Emerging threats to Western civilization and how to protect yourself, your family and your nation. Analysis + Solutions
A White Paper by Mike Adams and the Editors of NewsTarget.com
“I am mortified beyond expression when I view the clouds that have spread over the brightest morn that ever dawned in any country… What a triumph for the advocates of despotism, to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal and fallacious.”
— President George Washington.
Table of Contents
Executive Summary
Introduction
Part One: Summary of Threats
Racism and social unrest created and stoked by the White House
Protests that lead to — martial law?
Loss of the power grid
Failure of government support systems
World War
Political uprising and unrest following the election of Donald Trump
The spreading Zika virus and other biological threats
Disease threats made worse by the U.S. government
Reintroduction of HIV, via immigration
Ebola
Nuclear terrorism
Collapse of cities
Part Two: Solutions
Food and water
Moving through the chaos
How to stay healthy
Self-defense
More about food
Part Three: Conclusions
References
Executive Summary
Several events are converging that could cause major societal disruptions and chaos in the coming months, including the election of a new U.S. president, world conflict, terrorism at home and attacks on our infrastructure.
Increasing tension between ethnic groups and races is being stoked deliberately for the purposes of empowering political elites up to and including President Barack Obama, who himself has an established history of blaming America for racial injustice.
This includes an organization founded by Obama, which is currently training hundreds of thousands of “community organizers” who plan to continue agitating for “social and racial justice” after he leaves office.
There are growing concerns that protests may lead to increased civil unrest, giving the president a reason to declare martial law and perhaps even suspend the presidential election in November.
Threats are increasing to the nation’s power grid, as are risks of attacks, including nuclear war, a massive solar event, cyber warfare, terrorism and physical sabotage.
The national debt is spiraling out of control and will not reverse course anytime soon, threatening to bankrupt the country and severely curtail the government’s ability to continue providing cash benefits and other economic assistance to a restless population more dependent on handouts.
Tensions are increasing in Asia and Europe, making war with major powers like Russia and China more likely now than ever before.
The election of Donald J. Trump as president would likely incite rioting and collapse of the civil society as social change forces led by Obama and other activist groups opposed to him turn to violence in protest.
Incidents of biological and viral threats including Ebola, Zika, antibiotic resistance and other phenomena are rising and threaten to unleash a global plague.
Mass immigration from the third world is bringing deadly diseases once on the decline or virtually eradicated back into our country.
Collapse of American cities may be eminent if certain conditions are achieved by those who create crisis in order to permanently seize power.
The super-wealthy in American cities are investing heavily in so-called “panic rooms” that are high-tech and able to fend off marauding hordes while others are buying retreats abroad in far-away places like New Zealand.
The good news is there are many solutions that ordinary Americans can begin implementing right now, before things get worse.
Introduction
As America enters another presidential election cycle, there is clear and compelling evidence that the 2016 election is different than any other in modern history. Not only are both candidates of the major parties deeply unpopular,[1] one of them — Republican nominee Donald J. Trump — is a billionaire businessman with no political experience at all, while the other, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, is the first presidential candidate to have been under criminal investigation while running for the nation’s highest office.[2]
What’s more, the presidential race is taking place at a time when the social fabric of our nation is unraveling. Some pundits and political observers have compared today’s riots and protests, fueled by racism, class warfare and loss of economic status, as reminiscent of the civil rights protests and unrest of the 1960s.[3] Our college campuses, as in our city streets, seethe with hate, discontent and unrest. Political media engage nightly in dishonesty and discourse, fanning the flames of competing ideologies. Our police are under attack and are being killed by crazed domestic terrorists who have been whipped into murderous frenzy by an activist president who praises the protestors while criticizing the police.[4] There is also concerted effort by social change artists to fund, guide and lead — even if from behind the scenes — the unraveling of the social order.[5]
At the same time, the current administration has essentially stopped enforcing our national borders. Illegal immigrants by the tens of thousands are being allowed to pour into our country, while our border enforcement officials are rendered powerless and our federal immigration courts overwhelmed.[6] Hundreds of cities whose governments are more sympathetic to illegal aliens than their own citizens are in fact being turned into sanctuaries for millions who violated our laws to enter our country.[7]
In addition to threats to the civil society at home, there is also much turmoil abroad. Civil strife and terrorism in the Middle East has led to mass migration of refugees out of the conflict zones and into European nations, where their presence has sparked a religious backlash and nationalist fervor. Many of these people are not refugees at all but are using the mass exodus to infiltrate Europe; they are in fact radicalized Islamic militants.[8] In addition, acts of terrorism committed by Muslim extremist organizations like the Islamic State have been committed in several European nations including France, Germany and Belgium.
Add to this war fears as a resurgent Russia is on the move in the Baltic Sea and Ukraine, while an aggressive China is pushing outsized territorial claims in the South China Sea, threatening $5 trillion in annual trade commerce. Meanwhile, Iran and North Korea threaten to unleash cyberwar and terrorist organizations abroad are constantly looking for ways to engage in nuclear terrorism.
