US National Debt Officially Exceeds $37 Trillion
August 13, 11:04
1. The US national debt has officially exceeded 37 trillion dollars.
2. This debt will of course never be repaid. One way or another, it will be written off or zeroed out.
3. The Fed will continue printing new unsecured dollars, since it is already impossible to get off this needle.
4. Trump, who promised to cut spending and fight this debt, ends up increasing spending and increasing the debt himself.
5. Elon Musk fled Trump's team, including for this reason, and predicts a debt crisis in the coming year.
This is what has long been presented to us as a "healthy economy".
Boris, a master of Russian irony, often refers to Trump as 'Agent Donald'. Yet in truth Trump is destroying the US government more effectively than armies.
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James Carden: The Carnegie Endowment for the Permanent State: Why should taxpayers subsidize this think tank?
August 12, 2025
By James Carden, Substack, 7/28/25
Despite the myriad of disasters the permanent state—with the assistance of its allies in the media and its enablers on Capitol Hill—have brought about, it remains as entrenched as ever, Trump’s claims to the contrary.
How is that?
One answer is that, of course, the permanent state is lavishly well funded; it essentially functions as a public-private enterprise, in which Washington think tanks play a critical role. Perhaps it has escaped the administration’s notice, but tax-exempt organizations like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (which has assets of over half a billion dollars) are, as we speak, providing an institutional home for a number of men and women who sought to overthrow Trump’s first administration.
Now that DNI Gabbard has revealed the extent to which the Obama administration, acting in concert with former CIA director John Brennan, had to do with fomenting the Russia ‘collusion’ scandal, the administration might do well to turn its attention to a number of Washington tax-exempts that have long protected discredited members of the national security apparatus.
The Brookings Institution’s links to Russiagate, via Fiona Hill, are by now well known. It was Hill who made the connection between Igor Danchenko and Christopher Steele, the mendacious ex-British spy who authored the Steele Dossier. And it was Danchenko whose fantasies fueled the most salacious parts of that report, which went on to serve as a foundational report for Brennan’s fictitious Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of January 6, 2017.
As it happens, one of the proud authors (they were all handpicked by Brennan) of the Intelligence Community Assessment, Gavin Wilde, served as a former NSC director for Russia during the first Trump administration and is now nonresident fellow in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The ICA claimed, without evidence (or logic), that Putin interfered in the US election to benefit Trump and kicked off what was to be a years-long McCarthyite witch hunt culminating in his first impeachment. The impeachment drive, as readers will recall, was set off by an Ukrainian-American dual national on the staff of the National Security Council who decided that he, not the president, was responsible for the conduct of US foreign policy.
The Ukrainian national, a publicity-hungry Army foreign affairs officer named Alexander Vindman worked with a CIA operative detailed to the Trump NSC, Eric Ciaramella, who, reports indicate, leaked the contents of a phone call Trump had with Ukrainian president Zelensky to the staff of House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), Chairman Adam Schiff. As it happens, Ciaramella now works side by side with Wilde at the Carnegie Endowment where he serves as senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program.
In addition to these two, Carnegie boasts a slew of former high ranking intelligence and diplomatic officials, including Biden and Obama era national intelligence officers; former CIA operatives; and even a Clinton-era national security council staffer with a sideline in writing comic books.
Trump may think he is hitting the permanent state where it lives with indiscriminate firings across the federal workforce, but until such time as the IRS and Department of Justice turn their sights on the tax exempt status of institutions like Carnegie, the permanent state will not only survive, it will thrive.
Pat Buchanan: The Right Wing Sheep Dog
Roger Boyd
Aug 18, 2025
Pat Buchanan was born in Washington D.C. in 1938, to a Catholic English-Irish-Scottish-German family. His great grandfather had fought on the side of the Confederacy in the US Civil War and he has stated an admiration of Robert E. Lee, as well as Joe McCarthy. He gained a BA in English from Georgetown University in 1960 and then an MA in Journalism from Columbia University in 1962. He was then an editorial writer at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat before joining Richard Nixon’s political team in 1965, where he became highly influential all the way to Nixon’s 1974 resignation. He was a major supporter of the “Southern Strategy” whereby racist tropes and messaging were used to pull white Democratic voters over to the Republican party. In 1972 Buchanan had written to Nixon suggesting that he should not "fritter away his present high support in the nation for an ill-advised governmental effort to forcibly integrate races." As Gus diZerega notes:
Buchanan was a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and spoke at the 2001 SCV convention in Lafayette, LA. The Military Order of the Stars and Bars presented him with a battle flag and canteen like the ones his ancestors had carried. David Frum, one of the NeoConservative militarists who initially destroyed traditional American conservatism, found Buchanan too far removed from even his kind of ‘conservatism.’ Frum described how John Ehrlichman, a major Nixon aide, described Buchanan as advocating ”Segregation forever.” Buchanan saw northern Republicans as the south’s natural allies against the pro-civil rights northern Democratic Party.
After Nixons’s resignation, Buchanan returned to being an op-ed writer, as well as regularly appearing on radio and television. He co-hosted a daily radio show called the Buchanan-Braden Program and delivered daily commentaries on NBC radio from 1978 to 1984. He was also a regular on the right-wing political television program The McLaughlin Group on PBS (the US public broadcaster) and on CNN’s Crossfire between 1982 and 1999. He also served as the White House Communications Director in the Reagan administration from 1985 to 1987. He failed to gain the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1992 but helped push George H. W. Bush to the right, running on a platform of bigotry and white nationalism against multiculturalism, abortion and gay rights while opposing any new taxes. He failed again in 1996 to win the Republican presidential nomination, and left the Republican Party in 1999. He ran in the 2000 presidential election for the Reform Party (founded by Ross Perot) on policies of abolishing the Internal Revenue Service and taxes on inheritance and capital gains, and abolishing the Departments of Education, Energy, Housing & Urban Development, as well as removing all affirmative action programs. An utterly oligarch-serving agenda, while pushing social bigotry; very much like Project 2025. He received 450,000 votes, 0.4% of the total.
He then returned to the Republican Party, endorsing G.W. Bush in 2004, Mitt Romney in 2012, and Donald Trump in 2016. In 2002 he co-hosted the show Buchanan and Press on MSNBC, but the show was cancelled in 2003. Buchanan stayed on with MSNBC as a regular commentator. In 2009 he wrote an opinion piece stating that Hitler did not want war, which was removed from the MSNBC web site. After the publication of his book Suicide of a Superpower in 2011 which included the chapter The End of White America he was let go by MSNBC.
In 2002 he had also co-founded the magazine The American Conservative to push right wing conservative viewpoints. As with other such right wing magazines and journals, The American Conservative cannot win in the “free market of ideas” that its founders profess to support. Instead, it relies on oligarch philanthropic donations nowadays routed through organizations such as the National Philanthropic Trust that has been shown to have been used by Charles Koch to hide his donations. Basically, the American Conservative is another of those long term oligarch funded projects to push their agenda onto the American citizenry. Reinforcing this view of the publication as an oligarch political project, it now seems to be trapped in an “ideological tug-of-war between the Koch network and a Rockefeller heir”.
From 2006 to 2023 Buchanan was also a regular contributor to the far-right website VDARE; funded by oligarchs such as Charles Koch and the Mercer family. Buchanan has repeatedly stated Holocaust-denial beliefs and support for the Nazi regime. He also called for the public hanging and horsewhipping of the Central Park Five Black and Hispanic youths who were wrongly convicted of rape and battery.
His positions have consistently blamed ethnic groups and “liberals” for the ills of the US, while never pointing toward the US oligarchy and pushing extreme oligarch friendly tax policies and the abolition of the regulatory state. In this way, he acted as a reliable right wing sheep dog for working and middle class voters that may otherwise focus on class issues; feeding the oligarch divide and conquer strategy. Utilizing racist bigotry, white nationalism and religion to sucker in citizens into voting against their own interests while dividing themselves from their natural allies against the oligarchy. J. D. Vance is something of a modern version of Buchanan, a much more “presentable” version; one heart-beat or 25th amendment invocation from the presidency.
Special work based on official reports Between confessions and omissions from the DEA: the US is a narco-state
August 22, 2025 , 12:18 pm .
"The entire planet knows that the real cartel is in the North," said Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez (Photo: Archive)
For decades, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has been presented as the moral vanguard in the fight against global drug trafficking. Its public image—elite agents, covert operations, dismantling cartels—has been carefully constructed through media, documentaries, and political narratives.
However, the bureau's most recent official reports—the National Drug Threat Assessment (NDTA) for 2024 and 2025 —reveal an uncomfortable truth: the DEA doesn't combat drug trafficking, it manages it; it doesn't dismantle criminal networks, it covers them up; and it doesn't protect the United States from organized crime, it legitimizes it.
This special report, based exclusively on hard data and arguments contained in official DEA reports, demonstrates how the United States is not a victim state of drug trafficking, but rather a structural narco-state, whose economy, financial system, and foreign policy are deeply intertwined with organized crime.
Furthermore, it exposes how the DEA, rather than acting as an objective intelligence agency, functions as an instrument of geopolitical propaganda, designed to criminalize countries like Venezuela, while obscuring the true magnitude of the problem within its own borders.
Production, consumption and market made in USA
Self-sufficiency in the production of hyperpotent marijuana
One of the most striking findings of the DEA reports is the United States' acknowledged self-sufficiency in marijuana production. Far from relying on imports, the country produces domestically the marijuana it consumes, both in the legal and illegal markets.
The DEA confirms: there is an ambiguous and contradictory policy that allows legal use in some states (such as California, Colorado, and New York), while it remains illegal at the federal level and in other states.
But the most serious issue is not the legal ambiguity, but the deliberate genetic transformation of the plant to increase its potency and addictiveness.
According to the 2024 report, the average THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) content has increased from 1% in 1977 to 16% in 2022. This means that current American marijuana is 15 times more potent than it was five decades ago, a result of genetic modifications intended to maximize the psychoactive effect and, consequently, consumer dependence.
This increase is not a spontaneous phenomenon: it is the result of a technologically advanced industry, financed and permitted by the state itself. Agricultural laboratories, biotechnology companies, and massive cultivation networks operate within the United States, producing a drug that, in its legal form, is openly marketed, and in its illegal form, floods the streets with no means of stemming the DEA.
