Fair Use Notice: This site may contain some copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of vital issues which already exist in the public domain. – Note: These links are posted at the top of the page as the week progresses. Links from previous weeks can be found under the “Current Quicklinx” button.The fury of Europe’s farmers – The continent-wide revolt against the green agenda has shaken the EU elites to their core – by Fraser Myers – https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/01/the-fury-of-europes-farmers/ – This is the script from our latest video polemic. Watch it here. – “Europe’s farmers are rising up – and the elites are terrified. In France, farmers recently staged a four-day ‘siege of Paris’, blocking major roads around the French capital. In January, thousands of tractors descended on Berlin in Germany, lining the streets leading up to the Brandenburg Gate. In Brussels, farmers have gathered from all over Europe to demonstrate against the EU and pelt the European Parliament with eggs. In the Netherlands, tractors have caused the longest traffic jam in the nation’s history, as part of a years-long battle between farmers and the government. This farmers’ revolt is now truly Europe-wide. From Portugal to Poland, from Ireland to Italy, almost every EU country has been rocked by protests. So what is driving this populist uprising? What do the farmers want?.. Farmers in each country have their own specific grievances, of course. But there is a common root to their anger. What connects them is the European Union’s green agenda, which has been imposed on agriculture from on-high. It has made farmers’ lives a misery, sacrificing their livelihoods at the altar of climate alarmism. Bureaucrats who have no idea how farmers work and live, have essentially been condemning farms – many of them run by families for generations – to oblivion, all at the stroke of the regulator’s pen. And farmers are simply not putting up with it anymore… The first stirrings of revolt began in 2019, in the Netherlands, with the so-called nitrogen crisis. The Dutch Supreme Court ruled that the government was failing to cut nitrogen pollution to EU-approved levels. In response, the Dutch government promised ‘drastic measures’ to cut nitrogen emissions. In all but name, it declared war on its nation’s farmers. Suddenly, the government had turned against one of its most important and impressive sectors. You see, the Netherlands, despite its small size, is the second-largest exporter of food in the entire world, thanks to the world-beating efficiency of its farms. And nitrogen is intrinsic to this efficiency. Fertilisers are rich in nitrogen, and farmers need fertilisers to maximise their crop yields. Nitrogen is also an inevitable byproduct of animal farming. Livestock release ammonia, a compound of nitrogen and hydrogen, through their excrement. The Netherlands has over four million cows, 13million pigs and 104million chickens. Which is a lot of manure and a lot of nitrogen. Any crackdown on nitrogen emissions was always going to hit farmers hard. Even so, the Dutch government’s proposals went even further than anyone could have imagined. It said it would buy out thousands of the most polluting farms and simply shut them down. Other farms would have to cull a proportion of their animals. This would mean slaughtering around half of all the livestock in the Netherlands. In all, this represented an unthinkable act of national economic self-harm… Thus, the farmers’ revolt was born. Huge protests erupted in 2019. After a brief hiatus during the Covid pandemic, they came roaring back in 2021 and 2022. Dutch farmers blocked roads, railways and canal bridges with tractors and hay bales. They defied government bans to bring tractors into the Hague. Tens of thousands took part in the demonstrations. But the Dutch government did not back down. It kept proposing new targets, new measures and new restrictions on nitrogen. In 2022, the government’s own figures revealed that around 30 per cent of farms would have to close to meet their targets. And last year, it drew up a list of the 3,000 farms that it wants to forcibly close within the next few years… All of this has been done with the approval and encouragement of the EU. And there is worse to come in the Netherlands and beyond. The absurd nitrogen rules that are threatening Dutch farms come from an EU environmental directive that dates back to the 1990s. But the EU’s eco-mania has intensified massively since then. Farmers now have to contend with the drive to Net Zero, too. According to Laurence Tubiana, chief executive of the European Climate Foundation and the architect of the Paris Climate accords, Net Zero will require ‘the biggest overhaul of farming since the Second World War’. And yet, once again, farmers haven’t been consulted on this. Targets have simply been drawn up by the technocrats and rubber stamped by national governments, without