Lew Rockwell Institute

Donald Trump’s most recent comments have perplexed everyone. Sure, he always says provocative things, and trolling is an essential characteristic of the Trumpenstein Project. But he has inexplicably introduced ideas and proposals which he has never touched on before. And they contradict everything about the MAGA movement.

Trump has suddenly shifted focus from mass deportations and fake news to annexing Greenland. Making Canada the 51th state. And renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. He and his most loyal followers have begun singing the praises of a new North American Union. This was an idea supported by the dastardly Bill Clinton in the 1990s, and was basically an extension of the disastrous NAFTA trade deal, which of course Trump vehemently opposed. In the early 2000s, the establishment’s national country club the Council on Foreign Relations pushed for it. So it has a decidedly non-MAGA history. And yet Trump sycophants like Steve Bannon are proudly promoting his curious new scheme. I could find nothing from Alex Jones on the subject, but he unquestionably will back Trump, as he always does. World government is a good thing! Globalism is our friend! Welcome to the New World Order, Trump style!

This really came out of nowhere. Perhaps not coincidentally, Trump’s unprecedented emphasis on American expansionism occurred shortly after Elon Musk engaged in a food fight with MAGA faithful on X, and notably told one to “Fuck yourself in the face,” and vowed to “go to war” to protect the H-1B Visa program which takes jobs away from American citizens. Trumpenstein predictably sided with Musk instead of the MAGA base which has supported him through his endless history of flip-flopping. Around the same time, Trumpenstein pitched one of his renowned tantrums over the flag being flown at half-staff for Jimmy Carter. Of course, he wouldn’t be Trumpenstein if he didn’t make sure to refer to it as “half-mast,” thus inviting even more catcalls. It’s a hamberder thing, you wouldn’t understand. Trump’s trademark whining about a deceased president was in bad taste regardless.

And on top of all this, what are the odds, while the nation goes through an Abraham Lincoln-like extended mourning period for Carter, that Trump starts belligerently rattling sabers over “taking back” the Panama Canal? The Panama Canal hasn’t been an issue since the late 1970s. This was of paramount importance to the 70 million plus Americans that voted for Trump? That and renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Talk about a mindless gesture of plastic patriotism. Now that will make America great again! I don’t expect Trump to hold BP’s feet to the fire, over the horrific oil spill that had a lasting impact on our environment. I mean, if it’s going to be the Gulf of America, we’ll expect a much cleaner gulf. As Trump will undoubtedly boast, “We have the best gulfs! Nobody has gulfs like we do!” Just picture the way he explained that “I love the Visas.” Nobody has better visa workers than we do.

You’re probably asking yourself, just what does changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico, “taking back” the Panama Canal, annexing Greenland, and making Canada the 51st state have to do with MAGA, let alone putting America First? These are not issues that Trump ever mentioned, let alone ran on. I’m certain that probably a majority of the MAGA voters will be convinced that this is a good thing. This American Union is different than the one Bill Clinton and the CFR wanted. Much sexier. The best American Union ever. Manifest Destiny is a good thing. Sure, this looks pretty much the same as what the hobgoblin Vladimir Putin is doing in Ukraine, and also a lot like the imperialism that built the British Empire. But this is Trump imperialism. Winston Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt would be proud. Forget about the food and gas prices. We want Greenland! USA! USA!

Trumpenstein has been so over the top as president-elect that I really don’t know what to expect after he’s inaugurated. Maybe he’ll come “out” during his inaugural address. As what, I’m not sure. Gay? Transgender? Democrat? What I don’t anticipate are those promised mass deportations. On “day one.” His last “day one” featured no executive orders banning birth-right citizenships or sanctuary cities, or DACA, or the foreign visa worker programs. Which Trump now enthusiastically endorses. He loves the Visas, after all. I think it’s more likely that Musk eliminates Social Security than for millions of illegal immigrants to be deported. The essence of Trumpenstein is bluster. He doesn’t do anything. But he talks a lot. Odds are he will once again ignore all his campaign promises. Odds are that his MAGA base will once again ignore him ignoring them. This is a demented form of theater. Trump is the orangest crisis actor.

Trump hasn’t ruled out using the military for his bizarre new expansionist fantasies. He didn’t rule out doing that several times during his first administration. But he never did, except when he was ordered to bomb Syria (twice) by the real powers that be. He talked tough with North Korea. But he failed to even use the National Guard to restore order in the burning cities during the summer of 2020. He never brought a fraction of the U.S. troops home that are stationed nonsensically in over 150 countries around the world, and placed them at our purposefully open southern border, as he hinted at. He tweeted a lot of “I might dos.” So there is no reason to suspect that he will abruptly begin behaving like Genghis Khan. At least I hope not. The “Woke” Left fears he will use the military against his “internal enemies.” It’s debatable whether military leaders would even obey orders from commander in chief Trumpenstein.

I’m just speculating here. Trump is such a wild card. The Trumpenstein script has been unpredictable, to put it mildly. I still find the lack of protests against his election, by the normally deranged “Woke” Left, to be utterly perplexing. Maybe we’ll see some Antifa style fireworks during the inauguration. Certainly we’ll see them if Trump actually attempts massive deportations. Or actually tries to abolish the Department of Education or the IRS. Or actually gets Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., by far the most impressive thing about his prospective 2.0 administration, approved. RFK, Jr. by himself could make this the most radical White House in history by cleaning up our food and water. No one will be prosecuted except perhaps Matt Gaetz, who would have been a dynamo as Attorney General. I can see Trump’s own justice department prosecuting him for the fake charges stemming from an extortion attempt on his dad.

I can hear some of you saying, okay, it’s nice that you’re picking on Trump, shooting fish in a barrel again, but what about Biden and the evil Democrats? Well, as Rodney Dangerfield might have said, they’re no winners either. Biden’s list of recent Medal of Honor recipients was indistinguishable from a Babylon Bee spoof. Hillary Clinton? Serial Deep State criminal? Queen of the Swamp? George Soros? Funder of all that is malevolent and destructive of American society? Bono? The cartoonish, pretentious rock star/social “activist,” who is best remembered for his One Foundation, a “charity” that gives an astounding 1.2 percent of donations to actual causes? In some sort of twisted posthumous humiliation ritual, Biden threw Robert F. Kennedy in there as a winner as well. His award was accepted by daughter Kerry, best known for ridiculing her brother RFK, Jr. in public, and as the former wife of the odious Andrew Cuomo.

So for those of you who think I’m picking on Trump, and ignoring the nonstop shenanigans of the “opposing” party, please read what I’ve written about LBJ, and Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. Not to mention, going back a bit, my extensive exposure of the diabolical Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, which you can read all about in my latest book American Memory Hole. I’m an equal opportunity offender. I concentrate more on Trump and Republicans because they portray themselves as the opposition to the madness of today’s Democratic Party. There isn’t a single Democrat in Congress now that isn’t somewhere on the Satanic spectrum. Trump ignites the passions of millions, causing them to believe that once in power (again) he will end their reign of terror. He will finally bring all these nasty creatures to justice. If he does that, no will be more pleasantly surprised than me. I might even chant USA! USA!

Read the Whole Article

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In Germany, we suffer under an annual media ritual in which a “jury” consisting of four linguists and a journalist select an “Unwort des Jahres” – an “Unword of the year” – to condemn as politically incorrect. The entire German press then reprint excerpts of the press release issued by these self-appointed language police, and the Gutmenschen can either pat themselves on the back for never having used that evil word in the first place, or strive like hell to keep it from their lips in the future.

As with many deeply retarded conventions, the Unword of the Year became a thing after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1991 – as a “linguistically critical” campaign to lecture the masses about all the things they should not say. Its present guardians preach that “linguistic expressions become Unwords because they are used by speakers either thoughtlessly or with intentions worthy of criticism.” They furthermore hope that their “reflection and criticism on the use of Unwords” might “raise awareness about discriminatory, stigmatising, euphemistic, misleading or inhumane language usage.” That might sound all very transparently contentious, politically loaded and ridiculous to you, dear reader, but in Germany the Unwordians are experts and the media treat them like a minor lexicographical priesthood.

