I’ve been reading some analysis of ICE’s behavior and it resurrected memories from my military service and the counterinsurgency training we received. It struck me that ICE is acting in a way that would get them killed in a hurry if they were operating in a city filled with insurgents instead of protestors.
There are two ways to go about pacification: 1) win over the hearts and minds of the civilian population, or 2) murder everyone and burn the city to the ground. But ICE is stuck in the middle, where they are alienating the population with their brutality without fully pacifying them with extreme violence. By doing a mixture of the two, ICE is actually putting their personal in grave danger. A lot of ICE personnel are a bunch of barely trained yahoos dressing up like Delta Force, yet armed to the teeth and kidnapping, beating, injuring and murdering innocent civilians. But Americans are heavily-armed too and ICE, by roaming around in plain sight in small groups, routinely surrounded by residents, is setting themselves up for an ambush or attack.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is failing to hold the officers accountable for their blatant murders and thereby signaling that the only way there will be any punishment for what happened is if someone takes the law into their own hands.
And that raises the possibility that ICE is seeding the ground for a red/blue conflict that gives the Trump Administration, and advisers like Stephen Miller, the pretext to cancel the 2026 elections. I think the Trump administration is intentionally sending in their paramilitary goons to create chaos, manufacture a few martyrs, and ideally touch off a riot, to provide an excuse for further violent escalation: Invoking the Insurrection Act, attempting to federalize the National Guard, and eventually moving up to installing Trump as president-for-life.
There’s every reason to expect an acceleration of violence up to the November midterms. Maintaining our humanity through resistance in the face of such threats will require fortitude from both leaders and ordinary people.
Update: The threatened attack on Iran demonstrates that ICE’s para-military rampages are simply one aspect of the crazy-pants Trump administration.
We are fast approaching a Marie Antonette moment in the US largely because the rich and poor live in entirely different worlds with entirely different realities.
Indeed, our milieu is marked by the working class’s intensifying rage in a society being pillaged by corporate interests and their billionaire owners. Whether medical bankruptcies, foreclosures, lower life spans, spikes in prices, mountains of paperwork, or endless junk fees attached to everything–life in America keeps getting more difficult, annoying, inhumane, painful, and seemingly impossible.
While poor Americans struggle to afford the necessities of life, at the World Economic Forum in Davos billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin complained about the “oppression” he felt during the Biden administration during its “regulatory onslaught.”
Imagine the tyranny.
What’s ironic is that the allocation of resources towards policing is so drastically skewed towards controlling the plebs while virtually nothing is allocated towards punishing elite crime.
Matt Stoller calls it white-collar policing and blue-collar policing in a new article analyzing ICE’s murderous rampage. In Why ICE Polices in Minnesota, and Not the Corporate Board Room, Stoller writes–“Law enforcement budgets show we defunded those who police corporate America, while ramping up coercion on working people.”
Of course there has always existed a bifurcated rule of law in the US, where the rich are to be constrained simply by tort law while the poor require the full measure of criminal law to keep them in check, In An Economic Theory of the Criminal Law, 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner states that the poor require criminal law to keep them within the confines of the “market.” “The major function of criminal law in a capitalist society is to prevent people from bypassing the system of voluntary, compensated exchange-the “market,” explicit or implicit-in situations where, because transaction costs are low, the market is a more efficient method of allocating resources than forced exchange.”
And while capitalism in the US has always been unfair, the disparity hasn’t been this obvious since the first Gilded Age where the Robber Barrons wielded the Pinkerton’s and other para-militaries to intimidate, infiltrate, and break up labor unions. The 1892 Homestead Strike saw 300 armed agents hired by Henry Clay Frick (for Carnegie) fight strikers, resulting in deaths. The Pinkertons served as a crucial and often violent, tool for industrial capitalists during the rise of the American labor movement, enabling the maintenance of low wages and dangerous working conditions.
Under our current system the easiest way to become a billionaire, the new Robber Barrons, is to exploit workers, monopolize your industry, plunder resources from the global south, push all the externalities onto society, capture government with legal bribery via campaign donations, collaborate with the CIA and Mossad, and propagandize Americans into thinking all of this is normal.
Recently deceased Marxist scholar, Michael Parenti, well described the absurdity of our system–“The free market mythology argues that the most ruthless, selfish, opportunistic, greedy, calculating plunderers, applying the most heartless measures in cold blooded pursuit of corporate interests and wealth accumulation, will produce the best results for all of us through something called the invisible hand.”
