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We’ll Either Rise As A Collective Or Perish As Individuals: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

We’ll Either Rise As A Collective Or Perish As Individuals: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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Everyone who’s freaking out about wokeness and identity politics can relax. Liberals are 100 percent certain to get bored with that schtick and forget all about it without having helped a single member of any minority or marginalized group. Ask the immigrants and the kids in cages.

Anyone to the left of Ted Cruz is a communist. Anyone who opposes US imperialism loves and supports the governments it targets. Anyone who defends Palestinians hates Jews. Move the Overton window far enough toward your side of the debate and you can spin even the slightest hint of disagreement with you as dangerous extremism.

People who spend their time freaking out about communism are hilarious. Even if you believe communism is always necessarily evil, if you live in the western empire you’re so far from experiencing communism it makes more sense to spend your time fretting about shark attacks or being struck by lightning. If you’re reading this odds are you live in an English-speaking nation. If you live in an English-speaking nation your government is so very, very, very far from espousing communism that it would make more sense for you to spend your time worrying about being eaten by lions.

Even if you believe everything the TV tells you about communism, the simple economic realities of your nation and the mountains of violent force keeping it in place mean that of all the many, many existential threats you can worry about, communism should rank near dead last.

Reverse Batman: A working class ninja spends his nights beating up kleptocratic billionaires whose thievery has created the socioeconomic injustice that’s destroying his city.

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The Assange Issue Is NOT Complicated: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

The Assange Issue Is NOT Complicated: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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The most powerful regime on the planet imprisoning a journalist for journalistic activity is as brazen and obvious an act of tyranny as you could possibly come up with, and yet you still get pseudoleft pundits acting like you’re some kind of weird freak for expecting them to oppose it.

The Assange issue is not actually complicated. The most powerful government in the world is trying to extradite a journalist and try him under the Espionage Act for exposing its war crimes. It is that simple. This isn’t some super complex subject that you defer to the experts on.

That’s one of the things that’s so frustrating about this case. It’s such a blatant abuse of government power that virtually everyone would normally be ideologically opposed to it, but because there’s been so much media spin on it for so long people don’t see it.

Don’t imprison journalists for exposing the truth. I mean, like, duh. This should really be such a mainstream issue that fringey types like myself would see no need to focus on it, and if the media environment wasn’t being so despicably manipulated it would be.

China is far, far better than the US. That doesn’t mean China is awesome, it just means the US is far, far worse than anyone else in terms of tyranny and destructiveness. Working to destroy any population which disobeys you anywhere in the world makes you worse than anyone else.

The only reason nobody seems to recognize this in the west is because the US has such phenomenally excellent global narrative control. If it didn’t, the entire world would’ve laughed when the butchers of the Middle East started pretending to care about Muslims in Xinjiang.

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The Corporations Are The Government: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

The Corporations Are The Government: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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You’d think the revelation that the CIA planned to assassinate an award-winning journalist for journalistic activity would have been a bigger deal.

Capitalism hinders progress because it ensures that all mass-scale human behavior will be driven by the pursuit of profit. For example, a huge global issue we have right now is cleaning up the pollution in our oceans. That is an easily solved issue if you take out the profit motive; you don’t wait for market forces to find some way to make it profitable, you just get in there and clean it up. But with the profit motive it’s almost impossible to conceive of it ever being solved.

How often have you been excited by a great idea only to feel that familiar disappointment wash over you as you realize that it will never happen because it won’t make anyone any money? That’s how the profit motive stunts innovation.

The profit motive will never find a way to leave a forest alone or minerals in the ground. There’s no business plan that makes money out of moms being paid to bring up healthy, happy, secure children. You can’t find a way to make money out of people driving less or buying less. There is no money in curing an illness, only treating it. There is no money in solving poverty, only in setting up a multi-million dollar “charity” that never actually intends to solve poverty because it’s a business and a business requires endless expansion.

People who proffer the market as a solution to our massive problems have either never really thought about the restrictions of the profit motive, or they are heavily invested in pretending those restrictions don’t exist. I don’t respect either of those positions.

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People Don’t Understand How Unfree We Already Are

People Don’t Understand How Unfree We Already Are

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The biggest and most widespread blind spot among those who oppose totalitarian control by the powerful is the assumption that it has not already been achieved.

