THE Reality Check-All of Us Have Been Manipulated & Lied to-E. Nickson

Per Elizabeth Nickson: "Every person in your family or community living on nuts and bolts and berries has had his life stolen by the bureaucratic blob. And, we are going to get it all back." Before diving into her fascinating article in Part I below by journalist and author Nickson, let's note that we should call this ongoing series on this Patch "THE Reality Check." Several months ago this writer for MHProNews and this Patch posted an article that shared this clever bit of dialogue from the classic movie Charade. Audrey Hepburn's character Reggie Lambert asked the question. "Why do people have to tell lies?" Cary Grant's character Peter Joshua answers. "Usually it’s because they want something. They are afraid the truth won't get it for them." That's not Biblical but keep that in your mind from now until the day you die because it is packed with a useful insight for our times. You may find it useful in reading Nickson or others too.

https://patch.com/florida/lake...

Like millions of you, my wife and I have had a child (some of you have several), a teenage son. Like millions of you, we want the world he grows up in to be a better place. It is in several ways a natural parental emotion. When we reach a certain stage of life, we also want the best for our parents and others that we care about too, right?

That's said to frame what follows related to the headline and subheading topics. Because like you, I'm busy. I have plenty of things to do. So why does yours truly take the time to write "THE Reality Check" series this Patch? Because we are at a crossroads as a nation and in our world.

What's emerging from the early reports from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) may be surprising to many in its scope but millions of voters wanted to know the truth about the corruption of the federal government and they wanted to see that corruption brought under control. President Trump was elected by people who wanted him to be an agent for positive change and not to keep the arguably corrupt status quo.

As a publisher myself, I have a certain perspective on the mainstream media.

My view IS NOT that everything that the news media or politicos say is a lie. That's an exaggeration. I personally try not to exaggerate, but if we are honest with each other, there are times most of us have exaggerated during a conversation in order to "make a point." When that is understood, exaggeration is useful at times in the hands of some.

Some of what follows in Part I from the writer Elizabeth Nickson via the popular financial-news-views Zero Hedge website has been edited because there are words she used that don't meet the community guidelines of the Patch. There are things she said in the opening that might have been rephrased. There are some items that follow that are arguably an exaggeration. But there are parts that may be an understatement too. I'm not a follower of this woman's writing, so before yesterday, I little direct knowledge of Elizabeth Nickson.

I can't quote her headline because it violates Patch community guidelines. So, I'm not endorsing every word or letter, but the thrust of what follows is useful to understand and that is why I'm sharing it with you now. Additionally, in Part II, there will be more about Nickson that makes this post an arguably compelling insight into the journey of someone who was deeply embedded in the liberal and leftist media.

To illustrate, per her bio-in-brief, "Elizabeth Nickson began reporting for TIME, became European Bureau Chief of LIFE and has written for Harper’s, the Guardian, Observer, Independent, Telegraph, the Sunday Times, the Globe and Mail, Bloomsbury, Knopf and Harper Collins US."

Put differently, Elizabeth Nickson apparently came from a left-of-center media world. If this Canadian born author reads like a conservative or MAGA supporter keep that liberal background in mind, because she lived and worked for years in the left-leaning mainstream news and entertainment media.

A few more tips on reading her thoughts shared in Part I. Without saying so initially, Nickson is talking about certain recent revelations made by DOGE - Department of Government Efficiency.

The Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) is an identification code linking a Treasury payment to a budget line item (standard financial process).

In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost…
— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) February" class="redactor-linkify-object">https://twitter.com/DOGE/statu... 17, 2025

Elizabeth Nickson said this further into her article (think about the above): "Unknowable since 2/rds of the budget - $4.7 trillion - has no tracing." When you ask left-leaning Bing's AI powered Copilot if that $4.7 trillion was money spent one year or over many years, here is what Copilot answered (the numbers are hot-linked footnotes).

"The $4.7 trillion in payments found by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) represents one year 1 2 3 4 5."

The term "the blob" is used several times. For those who do not already know, here is how DangerousIntersection.org defines and described it. I've added the bold emphasis in the last sentance with the "it" meaning "The Blob."

“The Blob” is actually a term from President Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, who was opining on the difficulty within the White House of getting things done because they seem to be up against an impenetrable force, an a amorphous alien monster that was more powerful than even even the Obama White House. And so he sort of coined this phrase, out of exasperation, in a certain sense, but it’s been adopted in Washington. It refers to the foreign policy establishment and I’ll sketch out what that is, and it’s not just the foreign policy establishment within the government. It is the external stakeholders in the corporate and financial worlds who are the donor draftor class off of the government activity.