any consideration for their impact on farmers and their ability to produce food… Under the EU’s so-called Green Deal, every EU member state has to reach Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050. And the EU’s emissions rules for agriculture are especially, insanely, stringent. The punishing green policies don’t stop there, either. The Farm to Fork strategy, announced in 2020, calls for 10 per cent of farmland to be set aside for non-agricultural use. It says that at least a quarter of EU farms should become organic. It says fertiliser use must fall by 20 per cent. Pesticide use must be cut by 50 per cent. And all of this should be done by 2030. Each of these demands would be enough to put thousands of farms out of business on their own. When combined, they pose an existential threat to European agriculture. And if the EU’s laws weren’t bad enough, member states are actually gold plating these regulations. The EU had already demanded the impossible of farmers. Now national elites in Berlin, Paris and The Hague want to go even further… This is why farmers are out on the streets across the continent. It’s why they’re taking matters into their own hands. It’s why they feel they have no choice but to block roads with their tractors, bring life to a standstill and dowse public buildings with manure. They are determined to remind the powers-that-be just how essential they are to the functioning of modern life… At first, the elites tried to dismiss the protests. They resorted to their usual playbook. They called the farmers fascists, far right and pawns of online disinformation. But this propaganda campaign has flopped. Not only have these smears failed to demoralise the farmers, they have also failed to turn the public against the protests. In country after country, European peoples are backing their farmers, even as the protests disrupt daily life… In the Netherlands, where our story began, a farmers’ party briefly managed to storm electoral politics, too. The Farmer-Citizen Movement – or BBB – was set up in 2019 amid the nitrogen-crisis demonstrations. Less than four years later, the BBB swept the board in the Dutch provincial elections. It won the popular vote in all 12 provinces – the first time any party had achieved this in Dutch history. While the farmers’ protests managed to bring tens of thousands on to the streets, the farmers’ party managed to mobilise almost 1.5million voters… The fury of the farmers has now become impossible to ignore. The usually tin-eared elites across Europe have been forced to listen and respond. In Germany, farmers have got their government to delay planned cuts in subsidies for agricultural fuel. And they have managed to keep their tax breaks on tractors and farm vehicles, which were also under threat. In France, farmers have extracted millions of euros in additional grants. And they’ve put paid to government plans to hike fuel taxes. In Ireland, a deranged government proposal to cull 200,000 cows has quietly been shelved. Even at the EU level, farmers have already chalked up some significant victories. Remember that plan to halve the use of pesticides by 2030? It’s now been torn up… But the protests aren’t going to stop anytime soon. How could they? These concessions, though welcome, do not go nearly far enough. The green agenda is diametrically opposed to the interests of agriculture. So long as European politicians are committed to Net Zero, then the farmers will always be in their sights. What’s more, the farmers’ cause will continue to resonate with ordinary people, who are also served poorly by their environmentalist leaders, whose policies are pushing up prices and obliterating food and energy security. The farmers are merely the canaries in the coalmine. They were just the first group of people to be pushed to breaking point – and to get organised in response… The farmers offer a cautionary tale to Europe’s rulers. The green elites assumed that farmers would take their bitter medicine. They had no idea just how devastating their regulations would be to farmers’ way of life. They failed to see the human beings behind the emissions figures on their spreadsheets. And the broader push for Net Zero could soon generate much more resistance, from a much broader section of society. After all, under the current plans, our energy bills are set to soar, as we replace reliable fossil fuels with unreliable renewables. Our trusty gas boilers could soon be ripped out, replaced with expensive and inefficient heat pumps. Older, cheaper vehicles are being banned or taxed off the road in the push towards electric cars. Yet again, the establishment seems to think it can change our way of life and shred our living standards without a peep of discontent. This is bound to provoke an almighty backlash. And the farmers have shown us the way… Long may the farmers’ revolt continue. And here’s hoping it inspires many more people to take a stand.”