While the world struggles with unrest and geopolitical problems, the threats to U.S. stability are the most dire. The social struggles and political chaos that threaten to boil over any day and spill into our streets would produce not only domestic instability but instability the world over. Without a stable United States to lead the world and help keep and enforce the peace, conflict would most likely break out in a number of regions.
There may be anything anyone can do to heal our divides and pull us back from the brink at this point, however. One presidential contender has promised to “make American great again” while the other belongs to a party that exists to create social, racial and economic divide. Those two positions seem hopelessly at odds. That said, this paper will not only focus on the most dangerous and likely threats to liberty, freedom and stability, it will also address what each of us can do, individually and in small groups, to prepare ourselves to survive the worst of the violence.
Part One: Summary of Threats
The United States is currently facing several major threats to its stability — most from within our political, social and economic systems, but some from outside our country. The most serious of these stem from the current turmoil that is raging across the political spectrum, between “left” and “right,” “conservative,” “liberal” and “libertarian.” Nearly all of the unrest has been contrived by social change artists, would-be revolutionaries, community organizers and much of it is being directed by President Barack Obama[9] and financed by well-heeled multimillionaires and billionaires.[10]
1. Racism and social unrest created and stoked by the White House
There is little doubt that race relations have worsened under the nation’s first black president. Most Americans believe it.[11] So do some of our politicians.[12] Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says that is because Obama has continually railed against police officers, outright claiming that many white officers are racists in their dealings with black suspects.[13] In an interview with MSNBC morning host and former U.S. congressman Joe Scarborough, Gingrich explained:[14]
Well, the risk of, once again, being divisive. I think as long as you have Barack Obama doing what he did over the last few years, if you’ve had 7 1/2 years of a black president, 7 1/2 years of a black attorney general, Gallup reports race relations today are worse than any time in the last 17 years.
Why? Because how often has he hit the police. He hit the police in Cambridge and he was wrong.
He hit the police in Ferguson, he was wrong. He hit the police about Florida. He was wrong. At what point does the president have some obligation to say, you know — there are two parts of this.
One, we’ve got to better understand the experience of being black in America and in places like Chicago where 3,200 people have been killed in the Obama presidency, we had better have a strategy that works. We don’t.
Apologists for the president claim that the backlash against Obama is itself proof of racism. But the record — especially in dealing with police — is clear.
For instance:[15]
He took the side of his former Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates, when Gates was arrested by a white Cambridge Police sergeant for what looked like a home break-in. Obama said during a televised press conference that the police “acted stupidly,” though he admitted he did not know all of the details of what had happened. In this incident very early in Obama’s first term he began planting the narrative that white police are inherently racist and always have been when he claimed, “[T]here’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.” The incident shows “how race remains a factor in this society.”
In the Trayvon Martin case — in which a jury exonerated his killer, George Zimmerman — Obama said Martin “could have been me 35 years ago,” once more insinuating that American society in general (and police in particular) are racists.
After the killing of a black criminal, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, Obama again singled out cops, claiming 1) that what happened was police “abuse;” and 2) that the alleged abuse “is not an isolated incident.” It didn’t matter that eventually a grand jury and Obama’s own Justice Department found 1) police officer Darren Wilson was justified in shooting Brown; and 2) the “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative adopted by the Black Lives Matter movement, which sprang out of Ferguson, was bogus and did not happen.
After repeat offender Freddie Gray died from self-induced head-bashing inside a police van in Baltimore, Obama once again laid the blame at the feet of police, claiming, “This is not new, and we should not pretend that it’s new.” Translation: Cops kill black men all the time.
Following the death of Eric Garner, who was resisting arrest for selling cigarettes illegally in New York City, Obama began using the word “racist” to describe police killings of black men. And as usual, he claimed that racial discrimination is “deeply embedded in society.”
In March 2015, on the anniversary of the civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, Obama said:[16]
A more common mistake is to suggest that racism is banished, that the work that drew men and women to Selma is complete, and that whatever racial tensions remain are a consequence of those seeking to play the ‘race card’ for their own purposes. We don’t need the Ferguson report to know that’s not true. We just need to open our eyes, and ears, and hearts, to know that this nation’s racial history still casts its long shadow upon us. We know the march is not yet over, the race is not yet won, and that reaching that blessed destination where we are judged by the content of our character — requires admitting as much.
In a June 2015 interview with National Public Radio, Obama continued the “America is racist” narrative:[17]
What is also true is that the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives — you know, that casts a long shadow. And that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on. We’re not cured of it.
Racism. We are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say ‘nigger’ in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t overnight completely erase everything that happened 200-300 years prior.