With those insights and disclosures in mind, this article in Part I will be followed in Part II by additional information, observations, and sharing some insights followed by teasers into other topics.

Part I - From Zero Hedge

Authored by Elizabeth Nickson via 'Welcome to Absurdistan' substack,
Every person in your family or community living on nuts and bolts and berries has had his life stolen by the bureaucratic blob.

And, we are going to get it all back.

So essentially the entire town of Washington, D.C. has been stealing. The anomalies are those who are not stealing. $4.7 trillion, almost impossible to trace, represents two-thirds of the annual U.S. budget. And if it’s happening in the U.S., it is happening everywhere: France, Canada, the U.K., Germany, where budgetary processes are probably even more opaque than those of the U.S.
How does the Department of Defence have a $35 trillion black hole?

I used to think of people who worked for the government with a kind of veiled contempt or, in a more benign mood, compassion. I thought of them as pity jobs for those without initiative, as jobs paying off lefty campaigners, as a warehouse for the barely competent. In my own dealings with them, I found them punitive and extractive, papering me with demands to spend more and more money to hire more and more of their pet contractors, to get approval. In my working life, looking at the results of their involvement in America’s rural areas, I hated them for the hell they visited on people unable to fight back. They forced bad science on good people, and refused to see reason. They ruined forests, water courses, fisheries, and township after township turned to dustbowl status. The misery in rural sitting rooms in every state in the U.S. was palpable, long lasting; the green Blob ruined families for generations.

But I did not think of them as being embroiled in a theft so large as to be unparalleled in world history.

The level of the theft has now to be dawning on everyone not living off the public purse which is, what, 60%, 70% of us? The anger setting in is soul-deep, and very very powerful. People who live straightened lives, the poorly pensioned, those living off the laughable social security stipend, those waiting for health care, those whose children can’t even dream of an education, of college, of a six-figure salary which is now subsistence in the ruined cities. Those facing cancer treatment because of the vaccine, and don’t have excess funds. Their families, despairing, hurting, broke.

This isn’t going to go away. It affects everyone. Not addressed down to its deepest level, you are looking at a tax revolt, a national strike. A revolution. A real one, not a papered paid-for color revolution, which is what they have been doing to us.

Those living on social security should have five times the pension they do.

Can you count how many of those there are? Can you?

And meanwhile this:

Is this true? To this date, unknown; the digging continues. Look at this ghastly creature. She apparently has an account in the Cayman Islands. Look at her all compassionate and condescending. She started a war that killed 1.5 million people so far. And apparently got rich from it. A mass murderer celebrated at Upper East Side dinner parties.

Memes like this rocket around, and every one is now suspect. At this point who cares if it’s true, it’s truthy, it makes sense that she made out like a bandit, that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar have millions hidden somewhere. Ocasio can say “I only have $500,000!” all she wants, but we don’t believe her. If the Wall St Journal says it is false, we don’ t believe them. Do you actually think they’d have the money sitting in their savings account? No, it would be buried off-shore. The media is not only complicit, it is the principal actor in this scam. It built the fantasy world we live in, where people read The Guardian, the Times and the Globe and Mail and think they’re informed.

No, they are being propagandized. And as a result, no one sane believes anything any legacy newspaper or television or media says anymore. They hid the theft. They did not report on it. No one trusts a thing they say.

And this fellow, below, growling what every taxpayer is thinking: firing, disgrace, vitiation of not only the government pension, but your house, your savings, everything. You know what this guy is? Young. Strong. Determined. Imagine an army of them. It’s building. It is very satisfying to listen to him. No wonder they were creating beta-males, dumping hormones in the water supply, the food supply.

DOGE will fire up the citizens of every country, and they all will demand their “------- money back.” In every country. Every single country, this will grow and grow and grow. Within five years, ten at the outside, the entire world will be a different place.

And as DOGE moves into Defence, State, the IRS, Health, the revealed thieving of the upper middle classes will change the world. No wonder they were trying to disarm us.

Late last year, I thought I’d take a look at one of the papers I used to write for, the Globe and Mail, Canada’s long-time “national newspaper”. Fifteen years ago, I looked at its circulation because I wanted to sell my house, and the richest likely people lived in Calgary. The Globe had 5,000 subscribers in Calgary. It wasn’t worth the advertising dollar. Only three hundred thousand across the country, I noted, which made sense. The Globe at that point, was serious, worthy and dull. Since then it has become corrupt and bought and paid for by the state.

