The year of the fascists

In 2022, we learned the government runs social media

The best I can say about 2022 is that it was not a leap year. After 9 months of this year, Queen Elizabeth had all she could take. She was out of here. She had been through the London Blitz, the dismantling of the British Empire and the death of her husband of of 69 years. She always kept calm and kept rolling. But 2022 was just too much for her.

The year began with a poll on 2021 by Rasmussen. It found only 2% rated 2021 as one of the best years ever; 48% said it was a poor year.

2021 is now considered the good old days compared to 2022. Things were so bad this year that Florida Man should have won Time magazine’s Man of the Year.

March 20: “Florida Man Arrested After He Allegedly Stole 66 Rolls of Toilet Paper From Hotel.”

April 10: “Florida Man Arrested After Baby Alligator, Guns, Drugs Found Inside Truck.”

September 11: “Florida Man Arrested for Impersonating Police After Pulling Over Off-Duty Cop.”

December 7: “Florida Man Arrested for Allegedly Having Sex With Dog in Public, Damaging Church Nativity Scene.”

December 8: “Florida Man Charged With Battery After Slapping Police Horse’s Butt.”

But unlike our world leaders, Florida Man has his redeeming qualities.

December 11: “Florida Man Gives Back by Paying Past Due Utility Bills for 114 Families in His Community.”

The actual Time magazine Man of the Year was Volodymyr Zelensky, the kleptocratic president of Ukraine. The only worse choice would have been Vladimir Putin, who tried to trigger a world war. The two thieves need one another to survive. It is symbiotic Satanism. When Russia invaded Zelensky’s country on February 24, he remembered the words of Rahm Emanuel, who said, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

Within days, Zelensky was using the war to raise money from gullible NATO nations and their Bidenesque leaders. He rolled NATO as if it were the town drunk. Zelensky knew to give 10% to the various big guys. Think of Kyiv as Chicago on the Dnieper River.

Ted Galen Carpenter of Cato wrote on April 6, “The notion that Ukraine was such an appealing democratic model in Eastern Europe that the country’s mere existence terrified Putin may be a comforting myth to U.S. politicians and pundits, but it is a myth. Ukraine is far from being a democratic‐​capitalist model and an irresistible magnet for Russia’s groaning masses. The reality is murkier and troubling: Ukraine has long been one of the more corrupt countries in the international system. In its annual report published in January 2022, Transparency International ranked Ukraine 123rd of the 180 countries it examined, with a score of 32 on a one to 100 point scale. By comparison, notoriously corrupt Russia ranked just modestly lower, 139th, with a score of 29.”

As for freedom, the first thing Zelensky did was shut down the opposition parties. He has since shut down Russian Orthodox churches. I am not going to call his move against the Church Stalinesque because Lenin had already begun shutting down the churches before Stalin arrived.

Carpenter wrote, “Ukraine’s track record of protecting democracy and civil liberties is not much better than its performance on corruption. In Freedom House’s 2022 report, Ukraine is listed in the ‘partly free’ category, with a score of 61 out of a possible 100. Other countries in that category include such bastions of liberal democracy as Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines (55), Serbia (62), Hungary (69), and Singapore (47). Interestingly, Hungary—which has been a target of vitriolic criticism among progressives in the West because of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s conservative social policy—ranks eight points higher than Ukraine, which is the recipient of uncritical praise from the same Western ideological factions.”

While the press continues to falsely claim Russia elected President Trump, the fact is Zelensky was a key player in the 2019 impeachment of Donald Trump.

The Organized Crime & Corruption Reporting Project’s Pandora Papers showed corruption throughout the Americas, Africa, Asia and elsewhere. Ukraine had its own entry as Elena Loginova wrote four months before the invasion, “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky rode to power on pledges to clean up the Eastern European country, but the Pandora Papers reveal he and his close circle were the beneficiaries of a network of offshore companies, including some that owned expensive London property.

“Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his partners in comedy production owned a network of offshore companies related to their business based in the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, and Belize.