The problem we face is that the oligarchs have captured and repurposed the state. Certain features of the fascist state have long been in place. The unity of the state and major economic structures is an obvious case. One has not been able to tell for many years where the federal government ends and the most powerful American companies begin. Remember that Benito Mussolini stated that “fascism should more properly be called ‘corporatism’ because it is the merger of the state and corporate power.”
The oligarchs appear to believe that they are untouchable and I believe that the actions of ICE are a test run for how they believe they can govern, where they don’t require consent as long as they have overwhelming force and terror.
It started in earnest after 9/11 when the US took the gloves off in the war of terror, but now the terror has returned to the homeland. Remember the John Yoo torture memos written for George W. Bush and the “Dark Lord” Dick Cheney to justify US military treatment of prisoners in places like Abu Ghraib, where people were extrajudicially rendered, disappeared, and without due process? That sounds a lot like what ICE is doing.
Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism, sums up the dystopia. “I don’t know how America survives this level of willful, institutionalized savagery. By most counts, ICE pumped ten bullets into a ICU nurse, Alex Pretti, for the crime of filming them and trying to intercede on behalf of a woman they had shoved to the pavement. The evidence of the execution is clear cut. ICE has not just gunned down an innocent man, but is also successfully terminating what remained of the rule of law in the US.”
It’s been obvious for a while that ICE’s rampage has nothing to do with enforcing immigration laws and everything to do with intimidating and murdering enemies of MAGA.
Speaking of which, where are all the 2nd Amendment zealots protesting the victims right to carry a licensed firearm? Imagine for a moment the reaction if Mr. Pretti had been part of a militia protesting Obama imposing healthcare on them, or the Covid mask restrictions?
But fascists are fine when the state violence is aimed at socialists and the left. That’s why when push comes to shove the oligarchs and corporate owners and officers prefer right-wing violence to the left-wing kind that threatens their property and status.
It’s urgent that we remember how Jay Gould boasted that he could hire half of the working-class men to murder the other half, because it sure appears that we’re headed back to an earlier period of American history where the shotgun calls the tune.
Update: Yves again with the final word: “I hope this outrage rouses enough people to stand up to this violence. Trump targeted Minneapolis out of pique (Mike Walz), perhaps a desire to punish the city for its effective George Floyd protests, but most of all, that its police force is small enough that he could muster enough ICE goons to outnumber them. ICE is not yet big enough to subdue the US. There is a window for action that is closing. Can enough citizens muster the courage and organization to thwart Trump’s clear intent to use brutality to mow down all opposition?”
It’s amusing watching the vassals adjust to the new imperial reality under king Trump.
Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum was a masterclass in “limited hangout”, where he acknowledged that the “rules based international order” was always conditional and ultimately based on the whims of the hegemon.
“For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, praised its principles, and benefited from its predictability. We could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.
We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.
This bargain no longer works.
Let me be direct: we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”
Carney, for his efforts, received a standing ovation.
The concept of the rules based order, a lie in itself, was useful for the proxy forces and vassals of the global hegemon as long as they themselves were not threatened by its consequences. But now that the US has turned on the vassals who supported it, it’s time to allow some honesty.
Less amusing and more cringing was French Prime Minister Macron’s appeal to Trump, where he’s fine with the US attacking Iran and Syria, and massive support for Israel’s Gaza genocide, but that an attack on Greenland and Denmark is going to far. In his message to Trump, Macron told him “we are totally in line on Syria” and “can do great things on Iran” but that he “doesn’t understand what you are doing on Greenland.”
The hypocrisy is stunning. The vassals have been loyal subordinates as the empire has laid waste to the Third World, but now that they are on the menu it’s a different story.
But it’s nothing new. Empire’s in their terminal stage contract and the periphery is sacrificed for the empire core.
In all seriousness, the correct approach is for Europe and Canada to break from the US and reclaim their agency.
“Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney got up on stage in Davos and admitted the liberal world has been complicit in the breakdown of international law, war crimes and mass atrocities, but that the west was happy to go along with it while the brutality of empire benefitted them.
His speech was showered with praise by the liberal establishment and legacy media who in Carney have found themselves a new hero to make sense of the world.
The elites in the hall gave it a standing ovation. Many outlets including The New York Times and The Guardian, which called it “unflinching realism,” reprinted it in full. The Financial Times labelled it “timely and bold” and said it demonstrated “real leadership.”
But not for the reasons the liberal intelligentsia is crowing about.
Carney’s speech is worth reading for its confessions. For its confession that liberal centrism is an ideology of cynical self-interest, that its symbols are fake, its rhetoric designed to deceive. For its admission that the rules-based order is a lie, that western neoliberal governance is a hideous, hypocritical creation.”