Let us go through a few past Unwords of the year, to gain an understanding of what our Unwordians get up to:

• In 2023, the Unword was “Remigration,” a term that came into currency as many who were not of the migrationist school began to wonder how the millions of hostile guests we’d heedlessly welcomed to our continent might be encouraged to go home. The Unwordians claimed that “remigration” had to be unworded because it had become “a right-wing battle cry” and “a euphemistic camouflage word … that obscures actual intentions.” I don’t know what that means; I’m pretty sure that people who talk about remigration just want migrants to remigrate.
• In 2022, the Unword was “Climate terrorists,” a term of art for the Letzte Generation lunatics who would not stop blocking traffic and defacing monuments in a strange campaign to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide. The Unwordians argued that “climate terrorists” had to be unworded because “the term has been used in public discourse to discredit activists and their protests.” Heaven knows we wouldn’t want to cast aspersions upon a bunch of crazy and disruptive social vandals in thrall to a pseudoscientific apocalyptic cult. That would be just terrible.
• In 2021, the Unword was “Pushback,” a borrowing from English that describes stopping irregular migrants at one’s border – in this case, the European border. “Pushback” had to be unworded, they said, because it “glosses over an inhumane procedure” that is intended to deny asylees their human right to claim asylum. Imagine the almost infinite chain of privileges the Unwordians conjure with this argument: Claiming asylum is a human right, so asylees must be allowed to cross borders to exercise their human right to claim asylum, and presumably they must be permitted all the prior actions necessary to bring them to these borders so that they may cross them and claim asylum.
• In 2020, for the first time in history, the Unwordians selected two Unwords of the year, one of which is not worth explaining, and the other of which was “Corona dictatorship.” This had to be unworded because it was used by “right-right extremist propagandists to discredit government policy measures to contain the pandemic.” The Unwordians complained specifically that “Corona dictatorship” was a term “used at demonstrations,” which they found to be a “contradiction” because said demonstrations, “unlike in authoritarian systems, are explicitly allowed.” I do not know what benighted outer moon of Jupiter the Unwordians can live on, such that they remained unaware of the fact that the Corona dictatorship did few things so systematically as banning demonstrations and arresting and beating up demonstrators.

On and on it goes like this. Over the years our speech police have produced a dubious catalogue of Unwords that reveal nothing so much as the emotional and political fragility of the Unwordians themselves. In 2019, the year of St. Greta, the Unword was “climate hysteria”; in 2017, the first year of the Trump administration, it was “alternative facts”; in 2015, the year Angela Merkel opened the borders, it was “Gutmensch.”

This brings us to the Unword of 2024, a particularly infuriating choice announced today by our unbiased and unpartisan Unwordian jury. It is biodeutsch, or “bio-German,” an adjective used to distinguish ethnic Germans from more recent arrivals.

From the decree of our Unwordians:

In 2024, the term biodeutsch was increasingly used in public and social discourse and especially in social media, to classify, evaluate and discriminate against people on the basis of supposedly biological criteria of origin … The term biodeutsch constructs a racist, biological form of nationality. Originally used ironically as a satirical term … for several years now a very thoughtless and unreflective, non-satirical and literally intended use has been observed for biodeutsch. In this way, ‘being German’ is justified via an appeal to nature for the purpose of demarcating and devaluing Germans with a migration background. Biodeutsch and the associated nouns … are in line with other words such as “passport German” and “authentic German,” which serve to ascribe unequal characteristics to groups of people who are equal before the law, thus classifying them hierarchically. This division into supposedly “real” Germans and second-class Germans that goes hand in hand with the use of biodeutsch is a form of everyday racism.

This is dumb for several reasons. First of all, “biodeutsch” does not “construct” a “biological form of nationality,” despite the bio- prefix. Linguists – even linguists as stupid and politically addled as the Unwordians – ought to know there is a powerful distinction between etymology and meaning. Second of all, as the Unwordians themselves reluctantly acknowledge, biodeutsch originated in leftist circles with ironic overtones that are too tiresome to describe. Later, it came to be used more seriously by those who asked why migrants require special designations (like “people of migrant background”) and why ethnic Germans should not be the ones singled out by marked and specific terminology.1 Over a decade ago the Green politician Cem Özdemir – the son of Turkish immigrants – used the term repeatedly, and generally in a negative sense:

In the noughts, Cem Özdemir … appropriated the word. With it, the Green politician … threw down the gauntlet. There should be no distinction: Germans for whom this one word – “German” – is fully sufficient, and Germans who require an additional term, like “passport Germans” or “fellow citizens with a migration background.”

He countered this hidden linguistic devaluation by introducing biodeutsch. The biological German does not have two passports, is not bilingual, and does not deserve the unique selling point of being only “German” without any prefixes or suffixes. The trendy left then gladly adopted this in their self-deprecating pirouettes; the prefix “bio” signalled an awareness of their own limitations and privilege.

Because the distinction between ethnic Germans and non-ethnic Germans is very important (even if our present political religion insists that it does not exist); and because Özdemir was beyond accusations of racism, and furthermore precisely because he had christened biodeutsch as a specific ethnic pejorative – one intended to deny Germans the status of being simply German – Germans happily adopted the word for themselves. At least biodeutsch should be safe, they thought; at least biodeutsch would be a way to describe ethnicity, which is one of the most salient and important divisions in human populations next to gender.

Nothing, however, is safe from the left – particularly not the German left, and especially not when it comes to finding some way to describe or articulate Germanness. In the Anglophone world, “racism” is commonly understood to involve the (alleged) devaluation or dehumanisation of racial outgroups. Only recently and in the race-critical circles of particularly noxious radicals did the idea emerge that Europeanness itself (“whiteness”) is a false and racist concept worthy of abolition. The German left are altogether more eager to embrace this programme of aspirational self-annihilation by insisting the primary racist sin lies in believing that there are ethnic Germans at all, or at least in talking as if there were.

The Unwordians argue that the term biodeutsch has become “discriminatory” because “it violates the idea of democratic equality” and “excludes” non-ethnic Germans from the notional community of the Biodeutsche. We have achieved such an elaborated understanding of what “democratic equality” requires, that it is impossible to reconcile with everyday social realities. Perhaps if equality is to mean that we can’t even acknowledge or describe our own existence, we should strive to have a bit less of it. Or perhaps the Unwordians should try chasing down all the Turkish immigrants, the Chinese immigrants, the Syrian immigrants, and all the other immigrants who invariably maintain their own exclusionary ethnic identities long after receiving their German passports, and inform them that they, too, are guilty of undemocratic racism. That project is likely to turn out well.

—

1 As Welt points out, we find this important use in a 2010 book by the Ethiopian-German author Asfa-Wossen Asserate (Draußen nur Kännchen): “Recently, the strange term ‘people with a migration background’ has been in vogue. But what is the point of a term that is used to turn German citizens back into foreigners? Wouldn’t it be better to introduce a counterpart for the ‘people living in Germany without a migration background’? How about the term biodeutsch, for example?”

This originally appeared on A Plague Chronicle.

The post Leftist German Word Police Announce That a Standard Colloquialism for ‘Ethnic German’ Is Racist, Exclusionary and Antidemocratic appeared first on LewRockwell.

As someone who lives in the Los Angeles area, the past few days have been nothing but mind-numbing yet shocking. I can gratefully report that everyone in my family is safe and have not been threatened by the wildfires that have ravaged Pacific Palisades and Altadena.

These wildfires have been called the perfect storm. If one expands the scope beyond the fires themselves and include the luxury beliefs and criminal negligence built into state and local law, policy, and culture that have taken place over the past few decades, this claim simply can’t be argued.

Whatever the priorities Governor Newsom, LA Mayor Karen Bass, and the LA County Board of Supervisors had before the wildfires, it had nothing to do with the main responsibilities of local governments – education, fire, police, courts. The local infrastructure has been ignored at the expense of pet progressive projects for so long, they exacerbated the helplessness local fire and police had during the first hours of the firestorm. It is a miracle the death toll isn’t nearly as extensive as it could have been.

It may seem unfair to bring politics so early into this crisis, but California politics has been unfair for a very long time. I, for one, see no need to play fair when state and local authorities have been derelict in their day jobs while demonizing those of us who have objected to turning southern California into a progressive paradise.

All utopian projects end in misery and destruction. This one is no different. While I wish the mostly naive elites living in West LA and the San Gabriel Valley could have come to this realization on their own terms, many of them are realizing this as they ponder the ashes of their former homes. They and their families have built decades of cherished memories in these once beautiful abodes, and it’s all gone.