“Zelensky’s current chief aide, Serhiy Shefir, as well as the head of the country’s Security Service, were part of the offshore network.

“Offshore companies were used by Shefir and another business partner to buy pricey London real estate.

“Around the time of his 2019 election, Zelensky handed his shares in a key offshore company over to Shefir, but the two appear to have made an arrangement for Zelensky’s family to continue receiving money from the offshore.”

But Zelensky’s scam was just one of teh many lowlights of 2020. If Frank Sinatra were still around, he would update his song A Very Good Year to say 2022 was a vinegar year.

Inflation ravaged the world as governments that shut countries down in the Pandemic Panic printed money to give away and appease the peasants. Bread is now $4 a loaf — at Dollar General. The news media called 7.1% inflation a decline when the reality is 2022 was the worst year for inflation in four decades — and up from the previous worst-in-40-years inflation of 4.7% in 2021.

Good things did happen in 2022. The biggest political event was the Supreme Court reversing Roe v. Wade and returning control of abortion to the 50 states. Sadly, before Roe, only 4 states legalized abortion. Now 37 do.

Hundreds of protesters — we’d call them insurrectionists had they been conservatives — picketed the homes of Supreme Court justices in violation on the law. The Biden administration did little to stop them. No arrests were made. No one was thrown in jail without charge or bail. The FBI did not use face-recognition software to track down those who supported the protest. Leftists have rights. You don’t.

Lefties also have the Republican Party.

Despite beating Democrats by 3 million votes in the House elections, Republicans gained only 9 seats in the House and lost another seat in the Senate as Republican congressional leaders refused to support Republicans who had the support of Donald Trump. Then these same Republicans branded Trump a loser. It’s amazing. These clowns would rather serve in hell than rule in heaven.

Lefties continued to own the weather as they politicize it to push their socialist and anti-Western policies.

NPR reported on September 19, “It is likely that climate change helped drive deadly floods in Pakistan, according to a new scientific analysis. The floods killed nearly 1,500 people and displaced more than 30 million, after record-breaking rain in August.”

NPR reported on November 16, “Drought crisis in Ethiopia shows price of climate change on world's most vulnerable.”

The left cheered protests in Iran over making women wear hajibs. Apparently opposing actual tenets of Islam is not Islamophobic while protesting terrorism is. The American press repeatedly assured us this protest would bring the ayatollahs down.

The Council for Foreign Relations said, “Regimes born out of protests can also be toppled by them. That reality must haunt the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, who in 2022 saw the most significant challenge to their rule since they came to power in 1979. The protests began in September when morality police in Tehran arrested Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman visiting Iran’s capital city, for failing to cover her hair properly. She died in police custody.

“When the news reached her hometown of Saqqez in northwestern Iran, hundreds of people gathered to condemn her death and Iran’s mistreatment of women. The protests quickly spread throughout the country as Iranians across social, class, and ethnic lines marched to the slogan: ‘Women, life, freedom!’ Iranian leaders blamed the United States and Israel for engineering the protests, though the driving force was the government’s political repression, corruption, and mismanagement of the economy.

“The government tried to quell the protests with force. By December, Iranian security forces had killed as many as 450 protestors on the streets, and the government had begun publicly executing protestors convicted in rushed trials for crimes against the state. The persistence of the protests in the face of government repression prompted speculation that Iran is in the early stages of a new revolution. Perhaps. But so far, the regime has shown no signs of splintering, and no one has emerged to lead the opposition. Should that change, Iran’s theocratic regime could be headed for the ash heap of history.”

While the press cheers on the protests, aren’t these people insurrectionists as defined by Nancy Pelosi and her Capitol Police henchmen? Iran’s evil government is treating the protesters as such.

AP reported on November 28, “An Iranian general on Monday acknowledged that more than 300 people have been killed in the unrest surrounding nationwide protests, giving the first official word on casualties in two months.

“That estimate is considerably lower than the toll reported by Human Rights Activists in Iran, a U.S.-based group that has been closely tracking the protests since they erupted after the Sept. 16 death of a young woman being held by the country's morality police.

