2. Analyzing the past to understand the present. 2016-2023

I like to start in 2016, because that is when I really started paying attention. The election of 2016 was just off. Although I wasn’t watching TV, I was watching Twitter, and I saw a ton of TV clips there.

A NYC real estate developer named Donald Trump, who became really famous by telling people, “You’re fired!” on TV was running for President. He’d never run for any office before. People in NYC tended to hate him. He was very litigious—had filed hundreds of lawsuits—and it was said he did not always pay his contractors. He’d cheated on all three of his wives, and seemed to enjoy being in the scandal sheets. He’d made billions and lost billions. Why did he even want to be President? And why would we want him?

He had previously been a Democrat, and Hillary and Bill had been guests at his last wedding.

He was in a crowded field of Republican candidates, but the national media each day were all over him, while mostly ignoring the others. Who even remembers that Bobby Jindal, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki, or Rick Perry were running?

Jared Kushner had bought the New York Observer, and was able to give his father-in-law lots of exposure there. Trump’s wild statements also earned him plenty of headlines. Do you recall when he called fellow candidate Carly Fiorina a “dog”—emphasizing the physical attributes of his own wife #3? He gave the tabloids what they wanted and they gave him plenty of column inches, and he amused the rest of us.

He flew around in his massive golden plane with 24 karat gold plated seatbelts and much else. He was funding his campaign himself. Everything he did was larger than life.

Later we learned that opposing candidate and (former?) friend Hillary Clinton and her team were using a memo that identified the 3 Republican candidates who would be easiest for her to beat. The Democrats were encouraged to support these 3 Republicans over the others in the primary election, and one of them was Trump. While I’d been perplexed at the massive amount of publicity Trump was getting, I then chalked it off to the Democrats instructing or incentivizing the media to feature him, to help him get the nomination for an easy defeat by Hillary. And I let it go.

Wokeness and identity politics had been developing in a massive way during the 2010s, and I knew it was extremely fishy. People who had never shown any humanitarian spirit flipped: they were now insisting we push out policies favoring racial, religious and other minorities. Where had this come from?

Once Trump got the nomination, the wokeness turned into a “Never Trump” phenomenon. Those 2 Billion dollars in free publicity that Trump had somehow been blessed with by March 15, 2016, vanished after his nomination. Now the theme was that the world would end if Trump was elected. Things had turned on a dime—or in a New York minute.

But Killary had baggage—plenty of baggage. She never could connect with the public. There was that kill list. Corruption in Arkansas. Her leaked statement that Trump voters were a “basket of deplorables” didn’t help. Nor did Her blasé attitude toward the takeover of our consulate in Libya appeal to voters. Nor did the Wikileaks release of her campaign manager John Podesta’s emails help her, which seemed to be talking in code about pedophilia. Why would he be talking in code? Pizza? Walnuts?

Trump won. The world didn’t end, but the extraordinary split between Americans who were pro-Trump and anti-Trump only continued to build. There had been nothing like this in my lifetime. Before Trump, you did not discuss politics or religion in polite society. Everyone got along. It didn’t matter who you voted for. Politics was like sport. Yankees fans could have a beer with Mets fans.

But that woke identity thing had been quietly making people angry at each other. And then more angry. Suddenly you had to pledge allegiance to your political team under all circumstances. If you did not have the right political view, you could be forced out of your job. Yes, this was really happening in the 2010s. This craziness split the country, and we were frog-marched into an extraordinarily divisive political tribalism.

Trump got (s)elected after all. Maybe. My friend Mark Crispin Miller, who studies election results, thinks Hillary actually won the 2016 vote. He thinks the people with powers above presidents decided Hillary had too much baggage, and they could manage to control Trump, and so they chose him.

Trump went to bed early on election night and had no prepared victory speech. When he woke up, he’d been elected President. And then he had a massive amount of work to do to populate his administration. He had not planned for this, and he took bad advice and filled his cabinet with bad choices, many of whom turned out to be incompetent or disloyal or both. (So in 2024 he went for loyalty over competence. That didn’t work out so well either.) Most of his 2016 choices were what we now call RINOs.

Later, Mike Benz explained to us that a prodigious system of censorship and propaganda had been installed by the US government, and used to affect elections in Europe. Maybe elsewhere. Funded by the Departments of Homeland Security, State, USAID and probably other agencies, this massive network was then redirected to the US to affect the 2016 election and beyond.

