Our Nation Is about to Reap the Whirlwind of All Lies we’ve Told
I’m going to start this tale of lies with a little economic anecdote from today’s news (because the economy is the main focus of The Daily Doom, but this time it is just a lens for approaching a much bigger and more menacing topic):
“Fed’s Favored Inflation Gauge Cools In September,” says one mainstream article that suddenly dodged behind a paywall so you can’t read any of it. I’m keeping it in the headlines anyway in order to call attention to the usual mainstream malarky as an entry point to the big theme today—the lies that are about to devastate us.
The article says that PCE inflation is now down to 2.1% annually. That’s good. That’s great, in fact, but the title of the article is misleading because that is not the Fed’s favored inflation gauge. In fact, the Fed intentionally does not even look at that number! And misleading is what I’ve come to expect from mainstream financial reporting. Nearly all the time!
The article goes on to say that core PCE (which takes out food and energy) for September remained exactly the same as August at 2.7%, which was higher inflation than expectations. THAT is the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge. The Fed goes by core PCE in determining whether or not it is meeting its goals. So, to the Fed, this was a report that says, “We got nowhere last month.”
Zero Hedge gets the headline for the same news just right: “Fed’s Favorite Inflation Indicator Hotter Than Expected!” Yup. Economists expected to see some progress, and there was none last month. In fact, as ZH noticed, on a month-on-month basis (v. the YoY focused on in the first article), “PCE appears to be accelerating with Durable Goods and Services costs picking up.…”
Uh huh. Just as forecast here all along for this time of year.
And remember, just as I faithfully pointed out last year, too, leading all the way up to when even the Fed finally admitted they had just had three months of rising headline year-on-year inflation (Jan-Mar.) that they didn’t want to see, it is those creepy little months that keep accumulating to finally drive the YoY number up. And we’ve seen a few of those now.
Here you can see the recent trend is not our friend:
There is one big caveat that has just entered my “Return of Inflation” theme, however, and I just laid it all out in my last Deeper Dive (which I put out early this week because it is that much of a game changer). Now that the Fed has totally lost control of long-term interest rates, the bond vigilantes may crush inflation by driving us deeper into recession. They are doing the Fed’s dirty work and doing it well to drive down inflation by pricing it and several other big risks that I lay out in that Deeper Dive into bonds, regardless of where the Fed wants interest to go. It will all depend on how much resolve they have to keep at it.
It is as if, for example, bond investors want to crush home prices by stifling all hope of home sales with rising mortgage rates, which went even higher than the first graph I showed in my Deeper Dive. They, of course, don’t have that motivation, but that is the effect. A more recent graph later in the Deeper Dive revealed that with just a couple more days added on, home mortgage interest has now recovered HALF of everything it came down by since its high nearly a year ago. Half! In just a month!
Imagine what that does to already tentative home buyers to lock the market up even tighter. If the vigilantes stay in the war, they’ll hold mortgages tighter until they crush home sellers into capitulating with lower prices. The Fed, I think, was hoping to juice the old housing bubble just a little once again with some reprieve on interest, which historically is still at modest levels. (It’s prices that are outrageous to where no one can afford houses even with moderate interest.) So, the Fed is foiled on that one if it had hoped to stir a little commerce to keep us out of recession and ease its 747 down onto the tarmac.
Fortunately for those crippled by inflation, the government is doling out election-year money:
Imagine how much worse the Biden economy would be if the government were not paying out more than it is getting back dollar-for-dollar in economic performance just to keep the engine running. (That is if you look at the total government deficit, not just the transfer payments for Social Security, etc.) But that, too, is one of the big crisis problems laid out in my last Deeper Dive as to why we can expect this recession to be worse than the last, even if it is unfolding slowly because the feds are doing all they can to pump up gov’t spending and pump up stats to make it look as if all of Biden’s spending is accomplishing something—especially job statistics and GDP.
