in this essay pcr highlights just a bit of the foolishness we face here in the empire;

There is a hunger for truth and a rising cost of expressing it.  The New Year will give an indication whether truth is making a comeback or is continuing to lose ground to controlled explanations.  

Democracy cannot function without an honest and indepencent media, and no such media exists anywhere in the Western World. Instead, the Western media functions as an enforcer of the explanations that serve the interest of the ruling elites.  Everyone who challenges the lies— whether they are American, Canadian, Australian, British, German, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Scandinavian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Austrian, Jewish, gentile, black, white, Hispanic, Muslim, or Asian—that rule us is branded a “conspiracy theorist,” a “white supremacist,”  an “uncle Tom,” an “anti-semite,” a “holocaust denier,” a “self-hating Jew,” and a variety of other derogatory labels.

Given the weakness of character of so many present day Western people, the establishment’s name-calling is effective in scaring people away from truth-tellers.  This makes it difficult for truth to spread.

Without truth there is no freedom, no liberty, no accountability of government to the people in the Western democracies.  Indeed, there are no real democracies.  The Western “democracies” are just Potemkin villages.

Restoring what has been lost is the most difficult of all tasks.  The Greeks failed at it.  The Romans failed at it.  It seems too that we are failing at it.  Consider the controlled media’s multi-year campaign against Donald Trump. When Russiagate was exposed as a hoax, the presstitutes did not apologize for misleading the peoples of the world for years.  Instead, the presstitutes launched into impeach-gate.  Allegedly Trump threatened the Ukranian president with withholding of US funds unless the Ukrainian investigation, which was closed down by Vice President Biden, was reopened.  No evidence of this accusation against Trump has been found, and the President of Ukraine denies it.  .......https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/01/02/the-year-before-us/