Here is one of Mike’s Benz’ early reports on this, but readers unfamiliar with his work should spend considerable time perusing the website of the Foundation for Freedom Online that he founded. The network Benz described controlled the COVID propaganda and censorship also, and could potentially be directed to control the information reaching the public on mainstream and social media on any issue. (The MSM was already singing to the same sheet music, and this government-funded network took control of the information allowed on social media as well.)

The UK public voted in favor of BREXIT—leaving the EU—in 2016, and the split was accomplished at the end of 2020.

Antifa appeared suddenly.

2017: Trump begins his first term. He took the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement, which was designed to put very strict limits on rising temperatures and emissions, eventually leading to “Net Zero.” This was a major, great effort, challenging the fake narrative that human-caused climate change was an existential risk to humanity—which had been aggressively and successffully foisted on the world using fraudulent scientific studies, corrupt scientists and biased adjustments to temperature sensors.

A strange mass shooting occurred, with 58 deaths, at the Bellagio in Las Vegas during a music festival. It remains a mystery. A strange bombing event occurred in England at the Manchester Arena where a concert was being held. Both targeted random deaths and injuries of young people. Both are attached to stories that make no sense, and both were negligently investigated.

There were many hurricanes and wildfires.

The “Me Too” movement took off.

2018: The Parkland school shooting occurred. No one is safe, anywhere. The school shooters reveal no rhyme or reason for what they do.

Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court grabbed massive media attention, while FASAB 56 was silently being approved, allowing the federal government to keep its financial books secret, in the name of national security. This is unconstitutional and paved the way for major thefts of government funds, according to Catherine Austin Fitts.

What is FASAB 56? (A new rule from the federal accounting standards review board):

The Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) issued SFFAS 56 (Classified Activities) in 2018.

• Official Purpose: To allow federal agencies—specifically the Department of Defense—to modify their financial reports to prevent the disclosure of classified national security information.

• Mechanism: It permits agencies to “hide” or shift line items in public financial statements if revealing them would compromise state secrets.

Under FASAB’s Rules of Procedure, a proposed standard is submitted to three high-ranking officials for a 90-day review period:

• The Secretary of the Treasury: Steven Mnuchin (2017–2021).

• The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB): Mick Mulvaney (2017–2020).

• The Comptroller General of the United States: Gene Dodaro (Head of the Government Accountability Office).

If none of these three officials objects within the review period, the standard is considered approved and final. SFFAS 56 was officially issued on October 4, 2018, after passing this review without a veto.

2019: The longest government shutdown until that point occurred.

President Trump faced his first impeachment trial over hush money secretly paid to a prostitute. Much ado about nothing. This interfered with much other government business.

Notre Dame suffered a massive fire.

Event 201 took place, presaging COVID.

The Gates Foundation invested 55 million dollars in BioNTech, which had never brought a product to market at that point, in September 2019. This was its single biggest investment of the year.

The French government initiated the plan to move hydroxychloroquine from an OTC drug to one needing a prescription in October 2019.

The Wuhan military games took place, in which many athletes became sickened.

COVID cases began appearing in Wuhan, China, but may have appeared in Europe and the US in 2019 as well. This was covered up or ignored until New Years Day.

2020: COVID was acknowledged to spread person to person in January. Around January 10 the COVID genetic sequence was sent from a Chinese scientist to British scientist Ed Holmes, working in Australia, who sent it to an online database managed by his buddies Kristian Andersen and Andrew Rambaut, and to his buddy Jeremy Farrar. All 4 of them were involved with creating the false scientific paper, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.” This paper is one of the most downloaded scientific papers of all times, and was created to cover up the lab origin of COVID. It was successful at doing so for several years. I challenged the paper on March 26, 2020, a week after it was published, as did author Dan Sirotkin, independently. But the world of academic scientists allowed that paper to stand for several years, despite its obvious falsities and lack of logic. The paper has still not been retracted, despite its own authors admitting they did not believe its conclusions.

Remarkably, Moderna was able to create a vaccine sequence from the information provided by Ed Holmes in a mere 48 hours. Or were they, perchance, given the vaccine sequence?