The Plunder of Private Property Is the Lever for Global Tyranny – Virtually all of the issues that we cover in the THRIVE films, blogs and shows come back to private property. This topic arose in my recent Fireside Live and because of its dire importance, I wanted to share some of it with a larger audience. – by Foster Gamble – https://www.freetothrive.com/blog/the-plunder-of-private-property-is-the-lever-for-global-tyranny/ – “I have publicly voiced my concern that we are in the midst of a communist technocratic takeover of the world. When I mention this to my liberal friends many of them roll their eyes and go, “Oh, Foster… Communism…That’s so last century. That couldn’t happen here.” – That’s when I know that they’re getting their news from a very small bubble of CNN, MSNBC, Washington Post, New York Times, etc. — and they don’t know what Communism is… This essay is intended to facilitate your conversations with your networks about the importance of self-ownership… Many of the Social Justice Warriors in your life will say something like, “You know, private property is so selfish. And besides, it’s all God’s property and we’re here so temporarily, we’re just borrowing it and then it all goes back and, you know, for the good of the whole, the whole should have the property anyway.” – Those virtue-signaling platitudes don’t make any sense when you look into them and yet they are among the fundamental pillars of a very, very dangerous agenda. When I refer to a “Communist” agenda, I’m not name-calling. I’m making a direct and literal correlation… So let me start right out by sharing the 10 planks of communism as put forth in Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Here are the first five:
In the U.S. Bill of Rights, the first item is FREEDOM OF SPEECH, because without that everything else goes away… The second one is the RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS, because even if you have freedom of speech, you need to be able to protect yourself… Well, it’s just the opposite here. – The number one plank of communism is the – #1 — ABOLITION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY… The other planks all come from that. – #2 — HEAVY PROGRESSIVE OR GRADUATED INCOME TAX… “We’re going to take your property. Then we’re going to start taking your money during your lifetime, and if you haven’t given it all to us by the end of your lifetime, number three is … #3 — ABOLITION OF ALL RIGHTS OF INHERITANCE.” – You can’t give this to your kids. You can’t give it to other people. You give it to us, the State. – #5 — CENTRALIZATION OF CREDIT IN THE HANDS OF THE STATE BY MEANS OF A NATIONAL BANK WITH STATE CAPITAL AND AN EXCLUSIVE MONOPOLY… In other words, the State needs to centralize the money system so they can make the money system fake and use their authority to then dominate you through money… They’re just getting started. Let’s keep going.
#6 — CENTRALIZATION OF THE MEANS OF COMMUNICATION AND TRANSPORTATION IN THE HANDS OF THE STATE… So they’re going to control the media. They’re going to control transportation… #7 — EXTENSION OF FACTORIES AND INSTRUMENTS OF PRODUCTION OWNED BY THE STATE… That one goes into a little more detail, but the relevant part is that Socialism means the State owns the means of production. Communism is that next step further where they take over everything, including your body. So now they’ve got the money, communication, transportation, factories… all production… #8 — EQUAL OBLIGATION OF ALL TO WORK IN THE ESTABLISHMENT OF INDUSTRIAL ARMIES, ESPECIALLY FOR AGRICULTURE… This referred mostly to the big communist farms in the U.S.S.R. and China that they thought would be the solution to feeding the masses — which of course failed because they didn’t have expert farmers in charge of the farms. So it ended up in massive starvation… #9 — COMBINATION OF AGRICULTURE WITH MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY; GRADUAL ABOLITION OF THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN TOWN AND COUNTRY BY A MORE EQUITABLE DISTRIBUTION OF THE POPULATION OVER THE COUNTRY.
You can see here the roots of UN Agenda 21/30. They’ve reversed that now. They want to get almost everyone out of the rural areas, except their own controlled computerized farms and pack everybody into the cities where they can most easily control them. Of course, that’s going to get too crowded. So then they need to get rid of a huge percentage of us… And then finally, #10 – FREE EDUCATION… Wow. Fantastic. It’s free… and it’s education! Well, no, it’s not free. You’re actually going to pay through your nose, through taxes. And it’s not education. It’s indoctrination into government propaganda. You can see the beginnings of the Prussian school system, which was brought to the U.S. to train obedient workers, enthusiastic consumers and effective managers for the system… So there’s the core of The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx — the hero of today’s universities… So which ones of those coercions are the western governments NOT doing now? Really, every single one of them is already happening… I want to jump to the so-called free western world to see what’s actually happening now. I could go on and on, but here’s a short list of your private property that’s already in the process of being taken… DATA – They’re taking our data and most people are only beginning to understand that your data is personal information about you that you weren’t compensated for. You might’ve signed some 20 page small print permission that you never read, that nobody ever reads. And even if you read it, you probably wouldn’t understand it. They’ve been stealing our data for a long time and making literally billions over it and using it to program their AI to take over everything else… TAXES – The next one is they’re taking our earnings and land through