Its number of pages have shrunk by 70%, the physical paper smaller in size by a third. It can’t afford writers like me. It has 35% fewer reporters - mostly desperate kids - and bureaus — but lo and behold, it now has 1,000,000 subscribers!

How is that possible, I asked myself over and over, and it wasn’t until the Politico scandal broke that I realized what had happened.

They had replaced actual people with government subscriptions.

If you page through government accounts at dov.gov/savings, you can read $16,000 annual Politico Pro subscription line items many times in every agency, agriculture, defence, social security, you name it. The government is gaming the subscription numbers. Advertisers, knowing this, have fled, since there is no Return On Investment. If you look here, you will see the number of times various agencies paid subscriptions to Politico, the Washington Post, the Times, the Wall Street Journal, AP, the BBC.

I am not saying that agencies don’t need subscriptions, but I’ll bet the reality of it is more like the discrepancy between the Globe and Mail when it was still thriving at 300K, and the Globe and Mail, now irrelevant, at one million. Did governments not subscribe until 2016?

Thomson Reuters was granted $3,000,000 to effect a large-scale social engineering experiment by USAID/Defence, namely the Covid scam. I would imagine those millions are a fraction of what was actually paid.

Ninety percent of media in Ukraine is funded by the American taxpayer, according to Mike Benz. Ninety percent.

All of them have fake readers, subsidized by the tax payer. This is a moral hazard, obviously. As a reporter, you play for the one who hired you. So, no longer a viable private sector company, but a government granting office, selling government-approved ideas.

Government grants probably push media out of the red; those grants represent profit. Which means the government calls the shots on everything printed. And when I say government I mean permanent bureaucracy. .

Why would you believe anything you read from them?

Equally, you will note in the DOGE records, the number of climate related grants, to places like the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Why? What do they do? Well, I’ll tell you what they do, they go round with power points scaring the pants off commodity investors and forcing them into wasteful green ‘programs’, which do absolutely nothing for the “climate”. I’d bet billions are wasted that way.

Climate is a black hole of funding/theft. On Thursday, Lee Zeldin at the EPA reported a $2,000,000,000 grant from the EPA to a group associated with Stacey Abrams, a group whose 2023 donations totalled all of $100. What would they do? Stand up climate protestors, paid climate protestors. Go to schools and scare the kids. Rile up neighborhoods, glue themselves to paintings and sidewalks. The number of actual protestors, not counting the weak hysterics, is near zero. Heading every climate related group is a grim psychological operative, using every trick in the book to turn people into slavering maniacs.

These grants are meant to stand up an army, turn out protestors, spur riots, destroy the Trump presidency. Destroy MAGA. Steal.

DOGE in an initial look found that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid wasted $100 billion in 2023. They found that figure within a day. Where did that money go? To whom? Unknowable since 2/rds of the budget - $4.7 trillion - has no tracing.

Thousands upon thousands of cases of vanishing money.

This is my point: the whole culture, the entirety of the psychological space we walk around in, was manufactured and forced upon us using our money. The reason the ‘media’ failed is not because of digital, it’s because everything it produces is untrue garbage. Every time it took a government grant it lost more readership, because it played to the government. And as time went on, its content bore no relation to any lived reality beyond the subsidized. It became fake, falsified, demonic. So when people started to wake up, they stopped buying it, reading it, watching it. MSNBC and CNN’s audience dropped 50% again after November 5th, for the tenth year in a row.

What replaced it was censorship.

Michael Shellenberger has done the most detailed work on how the censorship apparatus was built. His series on the Censorship Industrial Complex is a must-read.

Given the dank dark hole at the center of legacy media, the military stepped up. This, below, was one of the core meetings - please note that it has 625 views, but nonetheless, received billions of dollars to kill populism across the world. Please note too that the representatives from Google and Facebook oversee policy for Eurasia. You can hear the whole thing analyzed here:

This is the head of the snake

This was a meeting to brainstorm on how to stop “unfiltered alternative media”, and present official views in their place.

Every former CIA head was involved, including retired Generals, Brookings, Homeland Security, CSIS, the universities, the Atlantic Council, the Aspen Institute, the Wilson Center, the National Endowment for Democracy (CIA), with Michael Chertoff as the Blob Monster in chief. USAID gave these jokers $800 million over the last eight years. And that was a fraction of their financing with our money.