“The activist group says 451 protesters and 60 security forces have been killed since the start of the unrest and that more than 18,000 people have been detained.”

You know — and I am just spit-balling here — but maybe if our intelligence spent fewer than six ways to Sunday (to use Chuck Schumer’s words) to get back at Trump and put a little more effort into overthrowing the ayatollahs, Iran would not be in the 43rd year of a theocracy after the Shah skedaddled one step ahead of the mob.

But the FBI has become a domestic terrorist group as it raided Mar-a-Lago and stole 11,000 items from President Trump. While it claimed he had stolen nuclear codes and the like, the FBI admitted only 100 documents seized — 1% of the total — were classified documents, and even that is in dispute as the president said he de-classified the items.

The judiciary is allowing the FBI to run roughshod over a former president’s rights as if ours were a banana republic run by thugs with badges and machine guns.

Sadly, Elon Musk cannot buy the FBI and rid it of its bad apples, which apparently are half the bunch. But he did buy Twitter and discovered it was run by America’s intelligence community as nearly 400 of its employees were ex-staffers for the FBI, CIA and other government intelligence agencies.

There was hope in 2022. Some people stood up against totalitarianism. Brett Craig wrote, “The Dissident 20. These nonconformists smashed the totalitarian hive mind in 2022.”

Musk was included but topping the list was Jennifer Sey, who spoke out against covid protocols and had to resign as chief marketing officer of Levis.

Craig wrote, “Former gymnastics champion, Jennifer Sey, had a dream: to one day be CEO of Levis. And, in fact, she was on a trajectory to achieve exactly that until she did something rare in Corporate America today: she acted like a leader. After all, to be a true leader you must be willing to say what is unpopular and throughout the pandemic that’s exactly what Sey did. She objected on social media to what she believed were harmful policies directed towards children during the pandemic.

“Specifically, the lack of in-person learning and the harm she believed it would cause. In doing so, she discovered that Corporate America doesn’t really want you to bring your whole self to work, just the self they say you must bring — a servile, compliant employee who tows the groupthink company line on everything, including inane Covid mitigation policy. When higher-ups told her to quiet down in exchange for staying on track for the CEO position, Sey refused. By neglecting to stand down, she no doubt lost incalculable financial incentives and priceless future Fortune 500 C-suite opportunities.”

Like many nonconformists, she was of course right. Her willingness to speak out against the covid closures of public schools stood in stark contrast to corporate conformity. She dared to question authority. She should have stuck to approved conventional dissent. It is OK to burn cities down in the name of black lives matter and to promote the butchering of children in the name of transgendering. Corporations are behind liberal efforts to promote black supremacy and LGBT. But to dare challenge the wisdom of closing schools for a disease with a 99.5% survival nrate will lead to your resignation, missy.

Sey continues to speak out. The revelations of the FBI, CIA and other government agencies pressuring social media companies to censor critics awakened her inner patriot. She wrote, “When private company leadership carries out the will of the government, with or without being explicitly asked to do so, we no longer live in a free country. Ask questions about lockdowns? Not only will you be censored, you may be out of a job.

“Democrats shriek fascist! at anyone challenging the edicts of the Party — anti-lockdown protesters, the unvaccinated, Trump supporters. Meanwhile, corporations are doing the bidding of Democratic Party elites as they ruthlessly censor and sideline dissenters. In fact, this is what real fascism looks like.”

And that, my friends, is what bugs me no end about this (string of naughty bad words) year. I learned I could not speak out on Google and Twitter against (another string of naughty bad words) the mindless support of the war in Ukraine. Putin started it and Zelensky is milking it for hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid. Handing him an unlimited credit card is bad policy. Silencing critics is immoral. In 2022, we the people allowed the government get away with it just as we the people allowed the government to shut us down in the name of stopping covid, which never even paused.

We need more Jennifer Seys and fewer Volodymyr Zelenskys and Vladimir Putins.

Maybe next year. We’ll see if 2023 will produce more of the former and none of the latter. But just to be safe, when 2023 knocks pretend we’re not home.