taxes, inflation, regulations, licensing, market collapses, bail-ins and outs, etc… FREE SPEECH – Look what’s happening with the censorship. Don’t be fooled with this TikTok thing because this is the next cover where Biden would end up having complete control over what platforms you’re allowed to see and to how much and where and when… As an example, Bobby Kennedy Jr. is the most popular presidential candidate by far on TikTok. Polls show people under 45 are way more enthusiastic about Kennedy than they are Trump or Biden. And it’s just multiplying like crazy on TikTok. That’s just one of many things that they want to be able to shut down. But if the government can shut down TikTok, if they can get the legislation to do that, then they can shut down any platform they want or any particular type of content on that platform… GOLD CONFISCATION – Gold was confiscated in 1933 in the U.S. by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And if you got caught holding onto gold and not turning it in, you could be in prison for up to 10 years. So it was not something you’ll just hide in your closet. No, they were very, very serious… And now gold, which used to be $35 an ounce is over $2,200. It’s skyrocketing because the stock market is just so inflated, the economy’s so inflated, the dollar’s so inflated. Bitcoin and gold are taking off. The big question is will they try to shut them down? – I think they will probably try to do both. The experts that I talk with think that it will be technologically impossible for them to shut down Bitcoin and I’m glad to hear that from people who are savvier than I am… Will they try on gold again? I think so, but I don’t think they’ll succeed on either of these because gold is so popular, as is Bitcoin now… amongst even BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard and Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs. Many of them are recommending to their clients now that they have between one and five percent of their portfolio in Bitcoin… So the big rise in Bitcoin now is mostly corporate. They got the individuals scared by crashing the price. Now they’re buying up. They started buying in at about $17k and now it’s back up near $70k. And I think it’s going to keep going… It always comes down to enforcement. If the government says, “Well, you can’t use Bitcoin. And if we find you using it, you know, we’ll be tracking your online activity. We’ll be coming to your homes and you won’t be able to use Bitcoin unless you allow us to transfer all of your Bitcoin at our designated price into Fed Coin.” So now you would be in the central bank digital currency (CBDC)… WOMEN’S SPORTS – I just listened to a remarkable interview where Joe Rogan is talking with Riley Gaines, an all American women’s swimmer who is the most outspoken person for women’s rights in sports… She’s only 23 and she’s already super savvy, eloquent and fearless. This is a girl who started swimming at four. By high school she was spending four hours a day in the pool. By college she was spending six hours a day in the pool and became a national championship contender… The next time she swam for a national championship, lo and behold, she found out a week before that there’s a new gal on the scene who’s swimming seconds faster than any other girl in the country. So where did that come from? – They all know each other at that competitive level. Well, this is Lia Thomas, who was something like the number 400 ranked 100-yard butterfly swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania on the men’s team… mediocre to say the least. But then he had started identifying as a woman and now he ends up winning all these meets and then ends up in the national championship tying Riley with the exact same time… But they give the trophy to Lia Thomas… The NCAA had been instructed to make sure that they got positive publicity for this guy who then ends up changing in their locker rooms with no warning. All of a sudden, they look around. Here’s this six-foot four guy naked in the locker room with the women — potentially traumatizing all of these athletes while destroying Title Nine protections… I think there’s one woman in the NCAA who’s identified as a man and went to a man’s sport. Obviously, there’s a reason why they’re all going the other direction because clearly men biologically have a lot of advantages that don’t all get changed with hormones and surgery. So women’s sports are being invaded… Fortunately, at the end of the interview, Joe says, “well, is anything happening for good in this?” She said 24 states have already passed a ban on biological men in women’s sports, no matter what they call themselves. So that’s fantastic. We’re halfway there with the states already… And that will spread around the world because this is obviously just one of those things where you take inclusiveness way too far because the people who are actually at the top of the pyramid behind the woke agenda, they couldn’t care less about women or men… What they care about is communizing the world. This is just another excuse to destroy culture, to destroy the critical thinking and set people against each other… LANGUAGE – I’ve talked before about how around the pandemic, they conveniently started just changing the definition of pandemic and of vaccine… Now with this recent incident where Donald Trump talked about how there would be an economic bloodbath if they kept up with these oppressive regulations in the automotive industry. Of course, they tried to grab that, take it out of context and make it sound like he was saying, “Well, if I don’t get elected, you know, America will be a bloodbath.” – They can just do these things because of the level of control that they have now over Wikipedia, over dictionary.com, over most, if not all, of the mainstream media. Fox is a little bit more freedom-oriented