Over the past several days I have had some time to think, and my thoughts have repeatedly turned to the current state of the Internet. For a couple of decades after it was popularized, the Internet was one of the greatest tools for free speech that the world has ever seen. It allowed ordinary people like me to share truth on a massive scale with other ordinary people all over the planet.

I have always been grateful for that opportunity, but now our ability to share truth with one another over the Internet is being systematically eroded. Nobody can deny that this is taking place, because it is literally happening right in front of our eyes. Over the past decade, control of the Internet has become increasingly centralized. The big tech companies have become exceptionally powerful, and they have become addicted to using that power to suppress speech that they do not like.

This is an extremely dangerous trend, because the Internet has become the primary way that the vast majority of us communicate with one another. It truly is our modern version of “the marketplace of ideas”, but now the big tech companies are absolutely determined to distort it into something else entirely.

At this point, there are a whole host of ideas that you aren’t allowed to freely discuss on the Internet anymore.

In fact, there are a whole host of questions that you aren’t even allowed to ask.

When a society gets to a point where you aren’t even allowed to ask questions, that is a very clear sign that you are living under a very oppressive authoritarian regime.

Years ago when they started banning various prominent voices we all knew that it wouldn’t end there.

And it hasn’t.

Today, the big tech companies have no problem banning literally anyone.  For example, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene just got permanently banned on Twitter…

Twitter permanently blacklisted the personal account of a sitting member of Congress, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) over the New Year’s weekend. “Twitter is an enemy to America and can’t handle the truth,” Rep. Greene said, in a statement responding to the ban. “That’s fine, I’ll show America we don’t need them and it’s time to defeat our enemies.”

Rep. Greene has one of the largest followings on social media of any Republican member of Congress. Prior to her ban, she had over 465,000 followers on Twitter, meaning the Republican party and conservative movement has lost one of its most influential accounts on the platform.

Five years ago, if you told me that the big tech companies would start banning our politicians in Washington, I would have told you that you were crazy.

But now nobody is safe.  Once Twitter and Facebook banned a sitting president, we all knew that there was no going back.

Of course the pandemic has given the big tech companies an excuse to push their levels of censorship to even higher levels.  Just a few days ago, Twitter banned Dr. Robert Malone just before he was interviewed by Joe Rogan…

Dr. Robert Malone played a key role in the invention of the mRNA vaccine, the type of vaccine that is being administered to many Americans in an effort to stave off COVID-19. Malone has often been critical of the use of the vaccines, as well those in the media and government who support them.

He shared a great deal of research on his Twitter account, which had more than half a million followers.

We all knew it would happen eventually,” Malone said on his Substack. “Today it did. Over a half million followers gone in a blink of an eye. That means I must have been on the mark, so to speak. Over the target. It also means we lost a critical component in our fight to stop these vaccines being mandated for children and to stop the corruption in our governments, as well as the medical-industrial complex and pharmaceutical industries.

So now it appears that Twitter is preemptively banning people.

We truly have entered “Minority Report” territory, and that is extremely chilling.

Considering everything that has been happening with the pandemic, you would think that we would want to hear what one of the inventors of mRNA technology has to say.  Dr. Robert Malone has decades of experience, and he had been one of the most respected names in his field.

But because he has viewpoints that don’t align with the official narratives being pushed by the pharmaceutical industry, he is being blacklisted by the big tech companies.

If you think that you can get around all the censorship by simply refusing to use the big tech company platforms, you are wrong.

Just consider this example.  Gateway Pundit is reporting that T-Mobile is literally erasing links to their articles from text messages…

Hi Jim. In one of the screenshots you can see where my sister tried to send me your website link four times but I never got it. The other two screenshots it shows me sending a link to one of your articles, that’s the one with the picture of the fox in it. In the other screenshot from my sister it shows that she never received the link. The text message it still has the fox in it. I hope this helps. But what I realized is it’s actually just my boost T-Mobile carrier that’s blocking your links. I have a friend in the 949 area code and he was able to send it to his wife, however, I can only receive it in a group text. Let me know if you have any more questions. Thanks. Mark.

I have had a similar experience with articles written by Mike Adams of Natural News.  When I try to send links to Natural News through Facebook Messenger, the links are simply erased from the messages somehow.

That is the level of censorship that we are now facing.

They literally want to control what we see, what we hear and what we think.  And of course this is setting the stage for a level of authoritarianism unlike anything we have ever seen before in all of human history.

Without freedom of speech, all of our other freedoms will rapidly become meaningless.

Sadly, at this point freedom of speech in the United States is getting pretty close to being completely wiped out.

Our Republic is rapidly dying, and millions upon millions of Americans are cheering as it happens.

The big tech companies have become the arbiters of truth, but most of the “truths” that they are relentlessly pushing are actually lies.

I don’t know if there is a way out of this mess, but we must find one, because the future of our society hangs in the balance.

Copyright 2022 Michael Snyder Economic Collapse-All rights reserved.

A Canadian street preacher was arrested after being attacked by LGBTQ protesters in a gay neighborhood in Toronto on Tuesday.

Pastor David Lynn of Christ’s Forgiveness Ministries has been preaching on the streets of Toronto for the past ten years without any issues.

As part of a 3-day, 22-location street preaching evangelism event being held throughout Toronto this week, Lynn went to the LGBT-oriented community of Church and Wellesley.

A crowd quickly gathered around Lynn and LGBT protesters with flags and signs appeared within minutes to surround and bully him.

The protesters blocked Lynn’s walkway, assaulted him and screamed obscenities at him until police showed up and arrested him for “disturbing the peace.”

A Toronto police officer asked Lynn to stop using his mobile microphone and amplifier and he reluctantly complied to the request so he could continue preaching the word of God.

