the patriarchy.
That’s not anti-white, or anti-men, it’s anti-oppression.

— Miranda Threlfall-Holmes (@MirandaTHolmes) March 21, 2024

[Miss Threlfall-Holmes has since switched her X feed to private.]

Anti-whiteness isn’t anti-white? What exactly is it then?

When asked to explain by The Telegraph, Threlfall-Holmes claimed that X is “perhaps not the best place for a nuanced argument,” adding “I was contributing to a debate about world views, in which ‘whiteness’ does not refer to skin colour per se, but to a way of viewing the world where being white is seen as ‘normal’ and everything else is considered different or lesser.”

The backlash was swift:

The Telegraph notes that the conference the Archdeacon is referring to was a day-long “Racial Justice Conference” in Birmingham organised by Reconciliation Initiatives, a charity working in partnership with Coventry Cathedral to help churches “contribute to reconciliation in wider society”.

The report further notes that the conference aimed “To encourage white participants to take next steps in facing their own whiteness, and in addressing institutional racism within Anglican churches and provinces.”

The group is also running a four-week long course titled “Being White” which asks clergy and lay members to consider “the ways we are caught up in a system of white superiority and white advantage in UK society.”

The Church of England has been heavily criticised recently for leaning into this kind of stuff.

The church recently announced it would be hiring a “deconstructing whiteness” officer to form part of a “racial justice unit” being set up by the Diocese of Birmingham.

In 2023 the CofE also established a £100 million fund to “address past wrongs of slavery,” even as some church buildings are literally falling apart.

In 2021, the CofE announced it was introducing quotas for black and ethnic clergy to pave the way for ‘anti-racism training’ in the Church, as well as ‘contextualising church statues that may cause offence.”

The CofE has become so infested with wokery in general to the point that it has considered dropping the phrase “our Father” from the start of the Lord’s Prayer, and instructing clergy to refrain from using male pronouns when talking about God.

Some churches have gone as far as erasing references to the nativity and Jesus in a Christmas carol and replacing them with a celebration of “queer” people.

In July last year, the Church of England refused to define what a woman was, saying they had no definition of it on their books, despite still ostensibly opposing same sex marriage.

Also last year, a vicar was officially rebuked for expressing criticism of the CofE’s decision to appoint a transgender archdeacon, after he noted that the person is “biologically, a bloke.”

*  *  *

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Tyler Durden
Tue, 03/26/2024 – 06:30

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Where The EU Exports Its Waste

Where The EU Exports Its Waste

The European Union exported 32.1 million tonnes of waste to non-EU countries in 2022according to Eurostat.

This is a slight decline from the 33.0 million tonnes of waste exports to these countries in 2021. 

As Statista’s Anna Fleck reports, Turkey was the primary destination country for EU waste that year with some 12.4 million tonnes sent there, accounting to 39 percent of the total exports of waste.

Infographic: Where The EU Exports Its Waste | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

India received the second highest quantity of EU waste that year, receiving some 3.5 million tonnes in total.

It was followed by the United Kingdom and Switzerland, with 2.0 and 1.6 million tonnes, respectively.

Tyler Durden
Tue, 03/26/2024 – 05:45

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Lockdown’s Fourth Birthday

Lockdown’s Fourth Birthday

Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,

Last weekend marked four years to the day since the UK went into “lockdown” for the first time.

What an exciting time that was, right? With the pan-banging and the curve-flattening and the Spirit of the Blitz living on. Good times.

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s team decided to honour the occasion by slapping themselves on the back:

Needless to say, this is revisionism of the highest order. To quote my favourite reply, it’s the “gaslightiest gaslight I’ve ever been gaslit by”.

The furlough system did not “save the economy”. The economy was not saved. Rather, it was laid out on a stone table and slowly flayed with a sharpened flint.

We are all still living with the consequences of lockdown, not just in the UK but globally. The world over, hundreds of millions of people have been plunged into extreme poverty by so-called “anti-Covid measures”.

Billions more are worse off, paying more for almost every product and service, and struggling in general.

It’s important to remember this was the point.

