“I realized this morning that I made the crossover.
It’s permanent. You don’t go back.
While getting ready for work, my wife asked me what I thought about the story of Savannah Guffrey and her mother being kidnapped.
Without hesitation, I said, “It’s a psyop.”
She stopped and looked at me sideways. Why? What are you talking about? Where’s your empathy?
And in that moment, I realized how far apart our operating systems now are.
In my head, possibilities started stacking immediately. Maybe it’s a cover story. Maybe it’s meant to pull attention away from the Epstein files resurfacing. Maybe it’s tied to power struggles around the Trump administration. Maybe it’s a distraction from financial instability or rising geopolitical tensions. There are a dozen overlapping crises right now. Pick your explanation.
To her, that sounded unhinged.
When I said, “If you don’t think the Epstein story matters, you have another thing coming,” I could feel the gap widen further. To me, that story represents a line that should never have been crossed and proof that something is deeply broken. To her, it’s noise. Old news. Something better left alone.
That’s when it hit me. We’re not disagreeing on facts. We’re living in different layers of reality.”
Americans are mostly like the authors wife in that they’ve been propagandized for decades to trust authority, believing that America is basically “just and decent,” and that we don’t need to concern ourselves with the domestic or foreign policies because we’ve got highly qualified leaders working hard at fixing them.
Caitlin Johnstone relates: “Believing our society is just and decent allows one to relax under the assumption that they deserve all the comforts they have in life and that the system will never turn against them. If someone is killed by police, or is impoverished or imprisoned or homeless, then it’s because they did something wrong and immoral, and all you need to do to avoid the same fate is follow the rules and make ethical choices.”
Heretics like myself know that the idea of ethical world is a diabolical lie, one that the Epstein Files has confirmed. Meanwhile, I can’t unsee the patterns, incentives, and repeated evidence of a deep state that advances its murderous policies while protecting itself thru seduction and blackmail. Instead of competent, just and moral leaders we have, instead, a powerful class of depraved individuals committing what would be criminal acts, excused by the powers that be.
These different layers of reality are why I can’t have real conversations with most Americans. When I try to talk about any of the crazy-shit that’s happening it gets uncomfortable real fast. And if the conversation somehow survives first contact eventually people will ask me why I care about things that don’t affect me. And then I have to explain why it does affect us. That as Americans we all live in a “Second Gilded Age,” where deregulation, financialization, and elite impunity has produced a feral elite capable of the abuses seen in the Epstein files.
The Zionist’s realize that they are hemorrhaging support in America, especially among young people, due to the Gaza Genocide and the ongoing Epstein Affair. So Israel is bringing unbearable pressure upon Trump in order to get him to strike Iran. Indeed Benjamin Netanyahu is flying to the US for another meeting Wednesday, almost assuredly to petition for an attack, and to discuss details.
The unbearable pressure most certainly involves Epstein and further damaging instances of Trump’s involvement. The new Epstein files release includes FBI witness reports that Trump was involved in murdering three girls who were buried at Mar-a-Lago and threatening the witness with a similar fate. Witnesses also told the FBI that Trump auctioned underage girls from his swimsuit contests, measuring their vulvas and rating them for tightness. Trump is also accused of forcing oral sex and other abuses against 13 and 14 year old girls.
Even at the ski resort where I instruct there is talk of war. One of the investment bankers for a large hedge fund came back from a phone call looking like he’d seen a ghost, and later the groups gossip revealed that he was told that the decision to strike Iran had been confirmed.
But attacking Iran is madness, and Trump and Netanyahu are delusional about their chances. Do they not remember how Iran overcame Israeli air defenses and began inflicting serious damage to high value targets? Or maybe they’ve come to believe their own propaganda descriptions of the 12-day exchange last June?
Iran was not defeated. It withstood the initial attacks. Its senior military commanders were quickly replaced, and it’s nuclear material from the three facilities were moved to other locations, then it overwhelmed Israel with drones and missiles that caused a lot of damage with conservative estimate of $3 Billion, with casualties of 33 killed and 3,500 wounded. Iran had also retaliated to the American attack in what they called “Operation Glad Tidings of Victory” with missiles hitting the large American Al-Udeid Air Base and Central Command headquarters in Qatar across the Gulf inflicting yet undeclared damages. A truce was quickly struck ending a twelve-day war between the two parties.