There have been concerns raised about how Democrats, who have been controlled by globalists for years, may use this destruction as an opportunity to turn LA into a 15-minute city; a digital prison, if you will. They point to city documents, published during the social equity dreams of 2020, detailing such plans.

There are two reasons why I think the likelihood of LA becoming a digital city is close to nil.

First, if city leadership is as craven and incompetent as it seems (and it is), how could it possibly rebuild the city that way? They may have the desire; they may even have the will. What they don’t have is the competence to pull such a gargantuan project off.

Second, if the Democrats wanted to build such a city, they couldn’t have angered a worse group of LA’s residents before doing so.

Some of the wealthiest, most talented, and energetic elites in LA live in Pacific Palisades. They vote overwhelmingly Democratic, and have donated enormous sums to the party. If the Democrats/globalists think that these people are going to be told that they won’t be able to rebuild their homes that were destroyed partly because of the state’s criminal negligence, these criminal clowns have another thing coming.

Elite LA Democrats, having been mugged by a very stark reality, have a lot of soul searching to do. The honest ones, at some point, will recognize that their support of the Democratic party have helped contribute to the very conditions that led to the destruction of their neighborhood. Such a journey is not easy for anyone, least of all for those who considered themselves powerful in any way. However, by seeking and gaining clarity, they have an opportunity to understand what it will take to not only rebuild their homes and neighborhoods, but California and the United States as well.

One of the reasons Trump won the 2024 election is that a subset of elites in the Silicon Valley recognized that the Democratic party would eventually destroy their businesses and industries. Some of these elites, such as Elon Musk, Marc Andreesen, and David Sachs, have made enormous strides in their understanding of the destructive role governments play in society. They recognize that after decades of foreign policy disasters, interest groups being favored over everyday Americans, and monetary debasement, America needs to refocus on rebuilding communities at home, rather than seeking to create yet another fever-dreamed utopia.

Unfortunately, many Los Angeles elites have begun learning this lesson in a very hard way. The scales are falling off of their eyes. Regardless of whatever schemes Sacramento may come up with to fight Trump’s agenda or rebuild Los Angeles based on insane notions, it will need to contend with a rising group of former supporters within southern California who are no longer willing to play ball with them anymore.

This originally appeared on A Simple Fool.

The post California Has Passed Peak Progressivism appeared first on LewRockwell.

Cuba was once a famous vacation destination for Americans. Although we can now travel to Cuba, most Americans have been deprived of various forms of trading with the Cuban people. Likewise, Cubans have been deprived of trading with Americans and visiting their American relatives. Does anyone think this situation is good for Americans? Does anyone think this impasse is good for Cubans?

The post My Cuban Vacation appeared first on LewRockwell.

It turns out that both the mainstream and the alternative-news portrayals of the Assad family were wrong. Whereas the mainstream portrayal was lies (such as this and this and this), the alt-news portrayal whited-out the very real evidence (and this, of course, does NOT include any of those U.S.-and-allied faked ‘evidences’) against the Assads.

An example of this white-out is here:

——

transcript:

https://www.memri.org/tv/fmr-british-mp-george-galloway-arabs-lost-cause-syrian-girl

https://archive.is/cesuB

video:

https://www.memri.org/player/clip/68359/934,467/1

14 December 2014

“Former British MP George Galloway And ‘Syrian Girl’ Maram Susli Lament The Fall Of The Assad Regime”

Here’s the transcript:

George Galloway: “I feel that that part of my life, fighting for the Arabs, with the Arabs, behind the Arabs, alongside them, I feel that that period has now ended. …

“I think the Arabs are a lost cause, frankly. At least for the time being. …

“I’m washing my hands of the slave Arabs and their useful idiots. …

“I cannot fathom why when the Arab world is being looted by imperialism, people would rather suck the boots of the imperial owner of their resources than associate with a Muslim who prays differently.” …

Maram Susli: “I just want to say George I did hear what you have to say. You’re absolutely right about everything you’ve said. I mean there’s people inside, you know, Syria as well are thinking: ‘What is the point of supporting this when you have the’… you know some of these people are essentially attacking themselves and benefitting Israel. Over the last thirteen months, we’ve witnessed the most horrific genocide in history, perpetrated by Israel on Gaza. And all of these people – and a Sunni I say this – all of these people would rather kill Shiites than do anything to stop Israel from committing that genocide. And it’s disgusting, it is absolutely disgusting. …

“They are Muslim Zionists. In the same way that Israel is the Jewish ISIS, these people are Muslim Zionists. They want to steal our land. And they want to kill us. And they don’t give a crap if they’re sharing with Israel, that’s the reality of the people we’re facing. And they’re not necessarily even Arab, you know. We the people of the Levant, historically we spoke Aramaic. We adopted the Pan-Arab ideology and unfortunately the only Arabs that have helped us so far, god bless them, are the Houthis [and] the Iraqis. So, you know, unfortunately we can no longer expect very much from them because instead of helping us the majority of them have actually betrayed us to Israel.”

MY COMMENT: What Galloway and “Syrian Girl” say is entirely true (UNLIKE he U.S.-and-allied lies). But, as I have only very recently learned, the Assad regime WAS a regime — NOT a democracy — even though it was supported by more Syrians to run the country than any available alternative was, because the vast majority of Syrians feared the jihadists that the U.S. was arming, even MORE than they feared the Assad family.

And HERE is an article about this, “Asma al-Assad: the mastermind of the starvation of the Syrian people”, by the independent Syrian investigative journalist Steven Sahiounie, that was recently published and also showing there the contentious reader-comments about it, which — all of that taken together — has persuaded me that the Assad family really WERE extremely corrupt (which reality almost all of the alt-news articles about the war in Syria ignore):

The reason that I was persuaded is that Sahiounie is a Syrian who has always, to my knowledge, reported honestly (and never parroting the U.S. lies) about the war in Syria, and that his article’s readers who criticize his article have cited only their beliefs, or else cited the very pro-Assad non-Syrian reporter Eva Bartlett, who flits from one war to another instead of knowing what it is like to actually live there. The article’s critics are not providing evidence, whereas near the end of the 26 existing reader-comments, I posted as my own reader-comments, two email-exchanges with Sahiounie that I had had about his article, where I posted my reasons for now finally accepting what the article says:

Eric Zuesse

January 10, 2025

I emailed to Steven Sahiounie requesting his documentation of the charges he had made against Asma al-Assad in this article; and here were his replies, and our subsequent conversation via emails:
From: [me]
Subject: Please respond to the reader-comments at
https://theduran.com/asma-al-assad-the-mastermind-of-the-starvation-of-the-syrian-people/#comments
—
Hello Eric,
I am going through a very sensitive health situation and am trying to recover. Here is the main article with links. Some of the stories involve my family, my neighbors, and people I know. None of the stories in the article are lies, but the difference is that under the Assad regime, we could not speak out because we were at risk of being arrested. I lost my own cousin, who was just 16 years old, simply for posting a few things on Facebook; he died in prison under torture. My aunt also passed away from depression due to her son’s fate. I do not support radical Islam, I will always support Palestine but the Assad regime is brutal and corrupt.
https://mideastdiscourse.com/2024/12/30/asma-al-assad-the-mastermind-of-the-starvation-of-the-syrian-people/
Best regards,
Journalist Steven Sahiounie
Latakia, Syria
—
May I post that as your response? Your statement here is important: you are citing YOUR OWN PERSONAL EXPERIENCES as your SOURCE — and this is methodologically entirely valid to do. I want to say that when I post it, if I may post this reply from you?
—
You can share this
Yes, this is a personal experience. Security forces terrorized my father just to steal his property in the heart of latakia, and this happened to 37 real estate developers in Latakia. The customs officials came into my neighbor’s shop and stole all his merchandise, worth thousands of dollars, in downtown Latakia. My cousin was in prison in 2012 for posting a few things on Facebook against the government, and he was tortured to death he was only 16 years old.
I do not and will never support radical Islam, but I will never support a regime that has stoled Syria for 54 years and tortured its people. I will always support Palestine and Lebanon, and I will always stand against imperialism. Syrians want a free, democratic, civil Syria—that’s all we want. We are tired of living in fear. We are tired of being poor while one family has everything. Syria is not a poor country, but the Assad family has been stealing everything. I have thousands of stories from normal syrians what they went through because of the Assad regime.