Suddenly in mid-March the world shut down. The whole world (practically) obeyed the same marching orders, at the same time. The WHO published recommendations for dealing with COVID, which were not enforceable. They were only recommendations. But national governments followed these guidelines as if they were the 10 Commandments coming from God Almighty. Citizens were told they must obey, and were subject to fines and punishments if they disobeyed. In some countries you needed to obtain permission from the government to leave your home. Schools closed. Only “essential” businesses and workers could work—mainly the poorest workers had to face catching the virus, while the “laptop class” stayed in their pajamas and got paid to work from home. While 5-10 $trillion dollars was allegedly spent by the US government on its COVID response, and now hangs around the neck of citizens as our combined debt, a few thousand dollars was doled out to individuals, and a lot more was doled out to corporations. At least 25% of small businesses went under, and a much higher percentage of business failures accrued to minority businesses.

Supply chains faltered and broke. Toilet paper and some foods were hard to obtain.

Several trillion dollars was transferred upward from the lower and middle classes in the US to the titans of internet industries during COVID.

How did the ZOOM company manage to have so much bandwidth and equipment at the ready for worldwide use in the “work from home” new world?

COVID spread. Hydroxychloroquine and later ivermectin were demonized as treatments, along with vitamins and supplements. We had to remain locked down until a safe and effective vaccine could be produced at scale. Supposedly Fauci and Birx snowed Trump and got him to agree to producing several different mRNA and DNA vaccines at scale before determining if they were either safe or effective.

People were discouraged from seeking care for COVID until their lips turned blue—when it was often too late.

But Trump has never wavered in his support for those poison vaccines, despite everything. On December 10, the Pfizer COVID vaccine EUA was approved and vaccinations began. Immediately, frequent severe side effects like anaphylaxis were noted, but hidden. No government officials, medical personnal or pharma companies had any liability.

George Floyd died and protests occurred all over. Suddenly, lockdowns were not needed if you were protesting George Floyd’s death in the custody of police officers.

A movement to “defund the police” appeared out of nowhere.

Big city riots began, and later Catherine Austin Fitts postulated that the wreckage from the riots occurred in areas that municipalities wanted to redevelop. Rumors that you could “rent a riot” began to appear, along with ads for riot actors.

The Election Integrity Project was established by Homeland Security agency CISA to control social media posts about the election. The Stanford Internet Observatory and a number of other pseudo-academic institutions were set up at NYU, U Washington and other places to censor American political speech, public health speech, and potentially other issues. Renée DiResta (formerly CIA) played a key role in establishing and running this censorship and disinformation network, which cost billions, and pretended to be merely academic research. She was also central in propagating the scam that Russia was influencing the election to favor Donald Trump.

Presidential elections took place in November and mildly demented Joe Biden won with an alcohol-addicted VP, Kamala Harris. Mark Crispin Miller thinks that Trump actually did win this election, but Biden was “selected” by a powerful cabal, and electronic rigged voting enabled his alleged win. Voting by mail was suddenly encouraged to prevent you from catching COVID, and this too provided opportunities for vote-rigging.

During the lockdowns, 5G networks were established nationwide:

President Trump filed notice that the US would exit the WHO in a year. The US left the Paris Climate Agreement, having given sufficient notice, the day after the election.

The Abraham Accords were a group of agreements between Israel and several Muslim nations. These included the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, to expand tourism, trade, technology and other activities between Israel and the Muslim countries. Kazakhstan entered the agreement in 2025. Jared Kushner is a chief negotiator.

Overall, as delineated very well by Jeffrey Tucker, the federal government assumed a level of control over its citizens’ lives and rights that had never been seen before in the USA’s 244 years.

2021: The January 6 “event” at the Capitol took place. Later hundreds of peaceful citizens were rounded up and jailed, some for years, for being at the event, despite being ushered into the Capitol by police and (presumably) FBI informants, who were there in force. Rep. Tim Burchett and Kash Patel note there were 274 FBI agents in place, some even placed into the Capitol building before anyone from the outdoors was allowed in. It certainly looked like a set-up to ‘get’ Trump, to prevent a challenge to the election results that was planned to occur in Congress that day.

One week later the House voted to impeach Trump once more, a week before his term ended. Ten Republicans crossed over to vote with Democrats and blame January 6 on President Trump’s inciting crowds to violence. This was followed by lawfare cases against him, one after the other, for the following 4 years.

The behavior of judges in these cases was, in general, a travesty. The concept that justice was blind was shown up to be a fantasy. Judges ruled based on their political affiliation over 90% of the time. One needed to remember that judges had been lawyers before they were judges. Polls show that only about 20% of Americans find lawyers trustworthy.