We have slammed up against the Law of Diminishing returns for the old ways of managing ourselves out of recessions or avoiding the worst pain. The Deeper Dive laid out in detail how clearly you can see the failure of the old ways now. That is why it was important. We’ve hit a major regime change where the Fed, at least for now, is not in charge anymore, and neither is the government, which is greatly at the mercy of its own encumbering debt and the bond vigilantes that are pricing that debt upward. All of that is laid out pretty clearly in that Deeper Dive. That shift, unexpected by anyone I read (including me), will change a lot of things from this point forward if it continues.
That gov’t lying by pumping of stats is why I’m not even going to talk about the latest government reports on GDP or jobs, and it brings us to the topic of the day. I’ve spent enough time laying out the baloney of the Biden Bureau of Lying Statistics. Many other writers have started calling out the BS now that it has become so obvious and constant. Even the Fed has called out the badly flawed employment reports. It’s all endlessly pervasive nonsense at such a high level that, at last, almost no one can miss it, though the mainstream press is not as outraged as they ought to be because we have become a nation addicted to lies.
That is why I am going to write, instead, about lies in general that have become the state of our disunion and that are consuming us. We have descended into such a state that each side of the political aisle (and nearly all the voters that vote for that side) will swallow and perpetuate any lie that serves their own party/candidate.
Liar, liar everywhere
Lies are being perpetrated and perpetuated all over so much that it is almost impossible to get any bearing on what is true. They are ubiquitous. I read so many news stories from both the Right and the Left everyday where I question the big claims of either side. Look at the highlighted election stories below. You look at what the Democrat politicians are saying; you look at what Trump & Co. are saying; and it looks to me like both sides are lying all the time, trying to exaggerate the flaws of the other:
“Trump is Hitler,” but then Trump brings it on himself by talking adoringly of Hitler without any qualifications. He does that because he likes to keep his name in the news, and he knows dangling that kind of red meat tantalizes the press; but that leaves him and his supporters with no basis to be upset with the liberal press when they decide to just take him at his word by saying he respects Adolf Hitler as a great leader and intends to be “czar for a day” in order to “seek retribution” on his enemies just like Hitler. They present all of that as if those things are his actual campaign planks, but why not? If someone says outrageous things like that just to gain attention, I’d take them at their word, too, if it would damage them. That’s the cost of saying stupid, outrageous things to get attention, especially if you think you’re going to lead “the greatest nation on earth.” Why would I have sympathy for someone who says such outrageous things being held intensely to his own flamboyant words?
And I don’t mean just the politicians are liars because you can always expect that. I mean many of the articles written from people on both sides who swallow whole lies that are good for their side’s argument and perpetuate some of the huge unsubstantiated or exaggerated claims that attack the other side. I also mean their readers who are willing to swallow it all up without any objective thought because it says what they want to hear.
The nation is divided into camps where the whole of each camp is addicted to lies. For example, do something purely apolitical and neutral like require your longtime liberal newspaper to NOT promote one side over the other but to give a balanced report on what each candidate accomplished, good and bad, while in office, and you get ripped to shreds as anti-democratic, even though that is probably the most democratic thing (but not Democratic (big “D”)) either the LA Times or the Washington Post have done in years!
The Left so abhors objective reporting that The Post has already lost a QUARTER-MILLION subscribers for refusing to endorse one political side over the other as its new editorial policy from on high! To me, that’s a move toward objectivity, forced by the publisher on very liberal editors. The Left loathes it. The fairly new opinion editor put in place by Bezos, however, told his editorial staff in the news today, essentially, “You can always quit, and I’d welcome you to do so.” The Left is outraged that their favorite liberal paper can no longer be as biased in their favor as they believe a truthful paper should be. The Right, of course, stopped reading either of those papers long ago. So, the editors were never doing more than preaching to the choir anyway.