Despite obeying the officer’s request, Lynn was arrested five minutes later by over ten Toronto Police officers.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS6AlYBnnlM]

In a conversation with the communications department of the Toronto Police Department’s 51st division given exclusively to Infowars.com, officers claim Lynn was arrested for “disturbing the peace,” and was “allegedly yelling derogatory comments at passers-by.”

“You can imagine if somebody is yelling things that are disagreeable to a certain community, in that community, there’s going to be a reaction,” the communications department stated.

Continuing, police said his “conduct was determined to be criminal” and that people were “clearly disturbed” and “appalled” by the comments being made.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvOjPLhElnU]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKEifgPFr80]

Copyright © 2019 Most Important News-All rights reserved.

They are transforming the Internet into the greatest tool of surveillance that humanity has ever seen, and if we stay on the road that we are currently on it is only a matter of time until our society becomes a hellish dystopian nightmare.  I wish that this was an exaggeration, but it isn’t.  Over the past couple of decades, the Internet has completely changed the way that we all communicate with one another.

At one time, all forms of mass communication were tightly controlled by the elite, but the Internet suddenly allowed us to communicate with one another on a massive scale without having to go through their gatekeepers.  This radically altered the landscape, and at first the elite were unsure of how to respond to this growing threat.  There was no way that they could roll back time to an era before the Internet was invented, and so they have decided to use it for their own insidious purposes instead.

Today, the Internet has become the centerpiece of their “Big Brother surveillance grid”, and they are gathering information on all of us on a scale that has never been seen before in all of human history.  But of course it was never going to stop there.  Over the past couple of years we have started to watch the elite use all of this information to punish those that are doing or saying things that they do not like.

Perhaps the most extreme example of this phenomenon is what is going on in China.  The following comes from BuzzFeed…

Chinese journalist Liu Hu always knew he’d have trouble with the authorities; he had been exposing corruption and wrongdoing for years. He was used to being hassled with regular fines and forced apologies imposed by his authoritarian government. He nevertheless persisted in truth-telling.

One day in 2017, Hu logged onto a travel site, but couldn’t book a flight because the site said he was “not qualified.” Soon he discovered he was blocked from buying property, using the high-speed train network, or getting a loan. And there was nothing he could do about it. His rights to essential goods and services were now circumscribed through an algorithm designed to discriminate against the 7.5 million people on China’s “Dishonest Persons Subject to Enforcement” list.

In China they call it a “social credit score”, but in reality it is nightmarish authoritarianism at its worst.

They are monitoring all that their citizens do and think – their political opinions, their shopping patterns, their travel history, their Internet behavior, etc. – and if they upset “the Beast system” then they could ultimately lose access to everything.

Put yourself in their shoes for a moment.

Just imagine a world in which you will no longer be able to buy, sell, open a bank account, get a loan, use public transportation or get a job.

Chinese authorities are even putting up surveillance cameras in the schools so that they can constantly monitor students…

Here, the surveillance cameras took the data on individual facial expressions and used that information to create a running “score” on each student and class. If a score reached a predetermined point, the system triggered an alert. Teachers were expected to take action: to talk to a student perceived to be disengaged, for example, or overly moody.

You would think that the Chinese would rebel against such a system, but most are already too fearful to say anything about it.

And some are actually embracing the new system…

In Beijing and throughout China, closed-circuit cameras and other surveillance devices are so ubiquitous that they’ve become part of the landscape. If facial recognition helps with public safety, some say, that’s a good thing.

“Perhaps people would behave themselves more,” said Xia Chuzi, a 19-year-old student interviewed in Beijing.

But we would never allow such a thing to happen here in the United States, right?

Wrong.

While not yet as advanced as what the Chinese have done, our own version of “the Beast system” is expanding with each passing day.

If you use the Internet, the technocratic elite know virtually everything about you.  And as we have seen so frequently in recent months, they also have the power to “deplatform” those that they do not like…

Independent Media readers are well aware of the multitude of ways big tech and social media platforms have been censoring conservatives, from demonetizing video channels, to blocking, banning and shadow banning conservatives, to limiting the reach of promotions and by “tweaking” algorithms so that search results push Independent Media sites so far down that they can rarely be found.

And restricting buying and selling is starting to happen too.  In fact, we have seen numerous online payment platforms ban individuals and organizations that hold “extreme views” recently.

Over time, the information that the elite have about all of us will continue to grow, as will their desire to punish those that think or act “offensively”.  But in the process of creating a “utopia”, they will actually be creating an authoritarian nightmare.  The following comes from Ethan Huff…

Social media is arguably the greatest accomplishment thus far of the “deep state” in establishing a new world order. For one, it allows the various ministries of propaganda around the world to project their official narratives without impediment using authoritarian censorship tactics. It also creates a virtual echo chamber of leftism that, once all the conservatives are finally removed from all the tech platforms, will create the online liberal “utopia” that the social engineers are striving to achieve.

We live at a time when political correctness has become institutionalized.

One wrong opinion, and you can lose a social media account that you spent years building up.  And one wrong statement can cost you a career that you spent years training for.

Ultimately, we are heading down the exact same path that China has gone.  Their “social credit score” system is being hailed as the next great thing all over the world, and those that hate freedom of speech can’t wait to fully implement such a system in the western world.

Copyright © 2018 Micheal Synder The Economic Collapse All rights reserved.

 

 

Civil conflict is coming to America, and it is going to tear our nation apart. Earlier today I received an email from a good friend about the rising tide of anger and frustration that we are currently witnessing in America.

After thinking about it for a few moments, I wrote back and told him that I don’t know if there is any way to stop what is coming at this point. In my entire lifetime, we have never been closer to a “civil war” in this country than we are right now.