Mike Benz has done the best work deconstructing the money flow, its original purpose, its founding and its source. He has tracked it across the world, and only some of it is from the revealed USAID. It was built to attack us, and to fight populism across the world. Specifically. So, therefore, the Globe and Mail, or any paper, can’t afford to hire actual journalists, because what they are doing instead of reporting is manufacturing news aimed against us, as hostiles, on behalf of the regime. They are oriented entirely as follows. World-wide, no matter what.

• Stop Trump
• Stop 5 Star - Italy
• Stop Brexit - UK
• Stop Vox - Spain
• Stop AFD - Germany
• Kill all unfiltered news - treat it as a virus
• Kill all accounts and narratives that support the above on Google and Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The war on TikTok? It doesn’t consent to their filters. Or at least not 100%.

And we are beating them. Independent media beat all that mustered intelligence and all that money to tell the truth and elect Trump. Populist movements are roaring across Europe, rejecting all the usual ideas. Populists are in power in the Netherlands, Italy, Austria, Hungary. This weekend Germany will turn out. I suspect, given what I know about election fraud, that fraud will be rampant, but German life is now so dire, AFD may overwhelm the polls.

Here’s my question - What if it was all to hide the grand scale theft?

What if this theft, the trillions a year flowing out to who the hell knows, was the entire purpose of the National Security State? Yes, these grants, the billions spent by USAID were designed to assemble army of dissidents, across the globe, to protect U.S. interests. Thousands of activists paid to agitate against any government going against the aims of the National Security State. USAID stood up LBGTQ groups, dancers, rap stars, theatre people, feminists, abortion activists, every conceivable activist group grubbing for pennies. Feminist groups were financially supported in every country in order to fracture the family.

The purpose wasn’t “aid”, it was to make life in every country contentious, angry, divided against itself, and to guarantee that whenever the CIA wanted, tens of thousands would pour onto the streets to protest. It was rent-a-riot money. It was to put CIA/globalist puppets in charge.
The money was also spent to quash any legitimate protest by populists angry about globalist policies of migration, eternal war, censorship, over-regulation and energy draw-down because of “climate”.

The money was spent to obscure the DC Blobs advance on the wealth of Eurasia.

For instance, the largest army base in the world is now being built in Romania, facing the Russian bear. Your money is building it. Romania refused to certify its election results because a populist anti-war-with-Russia candidate won the election. Which meant no honking military base, no hand over fist theft through the accounting.

As Denz points out, Russia has $75 trillion in natural resources, meaning it is the richest country in the world and the Blob/WEF has their eyes on that prize.

The above cited conference of the Global Censorship Project.took place in 2017. And while its stated purpose was foreign adventure ie censorship and overturning populism, it morphed quickly into a color revolution against Americans. It was easy to shift the algorithms from killing all populist accounts and narratives in western and eastern Europe to killing them in the USA.

Art and Activism

I, and others, have written extensively about the co-opting of popular culture by the CIA, by its seeding and deliberate corruption of the anti-war movement in the 60’s and 70’s, the creation of rap music to fracture the black community, the standing up of movie stars and pop stars to spout regime nonsense. Equally, in eastern Europe, Dua Lipa was sent out to squelch populism in the Balkans. ----- Riot was stood up against Putin, and twenty-two African rappers were brought over to the States to learn how to fight populism in their own countries. Every election cycle, tired old celebrities do videos about their oh so compassionate vote. Turns out they are all paid by USAID. Can you imagine the tens of thousands of feminist organizations, here and abroad, set up by Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State?

We beat the pants off all of them. Little people in their pjamas in front of laptops, reading, typing, and analyzing patterns and talking to each other, without any money, or power or organization, killed the most powerful army of power-mad supposed brainiacs in the world, wielding billions of dollars against us.

We beat them.

Not one more red cent goes out.

And, we are going to get our money back.

All of it.

---

MHProNews Note: Nickson appears to have a typo, "Denz" is likely "Benz" as in Mike Benz. Note too: the illustration below is not in her interesting article.

MHProNews also notes the keen and arguably related observation from longtime liberal attorney turned award-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald that it is no longer about the left vs. the right. It is about the Anti-Establishment vs. the Establishment (Democrat or Republican supporting Establishment: think Bush-Obama-Biden, etc.)

https://www.manufacturedhomepr...

Part II - Additional Information and Commentary plus Other Topics

1) From her Substack, "Welcome to Absurdistan," Elizabeth Nickson said the following, the first three bullets of which are quotes from George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984.

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. A political shift similar to the Glorious Revolution is underway and I am here for it."