We’ve been so busy watching out for the next overtly totalitarian dictatorship that wants to put the jackboot on our necks we never noticed the covert totalitarians sliding the shackles around our minds.

Everyone thinks about the abusers who beat their spouses, but not the abusers who dominate their spouses’ minds with psychological manipulation.

Everyone thinks about psychopathic killers prowling the streets, but not the psychopathic killers who rule our world via mass-scale manipulation.

Conspiracy analysts warn that the government is trying to give everyone a social credit score to force us all to comply with the agendas of the powerful, in nations where mass-scale narrative management through the media and online algorithms already manipulates everyone into complying with the agendas of the powerful.

People assume that they aren’t already behaving exactly how the powerful want them to behave within a civilization whose political, monetary and economic systems are already completely under the control of the powerful.

People think they are free just because they can go and buy whatever they want in an economy rigged for the powerful using money rigged for the powerful, because they can say whatever they want on internet platforms whose algorithms are manipulated by the powerful, because they can vote for a politician who only got on the ballot by being owned by the powerful.

People think they are free because the system let them elect a “populist” like Donald Trump, even after that “populist” spent four years doing nothing but advancing the interests of the powerful.

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Talkin’ About Armageddon: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Talkin’ About Armageddon: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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The fact that our world is hurtling toward man-made obliteration on multiple fronts should probably occupy more of our conversational bandwidth than it does.

My basic overall position is that humanity is about to end itself via climate chaos or nuclear war due to global capitalism and oligarchic imperialism, that propaganda prevents people from rising up to stop this, and our only path out is a mass-scale psychological transformation.

If you’ve ever been curious why I don’t write more about this or that subject, it’s usually because the above is my area of focus. Everything I write points to this in some way. That’s what I do here.

There are a lot of narratives circulating about what’s really happening between the US and China and whether the aggressions are actually as dangerous as they seem, and all of these narratives are rendered moot by the undeniable buildup of US military weaponry around China.

If you’re more concerned about China’s domestic affairs than your own country’s aggressive foreign policy toward China it’s because you’ve been propagandized. Change your media consumption habits accordingly.

Not even the craziest imperialists want a hot war with China. They’d much rather China to bow and be absorbed into the US-centralized empire as so many other nations before, or to collapse and fragment after a decades-long subversion campaign à la the USSR. In that order.

The empire will happily make life miserable for Chinese people in coming decades to pressure Beijing into accepting that it’s in the people’s interests that the PRC kiss the ring. The problem of course is that China will be resisting these maneuvers in ways that can easily blow up in catastrophic ways…

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Propaganda Scrambles Our Minds: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Propaganda Scrambles Our Minds: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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America is a unipolar superpower governed by octogenarians who work for corporations and banks where military weapons are made by prison slaves to be launched at impoverished foreigners while celebrities attend lavish galas and police guard food in dumpsters from the homeless.

Propaganda warps people’s perspectives so drastically their own opinions don’t even adhere to the values they’ll tell you they hold. A liberal will get angrier about a random member of the public circulating a conspiracy theory than about government agencies killing children with bombs. Political Twitter got angrier about Joe Rogan taking ivermectin than the Pentagon murdering an entire Afghan family and lying about it. All sense of proportion and perspective has been scrambled.

Facebook has had a two-tiered system where famous people won’t be censored or suspended for posts normal people would be. Politicians and celebrities freely ignore mask rules while their servants are forbidden to. They all think they’re better than us, and our systems agree with them.

 

If you rise to a position of influence in the western world you will immediately find yourself surrounded by people who are very interested in making sure you support status quo power structures, whether you’re a celebrity, a politician, or a social media executive.

It’s weird how nobody’s even saying the vaccine isn’t working as well as they’d hoped it would. You’re not even allowed to say that. Everyone’s really disappointed but they’re pretending they’re not because anything but 100 percent big-smile cheerleading gets you branded an anti-vaxxer. Everyone’s gotta do this weird, super tense, phoney happy smiley dance about how perfect and not-at-all-disappointing the vaccine is, because being truthful about how disappointed you feel hurts the vaccination campaign and therefore means you’re worse than Hitler.