Let us work for peace, but it would be foolish to ignore the forces that are ripping the fabric of our society to shreds. In this day and age, the coming conflict will not be between two armies from specific geographical locations. Rather, it will be between groups of Americans with fundamentally different ideologies. However, just like in our first civil war, American cities will burn before it is all said and done.

First there will be massive protests, then there will be widespread violence, and ultimately there will be mobs of lunatics running around smashing things, looting, stealing, killing and setting things on fire.

I have been warning about where we are heading as a society on The Economic Collapse Blog for quite a long time, but now the warnings about a coming “civil war” are becoming very loud in the mainstream media.

For example, in a Bloomberg opinion piece entitled “What Democratic Rage Would Look Like”, political scientist Thomas Schaller made the following astounding statement: “I think we’re at the beginning of a soft civil war. … I don’t know if the country gets out of it whole.”

And Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds, the author of “The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself“, made the following observations in his recent USA Today article entitled “Is America headed toward a civil war?”…

Will it get worse? Probably. To have a civil war, soft or otherwise, takes two sides. But as pseudonymous tweeter Thomas H. Crownnotes, it’s childishly easy in these days to identify people in mobs, and then to dispatch similar mobs to their homes and workplaces. Eventually, he notes, it becomes “protesters all the way down, and if we haven’t yet figured out that can lead to political violence, we’re dumb.”

Apparently, some of us are dumb or else want violence. As Crown warns, “We carefully erected civil peace to avoid this sort of devolution-to-a-mob. It is a great civilizational achievement and it is intensely fragile.” Yes, it is indeed fragile, and many people will miss it when it’s entirely gone.

But most alarming of all was a tweet that was posted by U.S. Congressman Steve King on Sunday…

America is heading in the direction of another Harpers Ferry. After that comes Ft. Sumter.

When sitting members of Congress start talking about a coming civil war, it is time to start paying attention.

King was responding to an incident in Portland, Oregon in which radical leftists had physically taken control of an ICE office…

“Occupy” protesters have been camping outside an ICE office in Portland, Oregon, leading the facility to temporarily shut down. The occupiers say that they won’t leave until the Trump administration revokes its “zero tolerance” immigration policy.

Since Sunday the agitators, whose numbers are increasing, have been engaged in activities such as blocking the entrance to the building…

One of the things about that “occupation” that particularly disturbed me was when one of the protesters removed the American flag from the flagpole and replaced it with a “Refugees Welcome” flag.

If the mainstream media and liberal leaders continue to stoke the flames of hatred and continue to incite violence on a daily basis, we are going to see much worse in the months ahead.

For example, over the weekend U.S. Representative Maxine Waters stunned the nation when she urged Americans to physically confront members of the Trump administration wherever they can be found.  The following comes from the Los Angeles Times…

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), a frequent critic of the administration, gave a high-profile boost to the tactic by saying members of the Trump administration should be repeatedly confronted in their everyday lives.

“If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they are not welcome anymore, anywhere,” Waters said at a rally in Los Angeles on Saturday.

I don’t know that we have ever seen anything like this in modern American history.

Could you imagine what would have happened if conservative leaders had called for members of the Obama administration to be physically confronted?

After being greatly criticized for her remarks, Waters decided to reaffirm them during an interview with MSNBC the very next day…

On MSNBC the next day, she doubled down, saying that Americans are fed up. “The people are going to turn on them, they are going to protest, they are going to absolutely harass them,” she said.

And since that time her remarks have been endorsed by other progressive leaders including Democratic Senator Cory Booker.

Of course members of the Trump administration have already been getting physically confronted in public.  Just a few days ago, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was forced out of a restaurant by anti-Trump activists, and then an unruly mob of protesters decided to hold an event right in front of her home.

Then on Friday night, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders and her kids were kicked out of a Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia.

That incident made headlines all over the nation.

And then on Monday we learned that a “group of chanting protesters” had gathered right in front of Stephen Miller’s apartment in Washington…

A group of chanting protesters gathered outside White House adviser Stephen Miller’s Washington D.C. apartment on Monday.

But before the chanting really picked up, the crowd circulated “Wanted” flyers expressing the contention that Miller is guilty of “crimes against humanity,” among other things.

Reportedly, they are passing out flyers portraying him as a “wanted” criminal.

Civil wars don’t emerge out of a vacuum.

You can usually see them coming a long way away, and they are the result of tensions that build up over a long period of time.

America is a very deeply divided nation, and it is getting worse with each passing day. The left has already shown that they are willing to become very violent when push comes to shove, and what we have seen so far is just the small tip of a very large iceberg.

Copyright © 2018 Economic Collapse Micheal Snyder-All rights reserved

It is an uncomfortable truth that most educators simply do not want to talk about.  Females are dramatically outperforming males on every educational level, and many are wondering what this means for our future.  If men do not feel a strong sense of purpose and meaning, they can get into trouble really quickly.

As I write this article, the vast majority of those that abuse drugs are men, the vast majority of those that commit violent crimes are men, and the vast majority of those that we put into prison are men.  I began researching this article by looking into the fact that the labor participation rate for men has been declining for decades, but our problems run much deeper than that.

Today, so many men feel lost.  Millions of them don’t have a sense of direction, millions of them don’t have anything that really drives or motivates them, and millions of them are deeply depressed and greatly dissatisfied with life.

For a lot of them, it started very early.  As Dr. Michael Thompson told CBS News, all across America girls are outperforming boys at every educational level…

Girls outperform boys in elementary school, middle school, high school, and college, and graduate school,” says Dr. Michael Thompson, a school psychologist who writes about the academic problems of boys in his book, “Raising Cain.” He says that after decades of special attention, girls are soaring, while boys are stagnating.