Liberals and so-called “leftists” denouncing Iran are useful idiots for the US empire.
Liberals tut-tut the mullah’s for their intolerance and accuse Iran of being a “theocratic fascist regime” while the US surrounds Iran with bases, and funds, arms and trains groups like MEK, who carry out terrorist attacks and act as agent provocateurs during demonstrations. Meanwhile liberal and progressive media are talking endlessly about the terrible regime violence against those peaceful protesters, based on extremely suspect sources.
The corporate media propaganda machine plays a big part in enflaming liberal passions, along with the many CIA-backed NGOs that help to stir the outrage and foment more violence. One of these groups is Human Rights Activists In Iran, frequently referred to as HRA or HRAI in the media. The group, and its media arm, the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) have become the go-to group of experts for Western media, and are the source of many of the most inflammatory claims and shockingly high casualty figures reported in the press. In the past week alone, their assertions have provided much of the basis for stories in CNN, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, ABC News, Sky News, and The New York Post, among others. And in a passionate plea for leftists to support the protests, Owen Jones wrote in The Guardian Tuesday that HRAI are a “respected” group whose death toll proclamations are “probably significant underestimates.”
Probably.
Part of the CIA’s mission was to create a worldwide network of media outlets and NGOs that would parrot CIA talking points, passing it off as credible news. As former CIA task-force leader John Stockwell admitted, “I had propagandists all over the world.” Stockwell went on to describe how he helped flood the world with fake news demonizing Cuba: “We pumped dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities, Cuban rapists [to the media]… We ran [faked] photographs that made almost every newspaper in the country… We didn’t know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans. It was pure, raw, false propaganda to create an illusion of communists eating babies for breakfast.”
Then there’s the NED. The National Endowment for Democracy was created in 1983 by the Reagan administration, after a series of scandals had seriously damaged the image and reputation of the CIA. The Church Committee – a 1975 U.S. Senate investigation into CIA activities – found that the agency had masterminded the assassination of several foreign heads of state, was involved in a massive domestic surveillance campaign against progressive groups, had infiltrated and placed agents in hundreds of U.S. media outlets, and was carrying out shocking mind control experiments on unwilling American participants.
The NED was created as a way to outsource many of the agency’s most controversial activities, especially overseas regime change operations. Basically it was a CIA cut-out used to advance regime change abroad. Presently the NED is spearheading a myriad of operations targeting the Islamic Republic. This is how they describe their regime-change operation. “Fostering collaboration between Iranian civil society and political activists on a democratic vision and raise awareness on civic rights within the legal community, the organization will facilitate debate on transition models from authoritarianism to democracy.”
Yes, yes. More of that sweet democracy.
Iran, of course, has been in American crosshairs ever since the removal of the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi during the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79. Pahlavi himself had been kept in place by the CIA, who engineered a coup against the democratically-elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh (1952-53). Mossadegh, a secular liberal reformer, had angered Washington by nationalizing the country’s oil industry, carrying out land reform, and refusing to crush the communist Tudeh Party.
And if you think all of the regime-change mischief carried out by the NED is only supported by the Trump Administration and their Republican minions, then you need to get out more. Recently, U.S. representative Eli Crane introduced a provision into the recent spending package that would cut funding for the NED. In response to the amendment to defund NED every House Democrat, including progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, and Ilhan Omar, voted against it, along with 81 Republicans, slapping down the amendment 291 to 127.
None of this should be surprising. US foreign policies of regime-change are a thoroughly bi-partisan endeavor and liberal outrage over perceived tyrannical regimes is major reason why. What’s notable is that liberal outrage is selective, only focusing on the states that have successfully resisted being absorbed into the US empire, like Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, and Cuba. Notice the way in which the liberal outrage died down after countries like Syria, and Venezuela were absorbed into the imperial blob.
There’s quite a history of liberal dupes for empire. Remember Afghanistan, with the evil theocratic Taliban and liberal concern for woman’s rights? Or Iraq, where liberals cheered on the illegal invasion to topple a savage dictator? Let’s not forget Syria and liberal outrage over the murderous Assad. And no list would be complete without commenting on the hysteria that liberals felt towards Putin’s crackdown on Pussy Riot and Russia’s “unprovoked invasion” of Ukraine. There are still blue and yellow flags flying in my liberal neighborhood.
