Lew Rockwell Institute

For years Donald Trump had no more committed a MAGA supporter than Rep. Margaret Taylor Greene of Georgia.

As a private citizen, she had been fervently loyal to Trump during all the troubles and setbacks of his first term.

Greene was then elected to Congress in 2020 and upon taking office fully endorsed Trump’s claims of a stolen election and his efforts to have it overturned. Just days later, the January 6, 2021 storming of the Capitol by a mob of outraged Trump supporters prompted many to denounce him as an insurrectionist, with numerous prominent Republicans joining that chorus of condemnation.

After that incident, Trump was immediately purged from Twitter, losing direct access to his tens of millions of erstwhile followers and crippling his influence. But Greene never wavered, and her loyalty to Trump soon led to a House vote removing her from all her committee roles, effectively eliminating most of her Congressional responsibilities.

During 2023 many dozens of felony charges were filed against Trump, with the four separate criminal prosecutions taking place in fiercely anti-Trump localities, whose juries were expected to convict him. As a result, most political analysts wrote off the former president as a political has-been, much more likely to end up financially bankrupt and in a prison cell than with any chance of regaining the White House in 2024. Indeed, many of the committed right-wing activists who had constituted Trump’s base shifted their support in the 2024 race to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, believing that he had a much better chance of winning the presidency and enacting elements of Trump’s agenda because he lacked the latter’s heavy political baggage.

But Greene stayed loyal, and her 28,000 word Wikipedia page never even mentions DeSantis, nor Nicki Haley, the former Trump official also widely promoted as a leading candidate in the 2024 primaries.

However, all of this began to change earlier this year, as Greene became more and more openly critical of many of Trump’s current policies. The flashpoint was the complete reversal on his longstanding pledge to release all the Jeffrey Epstein documents. So about a month ago Tucker Carlson interviewed Greene for thirty minutes regarding her growing break with Trump, preceding their discussion with his own hour-long monologue on the MAGA movement and its ideological principles.

Video Link

I’d always vaguely regarded MAGA—“Make America Great Again”—as merely a populist, right-wing slogan devoid of any substantive meaning, and indeed the 10,000 word Wikipedia article seems to suggest exactly that. But Carlson instead insisted that Trump’s ideological movement had clear principles, being based upon what he described as the Five Pillars of MAGA, which I’d summarize as follows:

• Putting the Interests of America First in Foreign Policy and Everything Else
• America Must Control Its Borders and Build a Wall
• No More Unnecessary Foreign Wars
• Stop Globalization and Bring Manufacturing Jobs Back to America
• Stop Censorship and Protect Free Speech

However, whether or not those fundamental pillars of the Trump MAGA movement may have existed, the actual policies implemented suggest that Trump himself was completely unaware of these.

For example, just a few weeks after Trump’s second inaugural I highlighted one of the most shocking actions taken by the new administration:

A 30-year-old Tufts doctoral student and Fulbright Scholar from Turkey was walking across her Boston-area neighborhood on the way to a holiday dinner at a friend’s house when she was suddenly seized and abducted in the early evening by six masked federal agents of the Department of Homeland Security. The terrified young woman was handcuffed and taken to a waiting car, secretly detained for the next 24 hours without access to friends, family, or lawyers, then shipped off to a holding cell in Louisiana and scheduled for immediate deportation, although a federal judge has now temporarily stayed the proceedings.

Just one of the Tweets showing a short clip of that incident has been viewed more than 4.5 million times, with a much longer YouTube video accumulating another couple of hundred thousand views.

That very disturbing scene seemed like something out of a Hollywood film chronicling the actions of a dystopian American police state, and that initial impression was only solidified once media reports explained why Rumeysa Ozturk was snatched off the streets of her home town. Her only reported transgression had been her co-authorship of an op-ed piece in the Tufts student newspaper a year earlier sharply criticizing Israel and its ongoing attacks on the civilian population of Gaza.

Apparently, one of the many powerful pro-Israel censorship organizations funded by Zionist billionaires became outraged over her sentiments and decided to make a public example of her, so its minions in the subservient Trump Administration immediately ordered her arrest.