Iran maintains a potent drone and missile arsenal, and has threatened to retaliate against any neighboring country from which the US attacks it, and these threats are being taken seriously. The entire region is counseling peace because they know that Iran can cause enormous damage to oil and natural gas facilities, power plants, airports, and harbors, throwing their economies into chaos and perhaps sparking political unrest.
Yves Smith, at Naked Capitalism, warns of the consequences of a US attack on Iran. “On an interview with Danny Haipong, Justin Podhur clarified that Iran does not have “proxies” but its allies Ansar Allah, Hezbollah, and Shia militias in Iraq have all said they will respond if the US attacks Iran. Podhur further notes that during the 12 Day War, Jordan and the Saudis fired missiles against Iran, but Iran only hit Israel. Iran has warned that any country that attacks Iran will be targeted this time. Iran could easily turn Saudi Arabia into an economic and environmental disaster zone if it struck its oil fields.
Even more important, Alastair Crooke has stated that if Iran is attacked, the Supreme Leader will issue a fatwa. Shia have substantial representation across the Middle East, such as 13% of Saudis. Crooke claims that the resulting uprisings would make Arab Spring look like a walk in the park.
We explained long-form in a recent post how the US forces then in theater were insufficient for the US to achieve regime change or meaningfully advance the the Israeli goal of breaking up Iran, even before getting to the costs Iran could inflict by closing the Strait of Hormuz and bombing Israel and US bases. Independent experts continue to be skeptical even with the US further bulking up its forces. Larry Johnson and former Royal Navy Commodore Steve Jermy have both argues that the most the US could do with its naval assets would be a short campaign, of say 5 days as very high intensity or at most two weeks at a less aggressive tempo. More recent takes on what the US could do from its airbases point to a similar ability to sustain a painful campaign. A critical limit is that the US cannot bring in its B-2s (which can drop super heavy bombs) without undue risk; recall Iran allowed them in to hit nuclear sites at the end of the 12 Day War, which is has said clearly it will not permit again.”
The slow drip of damaging Epstein revelations only tightens the screws. Meanwhile the corporate media continues to proclaim: “President Trump has not been accused of wrongdoing.” Obviously they will do a 180 and suddenly discover the FBI files, if Trump stops following Israel’s orders.
Update:Col. Larry Wilkerson: The U.S. Just Hit a Point of No Return . Dialogue Works, YouTube. “Wilkerson confirms a scenario we had warned about, starting at 2:20. He has heard from reliable sources that Netanyahu is bringing Epstein documents to his meeting with Trump to blackmail him to force an attack Iran. If Trump were sufficiently ruthless, he could record the Bibi threat and have him arrested and incarcerated. Blackmail is a crime, after all. But Trump beats up only on parties he regards as weak.”
While the corporate media pretends that Epstein was Putin’s secret Russian agent, there’s increasing evidence that he was working for the Rothschilds.
The writer who goes by Simplicus, makes an explosive observation–“Truth be told, it’s far more likely that Epstein was not a Mossad asset but rather a direct Rothschild asset being used to gain leverage over everyone including Mossad; why else would he need to compromise Israeli politicians like Ehud Barak along with the “goyim”, as he popularly termed them?”
In an email exchange between the pair in 2018, ahead of a meeting with a Qatari investment fund, Epstein asks Barak to allay potential concerns about their relationship: “you should make clear that i dont work for mossad. :)” Then there’s an email exchange with Peter Thiel, where Epstein admits who he works for. “As you probably know. I represent the Rothschilds.”
Simplicus again–“Why would the world’s most powerful compromiser be Mossad when he can work directly for the people who created Israel and the Mossad itself?”
The question answers itself.
Epstein has inadvertently confirmed one of the most dangerous conspiracy theories imaginable–that of wealthy Jewish banking families who secretly rule the world behind the pretense of governance. You will search in vain for this expose in the New York Times, Washington Post or Wall Street Journal. Predictably, these revelations are gaining almost no traction in the establishment media. But isn’t another one of more outlandish conspiracy theories the idea that the corporate media is controlled by powerful Jewish elites?
I know. Even posing these questions could get me on the Hasbara hit list.
But what the fuck! Our country started out in rebellion against an unjust overlord and maybe it’s time for a modern version.