Stability of the illegal market: a sign of saturation and control
The report highlights an alarming fact: the price of marijuana on the illegal market has remained stable for years, despite the exponential increase in potency and the general inflationary context. This stability indicates ample supply, efficient logistics networks, and saturated markets.
In other words, the DEA has failed to disrupt either sales or consumption. The illegal market coexists with the legal market, and both operate as part of a parallel economy that generates millions in revenue, evades taxes, and feeds distribution networks operating in all 50 states.
Instead of dismantling these networks, the DEA tolerates them as part of a system that prefers to regulate rather than eradicate.
This turns the United States into a "drug oasis country": a place where marijuana is produced, consumed, and sold on a massive scale, with no clear state policy to contain its social impact. The DEA, in this context, is not a regulatory agency, but rather a promoter of the normalization of consumption.
A laundromat for global drug trafficking
Official recognition of the financial centrality of drug trafficking
The DEA's 2024 and 2025 reports explicitly admit and confirm that the United States is the central hub for international drug money laundering. The agency acknowledges that:
There are money launderers on US soil who provide services to transnational criminal organizations.
Cryptocurrency exchanges, digital wallets, mirror transfers, buying and selling of movable and immovable property, and other mechanisms integrated into the North American financial system are used .
American real estate agencies are used to invest drug money in luxury properties, especially in areas like Miami, Los Angeles, and New York.
This admission is devastating: the DEA admits that its own country is the main money laundering center for global organized crime.
Marginal activity? Never: it's a structural system involving financial institutions, legal services, real estate agents, and digital platforms.
Shifting Responsibility: The "Chinese Underground Bank" Hoax
The most serious issue isn't the problem itself, but rather how the DEA presents it. Instead of taking responsibility, the agency prefers to blame "Chinese underground banking systems," as if they were the primary culprits of money laundering.
This accusation is strategic: it allows the US financial system, its regulators and its oversight institutions to be exonerated, while shifting the blame onto a geopolitical enemy. The DEA states (2024) that:
"Law enforcement efforts to detect, prevent, and prosecute money laundering are complicated by the diversity or lack of regulation of foreign financial institutions, the large volume of financial transactions that occur daily, the strategies and deceptions employed by Mexican cartels and other drug trafficking organizations to conceal the criminal origin of their profits, and the use of encrypted technologies."
This statement is a methodological farce. If the United States is the main center of money laundering, the responsibility lies with its own institutions, not with the supposed opacity of foreign banks. Transaction volume, cryptocurrencies, and encrypted technologies operate within the US financial system, not outside of it.
By blaming others, the DEA is protecting the real heart of the problem: the US government itself.
Venezuela's absence from the reports
Systematic omission on drug trafficking maps
One of the main arguments against the US interventionist narrative is the complete absence of Venezuela in the DEA's threat reports. Despite the fact that the Donald Trump administration and other political sectors have repeatedly accused Venezuela of being a "narco-state," the DEA does not mention the country as a producer, a corridor, or a money laundering center.
On the contrary, the reports accurately detail the drug trafficking routes:
Cocaine is produced in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia.
It is transported by Mexican cartels through Central America, or by sea to Caribbean islands such as Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.
Most seizures occur in California, on the border with Mexico.
Venezuela doesn't appear on any of these routes, not even as a secondary or alternative point. This silence is not accidental: it's compelling evidence that the accusation is false.
The "Aragua Train": a marginal and propagandistic mention
The only reference to Venezuela in recent reports is to the "Tren de Aragua," a criminal gang declared a "terrorist organization" by the Biden administration in 2023. However, as the document points out, even in this case it is not linked to international drug trafficking. Its inclusion in the 2025 report appears more like a post hoc justification for a political designation than an intelligence-based finding.
Furthermore, the report does not detail trafficking operations, logistical routes, or links to international cartels. It is a symbolic mention, intended to maintain the narrative that Venezuela is a hotbed of insecurity, without providing concrete evidence.
This approach reveals a strategy of selective stigmatization: the name of a local organization is used to justify a global label ("terrorism"), without demonstrating that it meets the criteria for that classification.
The "Cartel of the Suns": a propaganda fiction
The so-called "Cartel of the Suns" does not appear in any DEA report, neither in the 2024 report, nor in the 2025 report, nor in any previous report.
There are no names, structures, operations, not even an indirect mention. It's a purely propagandistic construct, concocted on political drawing boards by the U.S. government, the Venezuelan extreme opposition, and sectors of the international right.
Most significantly, while the DEA completely omits this fiction, it does accurately detail the command structures of the real cartels. This difference is key: the DEA describes what exists, not what is invented.
The fact that he doesn't mention the "Cartel of the Suns" is irrefutable proof that it doesn't exist. And if it doesn't exist for the DEA, it can't exist as a justification for sanctions, threats, or interventions.
The drug dealer is somewhere else
The document also mentions that the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) confirms what the DEA omits: Venezuela is not a drug-producing country. This international corroboration is crucial because it comes from an entity that is not subordinate to the U.S. government and that conducts technical assessments based on global data.
The fact that both the DEA and the UN agree that Venezuela does not significantly produce, transport, or launder drug money makes this statement an established fact, not a political opinion.
Any accusation to the contrary, therefore, falls into the realm of disinformation.
The DEA as a tool of geopolitical warfare
From anti-drug agency to arm of foreign policy
The DEA does not act as a technical agency, but as an instrument of geopolitical domination. Its reports, far from being objective, reflect the strategic interests of the U.S. government. The criminalization of Venezuela is due to:
Justify illegal sanctions that have devastated the Venezuelan economy.
Destabilize an independent government that resists US hegemony in Latin America.
Access to Venezuela's energy reserves, which have the largest oil reserves in the world.
As Vice President Delcy Rodríguez stated , this is a "crude ruse" to seize the country's wealth under the pretext of combating drug trafficking. But the DEA's own reports debunk this lie.
Complicit silence
The documents highlight a particularly serious fact: the DEA does not mention a single case of corruption among US officials related to the entry of drugs into the country. On the contrary, it does point to low-ranking officials in Mexico, Colombia, and Central American countries, accusing them of collaborating with cartels to facilitate trafficking into the US.
This contrast is shocking. If, as the DEA claims, Mexican cartels "dictate the flow of almost all illicit drugs into the United States," and if these drugs enter en masse across the southern border, through ports and airports, it is absolutely impossible for them to do so without the complicity of customs agents, border police, military personnel, transporters, or local officials.
The idea that a system trafficking thousands of tons of cocaine, fentanyl, and methamphetamines could operate without infiltration of American institutions is a mockery of logic.
The DEA's silence on this issue isn't an information void: it's a deliberate act of institutional cover-up. Revealing corruption within the border, immigration, or national security systems would jeopardize the legitimacy of the state itself.
Therefore, the agency prefers to project corruption to the South, keeping intact the image of a "vulnerable but clean" United States, while the real cancer grows from within.
Methodological hypocrisy
One of the most revealing aspects of the DEA reports is their methodological double standard. While the agency completely omits any reference to Venezuela, even on minor issues, it devotes extensive sections to surgically dissecting the internal structures of the Mexican cartels.
The 2024 and 2025 reports not only name the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), but also detail their aliases, hierarchies, operational networks, and specific geographic locations in Mexico. They even mention how these groups exert their "dominance" over drug trafficking in all 50 states.
This level of detail is no coincidence: it's a tool for legitimizing interventionism. By presenting Mexican cartels as highly organized entities with clear structures and identifiable leaders, the DEA constructs a narrative of external threat that justifies covert operations, military cooperation, extraditions, and diplomatic pressure.
However, this thoroughness disappears when it comes to analyzing the internal structures of drug trafficking within the United States: there are no maps of distribution networks in cities like Chicago, Detroit, or Atlanta; there are no names of money launderers in Miami or New York; there are no investigations into the infiltration of drug money into the Wall Street financial system.
The DEA, in other words, knows how other cartels operate, but feigns ignorance of the mechanisms at work in its own territory. This asymmetry isn't technical: it's political. It serves to blame the outside world while protecting the inside.
The real "Cartel del Norte"
Executive Vice President Delcy Rodríguez's statement— "The entire planet knows the real cartel is in the North"—is not an exaggeration. It's a truth documented by the DEA itself .
Because the United States:
Produces hyper-potent marijuana.
He consumes the largest amount of drugs in the world.
Launders money from global drug trafficking.
Protects its institutions while criminalizing others.
It uses the DEA as an entity legitimizing its dominance.
This is the profile of a functioning narco-state, where drug trafficking is not a marginal phenomenon, but rather an integrated structure within the economic, financial, and political system.
The DEA is not an objective intelligence agency. It is an instrument of soft and hard power, designed to:
Partially acknowledging internal problems (marijuana production, money laundering), but without taking responsibility.
Blaming third parties (Chinese banks, Mexican cartels, Central American officials) to exonerate the US system.
Inventing fictitious threats ("Cartel of the Suns") to justify sanctions and geopolitical harassment.
Deliberately omitting independent countries (Venezuela) so as not to have to recognize their sovereignty or innocence.
Within this framework, the DEA doesn't combat drug trafficking: it manages it, normalizes it, and uses it as a tool of domination. Its greatest crime isn't inefficiency, but institutionalized hypocrisy.
The farce revealed based on the DEA's own documents exposes the rotten heart of the former empire, which has perpetrated one of the greatest deceptions of the 21st century after decades as a moral and exemplary champion.
Drug trafficking is not fought with invasions, sanctions, or false accusations. It is fought with transparency, justice, and accountability.
And the first responsibility falls on the United States: if it truly wants to combat the illegal drug economy, it must stop pretending to be a victim and assume that it is an accomplice and the primary beneficiary. But it won't do so, because a profitable business rarely goes bankrupt of its own volition.
Meanwhile, the DEA will remain less of an anti-drug agency and more of an instrument legitimizing US drug trafficking.
America's Biggest Think Tank Donors
August 25, 1:11 PM
The largest Pentagon contractors funding American "think tanks" in 2019-2023.
The main devourers of foreign infusions are the Atlantic Council, the Brookings Institution, and the Center for a New American Security.