• The Zionist Destruction of American Higher Education
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 31, 2025 • 7,300 Words

Snatching legal permanent American residents off our city streets because they had once been critical of the policies of a foreign government seemed to violate more than half of the alleged MAGA principles, and this pattern certainly continued during the months that followed.

Despite the intense lobbying of both Carlson and influential TPUSA leader Charlie Kirk, Trump later attacked Iran at the obvious behest of the Israel Lobby, which seemed to exercise even greater influence over his administration than it ever had over previous ones. Kirk’s strong disillusionment with the Israeli control over our government was soon followed by his extremely suspicious assassination, then by more recent claims that the FBI investigation may have been severely circumscribed while efforts by other administration figures to get at the truth of what happened were completely blocked.

So while someone like Rep. Greene had been completely committed to the MAGA agenda, the president she followed was not, and as a staunch believer in the ideals of “America First,” she began expressing her outrage that our own government had apparently fallen under the control of partisans serving a foreign nation. Tens of millions of Americans had voted for MAGA but they instead got MIGA—“Make Israel Great Again.”

This has hardly been the only example of MAGA failures or betrayals at the hands of our erratic president.

The bizarre, almost random nature of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs and the rapid reversal that followed seemed very unlikely to shift substantial numbers of manufacturing jobs back to America. Major business investment decisions require confidence in long-term stability, and with Trump dramatically changing his tariff policies apparently by personal whim on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis, none of that exists.

Over the last few weeks, Trump has regularly denounced Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as a notorious drug-dealer while providing no evidence to substantiate such accusations. These seemed aimed at justifying a looming American military attack against that country, with former Trump ally Col. Douglas Macgregor recently arguing that such a war will cost him his presidency. Then just a couple of days ago, Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been convicted for drug-dealing by an American jury in 2024 and sentenced to 45 years in federal prison for flooding our country with 500 tons of cocaine over twenty years.

Soon after Greene’s appearance on Carlson’s show, Trump angrily denounced her and promised to support a Republican challenger in her district. More importantly, she began receiving numerous death-threats directed against herself and her family. Perhaps mindful of Kirk’s fate, she announced that she would resign from Congress in January.

Although all American presidents since Lyndon Johnson have been firmly pro-Israel, the Trump Administration has taken that policy to an absurd, almost cartoonish extent.

Earlier this year, Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel, had a long and friendly meeting with Jonathan Pollard, perhaps the most notorious traitor in recent American history, and neither Trump nor any of this officials seemed to take serious offense at that decision.

Meanwhile, one of the most forceful domestic policies pursued by Trump’s appointees has been their major campaign to combat antisemitism across our universities and the rest of our society, with the term usually so broadly defined as to encompass almost any criticism of Israel or Jews.

About a month ago, a political scientist named Laura K. Field published Furious Minds, a 400 page volume released by Princeton University Press analyzing the MAGA movement of President Donald Trump. Her work drew a long list of very favorable reviews and blurbs, from the New York Times on down and was even named a Financial Times Book of the Year.

But although her work was intended to be a guide to the beliefs permeating Trump’s political movement of the last few years and his current administration, she also naturally discussed the circumstances of Trump’s first presidential race. During that campaign, his candidacy was heavily associated with the Alt-Right movement, whose large and energetic presence on social media and the rest of the Internet may have helped him overcome all of Hillary Clinton’s huge traditional advantages in mainstream media support, political endorsements, and a far larger advertising budget.

Yet oddly enough, that Alt-Right movement was widely perceived as extremely critical of Jewish influence and Israel, with many of its leading figures expressing strongly antisemitic or even neo-Nazi beliefs.

The Alt-Right collapsed years ago and has no real connection with Trump’s current policies or personnel. But at the time, it had provoked an enormous amount of public attention, probably far more than any focus on MAGA. So before analyzing those latter ideas, I decided to first reexamine the very different group of activists and ideologues who had been so strongly identified with Trump’s 2016 race, a movement that I’d casually followed at the time but never investigated in any detail.

In her discussion, Field had repeatedly cited the work of George Hawley, a professor at the University of Alabama who had apparently become something of an academic expert on the Alt-Right, so I ordered and read his books, beginning with Right-Wing Critics of American Conservativism. Published by the University Press of Kansas, that 2016 volume seemed to have established his reputation as an authority on far right political movements, laying the basis for his subsequent books on the Alt-Right.