“Girls are being told, ‘Go for it, you can do it. Go for it, you can do it.’ They are getting an immense amount of support,” he says. “Boys hear that the way to shine is athletically. And boys get a lot of mixed messages about what it means to be masculine and what it means to be a student. Does being a good student make you a real man? I don’t think so… It is not cool.

Perhaps one of the big reasons why young males are so drawn to sports is because it allows them to do the sorts of things the come naturally to males.  Sporting events allow young males to engage in battle, to hunt and to conquer.  Yes, it is a simulated environment, but sporting events really do bring out something primal in young boys.

We all have natural tendencies, and it appears that modern forms of schooling are doing a much better job of connecting with females.  In fact, one extremely large study found that girls all over the world are substantially outperforming boys in the classroom…

According to a recent study from University of New Brunswick in Canada, girls have been outperforming boys consistently through the years. It is a popular belief that boys perform better in subjects like Math and Science; however, a review of 308 studies involving more than 1.1 million children across the globe has challenged this stereotype. The study looked at data from 1914 to 2011 and the findings suggest that girls do better in school than boys in the classroom regardless of the material.

So it isn’t just in the United States that this is happening.

And it is a trend that does not seem to diminish with age.

Young women are dominating in high schools all over the nation, and at one high school in Massachusetts girls make up 70 to 80 percent of the students in advanced placement classes…

At graduation ceremonies last June at Hanover High School in Massachusetts, it was the ninth year in a row that a girl was on the podium as school valedictorian. Girls also took home nearly all the honors, including the science prize, says principal Peter Badalament.

“[Girls] tend to dominate the landscape academically right now,” he says, even in math and science.

The school’s advanced placement classes, which admit only the most qualified students, are often 70 percent to 80 percent girls. This includes calculus. And in AP biology, there was not a single boy.

I suppose the silver lining for young men is that if they really want to meet more girls they should just work really, really hard to get into those AP classes.

But the truth is that this is no joking matter.  At this point, higher education in the United States is totally dominated by women.  Just check out these numbers…

Women earned approximately 57 percent of the bachelor’s degrees awarded by U.S. institutions of higher education in the 2016-2017 academic year, according to data released this week by the National Center for Education Statistics, which is part of the U.S. Department of Education.

That, according to NCES data, makes 2016-2017 the eighteenth straight academic year in which women have earned approximately 57 percent of the bachelor’s degrees awarded by U.S. colleges and universities.

Did you understand what that excerpt was saying?

Women have received about 57 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in this country for 18 years in a row.

Our future doctors, lawyers, politicians and societal leaders come from our pool of college graduates, and the numbers tell us that women are going to be dominating those fields for the foreseeable future.

So what will men be doing?

Well, in recent years more of them have been dropping out of the labor force than ever before.  The following comes from the New York Times…

Among women, the share out of the labor force has fallen from 66 percent in 1950 to 43 percent today. That is not surprising in light of changing social norms and the greater career opportunities now open to women.

Men, however, exhibit the opposite long-term trend. In 1950, 14 percent of men were out of the labor force. Today, that figure stands at 31 percent.

For those of you that prefer graphics, here is a chart from the Federal Reserve that shows this staggering decline over the last several decades.  Please note that we are currently at a much lower level than we were at during the last major recession…

If men aren’t working, how are they supporting themselves?

For many, the social safety net provided by the government is an easy answer.  Here is more from the New York Times…

One might wonder how these less educated, prime-age men support themselves after leaving the labor force. The social safety net plays a role. In a study for the Mercatus Center of George Mason University, Scott Winship reports that “75 percent of inactive prime-age men are in a household that received some form of government transfer payment.” Mr. Winship believes that government disability benefits in particular are one reason for the lack of interest in work.

For others, living with Mom and Dad for as long as possible is the solution.  Today, a staggering 38.4 percent of all Millennials live with their parents, and that number seems to keep going up with each passing year.

We live during an era of dramatic societal change, and many are concerned about where all of this change is taking us.

Yes, we need a society in which females can thrive, but we also need a society in which males can thrive as well, and right now that simply is not happening.

Copyright © 2018 The Economic Collapse-All rights reserved. Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

Source of image: Students celebrate their A-level results at Dominican College in Belfast (PA)

One of the fastest ways to ruin anything is to get lawyers involved, and lawyers are running amok in America today.  Several decades ago, Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger warned that our nation would become “a society overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts”, and that is precisely what has happened.

There are more than 1.3 million lawyers in the United States today, and it is estimated that those lawyers produce more than 40 million lawsuits each year.

Many of those lawsuits are completely frivolous, but frivolous lawsuits are often settled because it can be much cheaper to settle them than to defend against them in court.  So it is essentially a form of “legal extortion” that has gotten wildly out of control.

Earlier today I came across another shocking example of this phenomenon.  McDonald’s is actually being sued for charging the same price for a Quarter Pounder with cheese and a Quarter Pounder without cheese…

Two McDonald’s customers in Florida are suing the fast-food giant for a hefty sum of $5 million because they say they’re being unfairly charged for cheese they don’t want on their burgers.

Cynthia Kissner and Leonard Werner argue that hamburgers and cheeseburgers are different prices on the McDonald’s menu, but when they order a Quarter Pounder without the extra dairy, they’re still forced to pay the same amount.

Seriously?

In the end, this is something that nobody cares about, but some lawyers out there saw an opportunity to make a quick buck and so they are going for it.

Once upon a time you could order a Quarter Pounder without cheese right off of the menu.  But if you go into any McDonald’s today you have to specifically ask them to leave the cheese off if you don’t want cheese on your Quarter Pounder.