As we wrote in our piece addressing Covid revisionism last year:

The poverty, the depression, despair. The shuttered stores and closed hospitals and bankrupt businesses. They were all predictable, and all deliberate. They knew that’s what would happen…that’s what it was for. That’s why “Covid” was invented. Lockdown was not a policy mistake, it was a policy success.

Lockdowns killed more people than they saved. Lockdowns doubled global child poverty.

Lockdown doesn’t work, it never worked and it wasn’t supposed to work.

And the only thing more nauseating than the anti-human trolls pushing it at the time, are the same anti-human trolls re-writing history since, claiming lockdowns were a mistake or a panic reaction, or that no one could have known how much damage they would do.

As we wrote in our piece marking Lockdown’s first birthday:

Too often soft language in the media talks about “misjudgments” or “mistakes” or “incompetence”. Supposed critics claim the government “panicked” or “over-reacted”. That is nonsense. The easiest, cheesiest excuse that has ever existed.

“Whoops”, they say, with an emphatic shrug and shit-eating grin “I guess we done messed up!”. Unflattering, but better than the truth.

Because the truth is that the government isn’t mistaken or scared or stupid…they are malign. And dishonest. And cruel.

All the suffering of lockdown was entirely predictable and deliberately imposed. For reasons that have nothing to do with helping people and everything to do with controlling them.

It’s been more than apparent for most of the last fifty-two weeks that the agenda of lockdown was not public health, but laying the groundwork for the “new normal” and “the great reset”.

A series of programmes designed to completely undercut civil liberties all across the world, reversing decades (if not centuries) of social progress. A re-feudalisation of society, with the 99% cheerfully taking up their peasant smocks “to protect the vulnerable”, whilst the elite proselytise about the worth of rules they happily admit do not apply to them.

Lockdown was not a policy mistake it was murder.

This revisionism isn’t just about protecting reputations or saving face, of course, but about establishing a couple of important new “truths”:

  1. Lockdowns are responsible for post-Covid excess deaths, NOT the experimental “vaccines”.

  2. Lockdowns were so bad that we need to do anything we can to avoid using them for the next pandemic, including vaccine mandates and quarantine camps.

In the future we may see another lockdown – for terrorism or climate or “disease X” – but we might not. It might be we never see another lockdown again.

Either way, it’s a policy which realised its goal.

Massive unemployment. Massive misery. Massive state-overreach. Normalizing Orwellian police raids for private actions on private property, increasing snitch culture, and promoting fear and resentment of your neighbours.

Drugs, depression, suicide up. Prosperity happiness and freedom down.

And most importantly, they now know they can get away with it. They wanted to see what we would do, and for the most part the answer was “nothing”.

It was a test, and most people failed.

As I wrote two days before lockdown was announced in 2020:

“Special powers” don’t go away. They are not temporary, they won’t be surrendered. Everything we give the government our permission to do, they will do. For the foreseeable.

And now CBDCs and edible insects and 15 minute cities are on the way. They will continue to do what they want, because they think we’ll continue to let them.

Hopefully, next time, we’ll prove them wrong.

Tyler Durden
Tue, 03/26/2024 – 05:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/yGCR8no Tyler Durden

Watch: Huge Bridge In Baltimore Collapses After Container Ship Strike

Watch: Huge Bridge In Baltimore Collapses After Container Ship Strike

Shocking footage is coming from Baltimore City, home to the nation’s largest port facilities for specialized cargo (roll-on/roll-off ships) and passenger cruise ships. It shows a container ship striking the 1.6-mile-long Francis Scott Key Bridge and collapsing it. 

Here’s another view of the container ship strike. 

According to the ship tracking website MarineTraffic, the Singapore-flagged cargo ship “Dali” slammed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge around 0130 ET. 

The bridge spans the Patapsco River and carries an estimated 11.5 million vehicles annually. This collapse means a major shipping lane in and out of the Port of Baltimore City has been severed. 

With no commercial vessels sailing in and out of Baltimore City anytime soon, this is catastrophic for port operations and could spark major supply chain snarls in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. 