Hawley covered the origins of modern American conservativism and the many challenges it had faced over the years from the right, with his account generally following a rather conventional narrative.

After briefly discussing the Old Right of the pre-World War II era, he explained how William F. Buckley Jr. had essentially created modern American conservativism by founding National Review in 1955. Next, he recounted Buckley’s generally successful efforts to purge his mainstream conservative movement of various factions that he considered extremist or otherwise disreputable, including the highly conspiratorial John Birch Society and Ayn Rand’s libertarian Objectivists.

Following this introductory treatment, Hawley then devoted individual chapters to some of the other right-wing ideological challengers that mainstream conservatives had faced over the decades, including the “Localism” movement, libertarians, radical libertarians, and the Paleoconservatives of the 1990s. With the exception of his coverage of the “Localists”—who seemed rather unimportant to me—none of this material was new or ground-breaking, merely reflecting a traditional narrative presented in numerous other books that I had read over the years.

I noticed that no chapter was devoted to the Neocons, although the policies advocated by those former liberals and leftists were at least as divergent from the mainstream conservative movement as those groups that he had included. One of the most popular right-wing books of the 1960s was None Dare Call It Treason, with the title drawn from the famous epigram of an Elizabethan courtier pointing out that if traitors or rebels succeed in their enterprise, they inevitably rewrite history to conceal what had happened. And since the Neocons successfully seized control of the mainstream conservative movement during the 1980s and 1990s, purging any who opposed them, they were extensively discussed in Hawley’s text but unlike the other rebellious factions, no chapter was allocated to their successful coup.

Although most of his coverage seemed fine, some of Hawley’s rather blatant errors did jump out at me. For example, he repeatedly misidentified the very influential Gentile libertarian economist and Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek as a secular Jew. And although the author correctly explained that Buckley had based his conservatism upon Frank Meyer’s fusion of the three separate strands of free market economics, a hawkish anti-Communist foreign policy, and traditional social values, Hawley always misspelled it as “Fushionism,” a non-existent term rather than the “Fusionism” that it has always been called. These sorts of items suggested that the author lacked any deep knowledge of the ideological movement whose history he was describing.

A much more serious problem with Hawley’s account was one that he shared with nearly all previous histories of the conservative movement, which he had obviously used as his sources. These latter were almost invariably based in that ideological milieu, so much so that his discussion of the right-wing challenges that conservatism had faced was a little like using Stalinist tracts as the starting point for an analysis of Trotskyism.

This was not a major problem when author focused on libertarians or Paleoconservatives since he would then consider their own writings. But I think he seriously missed the boat with regard to earlier periods from the 1950s or the 1960s, failing to realize that later conservative chroniclers might have deliberately ignored or downplayed some important right-wingers whom they or their own earlier sources had regarded as too dangerous to discuss. After all, if conservatives had successfully thrown their early opponents down the memory-hole, the last thing they wanted was to resurrect such past ideological foes and bring them to the attention of later writers.

Consider, for example, Prof. Revilo P. Oliver, a distinguished classics scholar, who only received a single brief mention, one that casually dismissed him as a minor early conservative figure jettisoned for his antisemitism. Such a characterization was exactly how he has almost invariably been portrayed in mainstream conservative histories if they even bothered to mention him at all. But this is far from accurate, and by blindly relying upon such accounts, the author was merely repeating such severe distortions. During World War II, Oliver had headed an important American code-breaking division and then later served as one of the leading early figures in both National Review and the John Birch Society during the 1950s and 1960s, afterwards spending decades as a highly influential figure in far right circles prior to his 1994 death.

The fiercely atheistic and antisemitic Oliver had long been personally close to Buckley, having been a member of the latter’s 1950 wedding party—according to Paul Gottfried even serving as his best man—and his 1981 memoirs America’s Decline included some shocking facts about the early conservative movement. According to Oliver, National Review had originally been founded with the explicit, secret goal of combatting Jewish influence in American society. In support of that dramatic claim, we know that the largest portion of the initial funding came from Buckley’s own very wealthy father, who was notorious for his ferocious antisemitic sentiments. Oliver also claimed that the John Birch Society had been founded a few years later with exactly that same secret, antisemitic agenda. But Oliver explained that funding difficulties soon forced both those conservative organizations to desperately seek the support of major Jewish donors and therefore completely abandon those original goals, which they naturally did their best to conceal.