But this is probably only the visible tip of the iceberg. A significant portion of the funding comes through direct contracts with the Pentagon and the US State Department.
"The World Race, Red-Baiting, and the Wilsonian Century" Anievas
Roger Boyd
Aug 25, 2025
This is a review of a chapter in the edited volume “A History of American Literature and Culture of the First World War” that Alexander Anievas has made available online here. The introductory paragraph:
This chapter explores the mutually reinforcing transformations in American state-society and foreign relations engendered by the First World War and its aftermath. The post–Second World War period is typically seen as the moment of decisive rupture in the history of US foreign relations with the establishment of American hegemony and the making of the Cold War. This chapter problematizes the notion of such a sharp break by highlighting the continuities between the two postwar periods contextualized within the longue durée of American state-formation and the emergence of a racialized anticommunism. In particular it examines the ideological-political and cultural antecedents to Woodrow Wilson’s liberal internationalist project and its relationship to the defense of white supremacy at home and abroad. US hegemonic practices were constituted in and through the racial articulation of an anticommunist “common sense” defined by a militantly normative Americanism with roots in the First World War and its immediate aftermath.
Situating the beginning of the Cold War properly at the end of World War 1, and the basis of Wilson’s “liberal internationalism” in a racialized anti-communism that became embedded in the US hegemonic culture. Wilson, as recently belatedly recognized in mainstream US culture, was a racist bigot. He was also a fascist, see American Midnight by Hochschild, a fact that will never be accepted in US hegemonic culture.
As Anievas notes, at the dawn of WW1 in 1914 the white European colonial powers extended their control over 84% of the globe’s land surface. It could be said to be the zenith of white European imperial dominance. With the main driver of the world war being the struggle between imperial powers for colonial spoils, with Africa having been split between those power only the in the preceding few decades. And democracy at home attenuated by the realities of racialized imperial brutality and exploitation abraod.
Du Bois explained how modern imperialism wore a “democratic face” at home while turning “a visage of stern and unyielding autocracy toward its darker colonies.” Yet the denial of democracy in the colonies hindered its complete realization in the European metropole. “It is this,” Du Bois suggested, “that makes the color problem and the labor problem to so great an extent two sides of the same human tangle” (442). In Du Bois’s view anti-colonial struggles were inextricable from the emancipation of labor from capitalist exploitation
The threat of communism was very much seen in racialized terms, as it rejected the white supremacy with which the white ruling class bound the rest of the white population to itself rather than poor and working class whites seeing themselves and Black people as natural allies against the ruling class that exploited them both. A tactic used very much in the Republican “Southern Strategy” of the 1960s and today with the nativist, racist and xenophobic cultural tropes against Latinos, Arabs and non-white immigrants.
Racializations of the communist threat were found at the highest echelons of US policymaking circles. From President Wilson and Robert Lansing, his Secretary of State from 1915 to 1920, and later to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Cold War “architect” George F. Kennan, racial anticommunist assumptions and practices suffused the American state
As the author states:
Even as the history of international relations is embedded in a history of race, then, so too is the history of anticommunism. The global color line cut across the Cold War, dividing “white” from “black,” “brown,” “yellow,” and “Red” along blurred and often shifting ideo-political registers. “Being a white person or person of color,” Heonik Kwon notes, “was a major determining factor for an individual’s life career for a significant part of the past century, but so was the relatively novel color classifications of being ‘Red’ or ‘not Red’ in many corners of the world including the United States and South Africa” (38). The inculcation of anticommunism with racial signification was a potent force in the ideological and repressive repertoire of the American state and its counter-subversive practices. A distinctly “racial practice” embedded within and constitutive of a broader “common sense” (R. Seymour), it policed dissent at home and projected US imperial interests abroad.
The first “Red” socialist population was the Amerindian one that was subjected to ethnic cleansing and genocide in a process envisaged by white elites as a “regeneration through violence”.
War against the Amerindians offered the “symbolic surrogate for a range of domestic social and political conflicts”: a way of redirecting class conflict outward against the “Indian savage” and diffusing social tensions. US foreign relations were in turn conceived through the prism of a “grand-scale Indian war” whereby “progress was achieved through regenerative wars against a primitive racial enemy”.
With the first “Reds” defeated with the closure of the “frontier”, the US ruling class could both look abroad for new conquests and also required an external enemy to focus working class attention away from the ruling class exploitation of the average American. Especially with the 1873 to 1896 Long Depression that was a time of great labour and small farmer agitation in parallel with the development of huge corporate entities, during which “the entwinement of racialized imperialism and class conflict became ever more marked”. Socialism was imbued with both racial and foreign characteristics by the hegemonic culture reflected in the media and state policies and announcements. The Soviet communists were likened to godless savages in the same way that the Amerindians and Blacks had been; from a “half-Asiatic” and “backward” Russia . At home “subversives” were regularly claimed to be inciting the Black community, when the period was in fact one of extensive white violence against the Black community.
In parallel to the late and post-WW1 state fascism, including what could be seen as the first “brownshirts” the American Defence League directed by the precursor to the FBI, was the resurrection of racist terror campaigns with the Klu Klux Klan (fully supported by the racist president who is quoted in the infamous racist film “Birth of a Nation”). The state, and the ruling class that directed it, pulled every lever of nativism, racism, xenophobia, populist militarism and the branding of opponents as “aliens” and “radicals” and “radicalized minorities” in their fight to maintain power during the challenges to their rule.
Hoover charged the communists with having “done a vast amount of evil damage by carrying doctrines of race revolt and the poison of Bolshevism to the Negroes” … During his League of Nations tour, Wilson went so far as to attack opposition from ethnic Americans as both “un-American” and violent, arguing that “any man who carries a hyphen about him carries a dagger ... ready to plunge into the vitals of this republic whenever he gets the chance”
For the white supremacist Wilson, the natural global order was one of the civilized Anglo-Saxons teaching the other ethnic populations of the Earth how to be civilized; national sovereignty and determination being a Eurocentric privilege. Echoing the recent statements of an EU foreign representative about the European “garden” and “jungle” of the non-Europeans; showing how prevalent such attitudes still are, if usually better hidden, among Western elites. Socialism called for national determination for all peoples, upsetting the basis of Western colonialism and the self-image of the colonial Anglo-Saxons. As well of course, upsetting the “natural” class order of Western societies. When direct intervention failed to defeat the Soviets, a cordon sanitaire was erected to keep their dangerous ideas out and to keep the Soviet state weak. The real beginning of the Cold War, that enjoyed a respite during part of the 1930s and WW2. Wilson’s celebrated “Liberal International Order” was simply a culturally acceptable and indirect call for the continued dominance of the Anglo-Saxon elites over world affairs; continued into the present.
At the moment of its inception, then, America’s “Wilsonian century” was predicated on a form of anticommunism permeated and infused with racial undertones that became a key – albeit highly contradictory – pillar of US hegemony after 1945. And, in this respect, the reproduction and buttressing of racial hierarchy and white supremacy at home was a central foundation for the establishment and expansion of US “liberal” hegemony abroad.
This is why the success of the Chinese, of the Persians and the Slav Russians is so threatening to even the most basic conceptions of the world that the Anglo-Saxon elites (and the new “whites” and co-opted racial elites) hold, one of equality between ethnic groups rather than dominance and subservience. Or even worse, the dominance of non-white elites such as the Chinese. These are the racial undertones of the current geopolitical environment
Most if not all of the contradictions that are maturing today emerge from long ago events shaped by the US’s national religions of anti-Communism and racial supremacy. The Cold War and its deeply embedded assumptions account for a great share of the waste, irrationality, brutality, and chaos that we are living through today.
The fanatical consensus that the US was engaged in a life and death struggle with the specter of Communism provided a bulwark against any but the most insipid challenges to the reigning capitalist order.
Our spineless labor leaders-- today faced with Trump’s cancellation of union contracts across the Federal sector-- owe their impotence to the Cold War compact that defanged a promising, vibrant, militant union movement. Trading the purging of Communists, leftists, even international unions and locals, and the most ardent of fighters in return for long periods of labor peace and an uncontested slender piece of the economic pie, generations of labor union “managers” collaborated with both the boss and wild-eyed Cold Warriors. Their answer today to this existential threat to hundreds of thousands of workers stripped of their union rights? The AFL-CIO politely asks me to call my legislator: “Will you call your representative and urge them to sign the discharge petition and speak out in support of the Protect America’s Workforce Act (H.R. 2550) right now?” The idea of a general strike, a sit-down strike, a march on Washington, or other forms of mass resistance is beyond their imagination, a faint memory of a bygone era when the labor movement had a left.
It was the Cold War that smashed the popular front and the New Deal legacy in the US. Rabid anti-Communism, guilt by association, and callow opportunism derailed the 1948 Progressive Party, an attempt to rescue Roosevelt’s social democratic coalition. Roosevelt’s party-- the Democrats-- relied on a compromised coalition between social liberals and unreconstructed segregationists until the 1970s, a tenuous coalition only held together by a common battle against Communism. The Johnson era Great Society provided the last gift from the New Deal. The Democrats soon realized that they could not afford to conduct an anti-Communist crusade in Southeast Asia and deliver a social safety net to its people. They choose guns over butter.
Thanks to the Cold War, US citizens became inured to endless war and dangerous aliens under every bed-- Communists, Muslims, Foreigners, terrorists, and again-- today-- Russians and Chinese Communists! The once promised peace dividend from the end of the Cold War has been drowned by waves of new faux-threats manufactured to pose the same existential threat as the once feared Soviets and their allies.
The Cold War established the universal truth that defense of “liberty” and “our democracy” would require enormous sacrifice by all. Indeed, even “our democracy” might need to be sacrificed or closeted to protect the US from its imagined foes, a continuing fear that persists today in the forms of illegal immigrants and urban violators. As civil liberties decline, we can thank the Cold War for mass passivity and submissiveness in its face.
The broadly subscribed ideas of “the military-industrial complex” and “the deep state” owe their common usage to social structures that expanded dramatically in the Cold War.