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Manufacturing Dystopia: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Manufacturing Dystopia: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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We live in a world of manufactured lack, manufactured enemies, manufactured crises and manufactured consent. We’ve had sufficient resources to care for everyone for generations. All our wars are based on lies. All our problems are cooked up by a few psychos with too much power.

Ever since he came to Australia my American husband still finds it strange to see a parrot out in the open instead of sitting in a cage. I feel much the same whenever I see George W Bush.

The capitalist class has never voluntarily returned anything it has stolen from the working class; every time it manages to give people less it never reverses it, no matter how much greater profits become. Capitalism is never going to get less abusive. It will only grow more so.

If there were good billionaires they wouldn’t still be billionaires.

It’s impossible to be a good billionaire, not just because it’s immoral to remain that wealthy in a world full of need and because all billionaires are parasitic middlemen siphoning the profits off other people’s labor, but also because in order to obtain that much wealth you generally have to manipulate the actual movement of human civilization to your benefit in some way.

“You’re anti-American!”

No I’m anti-war, anti-militarism, anti-empire, anti-ecocide, anti-oligarchy, anti-capitalism and anti nuclear brinkmanship. It just happens that the US is at the center of a globe-spanning power structure that is the worst offender on all these fronts by an extremely wide margin.

The most evil and destructive things Trump did as president weren’t the Trumpian things but the American things. The things his predecessors and his successor are also guilty of doing.

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The World’s Deadliest Terrorist Group: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

The World’s Deadliest Terrorist Group: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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The CIA just casually discussed sinking a boat full of Cuban refugees and planting bombs in Miami and blaming Castro, but you’re bat shit crazy if you suspect such agencies may have had similar discussions about other geostrategic situations and decided to go through with it.

There’s more public criticism of ordinary people taking ivermectin than there is of planet-dominating power structures driving humanity to armageddon.

Nobody who supports internet censorship does so because they’re worried they themselves might consume dangerous words and believe them, it’s always to protect other people from dangerous words. It’s about the most megalomaniacal, emotionally stunted desire anyone could possibly have.

They see themselves as responsible adults who can be trusted to independently sort out truth from falsehood, but see other people as infants who cannot be trusted to do this. This is nothing other than garden variety narcissism.

Internet censorship via monopolistic government-tied tech corporations isn’t just a problem because of free speech issues, it’s a problem because the way it’s applied is completely uneven and power-serving: politicians and the mass media circulate disinformation constantly without ever being censored. It’s not just silencing people, it’s actually shifting power upwards.

There is no path forward for humanity on this planet without complete female reproductive sovereignty.

Imagine if the world’s deadliest terrorist group got their hands on drones and cruise missiles and nuclear warheads and aircraft carriers and circled the planet with hundreds of military bases and began waging wars and destroying any country which disobeyed their dictates.

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Divide And Brainwash: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Divide And Brainwash: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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In 2016 the most corrupt and murderous government on earth dealt with public discontent by selling a sociopathic billionaire as the anti-establishment presidential candidate, then in 2020 sold a lifelong empire lackey as the revolutionary people’s uprising against that candidate.

“You want a revolution? Here. Here’s a revolution for you to have. There. Done. Glad you got that out of your system.”

– Set up an imperialist oligarchy which rules as tyrannically as any monarch.

– Remain hidden and unaccountable.

– Propagandize people into thinking they’re free.

– Whenever there’s unrest due to systemic injustices, let them elect one of your employees who promises to change things.

The imperialist oligarchy deliberately keeps the public poor, busy and confused and then directs their resulting anger toward Russia, China, immigrants, and people from the other political party. Our anger at each other protects them from our anger landing where it belongs.

Propagandists know you don’t need to give the average person factual reasons to believe something. You don’t even need to give them financial reasons. All you need is to make sure your claim validates their current worldview. Rigidly-held belief structures facilitate propaganda.

Americans will happily give Israel billions of dollars a year to murder Palestinian civilians and then brush off a panhandler on the street because he might spend the money on booze.

Israel is getting another Prime Minister who was partly raised and educated in the United States with extensive ties to US power and speaks English with an American accent. Stop acting like these are two separate countries.

The US power alliance’s genocide in Yemen remains the single ugliest thing that is happening in our world today. What will it take for humanity to cease averting its eyes from this horror?

Enlisting in the US military should be infinitely more taboo and shameful than being a sex worker.

