About  Canadian Patriots, China, History, and the Drug Trade

There is  a need to write something  short  about  some things  which are written too long. 

For  awhile now I have had it in mind to write something  about the firm of Matthew Ehret  and Cynthia Chung. They write voluminously through their platforms of “Canadian Patriot” and “Rising Tide Foundation”. My  motivation to start it now is  the  article Cynthia wrote  in Substack  about the drug crisis in Vancouver, Canada, and what  is  really behind it. 

She actually wrote something readable about the growing drug and  homeless problem in Vancouver. However, she  used it as the lead-in to their  overly long series explaining the  international drug business, going back to  Noah’s  Ark and in  great  detail. 

No, the People’s Republic of China  has nothing to do with the present  global drug problem. But  neither does the British East India Company  and the Opium wars with China. Cynthia refutes the former well enough but seems to be implying the latter. 

The first big problem  with these people’s writing is that they have a severe case of footnote disease.  They also want to write entire books over the net. I wish someone would teach them to  start with an introduction and end with a conclusion. 

The second problem is they are not  really valid in where they are coming from.  They have  some good information about the  financial capitalist oligarchy. They see the various kinds of occult and quasireligious behaviors behind this power. 

However, they seem to be merely propagandists for a different faction among western economic elites. I  am not sure if they fully realize it. That is, the  industrial capitalists; the people behind  the “International Democratic Union” and other neofascist impulses.   

These are the people enamored with the idea that there can be infinite growth on a finite planet. We can have “superabundance” if all these conspiratorial people get out of the  way.

The two Canadian Patriots also seem to adhere to religious conservatism. They see the  conflict between civil society,   and the financial oligarchies and the cult  type groups they work through, in Manichean  terms of  a war between God and Satan. They also think being a ‘patriot’ is a good thing. 

I  have noticed a new faction emerging from the industrial capitalists in the English speaking world. The old type was  very libertarian. Everything to do with government and maintaining civilization was interfering with their freedom, was communistic, and so on. 

There is a new  movement emerging  among such people  which is not so hung up on government or even “communism”. They even accept the idea that the  currency needs to be issued by  government  through a public bank. Amazingly, they admire at least some aspects of Communist China, although  I do not think the Chinese Communist Party   are as impressed with them.

Ehret and Chung  seem oriented to this group. The Rising Tiders are  still hung up on the very bad idea of constant growth  whether there is any purpose to it or not. They support  ridiculous  ideas like nuclear power, fusion power, and genetically modified  crops.

They throw  around the word ‘freedom’ a lot,  but their ideas  do not  seem to align with real freedom. They  do not seem interested in the development of real democracy. That they seem to see  public health measures,   especially as  related to  airborne disease, as an infringement on ‘liberty’, is another  big bell ringer. 

In the near future, I  want to  deal with  the economic ideas Ehret  has, particularly  of open versus closed economic systems. I want to show  how this fits with the neoFascism rising in the world, and how that comes from the industrial  capitalists  and their new organization, the International Democracy Union, IDU. That is for  another blog post. 

In this post I briefly discuss Cynthia Chung’s  ideas about the narcotics business. Then, the basic flaw in her  methods of analysis and in the way she communicates. 

Cynthia wrote about the growing tent city problem in her home city of Vancouver.  That town has the worst homeless and drug problem in the country. That is a big reason why I went to Toronto instead. 

Part of the problem is that  the Province of British Columbia is  the social dump ground for the rest of the country. Canada  tilts slightly to the west.  The loose nuts  the other provinces do not want to take care of roll to the west coast. B.C. has no choice but to take them in. 

Cynthia correctly identified one part of the problem; the ideological liberal idea that drug dealing, drug addiction, and homelessness are  not a problem to be eliminated. It is just the  way some people are. It is a subculture which has to be tolerated and accommodated. 

It is true that the reason people stay homeless is usually  that they have substance  abuse problems. Often they  develop substance abuse problems when they become homeless and cannot get out of it. However, they also, most often, have such problems because they are  mentally ill  and there are no places for them  where they can get treatment or protection.