What’s also notable is that identity politics (Id-Pol) drives the liberal outrage. Domestically Id-Pol corrodes worker solidarity and supplants class-politics, while abroad Id-Pol is wielded by US empire managers to create and sustain support for the endless US “liberal interventions.” American propaganda is quite sophisticated and the appeal to liberals involves “human rights”, “gay-rights”, woman’s-rights, etc. rather than the USA–Fuck Yeah, pitch to conservatives. The New York Times, puts on a master-class daily.
Those states have successfully resisted being brought into the US empire maintain strong governments that don’t hesitate to exert control to by attacking and destroying the US regime-change ops and infiltrations which would otherwise have overthrown them. This doesn’t mean these governments are pure as driven snow or bastions of democracy, it just means they have a competent government and social cohesion, the qualities that enable a state to resist the US empire’s coups, color revolutions and psy-ops.
That liberals are outraged over the foreign governments that the US wants to overthrow, while ignoring the most tyrannical regime on earth–the US empire–demonstrates the power of our all-American propaganda. No other country has spent the 21st century slaughtering people by the millions in wars of aggression around the world, attacking civilian populations with deadly starvation sanctions, staging coups, aiding and abetting Israel’s Gaza genocide while garrisoning the planet with hundreds of military bases. Only the American empire is doing that.
Once again, Trump makes it all obvious. It took a mobster for us to see the mob rule we’ve always lived by.
Update: “After sponsoring the genocide of Gaza, welcoming the kidnapping of Nicholas Maduro, cheering the bombing of Iran, backing murderous assaults on Beirut and Iraq and applauding the assassination of Yemen’s government, liberal leaders across the west have discovered international law just in time for the US invasion of Greenland.”
Fat, dumb and fascist is no way to go through life. Unless you work for ICE and get to carry out revenge fantasies on all of the other identities who have wronged you.
What did neoliberals, who’ve deployed identity politics for the last 50 odd years, think was going to happen as they identified and celebrated gays, lesbians, trans, ethnicities and illegal immigrants? The bitter, left behind, white working-class men were always going to seize upon an identity too.
It’s not like there’s a history of grievance or anything. Where a charismatic leader rides a cult of resentment to power, convincing millions that they are victims of shadowy enemies consisting of immigrants, gays, Jews, communists, intellectuals, journalists and anyone who challenges his authority or contradicts his narrative. This grievance is not merely rhetorical; it is weaponized. It transforms resentment into loyalty and anger into political energy, binding followers to him not through policy or principle, but through shared outrage and perceived humiliation.
I’m aware that no one reads anymore and it’s the United States of Amnesia, but what the fuck!
Watch the video of the murder, where a goon from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) fired point-blank into the windshield of Good’s car as she tried to avoid a confrontation. Jonathan Ross, the murderer, then fired twice more at Good, the last of these shots from behind. Look at the body language at the start of the incident. It’s aggressive and predatory. As the ICE officer approaches Good’s vehicle, he shouts–“Get out of the car. Get out of the car. Get out of the fucking car.” This is not someone who is enforcing the law in a professional manner.
No, this guy, seething with animosity, is not a legitimate authority or law enforcement. He is a straight-out expression of resentment and grievance, expressing the poisonous mix of hatred and envy shared by any group that feels itself spurned or scorned or disdained–socially, economically or politically. This is the defining feature of the MAGA. Most ICE trainees are MAGA people who nurse their feelings of inferiority and resentment behind badges. What we see in the videos of Good’s murder is not the enforcement of anything. It’s payback.
We’ve had decades of neoliberalism, where the owners and their professional/managerial/class (PMC) lackeys thought it a great idea to offshore US manufacturing to parts unknown, while encouraging rampant illegal immigration. And while it might be uncomfortable to discuss in polite company, the results have been devastating for the working class, especially white male workers, who not only lost their jobs but lost their “manhood” in the ability to support a family. Since then, they’ve been lectured that they are racists by a PMC, who’ve gained massively from cheap imported products and cut-rate domestic and landscape services, provided by illegal immigrants. Moreover, wages for ordinary Americans have been stagnant for forty years and I’m pretty sure that it’s not a coincidence that the last forty years also have witnessed one of America’s greatest waves of illegal immigration.
To cover their betrayal the PMC embraced identity politics. Because solidarity and class politics are for losers. The right behavior is to maximize your human capital and broadcast your identity through social media. In a neoliberal society there are no traditional links of family, community friendship, even mutual commitment. There are only coincidences of interest, to be exploited for as long as they last, and then to be abandoned. The truth is that the PMC is like a cult, where certain ideas are held to be true because they are emotionally and aesthetically satisfying, and no opposition to them is allowed. If it’s true that uncontrolled immigration, or the export of jobs overseas accompanied by de-industrialization, are good things, then any evidence suggesting the contrary is by definition wrong and can be ignored or demonized as racist.