President Biden reentered the US in the Paris Climate Agreement.

The US retreated messily from Afghanistan. More than 2,500 U.S. service members and 4,000 U.S. civilian contractors had died in Afghanistan. The number of Afghans who lost their lives likely topped 170,000.

The US spent 2.3 trillion on Afghanistan, and left behind many billions of dollars in weapons for the Taliban. This brought to mind the earlier Operation Fast and Furious, in which the US ATF trafficked 2,000 weapons to cartels in Mexico. One border patrol agent was killed with a gun so trafficked. This story was not revealed to Congress during its investigation, and the explanation for this operation remains murky. See:

https://levin-center.org/what-is-oversight/portraits/fast-and-furious-investigation/

I have alleged for ten years that the Afghan war was fought primarily to take control of the minerals, precious metals, natural gas and heroin in and under Afghanistan, and to build a pipeline from the Caspian fields to the Indian Ocean. This was the TAPI pipeline, never completed as the Afghan war was never won—but it may have new life under the Taliban:

The constant barrage of information about the deadliness of COVID, the emotional blackmail about killing grandma, and the continuing lockdowns induced 81% of the public to get a COVID shot, and 69% to complete the 2 dose series, according to the CDC.

A massive program was implemented to stop any bad news about the vaccines, and a dragnet was established to catch medical misinformation spreaders, who were threatened with loss of professional licenses. There was even a brief warning put out by DHS that COVID misinformation spreaders were terrorists. YouTube censored any health information contrary to the WHO recommendations.

President Biden withdrew the notification to exit the WHO.

2022: Russia invaded eastern Ukraine in response to years of shelling of the area in an attempt to ethnically cleanse it of ethnic Russians, by neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

3 of 4 Nordstream pipelines were blown up, almost certainly by an operation involving the US, UK and possibly other European allies. The point was to stop Europe buying LNG from Russia, after the Ukraine war started and Russia had essentially gone to war with NATO in the UKraine. One pipeline had two attack sites, suggesting that frogmen or a submarine had attached explosives to the wrong pipeline in one case. Or perhaps the explosives were lowered from a boat since the seabed was only 220 feet deep where the explosions occurred.

Roe v. Wade was overturned, allowing states to make their own laws about abortion. This single issue further divided Americans.

COVID and restrictions dragged on, to a degree.

Railroads refused to carry 20% of fertilizer for spring planting, allegedly due to congestion on railway lines. Grain and ethanol shipments were delayed.

Monkeypox was declared the new public health emergency. Remarkably, a secretive federal agency asked the FDA to add a monkeypox approval for a new smallpox vaccine (currently named Jynneos) developed with about a $Billion in BARDA funding, as it was completing licensure. So we already had a licensed vaccine for monkeypox when it appeared, even though there had only been about 50 total cases in the US, ever.

Chat-GPT appeared on the scene, and AI for ordinary people was off to the races.

The USG’s Disinformation Governance Board was created, whose director Nina Jankowicz sang a Mary Poppins-like song about “information laundering” that went over like a lead balloon. It was intended to support government censorship. The agency didn’t last long. But its remit did.

Elon Musk bought Twitter, and allegedly the censorship was going to end. However, it took ages to get my account back after he took over, and then in December 2024 my @MerylNass account was frozen again, and I have been unable to get it back.

2023: COVID is disappearing from center stage, and life seems almost normal.

Lahaina wildfire erupts, killing over 100 people, with many suspicious aspects.

On October 7, Hamas breeches the electronic fence around Gaza and enters Israel, attacking a music festival and taking a couple hundred prisoners back to Gaza. Israeli military and police delay their response by 6 hours. The Samson option was used, and the Israeli Defense Force attacked its own citizens along with Hamas, to prevent hostage-taking.

Israel begins the invasion of Gaza, justifying it with the October 7 event that Israel either allowed to happen or assisted to happen, and which eventually reveals itself to be an ethnic cleansing event intended to empty Gaza.

In September, the IMEC Corridor was approved on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in New Delhi:

Substack says I have reached the email limit again. Part 3 will be coming soon to complete this discussion. Please add any important items for this chronology that I have forgotten in the comments, and I will edit this to include them later.

For tomorrow, I was asked to do a video on the Hepatitis B vaccine for CHD-TV, at 10:30 am. In the evening at 6 pm I will do a podcast on Daily Clout with Melissa Blasek, an activist and former Rep. in New Hampshire.