2) According to Copilot on 2.25.2025 was the following response to this writer's inquiry about Nickson and her backstory. The numbers are hotlinks in the original.

"Nickson's political journey is quite interesting. She has described herself as having been a leftist journalist, chronicling revolutionary narratives of her time. However, over the years, her views have shifted significantly. In a piece she wrote for C2C Journal, she detailed her journey from being a leftist to embracing more conservative views 2. Her book "Eco-Fascists: How Radical Conservationists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage" reflects her critical stance on radical environmentalism 3.

While she has worked for several left-leaning publications, her current writings, including her Substack "Welcome to Absurdistan," suggest a more conservative or libertarian perspective. Her recent posts and articles, such as the one you mentioned on ZeroHedge, indicate her alignment with some of the views commonly associated with the MAGA movement 4.

So, it seems that Elizabeth Nickson's political views have evolved over time, moving from a more liberal stance to a conservative or libertarian one. ..."

3) According to left-leaning Wikipedia: "Elizabeth Nickson is a Canadian writer and journalist. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, she was European bureau chief of Life magazine.[1]"

That same Wiki also said: "In 1994, Bloomsbury UK, Knopf Canada and Steidl published her novel The Monkey Puzzle Tree, an account of the CIA brainwashing trials in Montreal in the 1950s and 1960s."

4) From her article on the C2C Journal, Nickson said of herself:

"By 17 I declared myself at war with all of it, and marched through McGill’s campus with the French students, the anti-war left, and any other protest that was going around."

"By 22, I was dating a philosophy teacher, an Indian from Trinidad whose parents had been indentured labourers. He had been sent to Oxford by the Anglican church, was satisfyingly ink-black, and a pal of Paul Goodman and Ivan Illich."

"My beleaguered parents were suitably horrified, more by his ideas than his colour. For good reason; every Saturday we would go to lunch in Chinatown, and thence to the Communist bookstore, where a new pamphlet would be pressed upon me. The paranoid right is correct about the fate of their kids at college; I was being indoctrinated."

"My first “action” was the founding of a feminist theatre company, called the Women’s Theatre Co-op..."

5) Nickson, by her own account, was by her early twenties a leftist. Her narrative in C2C also said this.

"When I finished graduate school (leaving as a thoroughgoing Keynesian), I moved to New York and got married." For those who may not know, "Keynesians" are from the political left. Nickson wrote the following.

"I wanted to write, and a red diaper baby opened the first door. Shaun was the daughter of Joe Slovo, head of the South African Communist Party and Umkhonto We Sizwe, the terrorist arm of the African National Congress."

6) Skipping ahead again, Nickson said these pull quotes from her journey.

"Shaun worked for Robert deNiro, Martin Scorcese and Al Pacino, all of whom were greatly impressed by her Communist activist parents. When people say Hollywood is left-wing, the cliché masks the deep penetration of the hard left into film and television."

"When my marriage broke up, I moved from New York to London, where Shaun now lived in her family home in Camden Town."

"I was a happy swimmer in the cultural left and everyone I met – and it seems now as if I met everyone – was unhappy only because the right political system, socialism, had not been established. With few exceptions, every publisher, columnist, artist, great and small, thought the world would be made right, if that happened, and most cultural product was deemed to have gravitas only if it moved the cause along."

7) Keep in mind that when this writer says left-leaning, there is routinely evidence for that statement, it is not my opinion. On MHProNews, this writer for this Patch has been using the following graphic shown below starting in 2017. Since then, we've added this one linked here that includes the views of "All Sides" media bias chart. While most adults in the U.S. today on some level grasp that media bias is genuine, there are still millions who may not realize that there are resources like these graphics that can tell someone 'at a glance' which direction the media bias leans towards.

With that in mind, Nickson clearly was in the left-leaning media orbit. Back to her journalistic and writer's journey as she described it in C2C. I'm making Time bold, to make it clear she meant Time the left-leaning media publication.

"Time hurled me into hundreds if not thousands of interviews with politicians, artists, deposed kings and princes, scientists, torture victims, blood-soaked IRA chiefs, crooks and Nobel Prize winners. These encounters established a larger reality for me and hairline cracks appeared in my world view. I became European bureau chief of Life magazine and one day Nelson Mandela’s lawyer, Ismail Ayoub, walked into my office and offered me the rights to Nelson’s autobiography."

8) Nickson describes how she landed her role in what became the international bestseller of Nelson Mandela's autobiography the Long Walk to Freedom. Mandela, as many know, was also from the left, and in the view of many, was associated with communists.