I summarized this remarkable first-hand account in a 2019 article, and whether or not Hawley would have credited Oliver’s stories, he certainly should have included the latter’s memoirs among his important source materials.

An even more serious omission came with regard to Prof. John Beaty’s 1951 volume The Iron Curtain Over America, which went through some 17 printings and reportedly became the second bestselling conservative book of the 1950s. Like Oliver, Beaty was a well-regarded academic scholar and during World War II he had held one of our most crucial positions in Military Intelligence, being responsible for producing the daily briefing reports provided to the White House and all our other top military and political leaders. Once again, both Beaty and his huge conservative bestseller have been totally removed from almost all our conservative histories, and Hawley seemed completely unaware of either the man or his book.

The reason for Beaty’s total purge from conservative memory is hardly mysterious. Although he himself was a strong anti-Communist and a devout Christian of rather moderate views, his central wartime role and his subsequent years of research led to his explosive account of the enormous but hidden role of Jewish organizations in our political life and our involvement in the war, and his dramatic claims were strongly endorsed by a long list of top generals and influential U.S. senators. The title of his book referred to the “iron curtain” of Jewish media control that had descended upon American society, and it seemed likely that Beaty’s analysis of that growing problem may have helped prompt the founding of National Review a few years later.

Read the Whole Article

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Just as the news breaks that Trump has issued Maduro an ultimatum to leave Venezuela immediately if he wants to escape with his life, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has published an amazingly brazen war propaganda piece titled “How Venezuelan Gangs and African Jihadists Are Flooding Europe With Cocaine.”

“Venezuela has become a major launchpad for huge volumes of cocaine shipped to West Africa, where jihadists are helping traffic it to Europe in record quantities,” the article begins, going out of its way to note that “the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro — who it asserts is heavily involved in drug smuggling — has brought global attention to the country’s role in the drug trade.”

The propaganda piece is plainly aimed at Europeans as well as Americans, emphasizing Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s quip last month that the Europeans “should be thanking us” for blowing up alleged drug boats coming from Venezuela because he says some of those drugs are winding up in Europe.

It’s got everything. Whipping up international support for a regime change war. Fearmongering about “jihadists”. The evil, scary dictator. The whole war propaganda sales package.

Venezuela has become a major launchpad for huge volumes of cocaine shipped to West Africa, where jihadists are helping traffic it to Europe in record quantities. https://t.co/Oz1U9wtWVI

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) December 1, 2025

The mass media do this every time the US empire gets war-horny. And the Murdoch press are always the most egregious offenders.

Reminds me of an old tweet by a man named Malcolm Price:

“I remember in the run-up to the Iraq War a friend I had known all my life suddenly said to me, ‘We must do something about this monster in Iraq.’ I said, ‘When did you first think that?’ He answered honestly, ‘A month ago’.”

Price’s friend had been swept up in the imperial war propaganda campaign that had recently begun, just like countless millions of others. Month after month after month western consciousness was hammered with false narratives about weapons of mass destruction, forced associations of Saddam Hussein with 9/11, and stories about how much better things will be for the people of Iraq once that evil tyrant is gone.

Normally it never would have occurred to the average westerner that a country on the other side of the planet should be invaded and its leader replaced with a puppet regime. That’s not the sort of thing that would have organically entered someone’s mind. It needed to be placed there.

So it was.

The most common misconception about the free press of the western world is that it exists. All the west’s most influential and far-reaching news media publications are here not to report factual stories about current events, but to manufacture consent for the pre-existing agendas of the US-centralized western empire.

They report many true things, to be sure, and if you acquire some media literacy you can actually learn how to glean a lot of useful information from the imperial press without losing your mind to the spin machine. But reporting true things is not their purpose. Their purpose is to manipulate public psychology at mass scale for the benefit of the empire they serve.