Last year, according to the Maryland government’s website, the Port of Baltimore managed over 52 million tons of international cargo valued at more than $80 billion, ranking it as the ninth busiest port in the United States.

The port supports 15,330 direct jobs and 139,180 jobs in Maryland, according to the Maryland government’s website.

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott’s office posted on X:

“I’m aware of and en route to the incident at the Key Bridge. I have been in contact with Baltimore Fire Chief James Wallace, Gov. Wes Moore (and the county executives of Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties). Emergency personnel are on scene, and efforts are underway.”

*Developing… 

Tyler Durden
Tue, 03/26/2024 – 04:30

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/ApS9CBH Tyler Durden

Nissan Aims To Cut Costs By 30% Simply To Remain Competitive In EVs

Nissan Aims To Cut Costs By 30% Simply To Remain Competitive In EVs

Nissan is the latest manufacturer to aim to cut EV costs in order to keep up with an increasingly competitive and saturated landscape. The company is now seeking to compete with Chinese rivals by slashing costs by 30%, Financial Times reported this weekend.  

Nissan, in collaboration with Renault and recently Honda, faces challenges in China’s auto market, the report notes. After delays, Nissan’s new business plan seeks to boost sales by 1 million units by fiscal 2026, introducing 30 new models, half of which will be EVs or hybrids.

This includes launching eight “new energy” vehicles in China and starting exports of locally made cars next year. In North America, the goal is to increase sales by 330,000 vehicles by 2026, with India becoming a key export hub. Additionally, Nissan aims to release an EV with solid-state batteries by 2028, Financial Times writes. 

Chief executive Makoto Uchida commented: “Faced with extreme market volatility, Nissan is taking decisive actions guided by the new plan to ensure sustainable growth and profitability.”

Nissan’s new strategy follows a notable alliance with Honda to create EVs, marking a shift towards combating the influx of competitive, high-tech models from China, while still working with Renault and Mitsubishi in specific regions.

Despite Renault reducing its stake in Nissan to 15%, its partnership with Nissan persists. The report says that Nissan aims to reduce EV production costs to match those of traditional cars by 2030, tackling the current issue where manufacturers lose approximately $6,000 per EV sold in the U.S. due to high production costs and customer tax credits.

Amidst this, Nissan lowered its annual sales forecast after underperforming in key markets like China, the U.S., and Europe, highlighting a need for improvement especially in the U.S. hybrid market, where it lacks a strong presence.

Similarly, we have noted that auto companies are slashing investment in EVs, as is the case with American auto manufacturers like Ford and GM. We wrote last month that Joe Biden’s vision for EVs across America is in “full collapse”. 

As we wrote then: “Meanwhile, the higher costs are driving automakers away from EVs. And as battery material requirements are set to double by 2027, fulfilling these mandates will be increasingly difficult, putting Biden’s ambitious EV strategy at risk.”

Thinktanks like Brownstone have simply noted that when it comes to EVs, “the great reset didn’t work”. Jeffrey Tucker wrote last month: “In short, the illusions of these horrible policies have come crashing down. It was born of liberty-wrecking policies under the cover of virus control. Every special interest seized the day, including a new generation of industrialists seeking to displace the old ones by force.”

He concluded: “​​​​​​​More and more, it’s obvious what a disaster this was. And yet no one has apologized. Hardly anyone has admitted error. The big shots who wrecked the world are still in power. The rest of us are left holding the bag, and paying very high repair bills for cars that are non-optimal for driving from one town to another and back again in the cold weather that was supposed to be gone by now had the “climate change” prophets been correct.”

Recall, a report from Consumer Reports last year found that electric vehicles have almost 80% more problems and are “generally less reliable” than conventional internal combustion engine cars. 

Tyler Durden
Tue, 03/26/2024 – 04:15

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Government Funded Study Claims Shakespeare Made Theater “Too White, Male, And Cisgender”

Government Funded Study Claims Shakespeare Made Theater “Too White, Male, And Cisgender”

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

A study funded by the British government to the tune of almost a million pounds claims that William Shakespeare, one of foremost the literary icons in history, has been disproportionately represented and has enabled “white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender male narratives” to dominate theatre.