The results of Obama’s constant harping about racism and how America isn’t “cured of it” yet assumes that every other country on the planet has conquered its racism, which of course isn’t true. But Obama — who was well-schooled in tactics of division by his friend and mentor Saul Alinsky, author of Rules for Radicals, used “racism” to whip up fervor and unrest to advance his own political agenda.[18] In particular, Obama uses the political tactics in Alinsky’s book of revolution to persuade and empower the “’have-nots’ in our society to overthrow the haves and take away their power.”[19]
In particular, Alinsky taught:[20]
[You must help] the people in the community…feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. [An] organizer must shake up the prevailing patterns of their lives–agitate, create disenchantment and discontent with the current values, to produce, if not a passion for change, at least a passive, affirmative, non-challenging climate. [You must] fan the embers of hopelessness into a flame of fight.
Another observer Obama’s agitation this way, noting that the president intends to continue what he began in office after he leaves the White House in January 2017:[21]
After making America poorer, weaker, less free, more race-obsessed and balkanized throughout his tumultuous presidency, Barack Obama is gearing up to use his two tax-exempt nonprofits to continue attacking what remains of the republic’s civil society after he leaves office…
His presidency “has been pockmarked by rioting, looting and protests” as he “encouraged the nonstop civil unrest exhausting the nation,” writes Paul Sperry, a media fellow at the Hoover Institute.[22] Along with an “army of social justice bullies,” Obama plans to make things even worse than they are now before he leaves office on Jan. 20, 2017.[23]
He will do that, in part, by further empowering organizations that have sprung up in response to Obama’s creation of imagined societal inequities and racial injustice. One group that has sprung up in response to the president’s agitation is also growing in militancy: the Black Lives Matter movement, which exploded after the death of Michael Brown.[24]
Obama has feted the group’s leaders at the White House, calling them “much better organizers” than he was at their age while thanking them for their “outstanding work” and adding that he is “confident that they are going to take America to new heights.”[25]
Or new lows. Members of this organization have held street demonstrations where they have chanted, “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon” — a reference to killing police officers.[26]
Obama will utilize other groups as well — groups he has actually formed, helped finance and nurture.[27] Two groups, Organizing for Action (OfA) and the Barack Obama Foundation, will “continue punishing America for its imaginary sins and to promote manufactured controversies long after he leaves” the Oval Office.[28]
OfA, which is based in the president’s home town of Chicago, has trained “more than 10,000 leftist organizers, who, in turn, are training more than 2 million youths in [Saul] Alinsky street tactics.”[29] This “army of social justice bullies” will be tasked with carrying on Obama’s campaign to fundamentally transform the country.[30]
One observer describes the millions-strong force of agitators thusly:[31]
OfA is a less violent version of Mussolini’s black shirts and Hitler’s brown shirts, or of the government-supported goon squads that Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Cuba’s Castro brothers use to harass and intimidate their domestic opponents. OfA units brought muscle to the 2011-12 fight in Wisconsin over that state’s out-ofcontrol government labor unions. OfA has bludgeoned Democrats that Obama deemed insufficiently left-wing, especially red-state congressional Democrats who had been wavering on the issue of Obamacare.
The organization uses the Internet heavily to promote its goals and agitate, drawing inspiration from another Left-wing agitprop, MoveOn. org, which has perfected meet-up activism and online fundraising. Often these two groups work together on issues.[32]
But OfA is just one part of the plan. The president’s foundation, which hopes to raise $1 billion or about double what was raised for George W. Bush’s presidential library, may actually overshadow OfA in terms of “destructive, nihilistic, antisocial activism in the post-Obama era.”[33] Obama will use his foundation to continue wreaking Left-wing havoc all around the globe.[34] A smaller version of OfA will reside at Obama’s foundation headquarters, which is planned for Chicago’s South Side.
The foundation’s website states, ominously, “As President Obama has said, the change we seek will take longer than one presidency.”[35] And: “The President’s historic candidacy was never simply about winning an office; it was about building a movement to tackle challenges that would define a generation. This work will live on in the Obama Foundation, which will inspire citizens across the globe to better their communities, their countries, and their world.”[36] [My emphasis]
What we call the “mainstream media” has also been working in collusion with the president’s Democratic Party to foment unrest as well. “The DNC also made a secret ‘agreement’ with Kenneth Vogel, an influential report for Politico. An email from late April with the subject line ‘per agreement… any thoughts appreciated’ shows that Vogel sent an advanced copy of a story about Hillary Clinton’s fundraising to the DNC even before his editor even saw it.”[37] Story content and headlines were changed to suit the DNC narratives.[38]
Perhaps the president sees himself as a great revolutionary of the times. It may simply be that he wants to decrease American prestige and status because he believes our country has become too powerful and deserved to be taught some lessons.[39] Whatever the reason, clearly the president, and his ideological allies, are stirring discontent and disaffection among the American people, and then taking advantage of it.
