I thought often during the latter Trump years about the contrast with Barack Obama's "stray voltage" strategy, which involved saying provocative and often flatly untrue things to prompt discussion of Obama's preferred topics for political gain.

The coming year will see Biden Democrats walking slowly through a vast field of small businesses exhausted by the battle with the coronavirus, shooting any who can still move. Big Tech will hold a pillow over the faces of those who cry out too loudly.

The destruction of the independent American middle class is one of the highest policy goals of the hard Left. It is finally at hand, thanks to the coronavirus and its political aftershocks. A year ago, they could not have dreamed they would get such a perfect kill shot.

A true middle class has economic interests that run counter to command economics, confiscatory taxation, centralized power, and other features of socialism. It also has the numbers to protect those interests at the ballot box. Of COURSE the Left hates it and wants to subdue it.

Small business is the vital engine of middle class prosperity, and the specific enemy the Left hates the most. Small business owners - and their sharpest, most ambitious employees - place a high value on capitalist freedom and competitiveness. They know the value of a dollar.

The small business experience is defined by the atmosphere of competitiveness that statism and socialism are sworn to destroy. Local enterprises appear quickly in response to demand that cannot easily be seen by distant central planners. Entrepreneurship requires agility.

Xi Jinping's speech at Davos boiled down to: The world has no choice but to do business with China, and if you want to do business with China, you need to stop criticizing our tyranny and questioning our lies about the

Xi's address to the World Economic Forum will serve as well as any other moment for historians to mark the beginning of the Authoritarian Era. He said nothing new, but he restated the narratives and demands of Chinese fascism from a post-pandemic position of aggressive strength.

For the first time, Xi spoke to a world that is beginning to accept the tenets of authoritarianism, thanks to the incredible political and economic damage from China's coronavirus. China's ideals have become as viral as Covid-19.

Thanks to the pandemic, the political elites of the world now universally see their citizens as dangerous mobs that must be tightly controlled for their own good. Most of them always thought that way, but now they can say it openly and act aggressively on their prejudices.

Xi clearly stated that China will not be contained, censured, or judged for its actions. He denounced Western ideals of human rights as "arrogance" and imperialism. After Covid and Biden's inauguration, he sees no nation with the strength or will to thwart China's ambitions.

It's funny how so many people who claim to worship "democracy" also dismiss nationalism as selfish xenophobia. Democracy is absolutely meaningless without strong national sovereignty. Under globalism, citizens of any given state have little influence over how they are governed.

Nationalism isn't just mindless tribalism. People are correct to insist their government has a responsibility TO THEM that vastly outweighs any imagined responsibility to foreign governments they have absolutely no influence over, or foreign populations.

We've seen that point taken to absurd extremes by the Left during the Trump administration, with whack-job judges ruling that foreigners have rights that EXCEED those of American citizens, including absolute rights to enter the U.S. and influence its government.

And we're frequently told that some international elite "consensus" completely overrides our ability to make individual decisions - or even to petition our own government, or vote for representatives who disagree with whatever "the world" has supposedly decided.

All of that is the absolute negation of "democracy" in any form, including the dangerous mob rule and majoritarianism that the Left selectively advocates. (Notice they always have a list of things nobody gets to vote on anymore, no matter how strong the majority vote would be.)

The amazing thing about the era of filmmaking that ended with "Wonder Woman 1984" is that a script that dumb and joyless could get past dozens of people without anyone pumping the brakes before a firehose of funding was sprayed over the project.

The most entertaining thing about WW84 is the press tour where the filmmakers pretend to be creative geniuses who learned *so much* from the failings of the vastly superior original film, especially its climactic showdown.

"The studio forced us to wrap the first movie up with a loud, cartoony CGI smackdown!" they cried... then delivered a sequel that ends with an even more cartoony and pointless CGI smackdown, followed by half an hour of Wonder Woman explaining why cheating and selfishness are bad.

How do you come off a surprisingly popular, breezy, entertaining movie that began the turnaround for a flagging zillion-dollar franchise and decide the sequel should be a first-grade morality lesson with the logic of a Care Bears cartoon that's longer than a Tolkien film?

Presumably it's because everyone involved decided they had something Very Important to say about the hellish 80s Decade of Greed that would be Highly Relevant for modern audiences, even though many people involved in the production are too young to remember the 80s.

Is it possible to fight against totalitarian statists without ever compromising conservative "principles?" Is it better to play "fair," and constantly lose? Can you grapple with monsters without becoming a monster? That's the question at the heart of the schism on the Right.

1) Now learning about #GESARA and #NESARA. Starting to look like #Trump might have actually prepared the way for their implementation. A crucial step is getting nation off debt based system controlled by central banks and reclaiming control with gold-backed currency.

2) That's why I'm looking at ScoMo's much derided use of phrase "#goldstandard" in a new light. Remember that he made this comment about #NSWpol's handling of #COVID19AU back in September, saying "that is where we have to get everybody to":

3) ScoMo used phrase several times. In clip below (Dec): "NSW Govt's testing and tracing capabilities are #goldstandard not just in this country but anywhere around the world." So, local and global reference. #NESARA is USA, #GESARA is global.

4) In this clip (late Sept) he uses it again, specifically in reference to how #Victoria is catching up to NSW, which he believes is #goldstandard in #contacttracing. (In first clip above he also used it in comparing systems of these two states.)

5) Given that so much of what we see and hear in social and mainstream media from blue checks is coded comms, was this repeated use of distinctive and seemingly antiquated phrase another example? Was he giving heads up to *those in the know* that this system was imminent?

Much like the Gulf War, Trump's presidency never happened. Yes, there were soldiers in Kuwait, and there was a man named Donald Trump in the white house, but there was never a war, and there was never a presidency.

Trumpism was a bubble, and on Wednesday, it popped. In 2016, it felt like the beginning of a new American nationalism. Without Trump, that "movement" dies. Will those embers merely fade, or can the fire be rekindled?

If you want to transform the world, or your country, you cannot fuel your movement on discontent, nor on reasonableness. No, transformation can only be built on a foundation of extravagant hope

Gold toilets aside, Trump never had extravagance, in fact he had no content at all. He was the first fully post-modern president; what he did was so filtered through media that there's no effective difference between what happened and what the media says happened

We projected our dreams onto Donald Trump. A successful mass movement requires belief in an infallible leader or an irresistible doctrine. There is no mass movement without a little delusion (we call it a little delusion) "Reasonable" people can't effect big change

Trump’s belief that he will be reinstated, alongside Flynn’s hope for a coup underscores how patently absurd these 2024’ers sound when they say what we really need is some sterilized version of Trumpism, or Trumpism with a smile.

A smile won’t fix it. There’s no silver lining.

Trumpism threatens our constitutional system by its nature—the threat is what fuels it. There is no “middle way.” You are either with it or against it. It doesn’t offer ideas. It doesn’t want a debate. It doesn’t even want an election. It just wants power at any cost. Defeat it.