Less well-known, perhaps, is the Cold War antecedents of the current weaponizing of anti-Zionism as antisemitism. Today, the genocide in Israel is understood by growing numbers as a Zionist project, a product of an ultra-nationalist, settler-colonial ideology. Since its origin in the late nineteenth century, Zionism has sought a homeland for Jews, scattered through a vast diaspora. For some, that homeland was envisioned aspirationally. Still others brought a democratic, egalitarian vision to the notion of Zion. But the dominant thread-- boosted by the maneuvers of the British Empire-- was the creation of an exclusive, theocratic state in Palestine.
Other efforts to create a Jewish homeland-- for example a Jewish Autonomous state in the Soviet Union-- were scorned by the Zionist leadership. It was to be Israel: installed shamefully by the victorious powers after World War II in a land already occupied by a nation long suffering under British domination. Over decades, Israeli leaders sought to displace more and more indigenous Palestinians to create a Greater Israel (from the river to the sea!). Any resistance to this displacement (what we now call ethnic cleansing) was met with the cry of “antisemitism!”.
In the mid-nineteen sixties, the Israelis, along with their powerful friends in the US, devised a devious, but ingenious plan to both populate Greater Israel and discredit and disrupt the Palestine Liberation Organization.That the US security apparatus was likely involved should come as no surprise. As Kit Klarenberg and Wyatt Reed uncovered recently, after scrutinizing a recent release of CIA files, the Agency’s Counter-Intelligence Division under James Jesus Angleton was deeply engaged with Israeli interests, Mossad, and “the thousands coming from the Soviet Union”.
Beginning in 1963 with the Cleveland Council on Soviet Anti-Semitism, a movement swept across the US to “Save Soviet Jewry”. In a few short, remarkable years, banners were hanging from every synagogue and a host of other buildings throughout the US. The media decried Soviet antisemitism, portraying the Soviet Union as a hotbed of Jew-hating. Politicians of both parties joined the crusade, calling for economic sanctions against the USSR, culminating eventually in the Jackson-Vanik amendment. Students were mobilized in a “human rights” campaign to condemn the Soviets.
As the chief international material and moral sponsor of Palestinian liberation-- arming and training the Palestine Liberation Organization-- the Soviet Union argued that its foreign policy rejected the Zionist project and aimed at defending the fate of an oppressed nation pushed off its land. The relentless propaganda campaign waged in the West sought to create the opposite impression-- that opposing the Zionist ideology was tantamount to antisemitism, a conflation that weighs heavily today.
The campaign furthered another goal: the wholesale exodus of privileged, educated Soviet Jewish citizens to Israel to help build Greater Israel. It became less of a campaign to attack alleged antisemitism in the USSR and more of a ruse to direct Soviet Jews to Israel.
Consequently, the main slogan of the movement became: Let My People Go!. That is, remove any emigration barriers that Soviet authorities might place in the way of a brain drain. At the time, Jews held seventeen-times more highly honored Ph.Ds as their percentage of the population. As quoted by William Mandel, Professor Zvi Gitelman of the University of Michigan wrote in his article The Jewish Question in the USSR since 1964 that Jews “play social, political, cultural, and economic roles greater than their numbers would indicate.” In fact, at the time of the “Save Soviet Jewry” campaign, Jewish cultural life was undergoing somewhat of a renaissance.
One rare voice in the US resisting the Cold War entangled stereotypes of Soviet Jewry (Congress appropriated $50 million in 1972 “to assist in the movement and resettlement of Soviet emigrants”-- code for stimulating immigration to Israel) was author William Mandel. A Jewish-American who was once the United Press International expert on the Soviet Union and a Hoover Institute fellow at Stanford, Mandel wrote two well-informed books that dealt extensively with Soviet nationalities with a strong focus on Soviet Jews: Russia Re-examined (1964) and Soviet, but not Russian (1985).
Mandel acknowledged that “The overwhelming majority of Soviet Jews, like the overwhelming majority of American Jews, have no desire whatever to leave their native land. Zionism cannot admit that, because it would undermine U.S. government economic and military aid as an ally against the USSR. Therefore it maintains an unending campaign against non-existent persecutions of Jews in the Soviet Union.”
Of course sane, informed voices like Mandel’s carried little weight against the media and the punditry’s relentless charge of Soviet antisemitism. Once again, hysteria, ignorance, and political calculation trumped the truth. The “Save Soviet Jewry” movement became a further example of how official anti-Communism turned the truth on its head.
Thus, it was the Cold War and its intrigues that brought the idea that anti-Zionism is antisemitism into the US mainstream and established it as an unassailable truth.
Overcoming these Cold War myths and indoctrinations remains one of the biggest obstacles to building a formidable left in the US.
When The Pentagon Shifts Its Priorities Will U.S. Strategy Follow?
Is this a sign of a shift in the global U.S. strategy?
Politico reports:
Pentagon plan prioritizes homeland over China threat
This marks a major departure from the first Trump administration, which emphasized deterring Beijing.
Pentagon officials are proposing the department prioritize protecting the homeland and Western Hemisphere, a striking reversal from the military’s yearslong mandate to focus on the threat from China.
A draft of the newest National Defense Strategy, which landed on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s desk last week, places domestic and regional missions above countering adversaries such as Beijing and Moscow, according to three people briefed on early versions of the report.
The move would mark a major shift from recent Democrat and Republican administrations, including President Donald Trump’s first term in office, when he referred to Beijing as America’s greatest rival. And it would likely inflame China hawks in both parties who view the country’s leadership as a danger to U.S. security.
“This is going to be a major shift for the U.S. and its allies on multiple continents,” said one of the people briefed on the draft document. “The old, trusted U.S. promises are being questioned.”
The National Defense Strategy (NDS) is written by the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy which currently is held by arch-Realist Elbridge Colby.
The draft of the new NDS seems to be a contradiction of his previous believes:
Identifying as a realist, Colby believes China is the principal threat faced by the United States. He believes the US should shift its military resources to Asia to prevent a Chinese takeover of Taiwan. Colby supports reducing military aid to Ukraine. During the AUKUS review in 2025, Elbridge pressured Australia to confirm what role it would play in a war with China over Taiwan.
Colby wants to change U.S. defense policy from concentrating on China, as he had previously argued, to the Western Hemisphere. He may have seen new facts that have moved his opinion.
The failed attempt by the U.S. Navy to secure shipping through the Red Sea against attacks by Houthi in Yemen may have caused such rethink. As may have the loss of the US/NATO's proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
Or did he compare videos of the 'woke' U.S. military parade in Washington DC (vid) earlier this year with the recent flawless one in China (vid)? The difference was indeed glaring. It demonstrated that the U.S. has no chance of winning in a war against China.
Trump seems to concede that China is winning:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump - Sep 04, 2025, 22:14 UTC
Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China. May they have a long and prosperous future together! President Donald J. Trump
It is difficult to believe though that the Trump administration will be able to change U.S. grand strategy. Any change will typically happen only at a snail's pace. It would need all party support over multiple administrations. The pivot to Asia was launched by the Obama administration in 2010 and has since has been followed by all later ones.
More from Politico:
Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s policy chief, is leading the strategy. He played a key role in writing the 2018 version during Trump’s first term and has been a staunch supporter of a more isolationist American policy. Despite his long track record as a China hawk, Colby aligns with Vice President JD Vance on the desire to disentangle the U.S. from foreign commitments.
Colby’s policy team is also responsible for a forthcoming global posture review, which outlines where U.S. forces are stationed around the globe, and a theater air and missile defense review, which takes stock of U.S. and allies’ air defenses and makes recommendations for where to locate American systems. The Pentagon is expected to release both reviews as soon as next month.
It is expected that the new global posture review will move U.S. military resources from Europe, and probably also from Asia, back to the States.
But a shift in resources may well be all that there is.
Over the last year the U.S. has urged its 'allies' to invest more in defense than previously. Moving U.S. resources away from where allies take over is not a real change of strategy.
The U.S. pulls back from Ukraine but pushes the Europeans to continue the war against Russia. The general aim of 'weakening Russia', thus stays the same.
So while U.S. military resources are shrinking or shifting to geographically more nearby issues the overarching grand strategy aim, the achievement of global U.S. primacy, may well stay the same. It is just that other are pushed to carry a bigger burden for it. Colby's pressure on Australia and Japan is pointing that way.
Posted by b on September 6, 2025 at 13:32 UTC | Permalink
Trump is getting his ass handed to him on many fronts: governance, immigration, economy, Ukraine, tariffs. His modus operandi is to pretend it didn't happen and go on the offensive elsewhere. Thus American cities and rebooting the Monroe Doctrine. Truly a child of the age with the memory of a flat worm, which serves him well.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Horrible on its own, even more horrible because Gaza is far worse
Ohio Barbarian
Sep 07, 2025
The following two videos by Warhawk, who is very good, accurately and graphically describe the revolt of the Dakota Sioux against the Federal government and Minnesota settlers in 1862.
The first video describes how the Dakota, driven back from the Great Lakes by white settlement to Minnesota, then forced into reservations, and then starved by graft and neglect while the Lincoln Administration was focused on the Civil War, revolted against intolerable conditions.
Just like the Arabs in Palestine, the indigenous people grew so desperate they struck back, and their timing could not have been better since so many Minnesota men had volunteered to fight in the Union army and were in places like Virginia at the time.
They had a lot of success at first, and the resulting panic among the settlers should be very familiar to modern audiences. Warhawk quotes Minnesota politicians calling for the outright genocide of all of them.
Lincoln responded by sending a Minnesota battalion, which had ingloriously run away like Monty Python’s knights at the First Battle of Bull Run, back home to settle things, and they did so with brutal efficiency.
After a couple of short battles against hopeless odds, the Lakota capitulated. The Minnesota settlers demanded that all of the participating Lakota be hanged, and they held drumhead tribunals to sentence over 300 of them to death.
President Lincoln, warned by the Minnesota governor that anything less than that would cost the Republicans seats in the upcoming midterm elections, refused, saying he could not hang 300 men for the sake of an election.
At the time, just recognizing that indigenous people were people was something of a revolutionary act, albeit a very lame one by our standards. Lincoln still authorized the hanging of 33 Lakota, which was the largest mass hanging in American history, and a stain on his legacy to this day.
That does not count the hundreds of Lakota murdered in reprisals before the hangings.