2. Protests that lead to — martial law?
Most Americans today are not aware that the federal government has declared martial law on its citizens. “During the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln declared martial law and authorized such forums to try terrorists because military tribunals had the capacity to act quickly, to gather intelligence through interrogation, and to prevent confidential life-saving information from becoming public,” noted the Honorable Frank Williams, chief justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court, in a lecture on behalf of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.[40] During Lincoln’s presidency, and in some corners still today, he was and is criticized for taking extra-constitutional measures – so much so that “no president has carried the power of presidential edict and executive order (independently of Congress) so far as [Lincoln] did… It would not be easy to state what Lincoln conceived to be the limit of his powers.”[41]
The actions Lincoln took are instructive in their breadth and scope:[42]
In the 80 days that elapsed between Abraham Lincoln’s April 1861 call for troops—the beginning of the Civil War—and the official convening of Congress in special session on July 4, 1861, Lincoln performed a whole series of important acts by sheer assumption of presidential power. Lincoln, without congressional approval, called forth the militia to ‘suppress said combinations,’ which he ordered ‘to disperse and retire peacefully’ to their homes. He increased the size of the Army and Navy, expended funds for the purchase of weapons, instituted a blockade—an act of war—and suspended the precious writ of habeas corpus, all without congressional approval.”
There are a couple of things that make these actions significant. First, today’s modern technology would allow for a much more rapid recall and assembly of a recessed Congress, whereby presidents and the Legislative Branch would be able to discuss and work out plans should another national emergency of this sort arise. But more important is this: Most of what Lincoln did not only survived intact throughout the war — but was found to be proper by the U.S. Supreme Court — thereby essentially codifying Lincoln’s measures as acceptable uses of Executive power. That included Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus — a recourse in law whereby a person can report an unlawful detainment, usually through a prison official, to a U.S. court. After a former U.S. congressman lost his seat and began to speak out against Lincoln and the North, the president had him banished to the South. He appealed the banishment to the Supreme Court which, in February 1864 refused to hear the case, with justices saying they had no authority to review the rulings of a martial court.[43]
What would happen if non-stop protests and agitation led to widespread civil unrest and violence? Would a president today consider that a national emergency on the scale of a civil war? He — or she — might if the level of violence was producing hundreds or thousands of casualties and causing billions in damage to major cities.
In explaining his suspension of the writ in a letter to congressional Democrats, Lincoln’s reasoning sounded a lot like the rationale the administrations of George W. Bush and Obama used from time to time, to justify (or attempt to justify) Executive actions:[44]
Lincoln declared that the regular civilian courts were inadequate during a rebellion. He claimed that those opposing the Unions’ cause endangered “the public safety.” Ordinarily, he wrote, such people could not be arrested since criticizing the government was not a criminal offense. If such persons were arrested, they would undoubtedly be released on a writ of habeas corpus by a civilian court judge. The necessary solution, Lincoln argued, was to suspend the writ and lock up the troublemakers until the war ended.”
The Constitution permits the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Article 1, Sect. 9, Clause 2 states: “The privilege of the writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended; unless where in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it” [my emphasis]. But as Williams noted, it is not clear who has the power to do so, Congress or the president.[45]
In modern times, presidential administrations and the military have begun preparing for the use of troops to keep the peace during periods of declared martial law. In the late 1990s, Congress and the Clinton administration changed provisions of the Posse Comitatus Act — a 19th century-era law that forbade the military from engaging in civilian law enforcement — that permitted wider use of Defense Department assets in a domestic capacity.[46] The changes included formation of a new military unit that would deploy to assist civilian law officers during a terrorist attack. The new command was established Oct. 7, 1999, and is called the U.S. Joint Forces Command, which replaced the longstanding Atlantic Command.[47]
Though JFCOM was shuttered in 2011,[48] its mission was ominous. At the time the command was stood up, then-Defense Secretary William Cohen made the case that the American public should never fear U.S. troops on their streets and, in fact, “should welcome it.”[49]
The most recent example of actual martial law occurred in 2005 in New Orleans, following Hurricane Katrina. Widespread flooding — then looting — rendered local government ineffective, so then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco activated the state National Guard and ordered them to assist local police in restoring order. In addition, then-New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, also disgusted by the lawlessness, imposed martial law on his city as well and directed his 1,500-member police force to do “whatever it takes” to restore order.[50]
“Occasionally, when some national emergency or crisis threatens public order… the comment is made that the President may ultimately resort to imposing martial law in order to preserve discipline and good behavior,” says a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report on the subject. “According to one definition, martial law ‘exists when military authorities carry on government or exercise various degrees of control over civilians or civilian authorities in domestic territory.’ More significantly, it ‘may exist either in time of war or when civil authority has ceased to function or has become ineffective.’”[51]
So clearly, the president — our current and next president included — has the authority to declare martial law if he/she believes there is sufficient unrest and disorder to warrant it. How long martial law would last after that is anyone’s guess, but some in the know do not believe a national state of martial law would be good for the long-term survival of our founding form of government.
Former commander of U.S. Central Command Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the successful invasion of Iraq in 2003, went on record as saying that, if the country suffered another major terrorist attack in which tens of thousands of Americans were killed and wounded, the Constitution would likely be cast aside, probably for good.[52] Were that to happen, Franks told a pop culture magazine in November 2003, “…the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we’ve seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy.”[53]
What about a series of low-level attacks that began happening frequently, or daily — all over the country? What then? Would a President Obama or the next president declare martial law, in the name of “fighting terrorism”?