Until mass media was invented the best carrying agent for establishment propaganda was religion.

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If You Believed Something Else, You Wouldn’t Be Sitting Here: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

If You Believed Something Else, You Wouldn’t Be Sitting Here: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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It sure is interesting how stuff keeps happening that makes free speech on the internet something dangerous which must be curtailed. Covid, the Capitol riot, Russian propaganda, all of which just happen to require tightening restrictions on our single best tool against the powerful.

Had online platforms not agreed to curtail speech in alignment with the US empire, they would with 100 percent certainty have been broken up by antitrust cases and been replaced by other monopolistic companies that would censor in alignment with imperial interests.

You’re not permitted to ascend to power within the system unless you cooperate with existing power structures. If you don’t, you’ll be stopped in your tracks and replaced with someone who will.

A rookie journalist who doesn’t advance narratives favorable to US imperialism will keep getting called to the editor’s desk until they get the message. When rookie social media sites first showed up it was the same thing, except instead of the editor’s desk, it was US congressional hearings.

Western journalists learn very quickly that they can only get published by mainstream outlets by promoting narratives that are favorable to US imperialism. Example:

 

This is how propaganda occurs in the west. It’s not that Jeff Bezos emails Washington Post reporters saying “Promote US wars!”, it’s that only reporters who support imperialism see their articles published and their careers rise. As Noam Chomsky famously said in an interview with Andrew Marr, “If you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”

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Reject Mainstream Culture: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Reject Mainstream Culture: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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Hey remember when we learned that the CIA unilaterally funds its own clandestine operations via drug trafficking without the permission or oversight of any elected body and then everyone went “meh” and forgot about it?

It’s strange how many westerners who grew up watching Star Wars still side with the evil empire on every foreign conflict.

A foreign policy perspective which does not begin with and account for the fact that the US government is the most powerful and destructive force on earth, and that its behaviors are aggressive instead of defensive in nature, is a foreign policy perspective based on fantasy.

People tell me, “You just hate America!”

I don’t even know what this means. What specifically is it that I hate? The people? The dirt the country is built on? Or is it possible that my actual target is the most powerful and destructive government in the world and the oligarchy which runs it?

“I hate the USA” is as nonsensical a statement as “I love the USA”; the land that label points to is so vast and its people so diverse that nobody can have any emotional relationship with it. Beyond that it’s a just collection of conceptual constructs which exist only in our imagination.

 

Americans: Help!

Republicans: Fuck you.

Democrats: We need to come together and have a conversation about the help you need because these things take time and there’s a process and really it’s not just about the what it’s also about the how and the how sometimes gets lost in the what of the how of the how what how…

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Obama Is An Asshole, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Obama Is An Asshole, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

US empire: Assassinates scientists, invades countries, topples governments, circles the planet with military bases, deliberately starves civilians to death with sanctions, threatens the world with nuclear weapons.

Also the US empire: “Iran must begin acting like a normal country.”

Obama’s job is to tell you that the ruling establishment which murders, oppresses and exploits people all day every day is quite progressive actually and the people who oppose it are immature lunatics who should be scoffed at.

If you killed someone that’s all you’d be known for. When a US president kills thousands upon thousands of people all mainstream discourse is about his sound fiscal policy and ability to sink a three-pointer.

Nice guy fascism: A murderous and tyrannical political ideology whose iron-fisted agendas of oppression, exploitation and violent domination are hidden behind lip service to progressivism, diverse cabinet picks, and nice tweets.

The powerful are screwing us and there are more of us than there are of them. An entire culture and information ecosystem has been deliberately constructed around keeping a critical mass of us from awakening to this one basic fact.

Any issue of international conflict involving the US-centralized empire is going to be awash with western media propaganda marketed to western audiences. No one who ignores this indisputable reality is able to understand any major international news story.

It’s so weird how rich and powerful people are pouring massive amounts of wealth and manpower into manipulating our minds every single day and it’s not the main thing we talk about all the time.

Biden is like if everyone suddenly started gushing poetically about how wonderful and refreshing and inclusive the Chevron logo is.

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Seven Countries In Five Years: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Seven Countries In Five Years: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Part of the problem is that the most influential voices are people for whom the status quo has worked out well. Celebrities. Politicians. Pundits. Plutocrats. Meanwhile those who’ve been crushed by existing systems are voiceless. This creates the illusion that those systems work.