Chaos coming
I agree with the article below that says the days between Election Day and Inauguration Day are the most perilous our nation has seen in a very long time. From the start of the year, this is where I believed we’d end up at election time:
Predictably, suspicions that voting has been unfairly suppressed or that the counting is rigged will intensify. Rumors and fake news will flood social media, with some posts undoubtedly the products of agents of foreign governments trying to foment discord and chaos.
There could be delays in the count, challenges, recounts, disputes and litigation. Battle lines may sharpen as the contest proceeds to certification by the states and then by Congress on Jan. 6.
Clashes can occur simultaneously on several levels. Legislative intrigues at state and local levels could encourage street battles. Propelled by reckless exhortations and mass disinformation campaigns, partisan vigilantes may try to undermine the vote count, intimidate the vote counters, drive their enemies from office or launch local campaigns to further promote political and social agendas.
Not surprisingly, many Americans feel that the outcome of this election threatens their own personal safety. This is new territory.
While that article leans toward riots from the Right, it won’t be any better if the Left loses, just a little different on the kinds of claims that are made. It may even be more violent.
When no one knows what the truth is because lies are abounding and unchecked on both sides at a time when people are willing to fight for “the truth,” then we’re in a lot of trouble. The champion presidential liars of both parties have cultivated large followings of believers. We are barreling toward major rebellions all over this country once the election results come in because no one even knows what the truth is about election machines and their possible malfunctions—always claimed by the Right but never proved in court after years of opportunity to make their case, other than errors in completely insignificant numbers! No one knows what the truth is about the number illegal alien voters and the number of wrongly harvested votes or over-voting by individuals.
At the same time, any honest person would have to admit that having YEARS to make your case in over sixty courts and losing in every single one of them, after hiring the nation’s most expensive lawyers, is as resounding a defeat as you could ever think you’d see! Yet, one side still insists on believing something they have DEMONSTRATED time and again they have ZERO ability to prove at a legal level, even in highly conservative courts.
They believe it because they are fed the big lie and are part of perpetuating it. They believe January 6 was not an insurrection, no matter how many heads got bashed and windows broken or people shot for breaking and entering and trying to stop congress. They minimize all of that! I stood up in my home and exclaimed, “This is an actual insurrection. How is this happening” as it played out on television. They believe they were not as bad-ass as BLM and Antifa, whom they have always despised for such “protests,” and whose actions they would NEVER minimize. They call those actions “riots” (as do I) while excusing their own gallows-bearing, wrist-band toting, head-cracking riot as a mere “protest.”
It’s so blatantly disingenuous and two-faced it’s insane. I’m for calling out the BS by the BLS and the anti-social behavior of Antifa and the January 6 riot all based on the same standards of what is legitimate, constitutional “peaceable” assembly and protest and what is illegal mob violence and property damage.
I’m for a land that still makes it cases constitutionally in court, and when that cannot even be done in courts with judges politically biased in your direction, then you lose and agree to shut up and live with what the courts decide … because that IS the constitutional basis of the functioning democracy we have long enjoyed … until the last five years. So, I want to talk about what went wrong.
I’d be all over telling any story that was about the Trump campaign and his biggest supporters making a winning case about election fraud because I hate lies and fraud, and I believe there probably is some fraud to be rooted out (maybe even a lot), and I don’t trust those machines; so, if they are miscalculating, I’d certainly want to call it out; but the numerous claims of election fraud were the biggest failure of a vast collection of court cases I’ve ever seen to where even the most conservative Supreme Court in my lifetime said, essentially, “Get this garbage out of here!” And that was the much boasted Kraken case!
I saw all kinds of holes in the cases as I read parts of them, so I wasn’t surprised at all that all courts threw them out. I would read them and say, “OK, that looks suspicious, but where is the evidence that it is what you claim it is? It could have easily been something totally innocent.” I’d look for the evidence and couldn’t find anything more than suspicious looking activity, so I’d think up scenarios that would explain what was seen with no wrongdoing. You need evidence to back your suspicions because suspicions are often wrong.