Or what if our civil society began to unravel with the election of someone
– GOP presidential nominee Donald J. Trump — who is very unpopular with Americans of a different political stripe? Already we have seen protests and violence erupt at the Republican National Convention and at Trump campaign events all around the country. It’s possible a Trump election could trigger widespread and massive Left-wing anger that would spill out into our streets and endanger our civil society. Would martial law be far behind?
That Leftist-inspired anger is already manifesting itself in the targeting and death of police officers around the country. Officers in Dallas, Baton Rouge, La., Kansas City, Kan., and elsewhere have been shot and killed. The Black Lives Matter movement has already been associated with these killings; what if the organization whips up more opposition to police, and on a wider scale — would martial law be far behind?
3. Loss of the power grid
A recent investigation by The Wall Street Journal discovered something very unsettling about the nation’s power grid and the infrastructure supporting it: The grid itself his highly vulnerable to attack and sabotage, and if attacks are widespread enough and coordinated, large segments of the grid could be rendered inoperable for weeks, months and even years.[54]
The WSJ’s investigation found that in recent years there have been a number of attacks and deliberate acts of disruption inflicted on our grid — mainly on power substations — and incidents are growing in numbers. They include cutting of alarms to critical equipment and unauthorized intrusions at a substation in in Bakersfield, Calif. The WSJ reported that attack, which occurred in 2015, left police in the dark and was “among dozens of break-ins examined… that show how, despite federal orders to secure the power grid, tens of thousands of substations are still vulnerable to saboteurs.”[55]
Whether it is a sniper attack on a power station near San Jose, Calif., in 2013[56] that raised concerns about terrorism, or a cyberattack by a great power, the hard-to-replace equipment that the grid comprises is in danger. And, literally, so is our way of life.
What’s even worse is that the WSJ investigation found that record-keeping for such incidents is horrible. Nowhere in the vast sea of agencies and bureaucracy of the federal government is a single department that can accurately provide a complete breakdown of incidents to Congress and policymakers, or whether such acts are sinister in nature or merely destructive. Most substations are not guarded and are located behind flimsy fencing that is easily breached. Many don’t have electronic security, which means that breaches and attacks are not detected until after the damage takes place, said the paper.[57]
When there are security cameras, quite often they prove to be not worth anything. Also, in other cases, alarms are simply ignored, like we ignore auto alarms.
None of these threats are new to federal officials. They have known how vulnerable the grid and the mass of substations supporting it are for years and years.
For instance, way back in 1990 a report from the federal Office of Technology Assessment warned us that “virtually any region would suffer major, extended blackouts if more than three key substations were destroyed.” In addition, it noted that individual substations, “if rendered inoperable or damaged, could result in widespread instability,” or escalating blackouts in any portion of the three separate sections of the U.S. power grid.[58]
What’s more, some are even warning that targeting of our power grid is not a legitimate target — in warfare and for terrorists. William A Conklin, associate professor in the Information and Logistics Technology Department in the College of Technology at the University of Houston and director of the Center for Information Security Research and Education and coordinator of the Information System Security Graduate Program at UH, says because of that fact our country cannot just dismiss out of hand that the potential for a cyberattack against the grid by a rogue actor or a nation state doesn’t exist.[59]
In a March 2016 column he noted that most Americans take our national power grid for granted because it has always existed largely uninhibited, save for some brief outages due to storms or natural disasters. He also stated that our grid’s inherent stability has perhaps given us a false sense of security.[60]
He also pointed out that the power grid is one of the country’s most vitally important assets, and that we “assume the electric companies are properly prepared and that government oversight and regulation will protect” it from attack.[61] But that is not even close to being reality.
“Electric grids have been targets during conflicts since we became dependent upon them, and they are frequently first on bombing lists,” Conklin wrote. “Today, it doesn’t take bombs to disrupt electrical service; this can be done via computer hacks.” In continuing, he observed that the grid “is now a valid target, one to be concerned about and protected. This is no joke.”[62]
To support his view, Conklin noted further:[63]
In the last couple of years we have had cyber-attacks on grids across the globe, control centers locked out of their systems, ransomware attacks forcing utilities to pay ransom to get back their control. This last December, malware was used as part of a cyberattack to block operators’ ability to control the grid in Ukraine. The result was a major blackout.
In March 2015, USA Today reported that an analysis the paper did of federal energy records found that “about once every four days, part of the nation’s power grid — a system whose failure could leave millions in the dark — is struck by a cyber or physical attack…”[64]
Besides cyberattacks and acts of sabotage, the nation’s power grid is also at risk of being wiped out in a nanosecond by the electromagnetic pulse (EMP), which could come either from a massive solar flare or a nuclear weapon detonated in the high atmosphere.
In fact, this almost happened just a few short years ago.
