Are You Being Frightened Not to Travel?

In a blaring headline and an email alert, the forever fear-mongering New York Times has amplified a terrifying story from Mexico of four Americans who went across the border for medicine. Two ended up dead. 

The headline triggers every nightmare scenario. It was further covered by all mainstream news, with the conclusion: “Shootouts in Matamoros were so bad on Friday that the U.S. Consulate issued an alert about the danger and the local authorities warned people to shelter in place.”

The State Department joined in, issuing a travel advisory. This is the fourth warning issued about Mexico just this year. 

Getting the message yet? Don’t go there! Certainly don’t go there to get medicines you can only get by prescription in the US. Don’t bypass the US medical system. In fact, just forget about Mexico entirely. It’s a cesspool of treachery and bloodshed! 

It’s all very interesting especially when you consider that many American cities have never been more dangerous. Atlanta alone has seen more than two dozen murders this year, and Chicago and New York haven’t been this dangerous in decades. If the US were the subject of a travel advisory, at this point it would be at the top of the list. 

The thing about Mexico is that it was open during the pandemic lockdowns so that it was one of the few places Americans could go. Once they got there, many found that they loved it because it is beautiful, generally safe in cities and much more so than US cities, and the dollar goes extremely far, in addition to having a more accessible medical system, a rich culture, fresh food, an excellent night life, and so on. 

Bloomberg estimates that US professional migration to Mexico increased 85 percent from 2019 to 2022. This is for a reason. 

This is in evidence in many neighborhoods in Mexico City. Spending two weeks there in January, I can report that there are whole areas of the city that feel like 5th Avenue New York City in the old days, complete with high fashion and designer dogs. 

Might certain people in Washington be unhappy about losing so many US residents to Mexico? Perhaps so. It’s nothing like what these wild State Department warnings indicate. No doubt that there is an attempt to discourage this enormous outflow. Mexico, on the other hand, welcomes it with open arms, granting 6-month stays upon entering and happily renewing this without limit. The influx has been wonderful for the Mexican economy. 

If not Mexico, where can we go? Well, the US now has travel advisories out for the following: Israel, West Bank, Gaza, El Salvador, Gambia, Honduras, Guatemala, Burma, UAE, Togo, Russia, Burundi, Sweden, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran, Bolivia, Liberia, Antarctica, Palau, Mali, Uganda, China, Cayman, Venezuela, Colombia, Iraq, Turkmenistan, Peru, Brunei, Kenya, Madagascar, Nicaragua, Somalia, Haiti, Benin, Eritrea, Thailand, Cuba, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Trinidad, Ecuador, Moldova, Taiwan, Samoa, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Cameroon, and the UK.  

And that’s just in the last six months! I highlight El Salvador and Sweden because they are both on the hit list of the US right now, the former for having adopted Bitcoin as legal currency and the latter for being one of the few nations in the world to reject lockdowns. Nicaragua did not lock down either.

What does the UK travel advisory say?

“Country Summary: Terrorist groups continue plotting possible attacks in the United Kingdom. Terrorists may attack with little or no warning, targeting tourist locations, transportation hubs, markets/shopping malls, local government facilities, hotels, clubs, restaurants, places of worship, parks, major sporting and cultural events, educational institutions, airports, and other public areas.”

Criminy! That sounds absolutely terrifying! The only thing is that people in the UK today report nothing like this. Yes, following the disaster of the last three years, cultures and economies all over the world are massively degraded and crime is also up everywhere. But to essentially stop traveling anywhere in the world so that we are all trapped in our own countries no matter how bad it gets? That seems crazy. 

Even Canada is subject to a travel advisory. Why? You guessed it: Covid! Gotta keep flattening that curve.

It’s time we learn to take all this fear-mongering with a grain of salt. My worry is that there is much more going on besides the usual abundance of caution. What if there is some grand masterplan to essentially reverse the triumph of travel technology that began about a century ago and take us back in time to the point that we are all forever trapped in our locales no matter what?

These days, we cannot rule out anything. Fauci is on record in regretting the last twelve thousand years of technological progress. He wanted lockdowns to last forever. We know this because he has written this. Then you have the movement for 15-minute cities in which our activity is restricted. 

The lockdowns of 2020 targeted travel. It was international, yes, but it was also domestic. You could not go from state to state without quarantining for two weeks between trips. That made it very difficult, even treacherous to go anywhere. Together with stay-at-home orders, we did essentially reverse the great liberal triumph of the freedom of movement. And let us not forget the incredible attack on the cruise industry: it was demonized as nothing but a disease spreader.

Yes, those days are gone but what if those days were merely shock and awe to get us used to the idea of staying put? After all, the attack on fossil fuels is consistent with that. An electric drone is no way to recreate the great age of travel. Not even a hot-air balloon would be legal under the idea of a zero-carbon world. 

It’s all part of a vision of the future I’ve called techno-primitivism, massively reducing our standard of living, reducing us all to food foragers, restricted in our movements, but living under the lordship of data-collecting technological companies in league with a ruling class that hasn’t flown commercial in years in any case. 

Once you look at it this way, the nonstop fear-mongering about international travel by the US State Department begins to make sense. The glorious world celebrated by Jules Verne (Voyages extraordinaires) is supposed to come to an end, replaced by something even worse than feudalism. It’s not socialism either, which, for all its problems, at least had pretended to favor industrial civilization and progress. Under techno-primitivism, the idea of material progress and freedom is replaced entirely by a consistently revanchist longing for the masses of people while the ruling class lives well in privatized splendor. 

Added to this is the growing misery of airports, the random grounding of flights, the egregious invasions of privacy by the TSA, the high expense due to inflation, and the ever-growing list of required documentation. It’s all designed to discourage people and provide ever reason to stay put. Perhaps that is the whole plan.

This is not an immediate threat but perhaps a long-term agenda. And anyone who says this is a crazy thought can look back just a few years ago and observe that the elites in this country closed the churches, abolished weddings and funerals, stopped house parties, ended civic clubs, demonized singing, and restricted even interstate travel. 

You could say it was all a mistake but it happened. And it is consistent with a theory out there that has turned against all forms of progress as we know that term from the past. Let us hope that the lockdown years were aberrant but it would be wiser to see them as a possible template for what some sectors of elite society truly do have in store. 

And with Covid, the key to compliance is always and everywhere the same: fear. 

All headlines these days need to be read and interpreted in light of that.