There are a lot of parallels between what happened in Minnesota over 160 years ago and what is happening in Palestine right now, but the sheer scale of the current genocide would make even those old Minnesota settlers blush. None of them could even imagine the hell we are witnessing today.
None of this is intended to justify what happened back then; it is only intended to explain it, for it is only by squarely facing our history that we can learn from it and apply that knowledge to the present to make a better future for our children, be they white, Lakota, or anything else.
Thank you for reading and hopefully watching these two relatively short videos, good day or night, and good luck.
PATRICK LAWRENCE: A Nation of Narcissists
September 9, 2025
Narcissism is the open-and-shut condition of the elites who fashion and execute American foreign policy. And they are utterly incapable of seeing their country as it is.
Reception held in Tianjin, China, in honor of heads of state and government and their spouses attending the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit, Aug. 31, 2025. (Press Service of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan/CC BY 4.0)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
All those malign authoritarians, more than 20 of them, who gathered in Tianjin at the end of August for a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization: This was a festival of anti–Americanism, you need to know.
No other way to understand it. Making it all worse, Xi Jinping then invited more than two dozen heads of state to Beijing to mark the 80th anniversary of the 1945 victory.
How dare the Chinese president organize an elaborate military parade to celebrate China’s role in the historical defeat of the Imperial Japanese Army. How dare he stir pride in the People’s Republic’s determination to defend its sovereignty while refuting the revisionism — nonsensical but prevalent — that airbrushes the Chinese Communist Party out of the Second World War’s history.
The temerity of this man to suggest it was other than the Americans and their corrupt clients, the Chinese Nationalists, who did the fighting and won the war. Let us not, for heaven’s sake, make any mention of the 12 million to 20 million Chinese — there is no precise figure — who died in consequence of Imperial Japan’s aggressions.
No, nothing to honor in any of this. Between the S.C.O. and the festivities in Beijing it was all faintly demonic, a thinly veiled challenge to what the United States and the rest of the West insists is a “rules-based order.”
I keep a file labeled “Sentences to love in The New York Times.” From it: “It shows how Mr. Xi is trying to turn history, diplomacy and military might into tools for reshaping a global order that has been dominated by the United States.”
The mainstream reporting on the S.C.O. and the subsequent gathering in Beijing went on obsessively for days. You would think the Chinese were on the brink of starting another Pacific War and “invading” Taiwan—“invading” in quotation marks because a nation cannot invade territory that historically belongs to it.
As I read through the coverage I marveled at the wall-to-wall West-centricity of it. The Chinese, the Russians, the Indians, various others, even the North Koreans: They think of nothing and do nothing that does not arise from their all-consuming animosity toward the United States and altogether the West. So you read in the reporting of these events.
Then along came Donald Trump, who addressed Xi on his Truth Social platform with this, referencing the Russian and North Korean leaders as he watched the proceedings live: “Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un as you conspire against the United States of America.”
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Pyongyang on June 18, 2024. (President of Russia)
There is no beating the Trumpster when it comes to stating the case forthrightly. The mainstream press can strike the pose of objectivity all it likes, but Trump, the id of the late-phase imperium, comes right out and says it: The non–West is against us. Anti–American animosity is its sole motivation, its very raison d’être.
I write here not of our dissolute press, whose mission these past two dozen years — I take the events of September 11, 2001, as the point of departure — has been to prevent Americans from seeing and understanding the 21st century’s realities. Neither is the blunt instrument now lodged in the White House my topic.
No, the press and the president are merely exhibits, symptoms of a national failing that transcends either of these. This is the problem of America’s self-absorption, the pervasive narcissism that, it now becomes evident, is a primary cause of our troubled republic’s increasingly hostile relations with others and, so, its swift descent into isolation.
In Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Narcissus is a youth of transcendent beauty who spurns Echo, the nymph who loves him, and becomes infatuated with his own reflection in a pool of water. He thereafter takes to rejecting all admirers.
Narcissus is thus blind, but not only to others: He is also blind to himself. This fulfills the prophecy Tiresias made on his, Narcissus’s, birth: He will live long, the mythical seer said, “so long as he never knows himself.”
The Newest Narcissus; or, The Hero of our days, a cartoon by Edward Linley Sambourne, Punch, or the London Charivari, April, 1892. (Project Gutenburg, Public Domain)
Narcissism is the open-and-shut condition of the elites who fashion and execute American foreign policy. They see only themselves when they look abroad at others. And they are utterly incapable of seeing themselves as they are or their country as it is.
It is dangerous to be America’s enemy, Henry Kissinger once remarked in an often-quoted comment, but it is fatal to be America’s friend. This is the United States as run by the narcissistic cliques who set the imperium’s course. Nothing and no one matters beyond their own power.
I think too much of Americans to assign this condition to them out of hand. No, it is the media’s task to impose this condition on Americans. Consider again how the press covered Tianjin and Beijing: We are encouraged in every sentence to see our reflections in those events, for they were all about us.
Read a few of these pieces carefully, I urge. You find correspondents in this or that bureau abroad who rarely quote Chinese or Russian or even European sources in support of the reporting. No, they call reliably conformist scholars or think tank denizens back in the States to tell them how to think about what is going on in China or Russia or wherever it may be.
See what I mean? Journalism this flaccid is a new one on me. If it is not American narcissism as it is in practice I do not know what else to call it.
Did you read anything in the American press about Xi’s proposal for a “Global Governance Initiative” to assist in the pursuit of a more just and equitable world order?
What about the Chinese leader’s announcement in Tianjin of a new S.C.O. development bank, grants of 2 billion renminbi, $280 million, to S.C.O. members, and an additional 10 billion renminbi, $1.4 billion, in loans?
Or his speech calling for the historical record of the Pacific War — corrupted precisely as the West cravenly erases the Soviet Union’s decisive role in defeating the Reich — to be corrected?
Let me help you out. No, no, and no. The policy cliques are indifferent to these things and you are meant not to see them, blindness to our world the preferred condition. The policy people in Washington have been captivated by their own reflections ever since they set out to achieve global dominance almost immediately after the 1945 victories.
And so long as American power was hegemonic this did not matter. Diplomacy, as Boutros Boutros–Ghali memorably remarked after the United States forced him as out as the U.N.’s sec-gen, is for the weaker nations; the strong have no need of it.
There is need of it now, to state the obvious. And we find America to be self-blinded, stumbling, uncomprehending, and altogether incapable in this, a century of swift and momentous change.
Washington’s prevalent narcissism renders proper statecraft more or less impossible, as there has been, just as Boutros–Ghali astutely observed, no need of it for most of the past eight decades. And we cannot put this down to Donald Trump alone: This has been less obviously but just as true of the administrations that preceded his.
“[W]e find America to be self-blinded, stumbling, uncomprehending, and altogether incapable in this, a century of swift and momentous change.”
At this point the late-phase imperium is more or less entirely dependent on force as its mode of expression in the community of nations.
Parenthetically, this is how I read the Trump regime’s stunning decision to rename the Defense Department the War Department, just as it was called until 1949, when it was judged necessary to veil the arriving era of America’s imperial aggressions.
Military force, increasingly vicious varieties of coercion, sanctions that amount to collective punishment, in the case of Palestinians the refusal of visas: It is all Washington can think of doing as it responds so defensibly to the 21st century. It will, of course, lead nowhere but to further isolation and decline.
At a press conference in Beijing last Tuesday, as the days of diplomacy and celebration drew to a close, a correspondent asked Vladimir Putin what he thought of Trump’s “Say hello as they conspire against us” remark on Truth Social. The Russian president’s reply was a model of statesmanship and clear thinking:
“The president of the United States is not devoid of humor — everything is clear, everyone knows it well….
I can tell you, and I hope he will hear it as well: It may seem strange, but during these four days of negotiations, both informal and formal, no one has ever expressed any negative opinions about the current American administration….
The activities of the SCO and those of our partners, including our strategic partners, are not aimed at fighting anyone, but rather at finding the best ways to develop ourselves, our countries, our peoples, and our economies.”
It is a point that cannot be made too often, so commonly is it missed. The emergence of the non–West as a bloc of nations has not a shred of anti–Americanism in it. These nations would indeed welcome the United States, with its capital, its technologies, and so on, to participate fulsomely in building the new world order to which they are dedicated.
Only hegemons are unwelcome in this decidedly ecumenical undertaking. Only narcissists. Whether or not America can at last stop staring at its own reflection to see the world around it will determine its fate in our evolving century.
Chris Hedges: The Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk
September 12, 2025
Martyrs are used by messianic movements to sanctify violence. To show any mercy or understanding toward the enemy is to betray the martyr and the cause the martyr died defending.
Shot Heard Around the World – by Mr. Fish (clowncrack.com)
By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost
The assassination of Charlie Kirk presages a new, deadly stage in the disintegration of a fractious and highly polarized United States. While toxic rhetoric and threats are lobbed across cultural divides like hand grenades, sometimes spilling over into actual violence — including the murder of Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband and the two assassination attempts against Donald Trump — Kirk’s killing is a harbinger of full-scale social disintegration.
His murder has given the movement he represented — grounded in Christian nationalism — a martyr. Martyrs are the lifeblood of violent movements. Any flinching over the use of violence, any talk of compassion or understanding, any effort to mediate or discuss, is a betrayal of the martyr and the cause the martyr died defending.
Martyrs sacralize violence. They are used to turn the moral order upside down. Depravity becomes morality. Atrocities become heroism. Crime becomes justice. Hate becomes virtue. Greed and nepotism become civic virtues. Murder becomes good. War is the final aesthetic. This is what is coming.
“We have to have steely resolve,” said conservative political strategist Steve Bannon on his show “War Room,” adding, “Charlie Kirk is a casualty of war. We are at war in this country. We are.”
“If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is to fight or die,” wrote Elon Musk on X.
“The entire Right has to band together. Enough of this in-fighting bullshit. We are up against demonic forces from the pit of Hell,” wrote commentator and author Matt Walsh on X. “Put the personal squabbles aside. Now’s not the time. This is existential. A fight for our own existence and the existence of our country.”
Republican Congressman Clay Higgins wrote that he will use, “Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk…” He further states “I’m also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked from every school, and their drivers licenses should be revoked. I’m basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination.”
Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale capitalized on Kirk’s death to advocate for a takedown of the “red-green alliance” of “Communists and Islamists” who he claims have united to destroy Western civilization. He proposes an app where citizens can upload pictures of crime and homelessness in exchange for “property-tax rebates.”
Far-right comedian Sam Hyde, who has nearly half a million followers on X, wrote in response to Trump’s announcement of Kirk’s death that it is, “Time to do your fucking job and seize power… if you want to be more than a footnote in the ‘American Collapse’ section of future history books, it’s now or never.” In his tweet, he tags members of the administration and private military contractors.
Conservative actor James Woods warned, “Dear leftists: we can have a conversation or a civil war. One more shot from your side and you will not get this choice again.” His tweet was reposted by almost 20,000 people, received 4.9 million views and over 96,000 likes.
These are a sample of the slew of vitriolic sentiments shared and cheered on by tens of millions of Americans.
“Conservative actor James Woods warned, ‘Dear leftists: we can have a conversation or a civil war. One more shot from your side and you will not get this choice again.'”
The dispossession of the working class, 30 million who have been laid off because of deindustrialization, has engendered rage, despair, dislocation, alienation and fostered magical thinking. It has fed conspiracy theories, a lust for vengeance and a celebration of violence as a purgative for social and cultural decay.
Christian fascists — like Kirk and Trump — have astutely preyed on this despair. They stoked the embers. Kirk’s killing will set it alight.
Dissidents, artists, gays, intellectuals, the poor, the vulnerable, people of color, those who are undocumented or who do not mindlessly repeat the cant of a perverted Christian nationalism, will be condemned as human contaminants to be excised from the body politic. They will become, as in all diseased societies, sacrificial victims in the vain attempt to achieve moral renewal and recapture a lost glory and prosperity.
The cannibalization of society, a futile attempt to recreate a mythical America, will accelerate the disintegration. The intoxication of violence — many of those reacting to Kirk’s killing seemed giddy about a looming bloodbath — will feed on itself like a firestorm.
Kirk at Utah Valley University’s American Comeback event before he was shot. (Screenshot, MSNBC YouTube video)
The martyr is vital to the crusade; in this case ridding America of those Trump calls the “radical left.”
Martyrs are memorialized in ceremonies and acts of remembrance to remind followers of the righteousness of the cause and the perfidy of those who are blamed for the martyr’s death. This is what Trump did when he called Kirk “a martyr for truth and freedom” in a video message on September 10, awarded Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom and ordered flags to be flown at half-staff until Sunday. It is why Kirk’s casket will be flown back to Phoenix, Arizona on Air Force Two.
Kirk was a poster child for our emergent Christian Fascism. He peddled the Great Replacement Theory, which claims liberals or “globalists” allow immigrants of color into the country in order to replace whites, distorting immigration trends into conspiracy. He was Islamophobic, tweeting “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America,” and that it is “not compatible with western civilization.”
When children’s YouTuber Ms. Rachel said “Jesus says to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself,” Kirk retorted that “Satan has quoted scripture plenty” and added “by the way Ms. Rachel, you might wanna crack open that Bible of yours, in a lesser referenced part of the same part of scripture is in Leviticus 18, is that thou shall Lay with another man and be stoned to death.”
He demanded we roll back the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and disparaged civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King. He was demeaning towards Black people, “If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman…is she there because of affirmative action?” He said “prowling Blacks” are targeting white people “for fun.” He blamed Black Lives Matter for “destroying the fabric of our society.”
Kirk insisted the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. He founded Professor Watchlist and School Board Watchlist to purge professors and teachers with what he called “radical leftist” agendas. He advocated televised public executions which he insisted should be mandatory viewing for children.
The idea that he championed free speech and liberty is absurd. He was an enemy of both.
Kirk, who was a cheerleader for the cult of Trump, embodied the hypermasculinity that is at the core of fascist movements. This was perhaps his primary attraction to youth, especially white men. He claimed there is “a war on men,” fetishized guns and sold Trump to his followers as a man’s man.
“There’s a lot you can call Donald Trump,” he wrote. “No one has ever called him feminine. Trump is a giant middle finger to all the screeching hall monitors that attacked young men for just existing. He’s a giant F YOU to the feminist establishment that was never challenged before he came down the golden escalator. Most of the media missed this. Young men did not.”
History has shown what comes next. It won’t be pleasant. Kirk, elevated to martyrdom, gives those seeking to extinguish our democracy the license to kill, just as Kirk was killed. It lifts what few constraints still exist to protect us from state abuse and vigilante violence. Kirk’s name and visage will be employed to accelerate the road to tyranny, which is as he would have wanted it.
MaHGA: Making Hatred Great Ahead, An Oligarch Project
We are being played, yet again ...
Roger Boyd
Sep 11, 2025
I wrote this article, somewhat of a stream of consciousness, in response to the murders of Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk. Some will see it as over long, but I needed to show the road that got us to where we are today. Some will consider it missing important elements, like the “Russia, Russia, Russia” or the Ukraine War, but there is only so much that can be shoe-horned into an article. Hopefully, it provides some insights into the current woeful reality at the centre of the American Empire.
I am seeing far too many outright racist responses to the stabbing of the young Ukrainian woman, Iryna Zarutska, on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina. Views that were not that recently considered to be utterly unacceptable are now being normalized. Why?
The utter lack of any consequences for the financial and rentier oligarchy who had massively profited from the financial deregulation and extensive speculative and criminal activities that had lead to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (the second such crisis within only eight years) had created a backlash from the general populace. Fuelled by the extensive bailing out of those responsible by the state (bailouts for the rich, austerity for the rest), and investigations such as the 2020 documentary detailing the criminal culpability of so many senior financiers, and supposed independent academics, accounting firms, credit rating agencies and state functionaries.
The US Federal Reserve strove to hide the sheer scale of its bailout of the banking system, which was many times that of the official US US$700 billion state bailout (e.g. the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP), but was forced to release the details in 2011 by a Freedom of Information lawsuit raised by Bloomberg; US$7.77 trillion. The hiding of the scale of the bailout allowed the financial sector, and its great friend President Obama, to resist calls for a Great Depression style reform or even a breaking up of the big banks. Instead, the big banks became bigger and were even allowed to bolster their profits by US$13 billion as the Fed provided them with below-market interest rates. Within a relatively short period, the major banks had gone back to “business as usual”; including the paying of large executive bonuses. While the US government debt to GDP went from 56% in 2017 to 103% in 2012, as the costs of the crisis were socialized and calls for limits on the financial system and taxes on the rich to claw back the costs of the GFC went nowhere. As Bloomberg put it:
the Fed and its secret financing helped America’s biggest financial firms get bigger and go on to pay employees as much as they did at the height of the housing bubble. Total assets held by the six biggest U.S. banks increased 39 percent to $9.5 trillion on Sept. 30, 2011, from $6.8 trillion on the same day in 2006, according to Fed data.
From the resulting backlash grew the Occupy movement that started with Occupy Wall Street in September 2011 in Zucotti Park, New York and spread across the US and the Western world. The slogan “We are the 99%” drew a clear delineation between the interests of the top 1% and the rest of the population based on wealth and power; pointing out the class-based nature of the 2008 GFC and the resulting bailouts. When the protests started to have some real impacts, as with hundreds of thousands of people moving their bank accounts away from the big banks, the authorities quickly moved from attempts at trivialization, accommodation and co-option to a globally coordinated takedown of the OWS protest sites. The Occupy movement then moved more into mainstream politics and engagement with other groups, including the trades union movement and anti-eviction protests. The danger of a competing cultural discourse to the oligarch controlled hegemonic culture was crystallizing.
Something had to be done, and the usual tools of co-option, redirection and divide and conquer were brought to the fore by the US oligarchy; an oligarchy given even greater power over politics by the Supreme Court 2011 ruling that freed them to fully purchase the political system. Added to the massive concentration of the media into a small set of hands due to the utter lack of anti-trust enforcement under Clinton, Bush and Obama. First, the trusty sheepdogs to defuse the energies for real systemic change and redirect them toward oligarch-serving agendas; co-option and redirection. On the “left” Democratic Party side of politics Bernie Saunders served to perfectly defuse the energies for change, allowing the neoliberal warmongering Hillary Clinton to be anointed as the presidential candidate. On the “right” the Koch and other oligarch funded and astro-turfed “Tea Party Movement” not only defused the energy for change but redirected it toward the oligarch agenda of shrinking the state; at least the parts that did not serve the oligarchy.
All the while, a form of recovery from the GFC was engineered by the Federal Reserve through money printing; called “Quantitative Easing” to hide this reality. The danger was that the majority would wake up to the fact that if money printing could be used to help the financial system prosper without inflation then perhaps it could also be used to help the rest of the population prosper. By directing the US$4.5 billion of the three waves US QE (2009,2011 and 2012) through the financial system, rather than just directly funding government activities, the Federal Reserve also provided outsized profits to the financiers. Aided by a huge wave of money creation by the Chinese state controlled banking system, together with QE by other Western central banks, a lop-sided recovery was engineered to help stave off the “pitch forks” that Obama had promised the bankers that he would protect them from.
But there also needed to be some “cultural” causes to help divide the masses against each other, so the “woke” agenda screamed onto the pages and screens of the establishment media while corporations became surprisingly amenable to its progressive non-revolutionary agenda. They could deal with cultural changes that stayed well away from questions of political economy.
At a time of historically low levels of racism, sexism, homophobia and even violent crime within the US, even in Republican states, suddenly issues of “internalized racism”, of the “racism” supposedly inherent in teaching non-white children the skills needed to function in modern society such as standard English and mathematics, of the “violence” of “dead-naming” and “mis-gendering”, of a purportedly widespread “rape culture”, of the right of children and their parents to consent to irreversible chemical and surgical procedures, and the right of teachers to “support” children’s social decisions and hide such choices from parents. With Black people being widely encouraged to consider their white fellow citizens as “oppressors” rather than the real oligarch oppressors. With women encouraged to see all men as part of a monolithic patriarchy, rather than see the overwhelming power of a small number of men. With the issue of abortion rights also ramped up to create a stark division of extremes on an issue that a majority was in relative agreement on. Strife within the general population generated on any topic except that of economic class. Exemplified by Hillary Clinton’s disparagement of the “basket of deplorables” and Donald Trump’s disparagement of the “woke” and “liberals”.