None of this should be a mystery. The resentment that we witness with ICE was how Trump won in 2016. Then after attacking Trump as a Russian secret agent, liberals went out to brunch with Biden in 2020 and forbade any critical examination of how their policies allowed Trump to win the presidency. We let it happen. Our leaders went corporate decades ago. The CEO’s have worked against us for generations. They captured the Fed. Captured the regulators. Wrote the trade deals. Shuttered the factories and built condos in their place. Shipped the jobs. Kept the money.
The elite lawlessness trickles down. It doesn’t stay in the White House or the DOJ or Wall Street. It hits the pavement. The desperation that produced men willing to join ICE is a result. ICE just killed Renee Good in the street. Meanwhile, we’re losing our hearts. Our souls. Our minds. Turning on each other. More tribal every day. Looking for someone weaker to blame.
Instead, we must fight the system that produced Trump and his minions. The Fed that failed us. Regulators owned by industry. A Supreme Court that said presidents are above the law. Fifty years of our country being sold off. If we just replace Trump while electing a neoliberal infested Democratic Party we lose. Beat Trump but leave the system? We get another Trump. Smarter. More disciplined. Riding the same desperation because nothing underneath changed.
Fortunately Americans are rejecting ICE brutalities and murders. Furthermore, the crackdowns and weaponization of ICE reflect a presidency under mounting pressure. Trump’s recent actions, from economic subsidies to kidnapping Maduro and threatening Iran, don’t signal strength, they signal a presidency losing its grip on its own coalition.
Stay safe.
Update: If you think that ICE’s rampages are about immigration laws then I have a bridge to sell you. The idea of expelling tens of millions of people via violent roundups is completely bat-shit crazy. You are not going to pick them up one at a time in the Walmart parking lot. Any administration serious about eliminating illegal immigration would simply make it a felony to hire or rent to such an individual. But, of course, that would inconvenience Trump’s supporters, the corporations and their billionaire owners who enjoy maintaining a desperate army of immigrants laborers.
No, ICE is Trump’s personal paramilitary, a brand new army of fully militarized federal cops trained to drive around the country and disappear people into vans in broad daylight while murdering those who interfere.
My research on how AI has been weaponized is chilling, but I’ve come to realize that AI is only useful when accessing the massive data on the internet. An internet that we’ve been herded onto, for everything we do in our modern lives.
Maybe that was the plan all along?
In Surveillance Valley, Yasha Levine reminds us that: “The Internet was hardwired to be a surveillance tool from the start. No matter what we use the network for today–dating, directions, en-crypted chat, e-mail, or just reading the news–it has always had a dual-use nature rooted in intelligence gathering and war…The Internet is the most effective weapon the government has ever built.”
AI plus the internet is how Israel was able to attack Hezbollah in Lebanon even as the resistance organization operated with the strictest operational security. Hezbollah commanders and fighters were targeted and eliminated because while revolutionaries must operate in a sea of supporters, in our modern internet age the supporters meta-data can give them away. Intelligence agencies like Mossad and Unit 8200 are now using archived data, reconstructing entire timelines from past internet activity. What makes this especially lethal is not any one data point but the combination. Signals collected by drones are combined with metadata, AI analysis, ground informants, and environmental profiling. From all of these inputs, a kill matrix can be developed.
In a nod to the CIA’s Phoenix Program, Israel in September 2024 detonated thousands of booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies that had been covertly distributed among Hezbollah’s civilian cadres. The devices exploded simultaneously across Lebanon, killing dozens and maiming thousands. It was a devastating act of remote sabotage, designed not only to eliminate personnel, but to sow mistrust in Hezbollah’s means of communication. Soon after Israel bombed Hezbollah’s Beirut headquarters located 60 feet underground beneath residential buildings in the Dahieh suburb, killing Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general and many other key Hezbollah commanders. The Israeli Air Force attacked the buried command post using 2000 pound bunker-buster bombs, guided unerringly by the AI kill matrix. The latest breach of Hezbollah’s operational environment marks a technological leap that fundamentally alters the rules of engagement, where Israels war on the resistance movement has been fought using AI to monitor phones, undersea cables and the internet.