Reply to

Eric Zuesse

January 10, 2025

Subsequently, Sahiounie called to my attention, in order to clarify, that “in the last 12 years I supported the Syrian army, I supported Syria. I didn’t support Assad and I never said one good thing about him. I never even mentioned him. I only wrote one article in the last 12 years about him. I didn’t mention him, not in an article or in an interview. I never said one good thing about him or his wife in my journalism work. I always and will always support my country Syria [but] I don’t support people.”

In other words: Sahiounie did, in his emailed responses to me, provide valid evidences to back up his article, whereas the readers who rejected his article did not provide any evidence at all.

This originally appeared on Eric’s Substack.

The post The Denouement About the Assad Family appeared first on LewRockwell.

I had missed this Friday news item on Iran:

Trump’s Ukraine envoy says world must reinstate ‘maximum pressure’ on Iran

PARIS, Jan 11 (Reuters) – The world must return to a policy of ‘maximum pressure’ against Iran to turn it into a more democratic country, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg told an Iranian opposition event in Paris on Saturday.

Trump has vowed to return to the policy he pursued in his previous term that sought to wreck Iran’s economy to force the country to negotiate a deal on its nuclear programme, ballistic missile programme and regional activities.

‘These pressures are not just kinetic, just not military force, but they must be economic and diplomatic as well‘, Retired Lieutenant-General Kellogg, who is set to serve as Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, told the audience at Paris-based Iranian opposition group National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI).

He said there was an opportunity ‘to change Iran for the better’ but that this opportunity would not last forever.

‘We must exploit the weakness we now see. The hope is there, so must too be the action.’

I wonder how official this is. Is Kellogg, who is supposed to be Trump’s envoy for Ukraine, speaking for the future Trump administration?

The Iranian ‘opposition event’ in Paris was by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), also known as the terrorist organization MEK. It had fought on the side of Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war and was later involved in several high casualty terror incidents in Iran.

The MEK has a cult like structure. It is, at least in parts, financed by the U.S. and Israel. It regularly ‘invites’ former western officials to rant against Iran at its events while paying them generous speaking fees.

Kellogg seems to be one their regular well paid ‘guests’:

Kellogg has previously spoken at NCRI events, most recently in November, but his presence in Paris, even if in a personal capacity, suggests the group has the ear of the new U.S. administration. He postponed a trip to European capitals earlier this month until after Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.
…
Incoming U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also spoken at NCRI events in the past. The group has repeatedly called for the fall of the existing Iranian authorities, although it is unclear how much support it has within Iran.

The MEK has zero support in Iran.

I doubt claims that Iran is strong. But I also doubt claims that Iran is weak. It is a big country with lots of resources and a large population of well educated people.

Kellogg, like many, seems to underestimate what Iran can do.

His sentence, “these pressures are not just kinetic, just not military force, but they must be economic and diplomatic as well,” is a bit weird. What are the kinetic pressures the U.S. is putting on Iran? I do not see any of significance and if there were any “kinetic pressure” Iran would certainly pressure back. Its position in the Persian Gulf would make it painful.

Kellogg should know this. It also notable that Kellogg has previously criticized Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton for trying to instigate a war with Iran.

Thus his rant in front of the MEK looks unserious to me. I also doubt that his speaking for the incoming Trump administration.

We don’t know yet what policies with regards to Iran the incoming Trump administration will really pursue.

It is obvious that Israel’s Netanyahoo wants the U.S. to launch a war against Iran. Trump is duly aware of that. Three days ago he posted a video of a talk Jeffrey Sachs had given at Cambridge Union. Within the clip Trump posted Sachs clearly states that it was Netanyahoo who had dragged and is dragging the U.S. into wars in the Middle East.

Trump posting that video was clearly a warning to Netanyahoo to play games with such stuff. I therefore doubt that Trump wants to do anything “kinetic” to Iran.

Sanctions? – Yes! – “Maximum pressure”? – Yes!

Well … so what?

The Islamic Republic has been under sanctions since its very inception. They have hindered its growth but have never made it concede to whatever the U.S. demanded.

Iran is also a part of BRICS and has well developed economic relations with China and Russia. On Friday Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian will be in Moscow where he will sign a new comprehensive partnership pact with Russia which is said to also cover military aspects of the relation.

It will help Iran to become even more sanctions proved.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Sanctions – Trump’s Only Old/New Iran Policies appeared first on LewRockwell.

As I have emphasized in the past two days, “the Trump regime will be tamed before it takes office.” 

In the Western World You Become Respectable by Selling Out the People

Trump Regime Already Backing Off on Pardons for January 6 Supporters of Trump

 Now it is Tulsi Gabbard who is finding respectability in order to be confirmed.

“Tulsi Gabbard Says She Now Supports Controversial Surveillance Law.  Gabbard had previously criticized Section 702 as enabling the government to ’trample’ upon civil liberties.”

The Trump remaking of America is another example of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s theme in his historical novel, The Leopard, that “things have to change so that they can remain the same.”

When I witnessed the Democrats being called off the theft of the 2024 presidential election despite all theft mechanisms being set in place, I concluded that the Establishment had decided that this time it was easier to tame than fight the Trump regime.  

Readers might remember that I said that Trump appointees have to be confirmed in office by the Senate, which is very Establishment, and that confirmation gives the Establishment power over the regime. Make America Great Again is already being forced into embarrassing compromises with the Ruling Elite.

We face the prospect that to insure there is no remaking of America, Trump’s Zionist appointments will get him into war with Iran that will become the focus of the Trump regime to the exclusion of what MAGA Americans expected. Already we have seen Trump endorse the H-1B visas that give Americans’ jobs to foreigners, mainly citizens of India.

If you pay attention, you will see that what makes America great again is being reformulated to consist of profits and Washington’s hegemony. 

The emphasis on profits means that income and wealth will continue to concentrate in the top one-tenth of one percent. Hegemony means wars, not peace. Trump has even spoken of invading Greenland and Panama to add them along with Canada to the American Empire, and Trump’s appointment of Israel’s friends points to war with Iran.  But perhaps not. As I recently wrote, an Israeli government committee has concluded that Israel must prepare for war with Turkey over which of them gets Syria.  Is the land to belong to Israel as part of Greater Israel, or to Turkey as part of a reconstituted Ottoman Empire?  As Turkey is a NATO member, this produces a dilemma for the Trump regime which is firmly in Israel’s pocket.  Instead of making American great again, Trump will be focused on helping Israel become Greater Israel.

As for Ukraine, many believe Putin-the-Unready is responsible for Syria’s destruction. This is to the detriment of the Russian government’s credibility. With Israel and America on a roll, Putin is unlikely to prevail over a confident Trump  in negotiations, Putin’s favored way of dealing with conflict. 

In the end Russia, and perhaps all of us, are going to pay a price for the ridiculous Minsk Agreement clung to by Putin and Lavrov for eight years while the US built a strong and well equipped army for Ukraine that Putin’s minimalist approach to war has not defeated after three years, much longer than it took Stalin to drive the fabulous German Wehrmacht out of thousands of kilometers of Russia, all of eastern Europe, and to the streets of Berlin.

John Helmer reports that Putin explains his neglect of Syria in order to prepare for war with NATO in ten years.  Ten years? If there is a war, it is likely to be much sooner, and it will be with the US, not with the hapless NATO. Europe cannot even protect its women from mass rape by rape gangs of immigrant-invaders to which the European governments have opened their borders. An European army is the joke of a decade. See here.

The Russian government despite its military superiority might fare poorly in war. The reason is the extraordinary willingness of Putin and Lavrov to enter into negotiations with Washington that have never failed to be to Russia’s disadvantage. It seems there is no limit to Putin and Lavrov’s pursuit of negotiations that can only end in failure for Russia.  Perhaps this is the path of Russian diplomacy. Failed diplomacy is preferable to military victory. 

There remains in Russia an inexplicable trust of the West that is mindless. It seems that the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe did their jobs well. They have even replicated themselves inside parts of the Russian media and the Kremlin itself.

The post The Trump Regime Is Being Defeated Before It Takes Office appeared first on LewRockwell.

Resolved: Freedom is prerequisite to the acts of creation and resurrection…

As the first mass medium, print promoted linear thought, reason, individual liberty, freedom, and democracy.

By contrast, electronic mass media promote distraction, limbic reaction, mass conformity (anti-freedom), and state-centric socioeconomic models like fascism, socialism, and communism.

That’s not to say that some people can’t find some measure of individual liberty and reason in digital media. Merely that the inherent biases of all electronic media point us in certain anti-freedom directions and behaviors by default. In other words: the medium is the message — a lesson those who care to know have known for generations.