Cynthia correctly identifies that the big factor maintaining  the drug problem is  that addicts are very profitable. A narcotic industry is also a good tool for breaking down  societies. Cynthia   will explain that  element of it in detail; very great detail. 

She identifies that the Liberal idea of safe supply  and safe injection sites does not really solve the problem. But she also gets into this  social conservative idea  that forcibly treating addicts  will solve the problem. As with many social problems, there  are  conflicting ideological  takes on the cause  and solution, and then there is the real cause and solution. 

The key thing to understand is  that addictions  are not the cause of social breakdown. It may accelerate breakdown, but social breakdown is the cause of most addictions. As well, safe injection  and safe supply sites   are a pathetic crisis solution to the problem, but they keep people  alive. 

Forced treatment  has never solved  addictions and never  will. Until the  pain which is causing their  addictions is remedied,  people will be readdicted as  soon as they  hit the streets  again. The only thing which will reduce the  number of addictions is to address the ills of a dysfunctional society, which breeds  addictions. 

Until then, the best way to reduce the harm of addictions is to simply provide people with a safe supply of the drug. For some reason, it is a big  secret that  addictions  are temporary. After a period of time, usually ten years for Heroin,  the drug no longer has any effect. The addiction has  burned itself  out. 

Further, people can usually hold down jobs  while addicted if they  have  a safe supply of the drug. That is assuming the mental problems  which  got them addicted are  dealt with. No, Cynthia, Methadone treatments do not merely trade  one addiction for another. It  trades a more harmful addiction for  a less  harmful one. 

There is one big problem with treating addictions this way. The drug trade is very profitable  and, to repeat,  serves a purpose  for the nefarious   hegemony which maintains it. Cynthia knows  what  this industry is  about  but does not  quite make the connection with keeping Heroin  and similar drugs illegal. 

Drugs  are profitable  because they are illegal. If the traffic was legalized, the stuff would cost  ten cents a hit. There  would be no money in getting people hooked. 

Cynthia  seems to miss some other important information. She  thinks the drug problem only started in the  sixties when the globalist  empire was building  its new control mechanism of “national intelligence networks”. They had trouble keeping  the budgets of these agencies, theoretically branches of government, secret.

They decided to build the drug racket in part  as a source of the black funds  to run the “off the books” activities of these agencies. Also, for other  nefarious projects they  wanted to operate. To do this they had to  make addiction profitable by  making it illegal. 

Cynthia is evidently unaware that  we had a huge  drug problem in  the English speaking world up into the twenties. It was then usually legal to sell  Opium, Coca,  and other precursors of  modern narcotics. 

Then, we got some enlightened policies.  Narcotics were banned or tightly controlled. Yet addiction was still treated as a medical problem and prescriptions were written for these narcotics. This largely eliminated drug trafficking for that time. 

Then in the post war times the globalists employed public relations firms to create moral panics  against  addicts, leading to their criminalization. Addicts  were bad people who needed to be  punished for  being wicked.   This  lead to an explosion in  the numbers of addictions. 

Since this new drug trade has developed it has been very hard to shut it down again. There are now billions in profits from this trade, which  goes to fund very powerful people. As well, there  are large  and self perpetuating bureaucracies built out of the “war on drugs”. 

So back to the China connection. Cynthia  seems to think there is a direct connection between the opium wars and the opium trade into China during the eighteenth century, and the  modern  drug trade. There is not. 

Both historic phenomena  were operations of Anglosphere  financial imperialists,  but different groups in different eras, in different parts of the world, with different methods,  and  different aims. That is, aside from making money. The capitalist factions which see China  as  an enemy,  promote the ridiculous idea that  the current North American drug crisis is China’s revenge for the Opium trade. Cynthia dutifully refutes that, as if it really needed any answer.