9) Nickson then wrote: "After Time, I wrote a book about the CIA’s mind control experiments in Canada. My English agent was a socialist, despite his childhood as the son of a wealthy Jewish peer. My publishers, both in the UK and Canada, two of the most august literary editors working at the time, were left of center, as were the staff."

10) Ladies and gents, this description by Nickson of her early adult life is that of a person who was thoroughly in the leftist camp. If you, or someone you know, is mired in leftist thinking, think of Nickson and millions of others like her.

11) Per Nickson via her article in C2C. For those who may not know, Marget Thatcher was seen by many as a close right-leaning British leader who worked with former Democrat turned Republican President Ronald Reagan.

"Because I had met Prime Minister Thatcher, they would ask: “Why was she so popular? What do they see in her?” People who voted for the right were deemed to be primitive and lacking virtue and the allegiance to Thatcher from “the people” confounded them. I am ashamed to say I agreed. In the world in which I lived – literature, theatre, film, design – everyone saw the right as devoid of compassion for the less advantaged. Exploiters all. And profoundly racist.

Change came rapidly. The catalyst was my father saying at a family dinner in Vancouver, when I was at the magic age of 40, that I reminded him of my great-great-grandmother, who declared in 1850, at the age of 20, that marriage was slavery, and set off to see the world."

12) Describing her dive into family history, Nickson said: "The first thing I discovered was that they were Christian. And I mean very, very Christian. This was unnerving since on the intellectual left, faith in God, and particularly Christ, signifies a weak mind. But these people were anything but weak." She continued: "They had enormous families. The patriarch of the branch that moved to Canada in 1824 to dig the first deep cut on the Welland Canal, had 17 living children with one wife, who lived to 101. For decades, they were officers on the Underground Railroad, all through the northern states, with tunnels into Canada. They hid fugitive slaves, donated land for the “colored village” around the Welland Canal, and started schools for black children."

13) Jumping ahead from C2C as Nickson describes what she learned from reading the family history of her great-great-grandmother.

"To my dismay, however, none fit the narrative we were aiming for. Evidence of my great-great-grandmother’s oppression did not exist. She was not oppressed, she was free to do what she liked. Free to travel, not marry, and support herself by her own hand. The women of her family were decidedly not of the whining pathetic Susanna Moodie archetype so beloved by Margaret Atwood. They were mightily strong. They loved pioneering, and when they saw a problem, they damn well solved it.

This simply would not do for a modern publisher. ..."

14) Nickson was apparently looking for a modern feminist in her great-great-great grandma and she didn't find that to be the case. She elaborated.

"There was none of the barbarism expected of those unenlightened times. Instead it was a 400-year history of a family who, like all the other families they knew, constituted a parade of virtue and strength. By 1900, there had been so much enthusiastic breeding and pioneering, a vast cousinage reached through every sector of the culture, stretching from sea to sea in both Canada and the U.S. Finally one of the librarians, after another afternoon of my obsessive digging for dirt, declared in frustration, “Look, they were good people.”

Their Christianity particularly defeated me. Especially the revival thing, for along with participating in the Great Awakenings..."

For those who have followed my ongoing "reality check" series for months on this Patch, recall the one about the rumblings of the next "Great Awakening?" If not, see that linked below from December 7, 2024 because it is still relevant.

https://patch.com/florida/lake...

15) Back to Nickson's C2C journey. She wrote the following.

"This final lesson popped me right out of the cultural left where I had made my home. It was now clear to me that our contemporary story tellers were telling lies. They had utterly corrupted our idea of our country and culture, religion and past. They misread the very ground of human character. They had taught us that with few exceptions, we came from exploiters, oppressors of natives and blacks. All the “great” writers of our time read to me now as depressives caught in an almost demonic fiction, charlatans who had seized the criminal and disaffected and made of them the norm that must be defeated and replaced by another system. And that system was inevitably command and control socialism."

For those who are readers of ours at MHProNews and MHLivingNews the name African born Hanne Nabintu Herland might jump to mind after reading what Nickson said. Herland published a book on the topic of "The Billionaire World" subtitled "How Marxism Serves the Elite."

https://www.manufacturedhomepr...

16) My goal is to share reality, and it is useful and obviously necessary to do so from the perspectives of the left, center, and right. It is also useful to grasp why someone like Nickson who had a successful career deeply planted in the thinking and behavior of the left could find themselves one day experiencing their own "awakening." Here in "THE Reality Check" series on this Patch, I’ve shared insights from Herland beyond those found in our own publications. See some linked after the Ayn Rand quote.

https://patch.com/florida/lake...

https://www.manufacturedhomepr...

https://www.manufacturedhomeli...

https://www.manufacturedhomeli...