Of course, those in the best position to understand that the medium is the message and behave accordingly are pretty much like everyone else…

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair

Whether they understand intuitively (like many artists and entrepreneurs) or via deliberate research and study (like many academicians), those in a position to understand know that the mass media-driven tendency of the digital age is to accelerate the consolidation of state power and the wholesale adoption of mass media-driven conformity at the expense of individual liberty and freedom. Hence the 21st-century rise and primacy of immensely powerful global governance, regulatory, and cultural institutions like the Democratic Party, American academia, the EU, WHO, and the WTO.

Like most knowledge among those who know or should know better throughout history, knowledge that the medium is the message has done little to enhance the prospects of liberty and freedom over the past generation. Indeed, many of those who once knew better — especially the former 1960s student radicals now ensconced as the senior class of tenured professors in academia, the powerbrokers in the entertainment industry old enough to know the difference between legend and celebrity, and the political elite — are among those whose salaries and privileged lifestyles inhibit or shield them from acting in accordance with the inconvenient truths embedded in their own knowledge and revealed by their own lying eyes.

And thus did the former defenders of individual freedom and liberty — now the most stridently illiberal champions of anti-freedom conformity (and endless war) — betray both themselves and society at large when they turned state’s witness in a deliberate and self-serving effort not to understand. Instead of acting in accordance with the message of the medium, in accordance with what they knew to be true from their own experience, they surrendered their autonomy as free agents to it. Instead of promoting freedom and liberty they chose to promote and enforce mass conformity — in no small measure because their power and wealth and tenure guarantees immunity not only from the social repercussions of their own behaviors, but from any corresponding need to understand. Power, like water, will always follow the course of lease resistance.

Stating the obvious, the post-wildfire resurrection of Los Angeles will require far more visionary insight, self reflection, and outright competence than the current generation of local and state leaders can possibly deliver. That’s because the relationship of Californians to their leadership is now entirely dysfunctional, and very much like the relationship of the Palestinians in Gaza to Hamas: as enablers of pernicious and dangerous ideologists who promise utopia but deliver apocalypse — year after year — for generations.

The relationship of citizen to government cannot be otherwise as long as the primary characteristic between them is a toxic co-dependency in which government actors are always paid to take care of themselves first, and always rewarded for abject failure. More money and more support for the current leadership in California will only result in more fires and more heartbreak. Time to break the cycle.

Doing so requires a return to basics. Just as the true lesson of Easter is in the Resurrection, not the Crucifixion, the lesson of the disaster unfolding in Los Angeles is in the rebuilding of homes and the restoration of lives, not the fire. Time to turn our backs and walk away from leaders who value and finance ideology over competence, those whose only real imperative is to remain in power at all costs.

Ideology will not and cannot rebuild neighborhoods. It’s time to unleash the power of entrepreneurial builders and artists, time to reinvest in competence and vision. Both are critical in the coming days and months and years, and current state leadership can offer neither. So fuck them, and remember: resurrection, like creation, is an essential function and expression of freedom.

This originally appeared on The Quality of Life Resistance.

The post Freedom, Creation, and Wildfire… appeared first on LewRockwell.

In acts of wanton destruction, Netanyahu destroyed the prevailing status quo, which he saw as an American straitjacket

Like a smashed antique clock – with its elaborate cogs, ratchet wheels and innards splayed out from the casing – so the mechanics of the Middle East lie similarly exposed and broken. All the region is in play – Syria, Lebanon, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt and Iran.

The original Obama strategic blueprint for containing and balancing the potentially violent energies of West Asia was subsequently handed to Team Biden at the end of the Obama term – and it still clearly bore the Obama imprimatur right up until its collapse after 7 Oct 2023.

Netanyahu deliberately smashed its mechanics: In acts of wanton destruction, he destroyed the prevailing status quo, which he saw as an American straitjacket preventing the attainment of a Greater Israel reaching out to its ‘Grand Victory’. Netanyahu resented the American constraints – though by breaking the extant mechanism, paradoxically, instead of liberating Israel, he may have unleashed dynamics that will prove far more threatening (i.e. in Syria).

The cornerstone to the Obama ‘balanced region’ was contained in a secret letter sent to Iran’s Supreme Leader in 2014, in which, as the WSJ relates, Obama proposed to Khamenei joint efforts in Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State (where ISIS controlled territory). This joint action however, was made contingent on Iran reaching a nuclear deal with the U.S.

The letter explicitly acknowledged Iran’s ‘equities’ in Syria: To assuage Iran’s concerns about the future of its close ally, President al-Assad, the letter stated that the U.S.’s military operations inside Syria were not targeted at President Assad or his security forces.

The Obama understanding with Khamanei, it must be noted, thus implicitly extended to Hizbullah who were joined with Iran in fighting ISIS in Syria:

“Among other messages conveyed to Tehran, according to U.S. officials at the time, is that U.S. military operations in Iraq and Syria aren’t aimed at weakening Tehran or its allies”.

Of course, the Obama undertakings to Iran were lies: Obama had already signed in 2012 (or earlier), a secret Presidential Finding (i.e. an instruction) for U.S. intelligence support to Syria’s rebels in their bid to oust President Assad).

Were Iran to participate in a nuclear ‘deal’, the 2014 letter proposed that its regional ‘equities’ would be respected and could extend to Lebanon as a geography of international joint adjudication (as exemplified in U.S. Envoy Hochstein’s mediation of the Lebanese-Syrian Maritime borders).

The purpose to this highly complex blueprint was Obama’s primordial obsession: To arrive at a proto-Palestinian State, albeit as another internationally administered protectorate, supported internationally, rather than as a sovereign nation-state.

Why did Obama insist on a scheme that was such anathema to the Israeli Right and American Israel-Firsters? It seems that he (with good reason) both distrusted Netanyahu and knew well the latter’s determination to prevent any Palestinian State from ever coming to fruition.

Obama’s balance of powers initiative was an attempt indirectly to bind Iran and its allies to Obama’s Palestinian ‘State’ concept – i.e. deliberately planned as an escalating pressure point on Israel to concede a State. Without intense pressure on Israel, it was clear to Obama that a Palestinian State was a dead letter.

Netanyahu had made his intent to see the complete emptying of the Palestinian presence in the West Bank only too evident as far back as the 1970s (this was clear in the interview that he gave to author Max Hastings, who was writing a book on Netanyahu’s brother).

Netanyahu disliked and distrusted Obama – as much as Obama distrusted him.

In the wake of 7 October 2023, with the ‘ring of fire’ (seven ‘wars’) closing in on Israel, Netanyahu determined to break the straitjacket restraints. And he did.

It’s not sure however, whether Obama’s highly elaborated structure would ever have worked. In any case, Netanyahu – by openly defying the White House – decided to override the Obama-Biden ‘restraints’ and to smash the entire Iranian-centred project of Obama.

The logic of the Israeli serial destruction in the Region suggests to Netanyahu, as well as to many Israelis and American Israel-Firsters, that Iran now is “staggeringly vulnerable” (in the words of General Jack Keane), because of the loss of Syria – the ‘central’ node to the Axis of Resistance.

Axios reports:

“Iran’s recent nuclear advances give President-elect Trump a crucial decision to make in his first months in office: to neutralize the [Iranian nuclear] threat through negotiations and [escalating] pressures; or order a military strike. Several Trump advisers privately concede Iran’s program is now so far along that this [early] strategy might no longer be effective. That makes a military option a real possibility”.

“After Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer met Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November, Dermer came away thinking there was a high likelihood Trump would either support an Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities — something the Israelis are seriously considering — or even order a U.S. strike. Some top advisers to President Biden have privately argued in recent weeks for striking Iran’s nuclear sites before Trump takes office, with Iran and its proxies so badly weakened”.

Yet this may prove to be wishful thinking. Trump reposted on 7 Jan 2025, a video on the Truth Social platform featuring Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, in which he discussed the CIA’s covert efforts to destabilise Syria’s government and to overthrow Assad; the influence of Netanyahu; the Israeli lobby’s role in pushing the U.S. into the Iraq War; and Netanyahu’s continued attempts to involve the U.S. in a potential conflict with Iran. Sachs explained that the wars in Iraq and Syria were manufactured by Netanyahu, and had nothing to do with “democracy”.