By 2016 the discourse of the Occupy Movement had been lost to the past and the election of that year was between a bunch of neoliberal “progressives” and a bunch of neoliberal “conservatives” with the latter winning out. The result was more tax cuts for the rich, less regulation, and an ongoing orgy of financial speculation facilitated by the very low interest rates produced by the trillions and trillions of new money creation. Even non-financial corporation got into the act by levering themselves up, and even borrowing money to fund outsized dividends and share buybacks. The US economy seemed stable and growing, while the European economies much more tentatively recovered, but the surface level stability relied upon the huge amounts of liquidity still coursing through the veins of the financial system. As the Federal Reserve attempted to roll back a relatively small amount of that liquidity, the dependency became apparent with the Repo Crisis of late 2019. A major financial crisis was only averted by the quick intervention and a new liquidity infusion by the Federal Reserve, but even 11 years after the GFC there was no readiness of the general population to support another mass bailout of the banks and corporations.
The COVID-19 pandemic, and the related societal shutdowns, provided the perfect cover for such a colossal bailout. After the initial financial market crash in the second quarter of 2020, the bailout of the financiers and the corporations went into full swing on a scale even greater than in response to the 2008 GFC. The Federal Reserve slashed its short term lending rate to close to zero, and flooded the financial system with US$5 trillion of QE within just 2 years while even lending money directly to non-financial corporations. At the same time, the US federal government provided US$4.6 trillion through 6 “COVID-relief” laws in 2020 and 2021 with little real democratic oversight over how the funds were disbursed. The majority of the funds represented a huge cash handout to corporations rather than households. The US financial system and non-financial corporations, as well as those from other nations, were directly subsidized through these massive state subsidies. The Federal Reserve balance sheet ballooned to US$9 trillion, while US government debt rose from 100% of GDP in 2019 to 124.5% of GDP in just a single year!
And in the summer of 2020, the “George Floyd” many times violent protests broke out across the United Stats, with the “liberal” media down playing the amount of violence involved while the “right wing” media were given much to rail against. The scale and extensiveness of the protests was aided by astro-turfed and/or opportunistic NGOs seemingly funded to drive greater levels of domestic strife, such as Black Lives Matter. In many cases endorsed and supported by major corporations; and many times run by corrupt opportunists and establishment insiders “gone native”.
These included the Portland riots.
These protests achieved absolutely nothing significant, but took over the national political discourse to the detriment of the fundamental issues such as massive wealth and income inequality, and the colossal amounts of state money being shovelled into private hands with little or no democratic oversight. The reality that police shoot poor and powerless people at a much greater rate than other people, regardless of ethnicity, and that the Black population is predominantly poor and powerless was never focused upon of course; that would point dangerously to economic class as a factor. Such a discourse would encourage the “White Cracker” population to see the poor Black population and other poor people of colour as their allies against the oligarchy. Such a mindset is what got Fred Hampton a state murder.
Research points to the level of social vulnerability (a combination of factors such as poverty, lack of access to transportation, crowded housing) as being a key determinant of police shootings. High social vulnerability index (SVI) counties have much higher rates of police shootings than low SVI ones; 2.3x for whites, 9.6x for Blacks and 15x for Hispanics. Rich Blacks and Hispanics live very safe lives, poor Blacks and Hispanics live very dangerous ones. A good reason to reverse neoliberal policies and focus on improving those high SVI counties to become low ones. Can’t have that, and certainly can’t have poor Blacks and Hispanics seeing the rich in their ethnic groups as their adversaries rather than their “leaders”. And not celebrating President Obama as the first “Black” (actually mixed race raised by a white well off and well connected family) president; a man with absolutely no experience of ever being a Black man living in a poor community, or ever really being Black. But in the US, poor Blacks could be proud of the oligarch-tool that had nothing in common with them becoming president; even with his condescending tone-deaf messages to “his” community. While he diligently served his oligarch masters.
Then in 2021 the neoliberal “conservative” administration of Trump was swapped for the neoliberal “progressive” administration of Biden. And the BLM and other movements magically faded away without achieving anything, apart from filling the pockets of a good few of the senior people involved. With the Democratic Party promises of rebalancing the country between the haves and have-nots quickly disappearing and “revolutionaries” such as Ocasio-Cortez rapidly retreating into purely performative acts. Instead there would be a new wave of corporate handouts in 2022, ironically entitled the “Inflation Reduction Act” as monopolistic and colluding corporations massively expanded their margins aided by supply shortages; helping to drive official inflation to 7% by the end of 2021, and 6.5% by the end of 2022. Actual inflation as felt by the majority was higher, and with wage growth not nearly as high, real wages fell. And then claiming the need for “austerity” the administration rapidly removed the extra COVID-era social benefits that had so improved many people’s lives. While opening up the flood gates to waves of illegal immigration that were aided by state and oligarch funded NGOs; providing many millions of desperate people ready to undercut the wages of the poorer members of US society.
At the same time, the “woke” agenda was ramped up to full throttle by the new administration, with such things as open support for drag queen performances at elementary and middle schools and a transgender woman as Assistant Secretary for Health. The Supreme Court, diligently and intentionally packed with neoliberal conservative justices over a period of decades, also played its part to keep the “culture wars” going by striking down the seminal “Roe vs. Wade” abortion ruling in June 2022. Suddenly, abortion rights depended upon which US state a woman resided within. Both Clinton and Obama had had majorities in both houses for their first two years in office, majorities that could have been used to pass Supreme Court proof abortion rights legislation. But that would not have been to the benefit of the oligarchy, as it would have removed a significant element of the “culture war” through which the general population is redirected away from questions of political-economy and oligarch wealth and power. “Progressive” Hollywood also helped drive the culture wars with a never-ending deluge of “strong perfect women” Mary Sues and “diverse” characters set within standard Western supremacist stories, many times ignoring basic biology and history as well as the views of the majority of their audiences. With even large investment companies such as Blackrock requiring compliance to “diversity” goals.
Then came the Zionist genocide, fully supported by the US oligarchy and all of its political and media tools; a very ethnic-supremacist genocide that required a hatred of the non-European Arab population. In Israel, there is a hierarchy of Jews with the European Ashkenazi at the top and the Arab Mizrahi at the bottom; with any Black Jews below the bottom. A reality that had to be hidden, as it so clashed with the image that the neoliberal “progressives” wanted to put forward. The wall-to-wall US establishment support for the Zionist genocide drove an increasingly open discourse of such racism within the US, with both “progressive” and “right wing” media and political figures both blaming Palestinians for their own murders at the hand of the genocidal regime. With those that protest against the genocide likened to terrorist-enablers and increasingly disciplined whether it be in the educational system, the political realm, or the workplace. By both “progressives” and the “right wing”.
With the ability to deflect from the oh-so-obvious mental decline of the president becoming untenable, the Democratic Party bypassed any internal democratic processes to anoint the perfect neoliberal “progressive” first “Black” woman presidential candidate. Actually the mixed-race oligarch-tool upper middle class Kamala Harris, who had tended to identify as Indian (her mother is of Indian ethnicity) until quite recently. Raised in Silicon Valley and Montreal, Canada by her Indian mother, and married to a rich white Zionist. But her unwavering support for the Zionist genocide, and general vacuousness as a candidate, lead enough usual Democratic voters to stay home to allow for the election of Donald Trump.
The days of the Occupy movement now seem like a long distant echo from the past, as yet more tax cuts, fiscal goodies, and regulatory state gutting gifts are rained down upon the oligarchy. While at the same time the “left wing” woke “culture war” seems to have outlasted its usefulness to the oligarchy and has retreated as suddenly as the Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police movements did. As the economy had seemed to be entering a post-COVID recession in late 2022, the Biden administration had stepped back on the fiscal gas and then later the Federal Reserve chairman and the Treasury Secretary had colluded to re-loosen monetary policy. Seemingly in a vain attempt to get the first “Black” woman neoliberal “progressive” president elected. The Trump administration has made sure that government deficits of 7% of GDP can be forecast out as far as the eye can see. While the Federal Reserve considers interest rate cuts, and the regressive tariff taxes start to eat into the real incomes of the poorer members of society; and parts of the social state that benefit them are slashed.
The US economy staggers along with the “punch bowl” of monetary and fiscal largesse overflowing, with much of its growth driven by investment in data centres driven by a delusional “AI” bubble. Soon, the US oligarchy will need to come back for another bailout and yet more slashing and looting of the parts of the US state that serve the majority. So now the reserve option of neoliberal fascism is becoming increasingly required, with Trump dutifully normalizing the presence of federal forces and even federal troops on the streets of the major cities of the US. At the same time, the media allows more and more extreme voices to drive the hatred required for the jump to extreme authoritarianism. Immigrants are blamed and scapegoated (but not those that employ them to drive down wages), xenophobia against foreigners is ramped up, hatred of the Moslem/Arab “other” ramped up, and outright racism, Nazi apologism and Holocaust-denial allowed. At the very same time that the Zionist clamp down is being intensified, with even the Israel-apologist CBS being deemed not to be Zionist enough; with the Zionist-extremist Bari Weiss now being bribed to oversee the editorial content.
Into this milieu of hatred came the stabbing of the young Ukrainian woman, Iryna Zarutska, in Charlotte by an untreated schizophrenic who had been set free by the US justice system again, and again and again. The real issue is that justice system, his untreated schizophrenia, the lack of proper psychiatric care in the US for the poor, and his poverty. Whether he was white, Black, Hispanic, Asian etc. was irrelevant. Her youth and whiteness certainly played into the coverage by a media that ignores the turning of children’s bodies into unrecognizable body parts by US provided bombs and the Zionist sniper murders of innocent civilians on a daily basis. These realities were ignored by those who want to push a racist agenda such as eugyppius (who resides in Germany and supports the oligarch-financed neoliberal fascist AfD) who seems to not miss any opportunity to make any issue about race rather than class and oligarchy. As with this:
To put it as bluntly as possible – and with as little racial sensitivity as I dare – the U.S. black population is largely responsible for imposing on many American cities a civilian homicide rate equivalent to or far exceeding that seen in a modern country fighting a war on its own territory.
