As IF Times

After three years of fighting, the spotlight has returned to the ongoing war between Russia and The Ukraine.  With human losses on both sides continuing to mount along with the financial toll, a possible end to fighting is now at least on the horizon.

But even as some kind of détente is being negotiated, an even more serious war has emerged among players who were notionally ancillary to the actual conflict. What is surprising is that the conflict is now among heretofore allies in geopolitics.  Schisms have now appeared within the fraternity of the ‘Western nations’.

There is great umbrage in the West among those with dated notions of the East versus the West carried over from the alliances after the last Second World war, now 80 years past.  For these people, East is still the enemy and the West are the good guys.  They still think, better dead than Red. Any kind of détente between these two ideologies can never be accepted by the black and white mindset of those thus convinced.

If we consider the fundamental reason for the division between the East and the West, it is grounded in the vastly different political ideologies pursued by either side.  The East, principally Russia, are presented as authoritarian states without the benefit of free democratically held elections,  without freedoms of expression and the general constriction of individual freedom of movement.  They are widely perceived as surveillance states in which citizens are under constant watch and forbidden to criticize the government.   They are portrayed as bleak, sad places where people are kept in poverty and oppressed.  Though Putin is still the strongman of Russia, the nation is in fact a Christian one without the rampant religious related crime plaguing the West.  We don’t see the squalor in the large cities as we’ve become accustomed to in the advanced West.

Thus, it was with great furor among the heretofore champions of the Western nations, the UK, France and Germany among others, when they responded to what can only be described as a wake-up speech by Vice President J.D. Vance at a security conference in Munich. Vance boldly pointed out that the principles of civilization that made living in the West preferable over living in communist regimes such as Russia, had been abandoned by the erstwhile champions of freedom.

Ironically the very things for which Russia is criticized were being implemented upon their own domestic citizens.  The City of London has the 3^rd largest number of surveillance cameras in urban centers in the world. This statistic is even worse when you see that virtually all of the other ones in the top ten are in communist nations.  Russia doesn’t even appear on this list.

Why are these cameras necessary? The only reason is to monitor the explosion of crime that has taken place in London and other British cities over the past decade or so.  Who is responsible for all this crime?  What has changed in the past few years?

It’s certainly clear that in most European nations, the populations have changed significantly by the addition of immigrants from non-Western nations.  But to even suggest that there is any link between this and the uptick in crime is to risk being set upon by the national governments since this may be considered hateful speech.  Such was the gist of Vance’s speech: That the influx of so many immigrants that do not share and will never share the values of the West are endangering the very existence of Western culture.  As most are probably aware, even being seen to be practicing a silent Christian religious observation is considered an offense in today’s Britain.

Thus we have the reality of Western nations suppressing the opinions of those that would protest against the dilution and diminishment of their native societies.  They are threatened with censure at the least and imprisonment at the worst. After Vance’s speech, a German official labelled it as being unacceptable. The irony of not supporting freedom of speech, the foundation of Western societies was totally lost on him….as well as most of the EU nations.  We now have governments monitoring individual’s social posts for language deemed offensive. There is even a movement to ban the X platform from the UK if not Europe for its role in spreading hate speech.

Thus we have the many EU nations circling the wagons to defend ‘Western values”, which includes defending the Ukraine, but which they don’t defend in their own nations.  It’s lost on most EU leaders that they have become the totalitarian  society that they have always considered the enemy Russia to be.  To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, the US didn’t leave the West; the West left the US.

link:  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14393987/usaid-programs-republicans-drag-queen-ecuador.html

Well whaddya know? The veil has been lifted and to the surprise of almost no one, it’s been revealed that practically the entirety of the US media, if not media globally, has been funded by only one source: USAID.

For those paying attention through the years, it wasn’t a complete shock since often, the narrative espoused by all media outlets was practically word for word exactly the same on any given issue.  It was Pravda on a global scale. At the very least, the workforce at USAID was certainly on a global scale, numbering over 10,000 workers.

According to the Columbia Journalism Review, USAID supported 6,200 journalists, 707 news outlets and 279 media sector civil society organizations in 30 different countries. It’s revealed that USAID has been a major sponsor of fake news.

For perspective, USAID began as a humanitarian organization targeting humane causes.  It has grotesquely morphed into the main funding source for a pot pourri of bizarre causes and directed towards preposterous ends. As noted, it employs 10,000 workers to help spread American goodwill.

According to documents retrieved by Trump’s financial sleuth, Elon Musk via the DOGE initiative, a short list of beneficiaries include:

$7.9 million to teach Sri Lankan journalists how to avoid “binary-gendered language”,  $2 million for sex changes and LGBT activism in Guatemala, $1.1 million to an Armenian LGBT group, $1.5 million to promote LGBT advocacy in Jamaica, $2 million to promote LGBT equality through entrepreneurship in Latin America, $3.9 million for LGBT causes in the Western Balkans, $5.5 million for LGBT activism in Uganda, $6 million for advancing LGBT issues in priority countries around the world, and $6.3 million for men who have sex with men in South Africa.

Apart from this, USAID has funded $25 million for Deloitte to promote “green transportation” in Georgia, $6 million to transform digital spaces to reflect feminist democratic principles, $1.3 million to Arab and Jewish photographers, and $8.3 million for “USAID Education: Equity and Inclusion”

It has also funded over $4.5 million to combat disinformation in Kazakhstan. That one is amusingly ironic.  Here’s a good one: $520 million to teach people in Africa about climate change.  Why wouldn’t it have been cheaper to send Greta Thunberg for a whirlwind tour?

And yet, these are peanuts compared to the amounts distributed to media outlets.  As we can imagine, attributing an accurate figure on the amounts spent on media is difficult, but the number of at least $268 million dollars has been offered by the same Columbia Journalism Review.   The number is likely much higher since this has been going on for years if not decades.

Heretofore respected outlets such as the New York Times and Reuters were revealed to have been beneficiaries of large sums of USAID money.  Thus, people have been deluded about the veracity of a story if it was carried by these formerly venerable outlets.  The most recent example of propaganda as news was the universal support of vaccines and masks for the Covid campaign. It turns out that they were fronting for Big Pharma.

This is important because, despite all that’s happened, people still think the NY Times and Reuters are real news. It turns out, the reportage was essentially marketing scripts with the intent of shaping opinions, not providing news.

How do we know that news outlets such as Reuters were involved in large scale social deception?  Well, for one thing, the name of the USAID file of the 9 million dollar grant given to Reuters was named “Large Scale Social Deception”

As we know, people are maddeningly naïve and they will believe anything if it’s repeated often enough…and by enough media outlets.

Thus, the entire concept of a free and independent media has been a charade. Thankfully, technology has undermined their influence on people’s news consumption, because now, X is the de facto medium of record.  Though you must still navigate through a virtual firehose of opinions and facts, at the very least, there’s an unfiltered presentation of data for the discerning mind to assess. You are no longer a victim of the official narrative.  It gives people comfort that the reality that they observe is not the same as what they are told to believe.  Information is now bottom up rather than top down.