17) Nickson cited journalist Michael Shellenberger. Recall this post about journalist Shellenberger's findings.

https://patch.com/florida/lake...

18) Back to what Elizabeth Nickson wrote in her column cited in Part I. Keep in mind that as a Canadian, their English is more British in style so for her the word "Defense" is the British-Canadian "Defence."

"So essentially the entire town of Washington, D.C. has been stealing. The anomalies are those who are not stealing. $4.7 trillion, almost impossible to trace, represents two-thirds of the annual U.S. budget. And if it’s happening in the U.S., it is happening everywhere: France, Canada, the U.K., Germany, where budgetary processes are probably even more opaque than those of the U.S.

How does the Department of Defence have a $35 trillion black hole?"

It is too much, in my view, to say that "essentially the entire town of Washington, D.C. has been stealing." But in fairness, as was described in the preface that may be an exaggeration to make her point.

19) There is much more that could be said about this fascinating snapshot by Nickson, especially when framed by the context of her journey from being part fo the left to now apparently being more center-right.

20) In the view of this writer, who has been a student of history since the 6th grade, and having earned multiple awards in history during my scholastic years, it is useful to grasp the history of these issues she raised and the insights from George Orwell, whom Nickson essentially cited. We've used this illustration below on MHProNews, which cited the same expression "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength" Orwellian insight Nickson did into double-think from the top center. Keep in mind that Orwell, like Nickson, had a long background in socialist thinking.

21) There are many subjects that your columnist on this Patch finds of interest. As regular readers know, affordable housing and manufactured homes are among them. One of the reasons MHProNews and MHLivingNews began to look at the broader subjects of often biased media reporting and the manipulation of society is precisely to understand and frame for our readers the context of how it was possible that manufactured housing could be so misunderstood and marginalized despite the need for millions of affordable homes in the U.S. Capital and information access, as Danny Glover noted in what should be a famous insight below, is how much of society is manipulated.

22) Henry Ford has a dark side, which is hereby mentioned but is not the focus of this column. That said, Ford famously said that if Americans understood how the financial system in the U.S. worked that there would be a revolution by the people.

23) During the early 2000s there were two movements that in hindsight should be understood as potentially having quite a bit of common ground. There was Occupy Wall Street on the left and the TEA Party movement on the right. What Trump 2.0 is doing is arguably increasingly bringing some of those Occupy Wall Street style concerns into the MAGA or America First movement.

There is always more to know. To fix what's gone wrong in the U.S., we need to grasp at least the fundamentals of the problems and their root causes. With the observations noted above in mind, Nickson did an interesting and useful job of weaving together several important facts and ideas that could prove useful for bridging the gaps between the left and right in order to bring Americans together to end the corruption of the U.S. political and economic system. The first report immediately below will make even more sense in the light of this probe into Elizabeth Nickson's thinking.

https://patch.com/florida/lake...

Thanks for checking in and passing these insights on to others. As always, there is more to come.

https://patch.com/florida/lake...

https://patch.com/florida/lake...

By the Numbers - Evidence of Discrimination Against Believers in God

https://www.manufacturedhomepr...

https://patch.com/florida/lake...

https://patch.com/florida/lake...

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>Southwest border apprehensions drop by 85%, at ports of entry by 93%

> Chinese Spy Cases Up After 176,000 Chinese Enter U.S. Illegally

> Employees! It is ‘Not Free Market Capitalism It’s Corporate Feudalism’

'American Jobs Sold to Highest Bidder Through the Immigration Industrial Complex' - per WND Staff EXCLUSIVE

> Is Sanity Returning to Issues Related to Men in Women's Sports?

> U-Haul and North American's Moving Research-Top States for In and Out

All 50 states need more affordable housing, but millions are chasing lower costs of living. States with lower housing costs gain residents.

> 'Immigration Industrial Complex Struggling to Keep Their Lights on'

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> HUD Sec Turner-'Corporate Takeover of Housing—A Manufactured Crisis'

> Romano-U.S. Trade War with Mexico and Canada Lasted 1 Day. Trump Won.

> Urge Senate to Work 7 Days a Week Until Trump's Cabinet is Confirmed!