In Israel’s silent war on Lebanon, Mohamad Shams Eddine, calls the model of infiltration: Environmental Fingerprint Profiling (EFP). And how it’s the most lethal vulnerability facing any resistance movement embedded in a civilian society. “To grasp how commanders are now being reached inside Hezbollah’s fortified operational circles, one must first understand the layered technological arsenal deployed against them. The breach emerges from the fusion of dozens of surveillance systems into a unified, real-time data engine. In the past, hacking meant breaching a phone or computer. Today, the paradigm has shifted. The new target is not the device itself, but the digital ecosystem surrounding it. Israeli intelligence no longer needs to penetrate Hezbollah devices directly. They monitor the people around the target, the signals emitted by their environment, and the data shared unwittingly by family, friends, or even neighbours. A commander might carry a phone with no internet access, avoid public networks, and live free of digital identifiers. It doesn’t matter. Surveillance focuses on his driver, whose smartphone logs every route. The building Wi-Fi silently confirms presence. Smart cars track speed, location, and habits. Street cameras catch his face; apps map who else is nearby. As a result, the target’s own environment becomes compromised.”
Meanwhile, Trump is Building a Massive Data Center Beneath the East Wing. Israel built a fortified, 9 story deep, AI surveillance, targeting and operational decision-making command post. Trump is following suit. Remember, on January 21st, 2025, Trump’s first full day in office, they launched Project Stargate, a $500 billion AI infrastructure project, that was never really explained.
I wonder why?
The vast amounts of data that we feed into the internet–about our lives, our location, our relationships, and our plans–can be used against us in ways we might not yet imagine. It is in the interest of many defense-tech companies like Palantir to help their clients figure out crueler and crueler ways to have AI do so. We can see the powers of the world merging: corporate power, state power, institutional power, ideological power, the power of the oligarchs who built and control the internet, the power of the network itself. Some days it can feel as if we are living inside the plot of a piece of twentieth-century dystopian sci-fi.
Any serious revolutionary movement will have to destroy or block the internet. It was sold as transformative technology that would allow for connectivity and freedom but recent actions by our dystopian empire have shown that was a pipe dream. Perhaps the authorities always saw this outcome or maybe it’s AI that makes the surveillance so much better. Precision targeting depends on data collected from communication devices, GPS, and facial and voice recognition. Only AI can correlate such seemingly unrelated data points at lightning speed to pinpoint a target’s exact presence. This is the age of algorithmic warfare. And no resistance can afford to ignore it.
In the 1960’s activists called for Americans to kill their televisions.
Maybe it’s time to kill the internet?
Update: The internet is useful for insurgency, as well as counterinsurgency. In Iran, for example, the CIA and Mossad have deployed Starlink terminals to help affect regime change. But now the Iranian government, with the aid of Russian and Chinese tech, has jammed the Starlink terminals. Without internet access the CIA/Mossad agents directing the rioters are unable to command and control their on-the-ground forces. The lack of ‘horror’ propaganda videos from Iran, submitted via the internet and used by the media to maintain support for intervention, is also important.
All of this has given the Silicon Valley tech-bros a boner. Most of them are quasi-fascists and they are really, really interested in surveillance, counterinsurgency and murder. This is why American tech firms partner with Israel, have veterans of Unit 8200, Israel’s NSA, working for them, and buy up Israeli start ups. It also helps us understand why they have been willing to spend insane amounts of money on AI.
Israel, because of the business of war is incentivized to keep brutalizing the Palestinians and attacking neighbors in order to maintain its niche advantage in AI surveillance and AI-directed killing.
In Gaza, Israel is targeting civilian members of Hamas, the Palestinian resistance movement, through the use of an artificial intelligence (AI) system called “Lavender” to target thousands of Palestinian men in its bombing campaign in Gaza. There’s also a particularly diabolical AI targeting program called “Where’s Daddy?” that tracks any Palestinian civilian, somehow associated with Hamas, home, then bombs and kills the whole family.
Palantir has also scored a $10 billion contract to update and refine an AI program called Maven, for the US armed forces. The military calls Palantir’s Maven its “AI-powered battlefield platform.” It has already been deployed to guide US airstrikes across the Middle East, including in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq. Palantir has marketed its technology as shortening the process of identifying and bombing military targets — what the company’s CTO recently described as “optimizing the kill chain.”
Seeing the way Israel uses AI should be setting off alarm bells. Instead the esteemed leaders of Silicon Valley are competing to join the party. Some of these personalities are close to President Donald Trump including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, partner of Palantir with Alex Karp. and OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Silicon Valley figures like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen helped shape the President-elect’s tech policy agenda. To “take the lead over China” on AI, campaign allies said the new administration will get rid of Biden’s AI guardrails and focus on autonomous weapons, intelligence, and cybersecurity.
