"Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege."

Thomas Clement Douglas, Canadian MP

"Communism and fascism or Nazism, although poles apart in their intellectual content, are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority."

James Alexander Campbell Brown, Techniques of Persuasion, 1963

"Whoever today still doubts the reality, the existence of demonic powers, has failed by a wide margin to understand the metaphysical background of this war. Behind the concrete, the visible events, behind all the objective, logical considerations, we find that which goes beyond the merely rational: the struggle against evil, against the servants of the antichrist."

Die Weiße Rose, Fourth Leaflet, Munich, 1942

"Around the world, authoritarian leaders are on the rise. They’re working from a common playbook. They use violent rhetoric. They attack the media. They see their political rivals as existential enemies to the nation. Demagogues are willing to do or say anything to gain office or to consolidate their power. Unconstrained by ideology, they have no concern for the consequences of their actions. Anything that serves to make them more powerful is good enough for them — even if the political system that facilitated their rise should be destroyed in the process."

Daniel Ziblatt, Saving Democracy from Demagogues, 2022

"The oligarchs are flush with victory, and feel that they are firmly in control, able to subvert and direct any popular movement to the support of their own fascist ends and unslakable will to power. This is the contempt in which they hold the majority of American people and the political process: the common people are easily led fools, and everyone else who is smart enough to know better has their price.

And they would beggar every middle class voter in the US before they will voluntarily give up one dime of their ill gotten gains. But my model says that the oligarchs will continue to press their advantages, being flushed with victory, until they provoke a strong reaction that frightens everyone, like a wake up call, and the tide then turns to genuine reform."

Simon Johnson, The Quiet Coup, May 2009

"The more power a government has the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. Power will achieve its murderous potential. It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster, to justify the beginning of murder en masse."

R. J. Rummel,* Mass Murder and Genocide*, 1994

The Fed did not change interest rates today.

Stocks popped and flopped back to unchanged.

VIX is wallowing, oblivious to the growing economic and geopolitical risks.

Gold and silver went ballistic in an impressive rally to new highs.

What are the precious metals telling us?

If you don’t yet know, you have not been listening.

And you certainly are not prepared for what is coming next.

The hand of God is moving, slowly and silently among us.

I know, you don’t believe it.

Did you believe that gold would be at $5380 and silver at $117 even six months ago? If I told you what would happen over the next 12 months you would not believe that either.

"When war breaks out people say it’s stupid and won’t last long. Stupidity has a knack of getting in the way, which we would see if not wrapped up in ourselves. In this our townsfolk were like everybody else— they did not believe in plagues." Albert Camus, The Plague

Have a pleasant evening.