Apparently, some lawyers in Miami believe that McDonald’s is being “unjustly enriched” because the price is not reduced for those that would like the cheese left off their Quarter Pounders…

According to the lawsuit, filed by Andrew Lavin of the Miami-based Lavin Law Group, McDonald’s used to sell four items in the Quarter Pounder family, with and without cheese, with prices adjusted accordingly — about .30 to .90 cents more for cheese than without.

This practice continued for years, the suit says, but now McDonald’s, “at some point,” ceased “separately displaying these products for purchase on menus, and currently lists the availability of Quarter Pounder with Cheese and Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese.”

I can’t believe that someone should be stupid enough to bring such a lawsuit.  Andrew Lavin should be immediately disbarred for this.

Attorneys like Lavin are financial predators, and fortunately it doesn’t look like McDonald’s is inclined to settle…

“We do not believe the claims in this lawsuit have legal merit,” McDonald’s said in an email. “The advertised Quarter Pounder burger comes with cheese. We try to accommodate our customers’ requests by allowing them to customize their orders, such as a Quarter Pounder with no cheese.”

It is rapidly getting to the point where our entire society is becoming paralyzed by fear of lawsuits and legal matters. Just look at the White House. President Trump could have gotten so much else done if he wasn’t constantly fighting for his life against a legal witch hunt.

Robert Mueller has been given unlimited time, staff and resources to investigate the President, and it has been over a year and Mueller still hasn’t found anything.

But it looks like his absurd investigation is not going to end any time soon.

After seeing what they have done to Trump, do you think that good people will be encouraged or discouraged from running for public office?

Of course it isn’t just politicians that are being targeted for this kind of thing. You could literally spend years pouring blood, sweat and tears into building a business, and it can be destroyed in one moment by a single frivolous lawsuit.

And if you are a doctor, a lifetime of exceedingly hard work can be completely wiped out by one really greedy lawyer.

Look, every nation needs a legal system, and we do too. But today our system is in desperate need of reform. There are way too many lawyers, way too many lawsuits, and our entire society is rapidly becoming paralyzed by the misuse of legal power.

At one point I was optimistic that someday we would see some much needed reforms, but at this point I do not believe that it is going to happen…

Copyright © 2018 Economic Collapse–All rights reserved

I know that the headline sounds absolutely crazy, but this is actually a true story.  A Silicon Valley executive named Anthony Levandowski has already filed paperwork with the IRS for the nonprofit corporation that is going to run this new religion.  Officially, this new faith will be known as “Way Of The Future”.

Of course nutjobs are creating “new religions” all the time, but in this case Levandowski is a very highly respected tech executive, and his new religion is even getting coverage from Wired magazine…

The new religion of artificial intelligence is called Way of the Future. It represents an unlikely next act for the Silicon Valley robotics wunderkind at the center of a high-stakes legal battle between Uber and Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous-vehicle company. Papers filed with the Internal Revenue Service in May name Levandowski as the leader (or “Dean”) of the new religion, as well as CEO of the nonprofit corporation formed to run it.

So what will adherents of this new faith actually believe?

To me, it sounds like a weird mix of atheism and radical transhumanism.  The following comes from Way of the Future’s official website…

We believe in science (the universe came into existence 13.7 billion years ago and if you can’t re-create/test something it doesn’t exist). There is no such thing as “supernatural” powers. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

We believe in progress (once you have a working version of something, you can improve on it and keep making it better). Change is good, even if a bit scary sometimes. When we see something better, we just change to that. The bigger the change the bigger the justification needed.

We believe the creation of “super intelligence” is inevitable (mainly because after we re-create it, we will be able to tune it, manufacture it and scale it). We don’t think that there are ways to actually stop this from happening (nor should we want to) and that this feeling of we must stop this is rooted in 21st century anthropomorphism (similar to humans thinking the sun rotated around the earth in the “not so distant” past).

But even though Way of the Future does not embrace the “supernatural”, they do believe in a “God”.

In this new religion, the worship of a “Godhead” that will be created using artificial intelligence will be actively encouraged…

The documents state that WOTF’s activities will focus on “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.” That includes funding research to help create the divine AI itself.

The religion will seek to build working relationships with AI industry leaders and create a membership through community outreach, initially targeting AI professionals and “laypersons who are interested in the worship of a Godhead based on AI.” The filings also say that the church “plans to conduct workshops and educational programs throughout the San Francisco/Bay Area beginning this year.”

So how “powerful” will this newly created “God” actually be?

Well, Levandowski says that he envisions creating an artificially intelligent being that will literally be “a billion times smarter than the smartest human”…

“What is going to be created will effectively be a god,” he said. “It’s not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes. But ifthere is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?”

He added, “I would love for the machine to see us as its beloved elders that it respects and takes care of. We would want this intelligence to say, ‘Humans should still have rights, even though I’m in charge.'”

But what if this “super-intelligence” gets outside of our control and turns on us?

What then?

I am not sure that Levandowski has an answer for that.

Other transhumanists also believe that artificial intelligence will grow at an exponential rate, but instead of AI ruling over us, they see a coming merger between humanity and this new super intelligence.  In fact, world famous transhumanist Ray Kurzeil believes that this will enable us to “become essentially god-like in our powers”…

Kurzweil and his followers believe that a crucial turning point will be reached around the year 2030, when information technology achieves ‘genuine’ intelligence, at the same time as biotechnology enables a seamless union between us and this super-smart new technological environment.

Ultimately the human-machine mind will become free to roam a universe of its own creation, uploading itself at will on to a “suitably powerful computational substrate”.

We will become essentially god-like in our powers.