I still believe in the democratic principle that we take it to court and live by what the courts decide because that is a constitutional mandate of our democracy. We don’t get to take it back out to adjudicate it in the street with gallows and wrist bands. People have been sued and lost millions of dollars over these lies, and the courts were unanimous in great number … but the lie of the stolen election still continues in many forms. Never proven to a single court after years of trying, but never giving up.
So, we are a nation saturated in lies and addicted to our own side’s lies and now refusing to let courts decide the truth. I refuse to be a part of either side for that reason and turned in a ballot that voted for NO presidential candidate. I should have written in “Pinocchio” as more honest and preferable to the named candidates. I probably would have voted for RFK, but he removed himself anyway. (And to be frank, I’m not completely sure about all of his claims and theories; but he was better than the alternatives and still willing to shake things up.)
To make matters worse, the lies this year (and another factor in why I said this would be the “Year of Chaos”) are made so much more believable because they have AI helping to create them. I cannot even know any longer if videos I carry in the headlines that show Trump stumbling as he tries to get into a big rig or Biden biting children are true, or if they are AI concoctions. (Both are shown in today’s stories, except one that showed an alien mouth coming out of Biden’s mouth, ripping the flesh off a baby, which was clearly untrue and horrifying, even as a Halloween joke, so I excluded it.) I put them in the news today because I THINK they’re true, but there is far more to filter this year than I possibly have time for, and the videos are so well concocted that it is far harder to catch. So, I do my best as a one-man outfit, but I know some fake stuff probably gets past me. When you dwell in a world saturated with lies, you’re bound to get some on you even if you do your best to avoid them.
The headlines today show the Trump side is already laying the groundwork around the nation to claim the whole election is rigged again (all of which will go dead silent if he actually wins just like his 2016 claims of election rigging did the second he won). You can easily look objectively at the unsubstantiated claims Trump is throwing out and know that is exactly the case he’s preparing to pound to death if he loses again. Moreover, when some beat me up today and say, “No, you’re wrong; he’s not preparing to do that; YOU’RE the liar,” do you suppose they will come back to say, “I guess you were right after all” when he actually does it? Of course they won’t because those kind don’t care about the truth; they just jump to the next attack.
One of the things the Trump campaign is doing, as reported in one of today’s stories, is hiring pollsters from Republican organizations to put out lots of polls that show Trump winning. That is where nearly all the news you hear about Trump screaming ahead in the polls is coming from right now—not Gallup or Barna or Pew any of the big pollsters, but from Republican organizations. Are they doing this just to juice their supporters? I don’t think so. I think they are laying a case for saying later, “We were way ahead in many of the polls [sure the least-trustworthy because most partisan polls], so how did we lose the election?” If they win, of course, they’ll just say, “The polls showed we would win, and the polls were right.”
Trump is also accusing Pennsylvania today of voter fraud. He’s kind of right, except it was fraud that Pennsylvania caught and stopped. Trump doesn’t mention that! Of course, it is significant that such blatant attempts at fraud are happening, but we don’t even know which side the fraud favored—just that there were illegal ballots that were filtered out by Pennsylvania election officials.
But also look at ballot boxes being burned, which kill the democratic votes that already have come in, and no one knows what side is doing it, last I read, except that it is happening only in areas that would clearly vote predominantly for Harris. So, it looks like someone is intent on killing some Harris votes. This is lawlessness! Totally anti-democratic. In fact, democracy—long the heart and soul of America—is even being treated like a bad word in some of the far-Right articles I’ve read recently, including one article that I took a pass on today for exactly that reason. Prior to Trump, I would never have thought anti-democratic articles would originate from the Right.
Look at the Republican politician in the news this week who confessed he stole ballots from the site where voting machines were being tested for accuracy (and he was one of those participating in the testing). He absconded with a few ballots after they ran through the machines, which he clearly did so that he could make the claim that the voting machines counted more votes than there were actual ballots in the hand count of what went through them, but he got caught on video and with the ballots in his possession. Corrupt liar! But he does it in the belief that it’s good! The end justifies the means.