This doesn’t happen through some kind of centralized Ministry of Truth where sinister social engineers secretly conspire to deceive people. It happens because all mainstream press institutions are controlled either by plutocrats or by western governments in the form of state broadcasters like the BBC, both of which have a vested interest in maintaining the imperial status quo. They control who the executives and lead editors of these outlets are, and those leaders shape the hiring and editing processes of the publication or broadcaster. Reporters come to understand that there are certain lines they need to color within if they want to get articles published and continue advancing their careers, so they either learn to toe the imperial line or they disappear from the mass media industry.

If people had a clear understanding of everything that’s really going on in our world, they would tear the empire apart brick by brick. If they could truly see how much evil is being done in their name and really wrap their minds around it, and if they could understand how much wealth the plutocrats are getting out of the imperial status quo compared to how little they themselves benefit from it, there would be immediate revolution. So the oligarchs and empire managers shore up narrative control in the form of media ownership, think tanks, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, imperial information ops like Wikipedia, and now increasingly through billionaire-owned AI chatbots to ensure that this never happens.

I remember in the run-up to the Iraq War a friend I had known all my life suddenly said to me, ‘We must do something about this monster in Iraq.’ I said, ‘When did you first think that?’ He answered honestly, ‘A month ago’. #Propaganda @medialens

— Malcolm Pryce (@exogamist) April 12, 2018

The entire empire is built on a foundation of lies. The whole power structure is held together by nonstop manipulation of the way westerners think, speak, act, shop, work, and vote. If truth ever finds a way to get a word in edgewise, the entire thing would collapse.

We know this is true because the oligarchs and empire managers pour so much wealth and energy into manipulating our minds. They’re not doing this for fun, they’re doing it because they need to. If they didn’t need to, it wouldn’t be happening.

So what they are doing is intensely creepy and destructive, but it’s also empowering, because it shows us right where their weak spot is. They’re pouring all this energy into controlling the dominant narrative because that’s the weakest point in the armor of the imperial machine.

What we need, then, is a grassroots effort to help truth get a word in. Help people understand that they’ve been propagandized and deceived about the world by western media and by their power-serving education systems every day of their lives, because propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you. Sow distrust in the imperial media and institutions. Open people’s eyes to the fact that they’re being lied to, and help them learn to see the truth. Anywhere the empire is sowing lies and distortions — whether that’s in Venezuela or Gaza or somewhere else — use that opportunity to help more people unplug their minds from the propaganda matrix.

A better world is possible. The first step in moving toward it is snapping people out of the propaganda-induced coma which dupes them into settling for this dystopian nightmare instead.

_____________

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The post Ah, Good Old War Propaganda appeared first on LewRockwell.

Malcolm Muggeridge was a talented journalist who lived in Moscow in 1933, working for the Manchester Guardian. Though attracted to communism in his youth, the experience of being in Stalin’s Russia and observing what was going on caused him to become disillusioned. Especially disturbing was his realization that Stalin’s army and police were—as part of their collectivization program—starving millions of landowning peasants (known as kulaks) by confiscating their grain. A large and productive number of kulaks possessed farms in Ukraine, which has some of the richest soil in the world. This massive organized crime—known as the Holodomor—resulted in the deaths of millions in the winter of 1933.

Muggeridge was the ONLY western journalist to report what was going on. When his reports were published, many of his fellow writers—including George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley, Jean-Paul Sartre, Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb—refused to believe them, and they passionately asserted that Muggeridge was spreading falsehoods about Stalin’s regime.

Muggeridge was related to the Webbs by marriage, and years later he told a funny story about Beatrice.

I remember Mrs. Webb, who after all was a very cultivated upper-class liberal-minded person, an early member of the Fabian Society and so on, saying to me, ‘Yes, it’s true, people disappear in Russia.’ She said it with such great satisfaction that I couldn’t help thinking that there were a lot of people in England whose disappearance she would have liked to organize.”

For decades, Muggeridge’s accurate reporting of the Holodomor was denied and suppressed. The dominant narrative of Stalin’s Russia in the early thirties was that propagated by the New York Times Moscow bureau chief, Walter Duranty, who vehemently denied the Holodomor. While Muggeridge’s true and courageous reporting was denied, Duranty won a Pulitzer Price for his concealment of one of the greatest crimes of the 20th Century. It’s a testament to the power of Duranty’s mendacious work that most Americans have still never heard of the Holodomor.