And prominent transhumanist Mark Pesce takes things even further.  He in absolutely convinced that rapidly advancing technology will allow ordinary humans “to become as gods”…

Men die, planets die, even stars die. We know all this. Because we know it, we seek something more–a transcendence of transience, translation to incorruptible form. An escape if you will, a stop to the wheel. We seek, therefore, to bless ourselves with perfect knowledge and perfect will; To become as gods, take the universe in hand, and transform it in our image–for our own delight. As it is on Earth, so it shall be in the heavens. The inevitable result of incredible improbability, the arrow of evolution is lipping us into the transhuman – an apotheosis to reason, salvation – attained by good works.

Throughout human history, there has always been a desire to create our own gods or to become our own gods.

But no matter how hard these transhumanists try to run from death, it will eventually find them anyway, and at that point all of their questions about who God really is will be answered once and for all.

Copyright 2017, Micheal Snyder, Economic Collapse–All rights reserved

How much is your view of the world shaped by what you see on television?  On average, Americans spend more than 150 hours watching television every month, and it is called “programming” for a reason.

If you allow anyone to pour ideas and information into your mind for five hours a day, it is going to change how you look at reality.  Everyone has an agenda, and every single news program, television show and movie is trying to alter your views.

Sadly, our society has become absolutely addicted to media, and the mainstream media is completely dominated by the elite.  In fact, about 90 percent of the programming that comes through your television is controlled by just 6 gigantic media corporations.

Most of us are willingly plugging ourselves into this “propaganda matrix” that is completely dominated by the elite for several hours each day, and that gives them an enormous amount of power over the rest of us.

If you control what people think, then you control a society.  And through their vast media empires, the elite are able to shape how we all think to a frightening degree.

Just think about it.  What do we talk about with our family, our friends and our co-workers?  To a large extent, those conversations are about movies, television shows, something that we just saw on the news or a sporting event that just took place.

The reason why we talk about certain things is because the mainstream media gives those things attention, and other things we ignore because the mainstream media does not make them seem to be important.

The mainstream media literally sets the agenda for our society, and it would be difficult to overstate the power that is in their hands.  And as I mentioned above, the mainstream media is almost entirely controlled by just 6 colossal corporations.

The following list of these 6 corporate giants comes from one of my previous articles, and this is just a sampling of the media properties that they each own…

Comcast

NBC

Telemundo

Universal Pictures

Focus Features

USA Network

Bravo

CNBC

The Weather Channel

MSNBC

Syfy

NBCSN

Golf Channel

Esquire Network

E!

Cloo

Chiller

Universal HD

Comcast SportsNet

Universal Parks & Resorts

Universal Studio Home Video

The Walt Disney Company

ABC Television Network

ESPN

The Disney Channel

A&E

Lifetime

Marvel Entertainment

Lucasfilm

Walt Disney Pictures

Pixar Animation Studios

Disney Mobile

Disney Consumer Products

Interactive Media

Disney Theme Parks

Disney Records

Hollywood Records

Miramax Films

Touchstone Pictures

News Corporation

Fox Broadcasting Company

Fox News Channel

Fox Business Network

Fox Sports 1

Fox Sports 2

National Geographic

Nat Geo Wild

FX

FXX

FX Movie Channel

Fox Sports Networks

The Wall Street Journal

The New York Post

Barron’s

SmartMoney

HarperCollins

20th Century Fox

Fox Searchlight Pictures

Blue Sky Studios

Beliefnet

Zondervan

Time Warner

CNN

The CW

HBO

Cinemax

Cartoon Network

HLN

NBA TV

TBS

TNT

TruTV

Turner Classic Movies

Warner Bros.

Castle Rock

DC Comics

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

New Line Cinema

Sports Illustrated

Fortune

Marie Claire

People Magazine

Viacom

MTV

Nickelodeon

VH1

BET

Comedy Central

Paramount Pictures

Paramount Home Entertainment

Country Music Television (CMT)

Spike TV

The Movie Channel

TV Land

CBS Corporation

CBS Television Network

The CW (along with Time Warner)

CBS Sports Network

Showtime

TVGN

CBS Radio, Inc.

CBS Television Studios

Simon & Schuster

Infinity Broadcasting

Westwood One Radio Network

According to a report put out by Nielsen, Americans are plugging into “the matrix” more than ever before.  The following is how our daily use of media breaks down by device…

Live TV: 4 hours, 31 minutes

Time-Shifted TV: 33 minutes

Radio: 1 hour, 52 minutes

DVDs: 8 minutes

Video Game Consoles: 14 minutes

Multimedia Devices (Apple TV, Roku, etc.): 13 minutes

Internet on PC: 58 minutes

Smartphone: 1 hour, 39 minutes

Tablet: 31 minutes

When you total those numbers up, it comes to 10 hours and 39 minutes.

In essence, Americans are spending most of their waking hours plugged in to something.

And if you only add together “live television” and “time-shifted television”, Americans are spending an average of more than five hours each day just watching television.

Of course many of us spend countless hours on the Internet as well.  It has been estimated that 54,907 Google searches are conducted, 7,252 tweets are posted, 125,406 YouTube videos are viewed, and 2,501,018 emails are sent out every single second.

You may have guessed this already, but most of the news and information that we consume on the Internet is also controlled by the elite…

Overall, the top 10 publishers — together owning around 60 news sites — account for 47% of total online traffic to news content last year, with the next-biggest 140 publishers accounting for most of the other half, SimilarWeb found.

The biggest online news publisher for the U.S. audience was MSN, owner of MSN.com, with just over 27 billion combined page views across mobile and desktop, followed by Disney Media Networks, owner of ESPN and ABC News, with 25.9 billion.

This is why the “alternative media” is so important.  All over America and all over the world, people are waking up and realizing that they aren’t getting the truth from the mainstream media, and they are hungry for truly independent sources of information.