The history of the development of computers and the internet demonstrates how high-tech can be used for surveillance, counterinsurgency and murder. Contrary to the feel-good stories about how the internet and computers were developed in Silicon Valley garages, in Surveillance Valley, Yasha Levine, challenges conventional wisdom and says that the Internet was actually founded by the US government as part of their counterinsurgency program in Vietnam. The US government wanted to build a connected computer system that could collect and share real time intelligence, observe the world in real time, and watch and analyze people and political movements–especially communist or socialist ones.
Presently, the US is using AI directed violence to maintain its decaying empire, but what happens on the periphery of empire always returns to sender. “I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent,” Chalmers Johnson wrote two decades ago in his book, “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.”
Empires do not go quietly into the night. Any hope that Donald Trump would be an “antiwar” president went out the window almost as soon as he won the 2024 election, when he filled his administration with a merry band of neocons. I’ve come to realize that with our bi-partisan war party–No matter who you vote for, you always get Lindsey Graham.
Before kidnapping the Venezuelan president, Trump imposed a crippling blockade, seizing Venezuelan oil tankers in the Caribbean, under the flimsy justification that they had been “sanctioned.” Playing the Pirate of the Caribbean, Trump boasted at his press conference a couple of weeks ago that he planned to keep the oil or possibly sell it. Then at yesterday’s press conference announcing his triumphant seizure of President Nicolas Maduro, Trump declared that America will now control Venezuela and our country will “take back” the Venezuelan oil reserves, which he stated were rightfully ours.
Sounds totally legit to me.
All snark aside, Trump’s actions are unprecedented and signal that any adherence to a “rules based international order” has been deep-sixed. Unfortunately, the US looks less like a confident hegemon, maintaining order in the Western Hemisphere and more like an exhausted one, deploying the iron-fist of military force to maintain control after every other attempt has fallen embarrassingly flat.
If we are to suss out the reasons for the latest US attack on Venezuela and kidnap of their president, it’s probably a good idea to follow the money. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Trump is operating on behalf of financial capital. Wars, regime-change ops and sanctions are driven by the economic structure of the United States–oligarchy– and the role of multinational banks and corporations in the formulation of policy.
The attack on Venezuela that Trump laughably described as an effort to stop narco-terror belies the true objective of the kidnapping operation to remove Maduro, which is to secure the US control of Venezuelan oil. Remember kids, Venezuela has the world’s largest petroleum reserves. Although Trump’s boast that US oil companies would come in and invest billions to transform Venezuela’s petroleum industry seems suspect due to the immense costs involved, control of the oil is reason enough. The key is petrodollar-denominated oil. The US simply could not allow Venezuela’s oil to be sold in yuan, ruble, rupee or a basket of currencies. Only in dollars.
But oil isn’t the only strategic resource lying under Venezuelan soil. The country is also home to the fourth largest gold reserves on the planet and eighth largest natural gas reserves, as well as a treasure trove of critical minerals such as bauxite, iron ore, copper, zinc, nickel and even rare earth materials.
Returning to the role of multinational banks and corporations in the formulation of US policy–all of Wall Street’s fictitious capital–derivatives stacked on top of derivatives–are seeking a physical backstop. Former British Diplomat and MI6 analyst, Alastair Crooke has argued that US national finances are in very bad shape and this is leading to Trump’s seizure of global resources to prevent the collapse of the US dollar. “Today, with the U.S. in an era of unsustainable structural budget deficits, Trump is laser-focused on America’s financial core: The Treasury bond market (America’s lifeline) and the stock market (America’s wallet). Both are fragile. And any external pressure could trigger a chain reaction. Which is why Trump threatens war on anyone seeking to supplant or bypass the U.S. dollar trading monopoly. China was purchasing Venezuela oil and paying for it in yuan rather than dollars.”
While oil is the most obvious motivation behind the kidnapping of Maduro, getting rid of one of the hostile countries to Israel and Zionism in Latin America and returning Venezuela to when it maintained good relations with Israel and even purchased security technologies from it has undoubtedly played a role as well. Maduro, like his predecessor Hugo Chavez, was one of the few world leaders who stood in solidarity with the Palestinians and called out Zionism as a hateful ideology of terror. His removal is a coup for Israel and the neocons. On a recent appearance on Newsmax, the American Christian Zionist ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, boasted that Trump’s recent kidnapping of Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, was good for Israel.