Over the last five years, I’ve often thought about Muggeridge and Duranty as I have watched courageous scholars like Dr. Peter McCullough persecuted and censored, while COVID-19 vaccine ideologues are rewarded. Most notable is the COVID-19 vaccine propagandist, Dr. Peter Hotez, who was recently nominated for the Nobel Prize.

One of the most bizarre features of our bizarre time is that an experimental, gene transfer technology has become an object of unshakable devotion. Among members of the COVID-19 Vaccine Cult, belief in the substance (about which they know nothing) is an article of faith.

In the 1930s, 40s, and even 50s, many of the most prominent journalists, writers, intellectuals, and artists believed in Stalin’s Cult of Personality. Muggeridge knew (from his own observations) that they weren’t seeing the reality of Stalin’s regime. Because they viewed the world through the highly distorting lens of ideology, they couldn’t see what was right in front of them.

I was again reminded of this extremely shabby and disheartening chapter of intellectual history this morning when I watched Dr. McCullough’s exposition of the childhood vaccines deaths that were just acknowledged in a leaked FDA memo.

As he points out, we have known about this for years, and have persistently warned about since August 2020, when Dr. McCullough published his first alarm (The great gamble of COVID-19 vaccine development).

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post When Ideology Collides With Evidence appeared first on LewRockwell.

As it is becoming obvious that Ukraine is losing in the proxy war against Russia, the ideas European governments are are throwing around are getting more crazy.

Some are now eager to ‘pre-emptively’ attack Russia in ‘retaliation’ for alleged ‘hybrid attacks’ against European countries. Those ‘hybrid attacks’ are mostly pure fantasies.

Politico was first to report this nonsense:

Europe thinks the unthinkable: Retaliating against Russia – Politico, Nov 27 2025
Countries are looking at joint offensive cyber operations and surprise military drills as Moscow steps up its campaign to destabilize NATO allies.

Russia’s drones and agents are unleashing attacks across NATO countries and Europe is now doing what would have seemed outlandish just a few years ago: planning how to hit back.

Ideas range from joint offensive cyber operations against Russia, and faster and more coordinated attribution of hybrid attacks by quickly pointing the finger at Moscow, to surprise NATO-led military exercises, according to two senior European government officials and three EU diplomats.

“The Russians are constantly testing the limits — what is the response, how far can we go?” Latvian Foreign Minister Baiba Braže noted in an interview. A more “proactive response is needed,” she told POLITICO. “And it’s not talking that sends a signal — it’s doing.”

What are the ‘hybrid attacks’ in question?

Russian drones have buzzed Poland and Romania in recent weeks and months, while mysterious drones have caused havoc at airports and military bases across the continent. Other incidents include GPS jamming, incursions by fighter aircraft and naval vessels, and an explosion on a key Polish rail link ferrying military aid to Ukraine.

The idea to ‘pre-empivly’ attack Russia comes from an Italian defense paper:

Last week, Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto slammed the continent’s “inertia” in the face of growing hybrid attacks and unveiled a 125-page plan to retaliate. In it, he suggested establishing a European Center for Countering Hybrid Warfare, a 1,500-strong cyber force, as well as military personnel specialized in artificial intelligence.

To me that looks like someone is seeking additional NATO payments. Three days later a Italian NATO general furthered the idea:

Nato considers being ‘more aggressive’ against Russia’s hybrid warfare (archived) – Financial Times, Nov 30 025
Alliance’s top military officer says it could become proactive in dealing with Moscow threat

Nato is considering being “more aggressive” in responding to Russia’s cyber attacks, sabotage and airspace violations, according to the alliance’s most senior military officer.

Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone told the Financial Times that the western military alliance was looking at stepping up its response to hybrid warfare from Moscow.
…
Some diplomats, especially from eastern European countries, have urged Nato to stop being merely reactive and hit back. Such a response would be easiest for cyber attacks where many countries have offensive capabilities but would be less easy for sabotage or drone intrusions.
…
Dragone said that a “pre-emptive strike” could be considered a “defensive action”, but added: “It is further away from our normal way of thinking and behaviour.”

He added: “Being more aggressive compared with the aggressivity of our counterpart could be an option. [The issues are] legal framework, jurisdictional framework, who is going to do this?”