“Netanyahu is still trying to get us to fight Iran to this day. He is a deep dark son of a bitch because he’s gotten us into endless wars”, Professor Sachs said in the re-posted interview.

However, as Barak Ravid notes, “Others close to Trump expect that he’ll seek a deal before considering a strike”. When asked about the possibility of war with Iran in November, Trump replied, “Anything can happen, It’s a very volatile situation”.

What then does this mean for Iran?

Essentially, Iran has two options: Firstly to signal to the U.S. its readiness to enter into some sort of a new nuclear deal with the Trump team (a signal its Foreign Minister already has given), and then to wait on a subsequent successful Trump–Putin meeting to re-set the global post-war security architecture. From that ‘big picture’ global deal, Tehran might hope to negotiate its own separate ‘big picture’ accord with the U.S.

Of course, this would be optimal.

However, Ambassador Chas Freeman has said that although a sustainable peace between the U.S. and Russia (theoretically) is possible, it will be “very difficult” to achieve. To which Ray McGovern has added repeatedly that Trump is ‘plenty smart enough’ to know that he holds a weak hand with regard to Russia in the Eurasian space, and that Trump, the realist, has “bigger fish to fry”.

Is this why Trump and Musk are stirring the geo-political ‘pot’ so blatantly: On the one hand, Canada, Greenland and Panama as part of the U.S.? These may be Trumpian ‘talking points’, but Greenland and Canada together could change the leverage calculus with Russia: Is Trump planning to use added leverage via the Arctic to threaten control over Russia’s northern borders? (It is the shortest flight time for missiles targeted at Russia).

And on the other hand, Musk, in parallel, has started a firestorm in Europe with his Tweets – and his invitation to a livestream with Alice Weidel of AfD. Germany is the heart of NATO and the EU. Were Germany to ‘flip’ away from war with Russia – in company with other European ‘flips’ already in the works – then Trump plausibly could end a major economic burden (troop deployment in the EU) weighing on the U.S. economy. As Col. Doug Macgregor says, how many times do we have to tell people: “Americans don’t live in Europe – we live in the Western hemisphere!”.

Musk effectively has lobbed a (free speech) grenade into the European media hegemony that both tightly controls discourse across the continent, and is in the pay of the Anglo Deep State.

Will this bring the settlement with Russia and the Asian Heartland that Trump seeks? We must see.

The alternative option for Iran is higher risk (and is contingent on the Iranian Intelligence assessment of the likelihood of Israel attempting a pre-emptive strike on Iran): i.e. Iran has the option of a further ‘Operation True Promise’. No longer meant to deter (unlike in earlier versions of True Promise), but rather, as Shivan Mahendrarajah explains, through exposing the ‘improbability of victory’ and demonstrating the ‘unacceptable cost’ of conflict, to dismantle Israel’s illusory narrative of perpetual ‘victory’.

In 2003, as Mahendrarajah has noted, Iran proposed the U.S. a ‘grand bargain’. It was rejected by the Bush Administration. Can it be revived – not through nuclear talks, in which Iran has the weaker hand – but by the calibrated use of force. It would be an audacious, and big, bet.

(This is the second part of the piece ‘Can Trump Save America From Itself?’. Part 1 can be read here).

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

The post Trump, Iran and the Obama Strategic Blueprint appeared first on LewRockwell.

No wonder Trump had to come up with a seductive, but still fraught with danger, larger than life psy op to imperatively change the narrative.

It’s the greatest show on earth – unleashing a double bill of New Paradigm and Manifest Destiny on crack. We are the greatest. We will rock you – in every sense. We will crush you. We will take whatever we want because we can.

And if you wanna walk away from the U.S. dollar, we will destroy you. BRICS, we’re coming to get ya.

Trump 2.0 – a mix of professional wrestling and MMA played in a giant planetary cage – is in da house starting next Monday.

Trump 2.0 aims to be on the driving seat on the global financial system; on control of the world’s oil trade and LNG supply; and on strategic media platforms. Trump 2.0 is gearing up to be an extended exercise in the capacity to hurt The Other. Any Other. Hostile takeovers – and blood on the tracks. That’s how we “negotiate”.

Under Trump 2.0, global tech infrastructure must run on U.S. software, not just on the profit front but also on the spy front. AI data chips must be American only. AI data centers must be controlled by America only.

“Free trade” and “globalization”? That’s for losers. Welcome to neo-imperial, techno-feudal mercantilism – powered by U.S. tech supremacy.

Trump’s National Security Advisor Mike Waltz has named a few of the targets ahead: Greenland; Canada; assorted cartels; the Arctic; the Gulf of “America”; oil and gas; rare earth minerals. All in the name of strengthening “national security”.

A key plank: total control of the “Western Hemisphere”. Monroe Doctrine 2.0 – actually the Donroe Doctrine. America First, Last and Always.

Why the chessboard needs to be rejigged

Well, let’s delve a bit on pesky material imperatives. The Empire of Chaos faces a humongous debt, owed to usual suspect loan sharks, that may only be – partially – repaid by selected export surpluses. That would imply re-industrialization – a long, costly affair – and securing smooth military supply chains.

Where the resource base will be for this Sisyphean task? Washington simply cannot rely on Chinese exports and rare earths. The chessboard needs to be rejigged – with trade and tech unified under U.S. unilateral, monopoly control.

Plan A, so far, was to simultaneously confront Russia and China: the two top BRICS, and key vectors of Eurasia integration. China’s strategy, since the start of the millennium, has been to trade resources for infrastructure, developing Global South markets as China itself keeps developing.

Russia’s strategy has been to help nations recover their sovereignty; actually helping nations to help themselves on the sustainable development front.

Plan A against the concerted geoeconomic and geostrategic strategies of the Russia-China strategic partnership miserably failed. What has been attempted by the ghastly, exiting U.S. administration generated serial, massive blowbacks.

So it’s time for Plan B: Looting the allies. They are already dominated chihuahuas anyway. The – exploitation – show must go on. And there are plenty of chihuahuas available to be exploited.

Canada has loads of fresh water plus oil and mining wealth. The Canadian business class in fact has always dreamed of deep integration with the Empire of Chaos.

Trump 2.0 and his team have been careful not to name names. When it comes to the Arctic as a crucial, evolving battlefield, there may be a vague allusion to the Northwest Passage. But never a mention of what really matters; the Northern Sea Route – the Russian denomination; the Chinese call it the Arctic Silk Road. That’s one of the key connectivity corridors of the future.

The Northern Sea Route encompasses at least 15% of the world’s unexplored oil and 30% of the world’s unexplored natural gas. Greenland is smack in the middle of this New Great Game – capable of supplying years of uranium, as much oil as Alaska (bought from Russia in 1867), plus rare earths – not to mention providing useful real state for missile defense and offense.

Washington has been trying to grab Greenland from Denmark since 1946. There’s a deal with Copenhagen in place guaranteeing military control – mostly naval. Now Greenland is being revamped as the ideal U.S. entry point into the Arctic Great Game against Russia.

At the St. Petersburg forum last June, I had the privilege to follow an exceptional round table on the Northern Sea Route: that’s an integral part of Russia’s 21st century development project, focused on commercial navigation – “We need more icebreakers!” – and bound to surpass Suez and Gibraltar in the near future.

Slightly over 50,000 Greenland residents – which already enjoy autonomy, especially vis a vis the EU – would more than accept a full Danish exit; Copenhagen actually abandoned them since 1951. Greenlanders will love to profit from vast U.S. investments.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov went straight to the point: “The first step is to listen to the Greenlanders” – comparing it to how Russia listened to the residents of Crimea, Donbass and Novorossiya vis a vis Kiev.

What Trump 2.0 actually wants from Greenland is crystal clear: total militarization; privileged access to rare earths; and commercially excluding Russia and Chinese companies.

Chinese military expert Yu Chun noted that “soon, the long-desired ‘golden waterway’ of the Arctic Ocean is expected to open, allowing ships to traverse the Pacific Ocean and sail along the northern coasts of North America and Eurasia into the Atlantic Ocean.”

As the Northern Sea Route is “a key element of Sino-Russian cooperation”, it’s inevitable that the U.S.’s “strategic vision is to prevent the establishment of a ‘golden waterway’ between China, Russia, and Europe by controlling Greenland.”

Freak out in the chihuahua front

On the wider chihuahua front, activity is frantic. Assorted Davos/ Deep State-linked elites across NATOstan – from Europe to Canada – are in the process of being replaced by new, Trump 2.0-affiliated elites.