The only way that we are ever going to be able to throw off the insidious system of control that the elite have established is by winning the information war.  We are literally in a constant battle for hearts and minds, and the good news is that we have made a lot of progress.  Over the past decade we have “red pilled” millions upon millions of people, but we still have a long way to go.

Faith in the corporate media is dwindling, and the elite are deeply concerned about this.  The Internet has allowed ordinary people like us to communicate on a mass scale, and this has never been the case before in human history.  We have a window of opportunity to fight back against the elite, and we must not let this opportunity pass us by.

Copyright 2017, Micheal Synder, Most Important News-All rights reserved

If We Don’t Fight For It, The Liberal World Order Is Going To Kill Our Way Of Life

There comes a time when it becomes necessary to draw a line in the sand.  When the early settlers came to America, they were desperate to find a place where they could live in freedom.  And our Founding Fathers worked very hard to draft a Constitution that would guarantee that future generations of Americans would live in a nation where the freedom and liberty of the people were maximized.

Unfortunately, the way of life that our founders sought to establish is slowly being killed off by the progressive agenda of “the Liberal World Order”.  Just about every single element of their progressive agenda is diametrically opposed to the values and the principles that this country was founded upon.  And if they ultimately get everything that they want, our way of life will be eradicated for good.

The term “Liberal World Order” is a phrase that is starting to be used quite frequently by the establishment.  It was used by the Washington Post to describe Barack Obama’s final speech to the United Nations, and Vice-President Joe Biden used it during his speech at the World Economic Forum in January.

But of course it is a term that doesn’t just apply to Democrats.  Many establishment Republicans also believe in the progressive agenda of the Liberal World Order, and that is why before Trump was elected nothing ever seemed to change very much in Washington no matter who was in power.

Sadly, the same thing is true all over the western world.  The Liberal World Order dominates most of the major political parties in just about every industrialized nation, and they are very much accustomed to getting their way.  That is one of the reasons why they hate Donald Trump with such a passion, because he is someone that they cannot fully control.

At this point, the Liberal World Order has almost complete control of our culture.  In addition to dominating the political system, they also have a stranglehold on the media, on the entertainment world, on most large corporations, on our system of public education, and even on many of our largest religious institutions.

In the end, their goal is not to just win elections.  I recently wrote that liberals hate “anyone that disagrees with them”, and even though they claim to be “tolerant” the truth is that they are some of the most intolerant people on the face of the planet.

When Kathy Griffin held up a bloody mock ‘decapitated’ head of Donald Trump, it really was a picture of what they want to do to our entire way of life.  They literally want to eradicate our worldview, and laws are slowly being put in place all over the western world that are moving us in that direction.

For the true believers in the Liberal World Order, government is a weapon to be used to achieve societal dominance.  That is why so many of them are drawn to law school.  I have often referred to law school as “seminary for liberals”, because that is essentially what it is.

Our legal system is absolutely infested with radical leftists from the top to the bottom, and that makes it a perfect tool for the left to advance their agenda.  Whether it is abortion, gay marriage or any other issue, the left often finds that the easiest way to achieve their goals is by going through the court system.

True believers in the Liberal World Order also tend to believe that government is the answer to just about every problem.  So central governments all over the western world have just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger.

But every time government gets bigger, we lose more freedom and liberty.

If you will think about this you will see that I am right.  Today, there are hundreds of thousands of statutes, rules and regulations on the federal level.  If you throw in all of the statutes, rules and regulations on the state and local levels as well, that brings the total into the millions.

Every law restricts freedom and liberty in some way.  Of course in some cases this is a very good thing.  For example, we don’t want the freedom to go around randomly murdering one another.  But we certainly do not need millions of laws.

We are supposed to be “the land of the free”, but most Americans seem to have forgotten what that really means.  If people want the government to tell them what to do every moment of every day, they can move to Europe.

Our founders guaranteed us a nation where liberty and freedom would be maximized, and the Liberal World Order has stolen this from us.

And of course having an enormous government is very expensive, and so we get to pay very heavily for the privilege of being oppressed.  I talk a lot about the income tax because that is one of my pet peeves, but that is only one of the taxes they hit us with.

In a previous article I listed 97 different taxes that Americans pay each year, and when everything is all said and done there are some Americans that end up handing over more than half of what they earn to various governmental entities.

But our leaders don’t use the term “socialism” to describe what is being done to us, because the American people aren’t ready to accept that reality quite yet.

Unfortunately, the control freaks that dominate our government always want more.  Our progressive politicians always seem to have another new tax up their sleeves, and earlier this year top Democrats in Congress proposed yet another payroll tax that would be taken directly out of our paychecks…

The Democrats plan, reintroduced in February by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D, N.Y.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D, Colo.), is The FAMILY Act, which would create a national fund to provide workers with two thirds of their income for up to 12 weeks, no matter where they live or work. The Democrats’ proposal would be funded by employee and employer payroll contributions, averaging less than $1.50 per week for a typical worker.

One of the primary reasons why my wife and I originally moved up to north Idaho was because we wanted to find a place where we could live free without someone constantly telling us what to do.  But we have come to realize that eventually the Liberal World Order is just going to take over everything if we don’t fight back.  If the America that so many in previous generations fought and died to defend is going to survive, we must take action now.

So I am calling on every man, woman and child that can hear me to engage in a new American revolution.  This isn’t a revolution with guns and bullets, but rather a non-violent cultural revolution that will be fought with votes, pens and keyboards.

We need to clearly communicate a vision for the future of America that is based upon the values and the principles that this nation was founded upon.  Those values and principles once made us the greatest nation on the entire planet, and they can do it again.