This is of course utter rhetorical propaganda. The largest driver of murders in the United States is the availability of legalized, and other, handguns. In 2023 the number of murders by handgun and firearms “not stated” were 12,454, with the next most used weapon, a knife, being used for 1,562 murders. All other weapons pale in comparison. The ownership of private handguns in Ukraine is illegal, following the norm of non-US nations in severely restricting or prohibiting private handgun ownership. It is the ready availability of handguns that turn so many fights/assaults into murders. So we should ban personal handguns and close down any gun manufacturers facilitating illegal handgun ownership, right? It is also quite rare for a woman to be murdered by a stranger, with 92% of female murders in 2018 being carried out by a man they knew, and 63% by a current intimate partner of ex-husband. The twisting of this women’s tragedy into a discourse of racism is utterly contemptible and also utterly oligarch-serving.
The vast majority of murders carried out by Black men are of other Black men within their own local community, fitting a general pattern of murder rates that vary greatly between neighbourhoods in even the most violent of US cities. The US also has rates of deep poverty and drug use not seen in other Western nations, together with a threadbare social safety net. Poverty and hopelessness facilitate drug usage, and drug usage facilitates criminality and violence. As can be seen with the US “White Cracker” neighbourhoods overwhelmed with crystal meth and other drug usage. So we should put in public policies to support jobs to get people out of poverty, make sure all are well educated for such jobs (there is a very tight negative correlation between intellectual level and criminality), and legalize soft drugs to remove the conveyor belt of young men being brutalized in prison? Perhaps also remove the remaining differences in sentencing guidelines between crack and powdered cocaine, right?
But of course all of the above are the very things that the oligarchy DO NOT want to happen, as they intensify their extraction of wealth from the population. Instead, it wants to breed racial hatred in both Black people and white people to support its divide and conquer strategies. And commentators such as eugyppius waste no opportunity to sell this hatred and division to the majority, one that has been used for centuries by the oligarchy to divide and conquer. According to such commentators the most major issue in Germany is of course “Moslem immigrants”, not the German vassal oligarchy intensifying their extractive activities against the population. But isn’t the murder rate far, far lower in Germany than the US? Perhaps because personal handguns are strictly regulated, there is a real social safety net that strives to reduce poverty and hopelessness, the educational system is of pretty high quality for all (universities are tuition free!), the criminal justice system is much less about just punishing rather than rehabilitation, and drugs are much less of a problem? It must be terrible for eugyppius to live in such a hell scape of a country!
And now the right wing commentator Charlie Kirk has been murdered (shot) at a university event. We do not know the identity of the killer, and whether or not he was put up to it by malign forces wanting to intensify inter-social violence within the US. What I do know is that such violence only helps the oligarch project of increasingly violent divide and conquer, while helping to remove the focus from the Zionist genocide and facilitate the Trump administration’s agenda of increasing and normalizing authoritarian rule within the country. Trump has been in office for only eight months and so much has been changed, completely facilitated by an “opposition” and “progressive” media that has become surprisingly supportive or at least significantly less aggressively combative. 2011 now seems so far away, with the hopes of the Occupy movement snuffed out as we are being accelerate toward an increasingly fascistic future. While the sheepdogs of Bernie Saunders and Ocasio-Cortez take their utterly performative “Fighting Oligarchy” tour around the nation to once again enervate any drive for real substantive change. Charlie Kirk was really a sheepdog colleague of theirs, overseeing a very successful and profitable sheepdog business. His murder will be a boon to the other sheep dogs. Anything to stop the majority thinking in terms of political economy and class consciousness. The only ones allowed to be class conscious and to carry out class warfare are the oligarchs.
Postscript:
It is now being reported that the gun used to shoot Charlie Kirk has been found and within it bullets “engraved with expressions of transgender and antifascist ideology”, while the shooter is still not in custody. This so perfectly serves the authoritarian state in cracking down on “leftists” it raises serious questions about the forces behind the shooting. Again and again, we have seen “false flag” operations and outright lies that served the policy needs of the state carrying them out. Whether it be the Reichstag Fire, the Marco Polo bridge affair, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, post-war bombings in Italy, the Kuwaiti “babies thrown out of incubators”, Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, Libyan state rape gangs “full of Viagra”, and most recently the stories about Venezuelan drug gangs. A person who left behind absolute proof that they are a “radical leftist” after murdering on camera a very prominent right-wing political figure just seems too perfect. Like those passports that amazingly survived a fiery plane crash. Like so many Democratic judges letting dangerous, and even mentally unbalanced, individuals go free to spread mayhem in communities. Its known as a “strategy of tension” designed to both divide the population and deliver it into the hands of a fascist strong man; while removing any discussion of real systemic societal change. The liberal “progressives” cheering on the murder of Charlie Kirk are doing the oligarch’s work just as much as the right wing ideologues. The space for constructive dialogue within the majority of the population about their shared issues is being intentionally closed off; only inter-societal hatred and loathing together with the yearning for an oligarch-tool Big Brother will be acceptable. Together with the charms of the sheepdogs.
ALL Mainstream American Political Pundits Are Evil Scumbags
You cannot become a high-level pundit, politician or political operative in either mainstream party without being an evil piece of shit. It’s part of the job description, because the job requires you to make excuses for the abuses of a globe-spanning empire which is fueled by human blood.
Caitlin Johnstone
September 12, 2025
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Hi I’m an anti-establishment right winger. I’m enraged about the murder of a mainstream Republican pundit who worshipped the president and I demand sweeping authoritarian measures to stomp out the political left. I believe whatever the TV says about this. I’m anti-establishment.
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To be clear I would be just as unmoved if a mainstream Democrat-aligned manipulator like Bill Maher or Joe Scarborough was killed, and I would be just as disdainful of their memory. They are exactly the same to me.
I had no strong feelings about Charlie Kirk especially; to me he was just one of the empire’s countless flying monkeys, and his role will be easily filled by the next flying monkey in line. My disdain toward him was of the ordinary blanket variety that I hold toward all the lackeys of the most tyrannical and murderous power structure on our planet, regardless of their political affiliation.
All mainstream Republican pundits, politicians and political operatives are evil pieces of shit. All mainstream Democratic pundits, politicians and political operatives are evil pieces of shit. You cannot become a high-level pundit, politician or political operative in either mainstream party without being an evil piece of shit. It’s part of the job description, because the job requires you to make excuses for the abuses of a globe-spanning empire which is fueled by human blood.
The Republicans are not your friend. The Democrats are not your friend. If you have any special attachment to any mainstream American pundit, politician or political operative, then you have a special attachment to an evil piece of shit. That includes Charlie Kirk, and it includes all major Republican pundits and politicians, and it includes all major Democrat pundits and politicians.
There are no exceptions. That’s just the way the empire is structured.
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Rightists have been aggressively pushing the narrative that the weapon used to assassinate Charlie Kirk contained ammunition which had been engraved with “transgender and anti-fascist ideology”, based on an early internal police bulletin whose contents made its way to the press via right wing pundit Steven Crowder.
Yeah, sure. Hey you guys they found “I am trans” written on the bullets and “I am Antifa” was also written on the bullets and also “Nothing can stop us radical leftists but a huge Palantir surveillance network” and also “Killer police robots and murder drones would thwart our plans.” Come on.
The claim fizzled almost as soon as it surfaced, with one law enforcement official telling The New York Times that “the report had not been verified by A.T.F. analysts, did not match other summaries of the evidence and might turn out to have been misread or misinterpreted.”
CNN was then told by two law enforcement sources that “agents quickly ran an initial search on one of the markings, including a series of arrows, which analysts initially interpreted to be a connection to the transgender community. That information remains unverified and is still being investigated.”
So police found a “series of arrows” on some ammo, thought that maybe the arrows have something to do with trans activism, and then someone fed this completely unsubstantiated hunch to Steven Crowder, further inflaming the insane, shrieking vitriol that has been consuming the American political right.
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A few days before Global Sumud Flotilla activists began reporting that drones were repeatedly dropping incendiary firebombs on their aid boats headed for Gaza, TRT World came out with a report saying Israel has been using quadcopter drones to drop incendiary firebombs in Gaza. Social media users have been posting footage of these drone attacks in Gaza alongside the video footage of the flotilla attacks, and they look the same.
Israel is droning activist boats for trying to bring formula to starving babies and Israelis are still like “the world hates us because of our religion!”
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Jerry Seinfeld said during a speech at Duke University on Tuesday that he believes that members of the Ku Klux Klan are morally superior to Palestine supporters, because they are more honest about their hatred of Jewish people.
“Free Palestine is, to me, just — you’re free to say you don’t like Jews. Just say you don’t like Jews,” Seinfeld said.
“By saying Free Palestine, you’re not admitting what you really think,” he continued. “So it’s actually — compared to the Ku Klux Klan, I’m actually thinking the Klan is actually a little better here because they can come right out and say, ‘We don’t like Blacks, we don’t like Jews.’ Okay that’s honest.”
This is such a perfect example of the insanity of the Zionist ideology. They’re like, “The KKK is fine, it’s the ones who never voice hatred of Jews that I worry about. The ones whose Jew hatred is completely invisible and has no actual manifestations in the physical world.”
Israel supporters make alliances with the far right while attacking the left and alienating the centrists, and completely ignore all the actual white supremacist groups who want to kill Jews while shrieking about a fictional epidemic of Jew hatred among people who are protesting a genocide. You never see them yelling at Klansmen and neo-Nazis, you only ever see them yelling at people who think genocide is bad.
This is because Israel is a far right racist genocidal country, and its most natural allies are therefore racist right wingers who think genocide is cool. All the world’s worst people cozying up together in one big happy genocidal cuddle party.
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The other day I tweeted about an IDF sniper who had boasted about murdering unarmed civilians just for the hell of it, and a commenter said, “If that is a real quote from the real sniper, it’s bad but I don’t think it is real because it is so obviously bad.”
This is a common error when learning about the abuses of Israel. So much Israeli depravity hides behind the assumption that nobody could possibly be that evil. And then you dig a little deeper and it turns out, oh shit, yes they absolutely are. It really makes you reassess things.