Then there’s a school-of-thought that believes that the US is seeking control over Venezuela oil in anticipation of a disruption of the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf when Israel, with US-backing, launches a new attack on Iran. I’m sure it was simply a happy accident that the attack on Venezuela happened days after Trump’s latest meeting with Netanyahu. And I’m sure that the protests that erupted in Iran following Trump’s Monday meeting with Netanyahu were a coincidence too.
What clear is that the attack on Venezuela is the first real manifestation of the so-called Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Trump, as his usual, makes everything obvious, and echoes Thucydides, where “The strong do what they will and the weak accept what they have to accept.” He does not even try to justify his illegal attack on Venezuela with any of the usual propaganda. There is no talk of imposing democracy or saving woman or any other moral justification. It’s simply thuggish. Grab the oil–it’s ours–and ignore international law and opinion. The indictment of Maduro is just laughable.
The Onion sums up the absurdity.
Update: No expose would be complete without acknowledging the bankruptcy of the corporate media. The story of the attack on Venezuela and kidnap of the president, as well as all of the “war on terror” reporting, is also a story of a corrupt and captured corporate media. A media which does not speak truth to power, but which amplifies the lies and propaganda of the powerful. A media which deliberately omits critical context and manufactures consent for violence. A media which professes concern for international law, democracy and for the downtrodden, and then cheers on the regime-change ops and ongoing violence of the US empire.
Here’s a taste: “In November 2025, something extraordinary happened in Hong Kong that most people missed entirely. China issued $4 billion worth of bonds denominated in US dollars; a routine financial transaction on its surface. But when the orders came in, they totaled $118 billion. Thirty times oversubscribed. Investors from around the world were practically trampling each other to buy Chinese government debt.
Here’s the part that should make everyone pay attention: these Chinese bonds began trading at “lower yields” than United States Treasury bonds. Read that again slowly. Global investors were accepting lower returns on Chinese debt than on American debt—despite China holding a lower credit rating (A+ versus America’s AA). In the hierarchy of global finance, this is roughly equivalent to a challenger brand outselling Coca-Cola at a higher price. It simply doesn’t happen. Until it did.
One month later, the United States began mobilizing for potential intervention in Venezuela. If you think these events are unrelated, you’re missing the most important geopolitical story of our generation. This is about the slow-motion collapse of the architecture that has supported American power for half a century: the dollar’s role as the world’s dominant reserve currency. And Venezuela, improbably, has become ground zero in the fight to preserve it.”
The vast majority of Americans find the status quo poisonous. This is the inevitable blowback from decades of misguided bipartisan policies that have destroyed our country. From never-ending invasions, regime-change ops and sanctions, to ruinous financialization, to the steady outsourcing of American manufacturing resulting in the immiseration of American workers and destruction of the middle-class.
All of our recent elections have been protest ones yet nothing seems to change. Prices continue to skyrocket, Israel and the neocons continue to steer US foreign policies of endless war and, now, a national AI program supported by both parties that threatens millions of jobs. I joke to friends that we’d be better off if Putin and Russia, or Xi Jinping and China invaded and took over management of the country from the present bipartisan kleptocracy.
Hah, hah.
John Michael Greer sounds a message of hope but also peril –“As the last hours of 2025 slip away and 2026 dawns, then, I see the first stirrings of an unnoticed landscape of possibility. That is balanced, however, by certain equally unnoticed dangers. A crucial fact about the fascist regimes of the early 20th century that all sides have gone out of their way to suppress is that a great many of them seized power by offering electorates the commonsense policies that everyone outside the political class wanted and none of the established parties would discuss. That’s why the 25-Point Program of the Nazi party, for example, demanded such bland and reasonable steps as government food subsidies for pregnant women and children, reforms to make education available to all, and the expansion of old age pensions.
The bitter events of a century ago show clearly enough that if the elites in charge of democratic political systems insist on the preservation of an intolerable status quo in the teeth of widespread popular dissent, the people will turn to anybody who will overthrow the existing system—even if that means accepting jackboots and armbands. I can only hope that enough people in the political classes recognize what is happening in time to move to the center first, and prevent a repeat of that ghastly experience.”
I hope 2026 is the year when a critical mass of Americans change the status quo for the better.
Stay safe.
Update: Matt Stolleroffers words of encouragement. “It was during that time of great cynicism that the imbalances and corruption unmasked in the 1930s built up. Only when the public recovered its ability to be outraged, to believe in collective action, that Americans could once again see their society as a free people and act upon it. The actual economic collapse started in 1929, and it continued and worsened even as Brandeis became more optimistic. It was the public learning and regaining its liberty that had to come before the material part could be fixed.”
camelotkidd 