That’s indissociably linked to the Looting the Allies strategy: the further destruction of the vassal EU economy to strengthen the heart of the Empire.

In Germany, the Afd’s Alice Weidel – pragmatic, intellectually capable – offers a quite intriguing perspective. She is stressing on the record that Germany needs to restart importing raw materials and cheap natural gas – let’s reopen Nord Stream – from Russia.

That opens the tantalizing possibility that Trump and his factotum Elon Musk fully realize that Germany is worthless to the U.S. as a de-industrialized backwater – even under the overall framework of a hardcore neoliberal asset stripping offensive. Of course Trump 2.0 will extract a hefty price for Germans to get a revitalized nation back.

Trump 2.0 at least holds the – dubious – merit of a relatively realistic reading of the chessboard; Russia, India, China – the Primakov triangle – as well as Iran have become too powerful to be looted. So the next best option is Plunder the Chihuahuas. The blowing up of Nord Stream as ordered by the Biden crime family – as detailed by Sy Hersh – was a gleaming starter.

The future of NATO in the Great America project is now up for grabs. Gotta pay up – or else: contribution of each member nation should go up to 5% of GDP instead of the current 2%.

Talk about a 150% price hike. Incidentally, Trump so far has not even muttered the nonsensical expression “Indo-Pacific”. For all practical purposes, Trump is telling NATO to take a hike.

In the event of a double NATOstan annexation of Canada and Greenland, the U.S. may be even able to match Russia’s resource base. Arguably that’s the key rationale for unleashing this New Great Game. Forget “multipolarity”. BRICS, take note.

The most intriguing side plot is, of course, Elon Musk. Trump badly needs Musk’s massive social media/propaganda digital megaphone. Simultaneously, on the chihuahua front, the platinum sidekick wants to profit from a Europe capable of assessing enough energy, raw materials and loads of consumers with solid purchasing power.

The facts on the ground already spell out the “rules-based international order” being replaced in a flash by a no-rules international disorder. After all, international law has already been abolished by the Empire of Chaos itself (that’s bipartisan) – when it comes to illegal, unilateral sanctions, theft of financial assets or legitimization of genocide and head-chopping “moderate rebels”.

Trump 2.0 will be nothing but enforcing a de facto phenomenon: a post-historical disorder. End of History – that was always for suckers.

All of this incendiary chain of events is on a roll essentially because of one single reason: the Empire of Chaos lost the proxy war in Ukraine. What remains to be discussed is the modality of the surrender. So it’s no wonder Trump had to come up with a seductive, but still fraught with danger, larger than life psy op to imperatively change the narrative.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

The post I’m Gonna MAGA You, Baby appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ironically, two seemingly unrelated articles in today’s New York Times reflect much of what is wrong with the United States, at least in an economic sense. One op-ed, titled “The Tragedy of Joe Biden,” is by Peter Coy, a regular columnist for the Times. The other one, titled “A Big Idea to Solve America’s Immigration Mess” is a Times editorial.

In his article, Coy expresses sympathy for Joe Biden. He says that Biden just didn’t get the credit he deserved for what he did in managing the economy. He laments, “He had some remarkable achievements when it comes to the economy, but he couldn’t shape the narrative around his own record.” Coy writes about Biden’s pride in having created more than 16 million new jobs and his success against inflation.

What’s wrong with Coy’s point? Like so many other people, he doesn’t question the notion that in the United States, like in other countries, it’s the job of a president to manage the economy. A presidentially managed economy is now just taken as a given. No one questions it. And if a president does a good job at managing an economy, he gets reelected. If he doesn’t, the voters reject him. As the adage goes, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

At the same time, most everyone is convinced, thanks to the indoctrination received in America’s government-managed educational system, that Americans live under an economic system known as “free enterprise.” But in a free-enterprise system — a genuine free-enterprise system — economic activity is free of governmental regulation, control, and management.

So, how does one reconcile the principle of a presidentially managed economy with a genuine free-enterprise system? One doesn’t. They are opposites. By its very terms, a presidentially managed economy violates the principle of economic activity that is free of governmental regulation, control, and management.

Where Coy and Biden and most other Americans go wrong is in judging the principle of a presidentially managed economy within a relatively short time period — say, the last four years. Actually, the better measure is the last 100 years or so, stretching all the way back to the Franklin Roosevelt regime, when the principle of central planning, along with what is called a welfare state, was adopted by the U.S. government.

Consider, for example, the value of the dollar. Since the time that FDR foisted a paper-money system on the American people, there has been a downward trend in the value of the paper dollar. Sure, there have been periodic upswings in value along the way, which were proclaimed as a great success for the presidents who were in office during such upswings, but the overall trend has been down, down, down. Take a look at this graph.

Consider the $36 trillion in federal debt that now hangs over the American people. That amounts to around $323,000 per taxpayer. Take a look at this website. That debt continues to climb, incessantly.

Moreover, that debt doesn’t include the so-called unfunded liabilities, such as Social Security and Medicare. That’s even more money that has to be paid by the American people in the years ahead.

And then there are the periodic booms and busts caused by the Federal Reserve System, the entity responsible for managing the paper-money system that FDR foisted on America. An incessant cycle of raising and lowering interest-rate rates as well as managing the supply of paper money in the system, which has brought decades of of cyclical recessions and fake prosperity.

The welfare state and the centrally managed economy were supposed to bring an economic paradise to America. They did the opposite. They brought economic chaos and crisis. Let’s not forget the countless Americans who are now living from paycheck to paycheck, with barely any savings. It’s also worth mentioning the many young people who, because of financial straits, are still living with parents into their 20s and 30s. Millions of American hopelessly dependent on federal taxpayer-funded largess. Not exactly an economic paradise. The economist Ludwig von Mises put it best when he pointed out that centrally planning produces “planned chaos.”

Few better examples of this phenomenon can be found than in immigrtion, the topic of the Times’ editorial. But the good news is that the Times has a plan — what it calls a “big idea” — to finally resolve the decades-old, ongoing, never-ending, perpetual “immigration mess.” Isn’t that exciting? It’s a three-pronged plan consisting of the following:

1. “The government must make every reasonable effort to prevent people from living and working illegally in the United States.”

Wow! That’s ingenious! Why didn’t anyone, including U.S. presidents and their advisers, think of that before now?

2. “Congress should legislate an orderly expansion of legal immigration.”

Wow! Another ingenious idea! Darn, if only someone had thought about that before today.

3. “The nation also needs to deal humanely with the estimated population of 11 million illegal immigrants who already live here.”

Again, wow! This is absolutely brilliant. Why couldn’t anyone think of this before now.

There you have it — the perfect plan for the federal government to finally — finally! — bring an end to the ongoing, never-ending, perpetual immigration crisis.

But there is at least one big problem with it. It won’t work. That’s because central planning doesn’t work. Contrary to what the Times’s editorial states in its opening sentence, America’s immigration-control system is not “broken,” as everyone loves to maintain. Instead, it is inherently defective because central planning is inherently defective. Something that is broken can potentially be fixed. Something that is inherently defective cannot be fixed.

It would be difficult to find a better example of central planning than America’s immigration-control system. It would also be difficult to find a better example of “planned chaos.” What the Times fails to realize — what most Americans fail to realize — is that the chaos and crisis they lament in immigration is rooted in the very system they support. Keep the system, even in a newly reformed way, and you keep the chaos. Dismantle the system and you end the chaos.

Alas, unfortunately the notion of a presidentially or centrally managed economy is too deeply set within the minds of the American people. One of these days, however, there will be a rediscovery of the principles of a genuine free-market economy — one in which there is no central planning, mandatory charity or welfare, governmental regulation, or presidential management — and people will then be able to enjoy the benefits of freedom, prosperity, and harmony.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post The Failure and Fallacy of Central Planning appeared first on LewRockwell.

“No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”—George Orwell, Animal Farm

It cost the American taxpayer $24 million to find out what we knew all along: politics is corrupt.

After four years of being subjected to special prosecutor Jack Smith’s dogged investigation into alleged election interference by Donald Trump, the Justice Department has concluded that Trump would have been convicted of breaking the law if only he hadn’t gotten re-elected.

In other words, the Deep State wins again.

The revelation here is not that Trump broke the law but the extent to which sitting presidents get a free pass when it comes to misconduct.

None of this is news.

