Beneath the Surface
Five Years Later, “Mostly Peaceful” Is Back
May 29, 2025 • 6 minute, 10 second read
“Knowledge is a garden. If it isn’t cultivated, you can’t harvest it.”
– South African proverb
May 29, 2025 — On August 24 in the year 410 AD, a large army of Visigoths entered the city of Rome and rampaged through the streets for three full days.
They ransacked public buildings. They destroyed monuments. They looted wealthy homes. And they stole just about anything and everything that wasn’t nailed down. Only some churches were spared, given that their king was a Christian.
The Visigoths even desecrated Roman shrines– like the tomb of Augustus, where they dumped the former emperor’s ashes (which had been preserved for centuries).
News spread like a shockwave throughout the Mediterranean.
Within a few days, refugees and eyewitnesses had already brought the news across the imperial road network to Milan in the north and Ravenna in the east. Within a week, ships bearing the news arrived at major cities in North Africa like Carthage and Alexandria.
The famed theologian Saint Augustine was in modern day Algeria and received the news in early September. His contemporary Saint Jerome was all the way in Bethlehem, more than 1,500 miles from Rome, when he heard the news shortly after.
No one had any illusions about the state of the western Roman Empire at that point; it was so weak and feeble that Rome wasn’t even the capital city anymore; it had been moved to Ravenna nearly a decade prior.
But the city was still a legendary and powerful symbol of the Empire’s former strength. So news of it being sacked and pillaged traveled very quickly and was met with sadness and disbelief. People were stunned.
The sack of Rome was the ancient equivalent of the 9/11 attacks in 2001… one of those events that goes on to shape culture and history; where everyone knew that life would never be quite the same again; and where people ‘remember where they were’ when they heard the news.
My dad used to talk about the JFK assassination that way. I personally remember 9/11 like it was yesterday. Many of us probably have a similarly emblazoned memory about Covid, i.e. the day we knew something really bad was about to happen.
Then there was the death of George Floyd– also in 2020, exactly five years ago this past Saturday.
That infamous video came out of a man suffocating to death while multiple police officers looked on and did nothing. And it too became one of those history-defining, culture-shifting, seismic events.
Some of that change was positive and necessary, and helped to propel civilization forward.
Other change was completely ludicrous, including the media coverage.
The legacy media was already on thin ice at that point for their heavily tainted and histrionic COVID fear porn.
Continued Below…
This THIRD WAVE from Texas Will
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You probably remember how CNN and MSNBC used to have the real time body counts of how many people were supposedly dying of Covid; only later did we find out how inflated those numbers really were.
They preached constantly about how everyone must stay at home, wear masks, social distance, etc. And then the George Floyd protests started. Thousands of people were out in the streets packed together like sardines. No social distancing. No staying at home.
After months of being told we had to ‘shelter in place’, suddenly the media decided it was OK to be out in public… but only if you were protesting in the name of George Floyd.
It was as if everything they had been saying over and over again for the past few months was just thrown out the window and replaced with a new social justice theme. And, just like their coverage of Covid, the facts didn’t matter.
The public demonstrations quickly turned violent. Looters rampaged through the streets and plundered stores, stealing big-screen televisions and video game consoles– all in the name of Social Justice, of course.
And then the media tried to tell us that the protests were “mostly peaceful”. In other words, don’t trust your lying eyes. We’ll tell you what to believe.
That was probably the moment they lost any shred of their remaining credibility and viewers recognized them for the deceitful propaganda machine that they are.
Naturally, they never learned. And the propaganda didn’t stop. They later used this same approach to insist that Joe Biden was healthy, mentally vibrant, and vigorous. And they’re doing the same thing now with respect to attacks on white farmers in South Africa.
Donald Trump met with South Africa’s President (Cyril Ramaphosa) at the White House last week, and the media is in agony over the fact that Trump brought up the killings and said a “genocide” was taking place.
The media is now whining that Trump’s claims are false and part of a far-right conspiracy theory.
Reuters went out of its way to fact check the President, reporting that the total number of white farmers murdered in South Africa amounts to just 1,363… which is too small a number to be considered genocide or ethnic cleansing.
Wow. Hard to argue with that logic. Only 1,363 “mostly peaceful” murders.
Bear in mind that South Africa only has 32,000 commercial farmers. Even if we assume 100% of them are white, this would mean that 1 out of every 23 white farmers has been murdered. Not exactly great odds.
Reuters also, bizarrely, disputes President Trump’s claim that white farmers are having their land expropriated by the South African government.
Instead, Reuters states that white farmers have been “encouraged” to “sell their land willingly.”
Unfortunately, says Reuters, “that hasn’t worked,” so President Ramaphosa “signed a law in January allowing the state to expropriate land.”
So, just to be clear, Donald Trump said that white farmers in South Africa are having their farms expropriated. Reuters complains that this isn’t true. Yet three paragraphs later they said that Ramaphosa signed a law to expropriate land from white farmers.
This is championship level Orwellian doublespeak. You couldn’t make it up if you tried.
James Hickman
Schiff Sovereign & Grey Swan
P.S. from Addison: One of our Grey Swan predictions for 2025 was a rise in political violence. You’ll remember we published it on December 31, 2024 and before 24 hours had passed there was a politically motivated attack targeting revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Later that day in Las Vegas, the first of many violent instances involving Tesla cybertrucks in 2025.
It didn’t take long for that forecast to come true. But, at least, the United States has avoided extreme violence like what’s happening in South Africa. So far.
We will point out that since DOGE’s identified spending cuts didn’t get the axe following the GOP’s “Big, Beautiful” spending bill – those who keyed Tesla cars and torched dealerships did so for nothing.
Late word from Andrew in Vegas today, too:
Brandon Lutnick of Cantor Fitzgerald just announced they’re launching a gold-backed bitcoin fund. Sounds interesting. More details as Bitcoin 2025 wraps this evening.
Your thoughts? Please send them here: addison@greyswanfraternity.com
Our global tour continues this week, with a look at the violence in South Africa against farmers.