The study, by academics at the University of Roehampton, was funded by the government’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and essentially claims that Shakespeare is not diverse enough.

The Telegraph reports that the overseer of the study, Andy Kesson, complains that “masculinity and nationalism were crucial motivating factors in the rise of Shakespeare as the arbiter of literary greatness” adding that “[w]e need to be much, much more suspicious of Shakespeare’s place in contemporary theatre”.

There are not enough black and brown disabled queer transgender migrants in Shakespeare’s plays apparently.

As a counter to Shakespeare’s lack of diversity, the researchers are staging a production of a play by John Lyly, a playwright around at the same time as Shakespeare but who wasn’t as successful.

The researchers claim that the Lyly play Galatea offers “an unparalleled affirmative and intersectional demographic, exploring feminist, queer, transgender and migrant lives”.

Given that basically none of those things existed when the play was written, anyone in their right mind would conclude that they are not themes in the play, and instead have been crowbarred into it by the ‘academics’ obsessed with pushing their identity nonsense agenda.

Responding to this complete tripe, author Lionel Shriver noted “In Shakespeare’s day, half the European population was white and male. They didn’t have rainbow flags. Being disabled like Richard III was a matter of character rather than politics, and luckily for them no one had ever coined the linguistic abomination ‘cisgender’.”

Shriver further urged that “Still germane because his themes are timeless, Shakespeare will survive even this dogmatic mangling, and his plays will continue to be enjoyed long after today’s ‘intersectional’ performances have foreshortened into a freakish comical footnote in theatrical history.”

Comedian and author Andrew Doyle also commented “There’s a very good reason why Shakespeare is performed frequently and John Lyly barely at all. Shakespeare was by far the superior playwright. Yet again, ideologues are reducing great art to mere mechanisms for the promotion of an ideology.”

“A production of Galatea would be welcome,” Doyle continued, adding “but given that those behind it are already using anachronistic pseudo-religious terms such as ‘cisgender’ suggests that it will be a tedious affair. They evidently believe what they are doing is radical, but virtually all theatre companies today are obsessed with identity and gender, and so this is likely to be just more conformist and insipid propaganda.”

Conservative MP Jane Stevenson of the government’s culture, media and sport committee, said “I’m not sure reducing Galatea to a celebration of all things woke, or knocking Shakespeare for being pale, male and stale is much more than cultural click-bait.”

“Shakespeare’s works have been translated into 100 languages and clearly still resonate with people all over the world. Love, hate, ambition, loss, jealousy – all universal emotions we all still identify with,” Stevenson further declared.

*  *  *

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Tyler Durden
Tue, 03/26/2024 – 03:30

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France Raises Security Risk To Highest Level After Moscow Terror Attack

France Raises Security Risk To Highest Level After Moscow Terror Attack

Starting Sunday night, France raised the nation’s threat level awareness to its highest level of “emergency attack” – which comes two days after the Crocus City Hall attack which took the lives of at least 139 people, and has been claimed by the Islamic State.

President Emmanuel Macron had soon after convened a National Defense and Security Council to discuss the attack and examine France’s exposure to a potential similar terror attack. “Following the attack in Moscow, a Defense and National Security Council was convened this evening at the Elysée by the President of the Republic,” French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal  wrote on X.

AFP

“Given the Islamic State’s claim of responsibility for the attack and the threats weighing on our country, we have decided to raise the Vigipirate posture to its highest level: attack emergency,” Attal continued, according to machine translation. There are three threat levels, and prior to Sunday it had remained at the middle level. 

According to French media, this raised alert level “allows for exceptional security measures such as stepped-up patrols by armed forces in public places like train stations, airports and religious sites.”

It is unclear whether it will remain in effect through this summer, when Paris 2024 Olympic Games – from July 26 to August 11 – will be held, but this is likely.