ANY lie will do if it serves your side. That’s what that is. “We’re sure the machines are lying, so let’s prove it by stealing ballots to reveal the lie!” How corrupt and twisted is that? It’s moral nonsense; you cannot prove a lie by creating a counter-lie. However, we have become a culture addicted to lying for our own candidate at any cost in service of the greater truth (we think as we destroy the very fabric of truth) to where most supporters on either side will buy any cover story for their candidate that is presented and will believe any disparaging statement made about the adversary with no proof at all.
I had to laugh and scoff today when the story that showed Trump stumbling and fumbling as he tried to get into a big truck was linked to a post on X that complained, “Would you give this much attention to this guy,” showing a video of Biden stumbling up an airplane ramp. I replied, “Are you actually complaining because they are giving as much time now to Trump stumbling as your side constantly gave to Biden’s stumbling?” I imagine that guy posted the video of Biden numerous times before Biden got out of the race. If he’d didn’t, many Trump supporters like him certainly did. Now he grumbles about the unfairness of his guy getting the exact same treatment. Double standards abound.
How we got to the Year of Chaos
That is the true state of our nation … on both sides, and that is why I have always believed the tail end of this year would make this the “Year of Chaos.” It’s simple: When lies prevail everywhere, chaos prevails. And lies are clearly prevailing all over both sides right now. But now I want to ask a more important and revealing question: How did we get here?
All of this has been fostered by lead politicians who have no objective respect for the truth and governments that publish huge economic distortions, which confuse everyone, and by the economic disparity that has grown into such an enormous gap between “the rich and the rest” under Republican administrations and Democrats for decades but especially by all the blatantly anti-constitutional 1984-style tactics deployed by Democrats during the overhyped Covidcrisis.
As someone living in a very blue state, I certainly know how much I was seriously damaged by the Democrats’ vaccine mandates, enforced by illegal employment termination; their ghettos for the unvaccinated, enforced by government-mandated vaccine-certification entry requirements for pubic facilities; their blatant censorship of all my best-paying articles, implemented by cajoling Google to take that action; their prohibition of me from even collecting unemployment after THEY fired me for refusing vaccination; their disallowance of the constitutional right to assemble even in churches under freedom of religion; their lockdowns of businesses that killed some of the restaurants I most enjoyed. It was the most insane and badly transformative five years I’ve ever experienced in Amerika. It was more austere degradation of American rights than I ever thought I’d see. Worse even than under George W. Bush in the post 9/11 years.
Look at all of of the lies originally pounded about the vaccine being able to prevent people from getting Covid and from transmitting it, which were demonstrated to be disingenuous by the tellers’ own inability to believe they were safe from the unvaccinated zombie hoard (as they practically described us) even though they were double, triple or quadruple vaccinated, themselves. Look at Jalopy Joe’s hugely divisive claim (and he says Trump is divisive!) on national television made with great emphasis that the unvaccinated were the reason we all had this plague—a real “us versus them” tactic.
Lies after lies and gross abuse of power for years. Trump empowered these liars, too, by keeping Fauci in charge and ensconcing Fauci and Scarf Lady in the bully pulpit on a nearly daily basis with the president standing approvingly beside them. So many lies, such broad abuse of power, followed with such willingness by Democrats to control everyone via police-state quarantine mandates that put our nation deep into the now prescient predictions of 1984 like I never thought I’d see.
That was all done for a pandemic that was, once all the numbers were in, not that much worse than a bad flu season (especially given how EVERY death by someone who had Covid was mandatorily cataloged as a Covid death, even if the individual died because their ambulance crashed on the way to the hospital, and an autopsy revealed they had Covid, but that wasn’t even why they were going to the hospital!