Admiral Dragone is using Orwellian speech when he seems obviously lobbying for 1,500 NATO paid jobs in his home country.

One problem with this is that there is little evidence of any ‘hybrid attacks’.

Ursula von der Leyen was caught outright lying when her staff claimed that alleged Russian GPS distortion had prolonged a flight she was taking.

The alleged intrusion of Russian planes into Estonian airspace had turned out to be an innocent passage near an uninhabited island far from the coast.

The Dutch magazine Trouw has found that the myriad of recent drone panics had little to do with Russia.

Analysis sixty drone incidents in Europe: a lot of panic and little evidence (archived) – Trouw.nl

Machine translation:

Using the Dronewatch platform, Trouw mapped around sixty incidents involving drones in eleven European countries. These took place in the last three months. The conclusion: a lot of confusion and ambiguity and regular false alarms. For Russian involvement, as some authorities and experts point out, in the vast majority of cases no hard evidence has been provided.

In about forty incidents, the origin is still unclear or no evidence has been found for drones in the airspace. An example is Oslo, where drone reports shut down air traffic at the end of September, affecting thousands of travelers. The police did not find any confirmation afterwards that drones were actually flying. The same was true for reports at the airport of Swedish Gothenburg in early November.

In at least fourteen cases, it turned out to be something completely different afterwards. For example, people in Belgium mistook (small) planes and helicopters for drones, while the flying objects in South Limburg and Danish Billund were stars. The Norwegian police concluded that a suspicious ‘drone’ near an oil platform in the North Sea was probably a ship.

A number of times it has been established that drone flights were the work of a hobbyist or that it later turned out to be a tourist. In an incident in Warsaw where a drone flew over government buildings, Polish police picked up a Ukrainian and a 17-year-old girl from Belarus. There is no evidence of espionage.

This picture was published by media as showing alleged damage by an alleged explosion along a Polish rail line

bigger

According to the Polish outlet Super Express, a train driver travelling near the Mikołajówka (Mika) station informed dispatchers at 07:39 about irregularities in the rail infrastructure.

A preliminary inspection revealed that roughly one meter of track had been destroyed, forcing the train to stop. No passengers or crew members were injured.
…
Prime Minister Donald Tusk later underscored the gravity of the incident on X, stating:

“Blowing up the rail track on the Warsaw–Lublin route is an unprecedented act of sabotage targeting directly the security of the Polish state and its civilians. This route is also crucially important for delivering aid to Ukraine. We will catch the perpetrators, whoever they are.”

Nothing was ‘blown up’. What can be seen in the picture is not the result of an explosion. For comparison you might want to watch this attempt (vid) of using C-4 explosive to cut an I-beam. It is a VERY violent process. But the track ballast under the broken rail as well as the sleepers seem undisturbed and undamaged. The incident was most likely a brittle crack caused by fatigue. The rail was probably not firmly fixed on the sleepers and bent when trains were running over it. When that happens one time too many rails will break.

The alleged ‘hybrid attacks’ by Russia are over-hyped normal incidents with little if any relation to Russia. To use these as an excuse for ‘pre-emptive strikes’, be it cyber or whatnot, hardly makes such ‘defensive’.

And what, by the way, is Admiral Dragone planing to do if Russia hits back?

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post NATO Thinks of ‘Pre-emptive Strikes’ Against Russia To ‘Defend’ Against Something That Did Not Happen appeared first on LewRockwell.

If each of these is not a part of any ‘reform,’ than all that is being done is pouring money into a monopolizing cartel, just in a slightly different way.

Unbeknownst to those of us with little inside knowledge of the complex financial plumbing of the US healthcare system, healthcare is in a death spiral that will surprise everyone but insiders who grasp the system’s unsustainability.

To help us outsiders understand the death spiral, I asked a senior MD to guide us through “follow the money.”

Trump Blasts “Big, Fat, Rich Insurance Companies” As Lawmakers Propose Ways To ‘Fix’ Obamacare.

Since this is the issue of the day and it falls within my expertise, here are some thoughts.

A $2,000 direct payment to beneficiaries such as being currently contemplated is completely ineffectual, especially since it has to be borrowed and will just increase inflation that much further.

Read the Whole Article

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