This is the big problem with Matt and Cynthia’s  analysis of things; they are convinced there is some original cause to all these things. Cynthia’s husband and  collaborator  revealed  this in  an interview I watched. He thinks there is some guiding force  directing this all down history to oppose and defeat Christianity. 

Of course this force would have to be supernatural. These people are not overt about their religious obsession. It would destroy their credibility with most people. But it is there in  the background. 

So they focus on the  western financialism and imperialism  which developed in the  past  five centuries. They focus on the cult-like movements which tend to be wrapped up in it. They oppose it from the  perspective of Christianity and productivist economic  ideas. 

‘Productivist’ is another  word for ‘growthism’ or even ‘protestant work ethic’. It is the idea that  production must grow for the  sake of growth.  We must have infinite   expansion in a  finite world, with no relation to actual needs, or available resources,   for no reason except ‘growth’. 

There is a lot of money behind promoting this notion. This money wants to displace the financialist hegemony which has been the dominant form of  capitalism in recent  centuries. Matt and Cynthia, and their ‘Rising Tide Foundation’, are getting a lot of money  from somewhere to do their gig. 

Thus, they are  available as  critics of financial capitalism. So,  they can be useful when other  criticisms  are not so available. There  are other criticisms of Financialism from an authentic  left  perspective, but they are not as well funded,  and  often  heavily suppressed. So they are less available. 

Rather than the “satanic cults rule the earth” perspective, these leftist critical theorists  can take a more  sociological approach to  the study of oligarchy. They do not try to deny  that there are powerful families which transmit that power over many generations. What they do is to scientifically study the mechanisms  by which that hegemonic power  transmits. 

Geneological study shows that many of these families have persisted for centuries, some into the middle ages. However, in the Anglosphere most seem to have  arisen with the industrial revolution. 

So, ‘old money’ does seem to still rule. Many of today’s billionaires seem to think they are  part of a new ruling class. Yet they  do not seem to be as powerful as they imagine. 

There  are many questions to be asked  about the power of oligarchic  factions. What   exactly are these factions and  the relations among them? How does their internal government  work? Are they declining in power? 

Rising Tide foundation gives us no analysis. To them there is a satanic force  which has persisted from the time of the Venetian Black nobility, or even the time of the Babylonian temples. 

The present  denizens of the ‘City of London’ would not be direct  descendants of the Venetian Black Nobility. They may have  admired and imitated, and improved on, the methods of these earlier oligarchs. They may have even studied the  operations of the  ancient  Babylonian or Delphic oracles, but would have no linear connection. 

Thus, the Rising Tide Foundation  can give us some  entertaining and enlightening historic stories. However, it gets  very tiring after  awhile. For much of it, I have  read  different  versions from other, often more readable,   sources.  

I have already said they have a bad case of footnote disease. But footnotes are for books. Extreme footnotes are for  academic papers. Footnotes do not belong on the net. I dislike footnotes in most  instances, because I usually do not have ready access to the sources. 

What I like to be  able to do is read something over and make up my mind about it, or parts of it, in an abductive way. I think  most intelligent people do. I decide if it holds together and fits with  everything else I know  about reality. 

I  watched Ehret  snark once  about people  who thought  he  and Cynthia’s  pieces were too long. No, he thought,  our attention spans are too short. No, I say, they need to write better; also, shorter. We have other things to do than read you. 

It is not so much that their stuff is too long, but that it is unskimmable. It needs to be introduced with an introduction and concluded with a conclusion. For long work,  the  sections  need their own introductions and conclusions. 

This way, I can go back and forth in the text, decide  what each part is about, and  can look at  what is interesting to me. I might  already know enough  about the  trope that  the rituals of the Knights Templar  are carried over into Scottish Rite freemasonry. I might instead want to know more  about how the Scottish Rite was implanted in North America by the British  army as a surveillance system over uppity colonials. 

My conclusion is that Matt and Cynthia are very good researchers. They are good writers in a limited way, but really need  an editor. They  are  not good at analysis. 

Finally, they are really not so great as propagandists for  productivist, neofascist, late industrial capitalism.