We also need to wrestle as much political power away from the Liberal World Order as we possibly can.  That means contesting Democrats and establishment Republicans on the federal, state and local levels.

Even capturing a seat on your local school board can make a tremendous difference, and so I am encouraging as many people as possible to become politically active.

If we do not take a stand now, eventually there won’t be anywhere left for freedom-loving Americans and their families to go.

Just like with the original American revolution, there are no guarantees that we will win.  At the time, very few could have imagined that the great British empire could have been defeated by a ragtag group of rebels, but it happened.

And the Liberal World Order is most definitely a formidable foe, and it will not be taken down easily.

All that it takes for evil to triumph is for good men and women to do nothing.

So let us be strong and courageous, and let us rise up and fight for the future of our nation.

Copyright © 2017,  Economic Collapse.com– All Rights Reserved.

In 1968, a 90-year-old woman in Norway was given an incredible glimpse into the future. She was shown what life would be like just before World War 3 and the return of Jesus Christ, and what she saw is eerily similar to current conditions in our world today.

When evangelist Emanuel Minos held meetings in the town of Valdres, Norway where she lived, this precious elderly lady shared what the Lord had shown to her with him. Minos wrote down what he was told, and it got put away in a drawer for 30 years.

But after many of the things that she saw started to come to pass, Minos remembered the vision and decided to share it with the world.

One of the reasons why I wanted to share this vision now is because it has so many parallels to other visions that I have been sharing recently. You can read her entire vision here, but in this article, I just wanted to highlight a few portions of it.

One of the things that this 90-year-old woman was shown was that there would be a “lukewarmness without parallel” before Jesus comes back and that “Christians will not be open for penetrating preaching”:

A lukewarmness without parallel will take hold of the Christians, a falling away from true, living Christianity. Christians will not be open for penetrating preaching. They will not, like in earlier times, want to hear of sin and grace, law and gospel, repentance and restoration. There will come a substitute instead: prosperity (happiness) Christianity.

The important thing will be to have success, to be something; to have material things, things that God never promised us in this way. Churches and prayer houses will be emptier and emptier. Instead of the preaching we have been used to for generations —like, to take your cross up and follow Jesus—entertainment, art and culture will invade the churches where there should have been gatherings for repentance and revival. This will increase markedly just before the return of Jesus.

This prophecy is being fulfilled right in front of our eyes.

There is a reason why you very rarely hear words such as “sin” and “repentance” in the Christian world today. In fact, for many ministries those have become extremely dirty words. It seems like everyone wants to have “happy church”, and so the conviction of the Holy Spirit is suppressed as much as possible.

I have been thinking a lot about Steve Hill lately. Could the evangelical Christian world even handle his kind of preaching today?

One of the reasons why you won’t find a Brownsville revival in America today is because evangelists who dare to preach about sin and repentance like Steve Hill once did are run out of large churches and are blackballed by large ministries.

If you study church history, you will never find a revival without repentance.

So for those of you who claim you want revival, you had better start embracing repentance.

I have previously warned about the “exposure” that is coming to the church, and if you have been paying attention to the headlines lately, you know that it has already begun.

Those in ministry cannot embrace great sin and expect to get away with it. In these last days God is raising up an army, but those that refuse to live in holiness will not be able to be part of it.

Getting back to the prophecy, this 90-year-old woman was also shown the great moral decay that will immediately precede the second coming of Jesus Christ:

There will be a moral disintegration that old Norway has never experienced the likes of. People will live together like married without being married. Much uncleanness before marriage, and much infidelity in marriage will become the natural, and it will be justified from every angle. It will even enter Christian circles and we will let it—even sin against nature. Just before Jesus returns, there will be TV programs like we have never experienced. [TV had just arrived in Norway in 1968.]

TV will be filled with such horrible violence that it teaches people to murder and destroy each other, and it will be unsafe in our streets. People will copy what they see. There will not be only one “station” on TV, it will be filled with “stations.” [She did not know the word “channel” that we use today. Therefore, she called them stations. -E. Minos.] TV will be just like the radio where we have many “stations,” and it will be filled with violence. People will use it for entertainment. We will see terrible scenes of murder and destruction one of the other, and this will spread in society.

Sex scenes will also be shown on the screen, the most intimate things that take place in a marriage.” Then the old woman said: “It will happen, and you will see it. All we have had before will be broken down, and the most indecent things will pass before our eyes.”

In addition to everything that you just read, she also saw that there would be a long period of peace between the superpowers of the east and west, that there would be a tremendous wave of immigration into Scandinavia (that is happening right now), and she was shown that World War III would involve the use of nuclear weapons.

Up to this point, everything in her vision has been fulfilled with precise accuracy, and so it would seem to be quite foolish to doubt the rest of it.

We are living at a time when a great shaking is coming to the church and to the rest of the planet as well. Those who are on the fence right now are going to be forced to pick a side, because during the times to come there is going to be a great price for following Jesus Christ.

And we can already see this starting to happen. According to one expert, 90,000 Christians were killed for their faith last year alone:

A well-known researcher recently told Vatican Radio something shocking: More than 90,000 Christians were reportedly killed last year because of their faith, meaning that about one Christian died every six minutes, the Christian Post reported.

Massimo Introvigne, founder of the Italy-based Center for Studies on New Religions, gave a highlight of some soon-to-release statistics that paint a picture of how dire Christian persecution truly is across the globe. One measure he shared is the estimate that between 500 and 600 million Christians worldwide can’t freely practice their beliefs.

If you are not right with the Lord, now is the time to repent and to turn to Jesus Christ with all of your heart, because without Him, none of us is going to have any chance of getting through what is rapidly approaching.

Copyright © 2017, End Of The American Dream. All rights reserved