In the wake of the Moscow attack a number of countries in the West, including the United States, expressed sympathy and solidarity with the Russian attack victims – in a rare moment of positive feelings conveyed amidst the Ukraine war.

Moscow has signaled it is ready and willing to restore counter-terrorism cooperation agreements with Europe, after these were initially severed as a result of the war in Ukraine.

On Monday, Italy joined France in raising its security level, as the country is headed into Easter Sunday this weekend. “Both surveillance and checks will be increased, paying the most attention to the places of greatest aggregation and transit of people, as well as sensitive targets,” Italy’s Interior Ministry announced.

While the Kremlin has acknowledged that ISIS-K is issuing statements owning up to the attack, it has also pointed the finger at Ukraine, alleging that the attackers were seeking to escape into Ukraine territory with government help.

Tyler Durden
Tue, 03/26/2024 – 02:45

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German Doctor Refuses To Treat AfD Politician

German Doctor Refuses To Treat AfD Politician

Via ReMix News,

A doctor in the German state of Baden-Württemberg refuses to treat one of his patients because he is a local politician in the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

The doctor’s decision was reportedly sparked when he saw a photo in the local newspaper of the politician, Heiko Nüßner, at an event for his party’s city association in Lahr. Based on this photo, the doctor told him to find a new practice due to their “clearly different political views.”

Nüßner, who previously served as a Christian Democrat (CDU) politician for 26 years, told Bild newspaper that he was “very surprised by this reaction, as he had never spoken to the doctor about his politics. He described the interaction with the general practitioner as “very undemocratic.”

The AfD politician said, “I was disappointed with the CDU because of its euro and migration policy as well as its exit from nuclear energy. For me, the AfD is the ‘new CDU’ and by no means right-wing extremist.”

The AfD politician suffered an accident three years ago that he left him confined to a wheelchair. When he asked the doctor for a prescription at the beginning of March, he was denied treatment. Nüßner shared a copy of the email exchange shared between him and the doctor, whose name was not disclosed by Nüßner or Bild.

The doctor has responded to Bild, saying that the photo of the politician was only the “icing on the cake.”

“I had already found the patient very unpleasant beforehand, with his demanding and pushy nature,” he said.

According to medical ethicists, denying treatment based on “unpleasant” attitudes or because you do not agree with the politics of your patient does not meet medical standards. However, for patients who represent a threat or a major disturbance to a medical practice, doctors are permitted to deny care, but only if there is no immediate medical threat.

The doctor claimed however that the medication requested by Nüßner was “not vital.”

According to the Bild interview with the doctor, he did want to support any “undemocratic tendencies,” as the AfD is being monitored for extremism by the Office of the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), a powerful domestic spy agency.

He said if the AfD politician needed acute care, he would treat him and anyone else “regardless of their ideology.”

In 2021, AfD candidate Andrea Zürcher also had her general practicioner cancel her care, also in the state of Baden-Württemberg. In Zürcher’s case, the doctor also learned about her political activity from a photo in a local newspaper.

“He said that the relationship of trust had been destroyed as a result and that he could no longer give 100 percent in my treatment,” the woman said, who suffer from a chronic illness.

A third of Germans say they would consider voting for the Alternative for Germany, and a majority of Germans — at least in some polls — say they could support a government coalition that includes the AfD. However, there is still a sizeable share of the population adamantly opposed to the party. In the case of doctors, refusal of treatment is considered a serious ethical quandary. Such cases may increase political polarization in Germany.

Read more here…

Tyler Durden
Tue, 03/26/2024 – 02:00

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Election 2024: It’s The Psychopathology, Stupid

Election 2024: It’s The Psychopathology, Stupid

Authored by Roger L. Simon via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The deeper we get into the 2024 presidential election, the more pathological, in the psychological sense, our society appears.

Dozens of anti-Trump protesters gather in Times Square, New York, on July 26, 2017. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

You could say this psychopathology comes from both sides, but in truth, most of it is from the left in the form of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), which has gone from mere neurosis to full psychosis.

Those things used to be classifiable in the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” published by the American Psychiatric Association, but that tome, revised every five to seven years, has been so politicized itself as to be useless.