> ‘Endemic Mismanagement of HUD Manufactured Housing Program’ Nom Turner

'Restoring and Expanding Affordable Housing Role of Manufactured Homes'–MHARR Letter Cites 2000 Reform Act, "Enhanced Preemption" Much More...https://patch.com/florida/lake...

> Big Govt, Big Pharma, Big Food made Americans Overweight and Unhealthy

> Virginia Bishop for ‘Well-Regulated Borders’ Amid VP J.D. Vance Rumble

> Romano-Trump Bans DEI In Federal Govt—States And Corporations Are Next

> How Republicans Should Follow Through on Tough Talk on Immigration

> NPR=87 Registered Democrats in Editorial Positions and No Republicans

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> President Donald J. Trump’s Official 'America First Priorities'

> Rubio Senate Replacement Ashley Moody (FL-R) Gets Key Assignments

> Trump Plan: Make America Safe, Affordable, Restore U.S. Values for All

> NPR=87 Registered Democrats in Editorial Positions and No Republicans

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> Official Manufactured Housing Production from 1995-2023-Why it Matters

> Anna Paulina Luna (FL-R) and Barry Loudermilk (GA-R) MERIT Act Insight

> Executive Orders on Investigating Biden Censorship & Weaponization

> Floridian Dr István Dobozi Strikes at Trump Again in Magyar Article (Another critical analysis - fact check).

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> Why do Liars Lie? Why do those Engaged in Paltering and Spin Palter?

> Controversy-Manufactured Housing Institute-Lesli Gooch-Mark Bowersox

> ‘Mobile Home Values Rising Faster Than Single-Family’ House-Wow Fact$

> Realtor-What Is a Manufactured Home? The Next Step Beyond Mobile Homes

> Orlando RE Agent Smith-Younger Adults Will Need $8500 Monthly for Rent

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> Rob Romano-Time To Declassify Everything, Or Another RussiaGate Ahead

> Contemporary Tips from Legend Paul Harvey-Surprising Rest of the Story

> Alert: Is Affordable Housing Linked Scandal at Champion Homes Brewing?

> Report: Biden-Harris Federal Agencies Spent Millions Torturing Cats

> Lesli Gooch Ph.D.-Award, Coverup, Headfake, Scandal? Rest of the Story (Manufactured Housing Institute linked)

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> ALG Unpacks Trump Pitch to Cut Drug Costs by Cutting PBM Middleman

> Is there Evidence that God Exists? Evolution vs. Intelligent Design

> Democratic Voters-Closer Look at Biden’s Acts Before Biden-Harris Exit

> Christian Leaders-Signs of 4th 'Great Awakening' Millions go to Jesus

> Attorney John Morgan - Democrat Megadonor on Kamala Harris Campaign

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> USA Today - David Plouffe and Dem Advisers on Kamala Harris Revelation

> Majority OK Trump Transition-Mass Deportations-Tariffs- Is it Hopeful?

> Niskanen Center Praises Manufactured Home ‘Cost Savings’ and ‘Quality’

> Alice Carter-The Northern Forum-Deporting Immigrants & Housing Crisis

> Cartoons-Kamala Day 1, DOGE the Swamp, Brainwashing, & Out In the Cold

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> The Creepy Line-Peter Schweizer-Dr. Jordan Peterson-Dr. Robert Epstein

> Secret State Miniseries - Fictional TV Series Shed Light on Reality

> Trump Transition Team Asked to Prioritize Affordable Housing Issues

> Top 10 States for Homelessness & Top Cities for Crime=Shocking Lessons

> WashPost-American Dream Fades But Assoc CEO Mark Weiss Shows Solution

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> Blankley-Goodbye American Dream? Only 10% Polled Can Buy a House; But

> Frank Rolfe-Special Interests ‘Don’t Want to Solve Affordable Housing'

> TARK-‘I’m a Teen and Know the Solution to Affordable Housing Crisis’

---> Renting? Rent too High? Odds Are DOJ Suit vs RealPage Matters to You

> New-Certified “Half Price Homes” - Affordable Housing Solution Redux

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> Solution: “Would-Be Homebuyers Need 80% More Income Than 4 Years Ago”

L. A. “Tony” Kovach is a publisher who has earned multiple awards in history. He and his family live in a manufactured home on private property in Winter Haven, FL. He is the co-founder of Manufactured Home Living News.com (MHLivingNews.com) and Manufactured Home Pro News.com (MHProNews.com), trade publications serving segments of the manufactured home industry. Having worked in several segments of the manufactured home industry for over 3 decades, Kovach is a widely acknowledged and often praised expert on manufactured housing. ###