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People often (correctly) cite General Wesley Clark’s famous “seven countries in five years” statement to show how evil the drivers of the US empire are, but I also like to use it to show what dumb, incompetent failmeisters they are. They really thought they’d be able to topple all those countries in five years. Nineteen years later and they’re still flailing. Don’t be intimidated by these assholes.

Humanity is more than capable of standing up to these sick fucks. They overestimate themselves and underestimate the rest of us. We shouldn’t do the same. A lot of people talk about elite manipulators like they’re these unstoppable, god-like forces when nothing could be further from the truth.

Our species is in its current situation because a few primates without functioning empathy centers got a little more clever than the other primates. That’s it. There are still vast forces in our universe and within each of us that can slap the empire away like a sand castle under a tsunami. They’re little kids riding a temporary wave through a universe that they do not understand. There are changes and upheavals coming that they won’t be able to control any more than a hang glider in a tornado.

Everyone with an ear to the ground has a suspicion that the elite manipulators are up to something big, but just because they’re planning something doesn’t mean they will succeed. There are forces bubbling to the surface right now which their sociopathic little minds cannot anticipate.

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The Undoing Of Illusions: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

The Undoing Of Illusions: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Governments have obscenely well-funded intelligence agencies that are literally dedicated to orchestrating secret conspiracies around the world, but if you say they might be conspiring in some part of the world people call you a mentally ill conspiracy theorist.

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The fact that the Phoenix Program existed is by itself an unassailable argument for permanently dismantling the entire CIA.

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A political establishment which thinks it’s crazy and extremist to reduce a $740 billion military budget by 10 percent is a political establishment that should not exist.

A political establishment which thinks it’s crazy and extremist to reduce a $740 billion military budget by 10 percent can never and will never lead to a sane world.

A political establishment which thinks it’s crazy and extremist to reduce a $740 billion military budget by 10 percent has no business calling its members “moderate” or “centrist”.

A political establishment which thinks it’s crazy and extremist to reduce a $740 billion military budget by 10 percent is a crazy and extremist political establishment.

A political establishment which thinks it’s crazy and extremist to reduce a $740 billion military budget by 10 percent is too crazy and extremist to be permitted to exist.

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Democrats and Republicans are like male and female starfish; it’s hard to tell them apart unless you’re one of them.

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The modern US imperial war machine kills more like a python than a tiger, placing less emphasis on the full-scale ground invasions of the Bush era and more on slowly suffocating the life out of targeted nations using sanctions, blockades, coups, psyops and CIA-backed uprisings.

This is one reason to be dismissive of Trump supporters who say he “hasn’t started any new wars”. What they mean is he hasn’t done any old school ground invasions. He’s still attacking and killing with sanctions and blockades and imperiling the world with cold war escalations.

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Revolutionary Boiling Point, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Revolutionary Boiling Point, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Still mad at China’s brutal authoritarian government for imprisoning Julian Assange after his journalism exposed Chinese war crimes.

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Arresting people for future crimes is called “pre-crime”, and it’s the stuff of dystopian horror fiction.

Violently dominating an entire planet because another country might hurt yours in the future is called “US foreign policy”, and it’s the stuff of mainstream news punditry.

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Saying a US politician is bad on foreign policy but good on domestic policy is a bit like saying “Yeah my boyfriend murders hitchhikers, but he cooks.”

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Dominant revolutionary thought consistently fails to adequately appreciate the power of oligarchic propaganda and its ability to manipulate the way people think, act and vote. Until this changes, there will be no revolution.

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I was upset the Democrats nominated a candidate with a decades-long track record of reactionary warmongering corporate cronyism, but I changed my mind when I learned he has a “task force” where vaguely left-wing voices are allowed to speak words into a hole in the ground.

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“Obamagate” will not lead to anything. Since 2016 both mainstream US parties have been saying the other party is about to be obliterated any minute now by scandalous revelations, and they’re always wrong. Both parties are pure swamp; you cannot use the swamp to drain the swamp.

If you still believe that one of America’s two mainstream parties is about to be brought to its knees by earth-shattering revelations any minute now, I highly recommend you also take up watching WWE, because you’ll definitely love it.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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