Many therapists these days spend their 50-minute hours calming down patients sleepless from the specter of former President Donald Trump while reassuring them that President Joe Biden will be reelected.

Meanwhile, speaking of TDS, the effort to destroy President Trump—if not through incarceration then through bankruptcy cum the humiliation of selling his real estate—has doubled or quadrupled its pace, and all the more so since he appears to be leading in the swing states.

Forget Hitler. After all, the Israelis are so “mistreating” the “innocent” Gaza “civilians,” at least according to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), that comparisons to Alois Schicklgruber are all but passé.

The real bête noir of Western civilization is President Trump. (Second place goes to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.)

“Why” is not the question.

When it comes to TDS, facts are the last thing that matter. It’s about feelings so deep that they approach the primordial. Just ask Letitia James, Fani Willis, Jack Smith, and the vast majority of the employees of mainstream media.

To call our society unhinged is an understatement. The legal system as originally conceived seems no longer to exist. Its current reason for being is to fine President Trump so many millions or billions of dollars that few of us can remember exactly how much it is without having to look it up, multiple times, just to make sure.

No one expresses that better than Mark Steyn, who has suffered financial retribution himself on a smaller, yet significant to mere mortals, scale for having the temerity to question the climate orthodoxy. He wrote the following on SteynOnline on March 19:

“Politics itself is meaningless: cable pundits and radio hosts can yak about polls and policies all they want, but Democrats are pre-litigating the election because they’re pretty confident it’ll work for them. As I wrote a month ago, after (Democrat) Judge Engoron’s decision to fine the (Republican) presidential nominee close to half-a-billion dollars: ‘This Judge [Engoron] is taking it to a whole new level. It’s not very difficult, after all, to ramp up the judgment to a number it would be impossible to get a bond for.’

Justice Arthur Engoron’s decisions seem to come not from reasoned legal judgment but straight from the cerebellum, the part of the brain that controls involuntary survival instincts.

We see this survival obsession across the culture as TDS moves from neurosis to psychosis.

The growing attack on the free speech that once defined our country is arguably one of the strongest manifestations of this illness.

Not surprisingly, we find this appearing in a recent analysis by CNN’s Oliver Darcy:

“Elon Musk is showing the world how radicalized he has become. The billionaire, one of the most consequential figures to walk the Earth, spent another weekend swimming in the right-wing fever swamps of X—a bad habit that was apparent when his interview with Don Lemon was released Monday morning. In the contentious interview, Musk equated moderating dangerous and appalling hate speech to ‘censorship,’ bashed the press for legitimate reporting, assailed DEI programs without supporting evidence, skewered advertisers who fled the X platform last year and yet again gave credence to the racist Great Replacement theory, among other things.”

Well, one man’s “dangerous and appalling hate speech” is another man’s truth. At least that’s the way our founders thought.

It wasn’t until the arrival of President Trump that this was ever really a question. The man has an uncomfortable habit, unlike most politicians, of saying exactly what he’s thinking, often with a humorous twist that clarifies his point.

To the likes of Mr. Darcy and his many allies, this is unconscionable. That makes the CNN analyst the marginally more literate equivalent of Justice Engoron.

The more President Trump threatens to win the election, the further into the realm of psychological disturbance these people will go.

Whether the economy would improve, whether public safety would be better, and whether the world would be more peaceful are all irrelevant to them.

The most rational part of their otherwise aberrant behavior is fear for their jobs. In cases such as Mr. Darcy’s and Justice Engoron’s, that too is irrelevant. Mr. Darcy would do fine, perhaps better than ever, as an opposition journalist, and Justice Engoron, like it or not, has a lifetime position that, despite the highly justifiable enmity of President Trump, is almost certain to be preserved.

All this and spring has barely arrived. As we plunge into summer, things are likely to heat up to extraordinary temperatures; not because of global warming, but through and because of this psychopathology.

Let’s hope they cool, at least somewhat, before reaching a boil.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 03/25/2024 – 23:40

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/NE50hYH Tyler Durden