The Deep State has been operating from this exact same playbook for decades, regardless of which party has occupied the White House.

Indeed, Richard Nixon let the cat out of the bag when he explained that the very act of being president places one beyond the rule of law (“when the president does it … that means that it is not illegal”).

This is how we ended up with an imperial president—empowered to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability—and why “we the people” keep finding ourselves mired in a political swamp of lies, graft, cronyism and corruption.

George Orwell, who died 75 years ago on Jan. 21, 1950, must be rolling in his grave.

In the 75 years since George Orwell died, his works of dystopian fiction—which warn against rampant abuse of power, mind control and mass manipulation coupled with the rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism—have become operation manuals for power-hungry political regimes wedded to the corporate state.

While Orwell’s novel 1984 foreshadowed the rise of an omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state, his novel Animal Farm aptly sums up the state of politics today, propped up by a two-party system designed to maintain the illusion that voting matters.

Orwell understood what many Americans, caught up in their partisan flag-waving, are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people—even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control at all costs.

As Orwell explains:

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”

No doubt about it: the revolution was successful.

That January 6, 2021 attempt by President Trump and his followers to overturn the election results was not the revolution, however.

Those who answered President Trump’s call to march on the Capitol were merely the fall guys, manipulated into creating the perfect crisis for the Deep State—a.k.a. the Police State a.k.a. the Military Industrial Complex a.k.a. the Techno-Corporate State a.k.a. the Surveillance State—to amass even greater powers.

It took no time at all for the switch to be thrown and the nation’s capital to be placed under a military lockdown, online speech forums restricted, and individuals with subversive or controversial viewpoints ferreted out, investigated, shamed and/or shunned.

It was a set-up, folks.

The Justice Department’s policy of not prosecuting a sitting president was the tell.

The only coup d’etat to undermine the will of the people happened when our government “of the people, by the people, for the people” was overthrown by a profit-driven, militaristic, techno-corporate state that is in cahoots with a government “of the rich, by the elite, for the corporations.”

This swamp is of the Deep State’s making to such an extent that every successive president starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt has been bought lock, stock and barrel and made to dance to the Deep State’s  tune.

Beneath the power suits, they’re all alike.

Donald Trump, the candidate who swore to drain the swamp in Washington DC, merely paved the way for lobbyists, corporations, the military industrial complex, and the Deep State to feast on the carcass of the dying American republic.

Joe Biden was no different: his job was to keep the Deep State in power.

Trump’s return to the White House has already thrown wide the gates to all manner of swampiness.

Follow the money.  It always points the way.

As Bertram Gross noted in Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America, “evil now wears a friendlier face than ever before in American history.”
Writing in 1980, Gross predicted a future in which he saw:

“…a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our constitution. More broadly, consequences include widespread intervention in international politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or military invasion…”

This stealthy, creeping, silent coup that Gross prophesied is the same danger that writer Rod Serling envisioned in the 1964 political thriller Seven Days in May, a clear warning to beware of martial law packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.

Incredibly enough, more than 60 years later, we find ourselves hostages to a government run more by military doctrine and corporate greed than by the rule of law established in the Constitution. Indeed, proving once again that fact and fiction are not dissimilar, today’s current events could well have been lifted straight out of Seven Days in May, which takes viewers into eerily familiar terrain.

The premise is straightforward.

With the Cold War at its height, an unpopular U.S. President signs a momentous nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. Believing that the treaty constitutes an unacceptable threat to the security of the United States and certain that he knows what is best for the nation, General James Mattoon Scott (played by Burt Lancaster), the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and presidential hopeful, plans a military takeover of the national government.  When Gen. Scott’s aide, Col. Casey (Kirk Douglas), discovers the planned military coup, he goes to the President with the information. The race for command of the U.S. government begins, with the clock ticking off the hours until the military plotters plan to overthrow the President.

Needless to say, while on the big screen, the military coup is foiled and the republic is saved in a matter of hours, in the real world, the plot thickens and spreads out over the past half century.

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’ve been on that fast-moving, downward trajectory for some time now.

The question is no longer whether the U.S. government will be preyed upon and taken over by the military industrial complex. That’s a done deal, but martial law disguised as national security is only one small part of the greater deception we’ve been fooled into believing is for our own good.

How do you get a nation to docilely accept a police state? How do you persuade a populace to accept metal detectors and pat downs in their schools, bag searches in their train stations, tanks and military weaponry used by their small-town police forces, surveillance cameras in their traffic lights, police strip searches on their public roads, unwarranted blood draws at drunk driving checkpoints, whole body scanners in their airports, and government agents monitoring their communications?

Try to ram such a state of affairs down the throats of the populace, and you might find yourself with a rebellion on your hands. Instead, you bombard them with constant color-coded alerts, terrorize them with shootings and bomb threats in malls, schools, and sports arenas, desensitize them with a steady diet of police violence, and sell the whole package to them as being for their best interests.

The 2021 military occupation of the nation’s capital by 25,000 troops as part of the so-called “peaceful” transfer of power from one administration to the next is telling.

That was not the language of a free people. This is the language of force.

January 6, 2021, and its aftermath merely provided the government and its corporate technocrats the perfect excuse to show off all of the powers they’ve been amassing so assiduously over the years.

Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats.

I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

I’m referring to the corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House.

This brings us back to Orwell’s Animal Farm, which turns 80 this year.

Originally titled a fairy story, the satirical allegory recounts the revolutionary struggle of a group of farm animals living in squalor and neglect on a poorly run farm managed by a derelict farmer.

Hoping to create a society where all animals are equal, the farm animals mount a revolution, ejecting the farmer, taking control of the farm, establishing their own Bill of Rights, and operating under the mantra “four legs good, two legs bad.” Not surprisingly, as is the case with most revolutions, the new boss—a pig named Napoleon—turns out to be no different from their old human oppressor. Over time, a ruling class of pigs comes to dominate on the farm, which is policed by dogs, with the pigs starting to dress, walk and talk like their human counterparts. Eventually, the pigs forge an alliance with their former two-legged adversaries in order to maintain their power over the rest of the farm animals. Before long, the pigs’ transformation into two-legged overlords is complete: “they were all alike.”

Much like the gullible, easily led creatures of Animal Farm, we find ourselves being brainwashed into believing that the tyrannies meted out against us are for our own good; that the trials are tribulations we experience at the hands of the ruling elite are privileges for which we should feel grateful; and that our bondage to the Deep State is actually, appearances to the contrary, freedom.

Over time, without their realizing it, the Seven Commandments of liberation and equality that were so central to Animal Farm’s revolutionary movement are whittled down to a single commandment: “ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.”

And that, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, is the lesson for all of us in the American Police State as we prepare for yet another changing of the guard in Washington, DC.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

This originally appeared on The Rutherford Institute.

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Watching just a bit of the Hegseth hearings before the Senate AF Committee, it is clear that many on that committee understand exactly what is at stake.  Hegseth will be a US secretary of defense offense who will obey Donald Trump, won’t be bought by the same old companies, but can probably be contained by other means. His assigned mission in the Pentagon will be to disrupt, delay and deny — and Senators were sweating their real concern about a potential disruption of the district kickbacks and reduction of state defense investments, their nervousness thinly disguised by statements about doing right by the soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines.

Both Hegseth and the members of the Committee seem unfamiliar with various parts of the Constitution, and come across as unprepared.  It’s probably a match made in heaven. Curiously, Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin made a lot of sense.  Of course, he’s a plumber and a rancher, both careers Americans have far more need of than “US Senator.”  Another point of light:  Hegseth’s written statement included a sly, if sophomoric, callback to the days of Rumsfeld, asserting “I know what I don’t know.” This is on its face silly — but it reminds us that the Senate easily confirmed secretaries of defense in our lifetimes that have been far more dangerous and anti-American than Hegseth will ever be.

I doubt Hegseth, or any other secretary of defense that this Senate can confirm, will be much of a disruptor.  It is the job of Congress to cut spending, to hold the executive branch accountable, and end the illegal wars, the odd overseas assassination, and genocides that nearly all of them support to some degree.  Most of them have no intention of doing their job. If this hearing is any guide, we can confirm only that the US Senate and House will do what they always do — give the Pentagon more money than even that rapacious cesspool of waste and fraud asks for, and mandate inappropriate, unneeded, and unsupportable defense programs that have little or nothing to so with actually protecting our country, or American interests.

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