No wonder people believe lies and push them when both sides lie at the top so prevalently and with no shame at all. They just jump like a frog on a lily pad over to the next lie. I can say it was all lies because here I am, still unvaccinated, yet less affected after years by Covid than most of the vaccinated people I know. And I live in a town that didn’t practice social distancing any more than they could get away with avoiding.
The Left complains that Trump will be a dictator, but I never in all my life saw any president as dictatorial as Biden or any governor as dictatorial as Washington’s Jay Inslee. It was all-out rule by decree, and it was, for a fact, HUGELY destructive in my own life. I will forever make less money from Social Security and from my job where pay scales are based on years worked because of those two years of forced termination with zero wages. It will damage my earnings for the rest of my life, not just for those two years.
So, I understand where the rage is coming from and why people so readily believe lies all over the place. Lies are all they’ve been told by leaders on both sides (with Trump being a pathological, narcissistic liar) for several years now; and I don’t attack Trump with any bias because I’ve been attacking the Biden administration’s lies every month throughout his presidency, but especially this year when the economic lies have grown so thick. I just attack the lies wherever I see them.
I have lived through the worst distortion of society by Trump and Biden I ever witnessed. Lockdowns everywhere, starting under Trump. Drug companies practically baited to lie because they were given immunity from any injuries or deaths that come from their poorly tested, warp-speed drugs. Therefore, why not cover over any bad news in the testing and keep moving forward since you can’t be taken down for it anyway? (A level of protection that needs to be retroactively peeled back for anyone involved in knowingly presenting fraudulent data.)
The news media has, itself, lied so much through all of that it is now the only entity trusted less by members of both parties and members of none than congress! (Another story that passed through this week’s news.) So, when the supposed source of objective truth—the watchdog of society—carries the lies of the Biden administration in their reportage on the economy, as laid out again and again here, people just start believing the lies that they like the most.
But in the coming week, I strongly suspect, no matter which side wins, we are going to seriously start to reap the whirlwind—a twister comprising all the lies we’ve told and sold and believed. This could get uglier than any of the hurricanes we’ve seen this year! One could hope that everyone will read this article and recognize the truth about how many lies are on both sides and NOT go there, BUT I HAVE NO DELUSIONS ABOUT THAT EVER HAPPENING.
That’s why I believe we are about to enter the most chaotic part of the “Year of Chaos”—the part that caused me to give the year that name right from the start—and it is likely to whip up into quite a storm of lies about what happened in the voting and violence and then more lies to cover the violence. I hope I’m wrong. In fact, I would gladly agree to quit writing The Daily Doom forever if people would agree to prove me wrong about the chaos and violence and just not go there.
Unfortunately, I think I’ll have more to write about after the election, and I promise to punch just as hard and directly as I can at any of the falsehoods and violence and anti-constitutional acts I see from either side, even if it costs me every reader because I attack both sides. I say “anti-constitutional” because we are talking not just about acts that the constitution doesn’t allow but acts that actually destroy the constitutional rule of law in our nation because we wont’ accept it when the courts rule against us or when election results don’t come out as we believe they will or should. I would truly rather go out of business than fail to fight those lies with truth as best as I can, whether the Left wins or the Right, so no matter which side is making the lies.
I won’t always get my efforts at objectivity right—obviously—but I WILL always try, and I have no more emotional sympathy for one side than another. I hate lies wherever I find them, as few things more greatly damage society in aggregate. Lies are the little foxes that eat all the grapes.
I also write this trusting most of my readers by this point are objective enough to handle it, even if they disagree or think I’m coming down too hard. If some are not, I won’t miss them anyway—not even the paying ones—because I’d rather go down financially than not criticize any one side during the whirlwind of our own lies that is about to sweep over this nation in destruction next week and even more so in the weeks that follow. We’re about to pay the price of being so saturated in lies. We’re about to the reap the whirlwind.
(Articles laying out the many lies and accusations talked about above appear in boldface among the headlines that follow for paying subscribers.)