than woke/fairness oriented. But when they kicked off Tucker Carlson and a few others who were really freedom lovers and truth tellers, it was a bad sign… Alternative truth media is way outstripping all the mainstream media, which is literally dying on the vine. The latest figure I heard was they’re getting a maximum of 700,000 viewers in the entire prime time schedule of shows on CNN. Whereas meanwhile, for a single podcast, truth-seekers like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson are getting 10 to 50 million. And this is growing because most people want truth… GUNS – They’re trying to take away our guns and our ability to defend ourselves. Every single dictator in history, the first thing they’ve done before taking over is get rid of the guns. Remarkably many of my liberal friends are starting to wake up to this, actually buying guns, learning how to shoot them just for their own protection… I don’t think that next attempt at private property confiscation will be successful either… SELF OWNERSHIP – The biggest private property issue of all is ownership of your body… If somebody tries to argue with me against private property, it usually goes something like this… I simply say, “Well, do you think you should own your own body?” – And they go, “Well, it’s God’s, you know, and for the good of the whole I’m…” – “No, if someone wants to rape you and they haven’t been getting much sex recently, so they’re underprivileged sexually, do you think that they should be able to?” – “Well, no, I wouldn’t take it that far.” – THE FRUITS OF YOUR LABOR… “Okay. Well, you know, you go off and work hard every day and you bring home your paycheck. A lot of it has been taken already by the government. Do you think that you should be able to retain the fruits of your labor?” – “Well, you know, I believe I should pay for the taxes and so forth. It’s the price way pay for civilization.” – “Okay. You’re welcome to do that if you believe in it, but if I don’t, and I don’t want to pay for all the ridiculous things that the government is doing, do you think that they should be able to still take my money?” – “Well, yeah, maybe not.” – It just begins to open up the conversation. And now it’s gotten even clearer through people who have been defending a woman’s right to choose in relation to her own body with abortion for decades, now going around marching in the streets for mandatory vaccines. All of a sudden, it’s not “My body, my choice” this time…THE AIR YOU BREATHE, THE FOOD YOU EAT… Can they put stuff in our food? mRNA vaccines in our lettuce and spinach? Can they take over farms with GMO seeds, float pollen through the air to infect organic farms? They are already doing all of this… EDUCATION – The right to educate yourself and your children is really no longer yours. We still have homeschooling in the U.S. Now in Germany, they’ve banned it. And that’s a sign of things to come with the EU… BORDERS – I am an anarcho-capitalist, a voluntaryist. I don’t believe in government. Therefore, I don’t believe in the state. Therefore, I don’t believe in borders ultimately. Ultimately, we shouldn’t have any national or state borders — just individual and organizational private property… Everything should be based on honestly gotten private property that is yours to do with what you want, as long as you’re not violating anyone else… However, we’re not in that world. We are in a world of nation states that will shoot you or take your stuff if you disobey them. So while we have nation states, then your country needs to be as honest as possible as a Republic. And then it needs to protect itself… If it’s going to declare its existence, then it at least needs to protect itself. The whole open border issue is just a blatant operation by the Biden administration, working for the Chinese Communist Party as the enforcement arm of the global deep state in order to not only increase the number of Democrat voters with non-citizens who will be expected to be beholden to the people who let them in… But it’s more than that… It’s another part of Agenda 21/30, the UN scam to collapse the U.S. economy, to get 300 million freedom fighters in distress, in despair, in collapse, so that the main obstacle to the new world order, which is America, can be disappeared and just sucked up into the global police state… SOVEREIGNTY – And that brings us to the last one on my short list here, which is individual sovereignty and this WHO Health treaty, which will be voted on by 194 nation states at the end of May and is the most imminently dangerous event that I know of. Its purpose is to take over our healthy, travel, food, money and social credit scores… It was very dangerous at the Copenhagen Climate conference where Donald Trump went and was the only major leader to say no to a climate change agreement that would have surrendered all of our national sovereignty, and therefore our individual sovereignty, to a global state. Trump single-handedly prevented that one… Here’s a clip where David Martin does a nice succinct summary of that WHO treaty. It’s intended to control every single sector… Regarding the WHO treaty, the U.S. government has no right to do this. They would never get it passed in the Senate. It should never be a vote anyway, but even if they went to the Senate, they wouldn’t get it. So my information is that Biden is going to try some sort of executive order and just claim the authority to sign this treaty… It’s mind boggling to try to sort out all these little individual problems. It’s like a swarm of bees that are after you, but there is a queen bee and the queen is the deep state. Their goal is to get rid of private property and create a global communist technocratic state with them in charge, especially the central bankers and the secret societies… Ultimately, the solution is to get rid of government an”