In the summer of 2012, there was a very large solar storm on the Sun, during which a massive coronal mass ejection (CME) was belched out millions of miles. Scientists said the CME barely missed the Earth and if had hit, “we would still be picking up the pieces,” according to University of Colorado Prof. Daniel Baker, who led the research into the massive solar storm.[65]
One report described what would happen if the Earth were hit with a massive CME:[66]
Suffice it to say, but it’s bad news if the energy and plasma from a big solar flare or CME hits the Earth. Much like a man-made electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon, the solar energetic particles strike the Earth with such force that it ionizes the atmosphere, creating a vast cloud of energetic electrons that bounce around inside the atmosphere destroying electronics and fusing conductive wires everywhere. It would probably take out a few satellites in Earth orbit, too.
The last time an event of this magnitude struck Earth was in 1859. Called the “Carrington Event,” a gigantic CME destroyed much of the Victorian telegraph network that was being built and utilized in parts of Europe and North America. Only one large storm in modern times caused a blackout in Quebec, Canada, in 1989.[67]
Another way in which an EMP event can destroy the power grid is by direct attack using a nuclear weapon. In March 2015, the Washington Examiner reported that longtime U.S. enemy Iran — with whom the Obama administration has just made a “nuclear deal” with — endorsed a nuclear EMP attack on the U.S. for the specific purpose of destroying our power grid:[68]
Suspected for years of plotting to dismantle the U.S. electric grid, American officials have confirmed that Iranian military brass have endorsed a nuclear electromagnetic pulse explosion that would attack the country’s power system.
American defense experts made the discovery while translating a secret Iranian military handbook, raising new concerns about Tehran’s recent nuclear talks with the administration.
North Korea is also likely working on a similar capability.[69]
What should really concern us is the societal chaos that will ensue following a massive cyberattack or acts of terrorism and sabotage that put our grid down and out for months or years at a time. In May 2014 experts who testified before a House committee painted a grim picture: An EMP attack could kill as many as 90 percent of our population.[70]
In a hearing titled, “Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP): Threat to Critical Infrastructure,” before the House Homeland Security Committee’s Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Security Technologies,” the experts laid out various scenarios.
“Some would say it’s low probability, but the damage that could be caused in the event of an EMP attack, both by the sun, a solar event, or a man-made attack, would be catastrophic,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas. “We talk a lot about a nuclear bomb in Manhattan, and cybersecurity threat to the power grid in the Northeast, and all of these things would actually probably pale in comparison to the devastation that an EMP attack could perpetrate on Americans.”[71]
Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., has been studying the issue for years. He said “every single facet of modern human life” would be “crippled” by an EMP event. “It strikes me at my very core when I think of the men, women, and children in cities and rural towns across America with a possibility of no access to food, water, or transportation,” he said. “In a matter of weeks or months at most, a worst-case scenario could bring devastation beyond imagination.”[72]
Everything would be affected by a sudden, long-term loss of electricity. Anyone who depends on a computer for their job would be out of work. The financial sector would be gone (as would any money you had in a bank or financial institution). Water treatment plants would cease to operate, as would mass transit systems. Food distribution would come to a standstill since the logistics chain is electronic. Scores would die in hospitals after emergency and backup power systems failed. Virtually all commerce would come to a halt.
And our cities would erupt in chaos. The civil society would almost immediately unravel. Emergency services would no longer operate as police, fire and EMS personnel retreat to take care of their own families. The military might restore some order in some places, but that order would be short-lived; unit after unit would eventually be overrun in the face of millions of displaced, hungry, thirsty civilians. Enemies far and wide would take advantage of our chaos to make war on now-vulnerable neighbors that used to fall under our protection. The global order would fall.
At the May 2014 congressional hearing, Dr. Peter Pry, a member of the Congressional EMP Commission and executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, told lawmakers during his during testimony the issue is urgent because an EMP event could kill nearly all of us. “Natural EMP from a geomagnetic super-storm, like the 1859 Carrington Event or 1921 Railroad Storm, and nuclear EMP attack from terrorists or rogue states, as practiced by North Korea during the nuclear crisis of 2013, are both existential threats that could kill 9 of 10 Americans through starvation, disease, and societal collapse,” he said.[73]
Subcommittee Vice Chairman Scott Perry, R-Pa., told the panel that enemies of the U.S. already possess the capacity to launch an EMP attack. “Currently the nations of Russia and China have the technology to launch an EMP attack, and we have speculated that Iran and North Korea may be developing EMP weapon technology,” Perry said. “This is why we must remain vigilant in our efforts to mitigate the effects of an EMP attack.”[74]
As for the effects of an attack on basic necessities like food and water, Bugout.news reported in March 2016 that there is just a three-day supply in the nation’s thin, fragile logistics chain.[75] And some lawmakers and government officials have wondered aloud why the nation’s food chain has not been a target of terrorism.
“I for the life of me cannot understand why the terrorists have not, you know, attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do,” former Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson has said. Also, U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, has observed, “In the war on terrorism, the fields and pastures of America’s farmland might seem at first to have nothing in common with the towers of the World Trade Center or busy seaports. In fact, however, they are merely different manifestations of the same high priority target, the American economy.”[76]
4. Failure of government support systems
In the event of an EMP attack, widespread terrorism, or anything that disrupts the normal processes of government, it is safe to assume that widespread social unrest and chaos will follow. Here’s one major reason why.
During the presidency of Barack Obama, Americans’ reliance on Uncle Sam and taxpayers to provide them with food support has risen to record numbers. In 2013 the participation rate for food stamps and other government-sponsored food security programs rose to more than 47.6 million Americans — a record. That number has since fallen to around
45.7 million but that still amounts to about one-in-six Americans depending on some level of government-provided food support.[77] And this is despite the unemployment level (supposedly) being the lowest now (4.9 percent as of this writing) that it has been in eight years.[78]
In fact, in 35 of 50 states, it actually pays better to be on government assistance than to have a job. In 2013 the libertarian CATO Institute conducted a study to determine how much government assistance in the form of food, shelter and other living expenses individuals could expect from federal and state governments. The results were stunning, as you can see below:[79]
That anyone could make more than the average median income on government assistance is mind-boggling.
While that may seem like a low number when compared to the nation’s entire population of 321 million,[80] to put it in perspective, having about one-in-six people desperate enough to commit violence in order to replace food and provisions lost by a collapsed government system becomes a very large number indeed.
And that’s precisely what would happen because history proves it. In June 2016 the Los Angeles Times reported that riots and looting were occurring more and more frequently in Venezuela, a country whose socialist leaders took control of the economy more than a decade ago and is now seeking chronic shortages of basic food items and supplies:[81]
Venezuela, where anger over food shortages is still mounting, continued to be roiled this week by angry protests and break-ins of grocery stores and businesses that have left five dead, at least 30 injured and 200 arrested, according to various news reports. …
As consumers grow increasingly frustrated with ongoing food scarcities and lengthening lines outside stores, protests are turning more violent. …
A common thread among protesters demanding the government provide food is that they are suffering from hunger and in some cases heat exposure from spending hours in line. Mired in economic crisis, Venezuela must import the bulk of its food items, but supplies have run short because of the government’s cash shortage…
Some political observers think that the country’s poor are actually being “weaponized” against one particular presidential candidate, Donald Trump. Should he win, they believe that Clinton supporters already working in the vast government bureaucracy would find a way to ensure that the tens of millions who are currently addicted to government assistance be deprived of it for a prolonged period, perhaps through some sort of electronic “glitch.” Anything is possible; after all, anti-conservative factions within the IRS were able to deny Tea Party and patriot groups their tax-exempt status ahead of the 2012 presidential election so they could not organize and oppose Obama’s reelection.[82]
White the U.S. isn’t a socialist country yet, as mentioned earlier in this paper, social unrest currently being planned by soon-to-be ex-President Obama and the cadres his organizations are training are likely to cause major disruptions in the coming months, as well as the continued degradation of American institutions and society.
5. World War
One of Obama’s weakest areas, argue many political observers, has been his handling of foreign policy. Since he has taken office, relations with major powers like Russia and China have gradually deteriorated. We are now at a point where open war with either of these powers — or both of them — is a stark possibility.
In May 2016 a defense web site reported that U.S. European Command was shifting to a “warfighting stance” stance as relations between Washington and Moscow — now very cool — have continued to grow colder. Specifically, as Russian provocations became more intense, including breaches of airspace and incidents at sea, EUCOM was shifting from “reassurance to deterrence” and “from a training to a warfighting stance.”[83]
In June 2016, NATO announced that it would send “combat-ready” battalions to its perimeter facing Russia.[84] The Washington Post noted:
NATO ministers have agreed in recent weeks to amass a contingent of 4,000 troops in Poland and the Baltic States, a decision that will likely agitate Moscow but one that was, nevertheless, in response to Russian aggression in the Crimea and Ukraine.
The same day of NATO’s announcement, which came last week, Russia launched a week-long series of snap readiness drills aimed at ensuring its forces were ready to mobilize quickly in the event of a conflict.
The Russian drills also came as NATO countries were preparing the largest military exercise in Poland since the end of the Cold War.
The Baltic States and Poland have all asked for a bolstered NATO presence in the wake of Russian action in Ukraine. Some in NATO and the U.S. were growing increasingly concerned that, if left unchecked, Moscow might begin pressuring the Baltic States — with force, even — to shift away from the military alliance and back towards Moscow.
In July 2016 the Pentagon said it was preparing for a “tank war” with Russia as part of planning “wrapped up in an ongoing project known as The Russia New Generation Warfare study, a secretive effort that would target Moscow in any major war. Some 25 years after the end of the Cold War, the Defense Department is once again growing concerned over Russia’s growing military prowess.”[85]
Some even believe that a new spacecraft being developed by the Russians — a craft that resembles NASA’s old Space Shuttle — is to be armed with nuclear weapons, in violation of a long-held international law and standards not only to keep weapons out of space, but especially nuclear weapons.[86]
China is also a rising threat — not so much as an invader of the United States but as a great power seeking to flex its newfound muscle and military power throughout Asia, a region where the U.S. Navy and its allies current dominate.
In May the Pentagon said in a 145-page report that China was restructuring its military from a largely civil defense role to that of a force capable of conducting combat operations in the near abroad. The report noted that the Chinese military underwent major reforms in the previous year to prepare it for war. The armed forces were reorganized into new military regions, a new command structure was put in place and strategies were updated to prepare to fight regional, high-tech warfare.[87]
“These reforms aim to strengthen the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) control over the military, enhance the PLA’s ability to conduct joint operations, and improve its ability to fight short-duration, high-intensity regional conflicts at greater distances from the Chinese mainland,” the report said.[88]
Abraham Denmark, deputy assistant defense secretary for East Asia, told reporters those military reforms “are intended to enhance the PLA’s ability to conduct joint operations by replacing the old military regions with new geographic commands.”[89]
A large part of China’s strategy is the militarization of practically the entire South China Sea, which Beijing claims as its own — a very outsized claim that a world tribunal recently declared null and void.[90] That mostly has involved ‘building’ manmade islands and reclaiming atolls through dredging. The Chinese strategy has been to then militarize the islands — some which contain airfields and surface-to-air missile batteries. China is also moving warships into the region.[91] This is an important region because some $5 trillion worth of goods travel through the waters of the South China Sea every year.[92] While trade is obviously important to China as well, allowing Beijing to make the rules in a heavily trafficked region does not make good foreign policy sense because China would only have its best interests in mind.
The Obama administration has repeatedly made it plain that the U.S. Navy will ensure “freedom of navigation” throughout the South China Sea, where U.S. allies Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and other nations depend on Washington’s military might to ensure their countries are not harassed by Chinese warships. To that end, the Pentagon has dispatched additional U.S. Navy assets to the region.[93]
But our buildup has led to a counter-buildup by China, along with warnings from top Chinese admirals that freedom of navigation patrols by our navy could end “in disaster” — a not-so-vague warning of war.[94]
6. Political uprising and unrest following the election of Donald Trump
It’s no secret that GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s political rallies and events around the country have stirred no small amount of protests. Sometimes hundreds of people show up to speak out against the Republican billionaire, showing the very same kind of intolerance for another person’s political viewpoint the protestors themselves claim to be against.
But the situation is moving on from simple protests — disruptions that have largely been organized and funded by uber-wealthy Left-wing rabble rousers like George Soros.[95] Now, anti-Trump forces are actively predicting open armed rebellion if a majority of Americans choose him in November.
One of those is Shaun King, a New York Daily News columnist who, in a recent tweet, wrote:[96]
If Donald Trump becomes President, you are fooling yourself if you think we’re far from having a coup our own selves. I’m dead serious.
King was referencing the mid-July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey where a small group of military commanders and personnel attempted to take over the government but were thwarted by other state security forces and the Turkish people. Still, in the end nearly 300 Turks were killed and thousands of military officers, troops and civilians seen as friendly to the coup planners were rounded up and jailed.
King is not the only agitator. Prominent Black Lives Matter activist Tef Poe has threatened violence and riots if Trump wins the presidency (though he has since claimed he was slandered” and that he never made the comments). In an archived tweet, Poe — whose Twitter handle is “War Machine III” — wrote, “Dear white people if Trump wins young n**gas such as myself are fully hell bent on inciting riots everywhere we go. Just so you know,” and, “Trump wins aint no more rules fammo. We’ve been too nice as is.”[97] This is the same Poe who, with other black Left-wing racialists and activists, met with President Obama at the White House following racially charged events in Ferguson, Missouri.[98]
Even the famously liberal “mainstream media” is stoking the flames of unrest over a prospective Trump presidency. In March a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest if Obama was “concerned… that Democrats could possibly resort to violence or pockets of violence could break out.”[99]
If Trump beats Clinton in November, it will obviously be due to the fact that a majority of Americans voted for him. But there will remain a sizeable plurality of already angry citizens who will be livid over his victory. What might they do? Will they take to the streets? And if so, how long will it take to quell the rioting? How many lives will be lost in the meantime? How many homes, businesses and factories destroyed? It is impossible to predict but clearly such unrest is already on the minds of millions.
7. The spreading Zika virus and other biological threats
In early 2015, Brazilian government and health officials began sounding alarms over the spread of the Zika virus, a highly contagious disease that is transmitted largely by mosquitos but also by sexual contact, pregnancy, laboratory exposure and blood transfusions.[100] While the virus is relatively mild for adults — it can cause fever, rash, joint pain and red eyes, lasting less than a week — it’s most dramatic effects are seen in newborns whose mothers were infected. Zika-infected mot