I’ve always wondered why Epstein made connections with MIT, Harvard, Stanford and Silicon Valley but the released documents reveal the Rothschilds interest in investing in tech because their other investments were flatlining. Then there are the darker possibilities. Control of tech and AI infrastructure should be thought of as a form of neo-imperial control. There’s also the urgent need for a digital panopticon to control the citizens who have been getting uppity.
I’ve also wondered how Jeffery got around the way he did but Epstein was an agent of neoliberal globalization moving within elite circles to exploit power for profit transnationally. Epstein manipulated people, policies and events in ways that would allow for the Rothschilds to profit from economic and national security decision-making. But he was also acting as the point man for the Rothschilds at a time when the world was transitioning from neoliberalism to something much worse. For the Rothschilds, Epstein was their pathway to new investment opportunities in the modern version of primitive accumulation. Epstein was, in many ways, pioneering this transition. The Shock Doctrine, written by Naomi Klein, presciently describes Epstein’s disaster capitalism.
Epstein was the key enabler of a system where rich people have to be kept rich. A tiny financial elite, epitomized by the Rothschilds, needs absolute freedom to amass more wealth and power to transition to the techno-feudalism of their dreams. The rest of us are simply an impediment to their machinations.
Update: Whitney Webb, author of One Nation Under Blackmail, says –“They don’t… need blackmail anymore… Palantir… [is] the new Jeffrey Epstein… if they want to blackmail [you]… they… access… your search history… your finances, tweets you’ve liked… you don’t really need Epstein in the Surveillance Era.”
I’m willing to bet that the ultimate owners of Palantir are the Rothschilds and that they are planning on using the dystopian surveillance tech to maintain control of their massive wealth in the face of an unruly population. And while the Epstein scandal has exposed the rot at the heart of the political, business and media establishment, it also reveals why they are so desperate to build an AI-powered surveillance and control grid.
The United States is a country defined by yawning inequality, institutional decay, and a feral elite that operates a vast criminogenic enterprise featuring corruption, rape, torture, sexual deprivation and apparently cannibalism, as evidenced by the latest Epstein drop. Indeed, the stories coming out are horrible and sickening, confirming some of the most outlandish conspiracy theories you might imagine.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the department was releasing more than 3 million pages of documents in the latest Epstein disclosure, as well as more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. The files, posted to the department’s website, include some of the several million pages of records that officials said were withheld from an initial release of documents in December.
The revelations point to elite class of monsters who have abandoned any fig leaf of morality or respectability. It is not merely cultural degeneration or a loss of values. It is something darker: an elite that operates outside any recognizable moral limits and yet continues to govern. It’s an elite composed of pedophiles, satanists, murderers and cannibals.
And, of course the list of monsters is bi-partisan, with Democrats and liberals featured just as extensively as Republicans and conservatives. There’s Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Bill Gates and Noam Chomsky, but also Musk, Dershowitz, Bannon, Trump and even the creator and past owner of 4chan, Chris Poole. Poole, known as Moot, was in contact with Epstein, and possibly opened up the board /pol/ after meeting with him.
Perhaps that’s why the Biden Administration refused to release the vast trove of incriminating documents, emails and texts. That, and for a lot of insiders on both sides there’s a reluctance to acknowledge the role of a secret network of elite wielding power, that would disprove their pretense of meritocracy.
Future historians will ponder the timeline for elite lawlessness and impunity but I’m sure that Watergate, Iran Contra and the Wall Street bailout will feature prominently. Indeed, there are some indications that Epstein’s fortune originated in the nexus of bad actors involved in 80’s scandals like BCCI and Iran Contra.
Matt Stoller has been on a tear, connecting Epstein to the larger transformation of American life. “While all the specifics of Epstein’s network are not known, and while conspiracy theorists often have crazy views, they have correctly fingered that the world of meritocracy and formalized systems is increasingly a fraud. And that the real government lies elsewhere…Epstein was an entrepreneurial broker across multiple public and private bureaucracies, helping organize ‘under-the-table’ deals among the legal, business, intelligence, and political elites to allow them to escape the rule of law and traditional conflict of interest restrictions. It’s statecraft to allow a superclass to systemically escape the formalized rules.”
It’s important to ask how did we get to such a state?
Look in the mirror.
Americans have largely acquiesced to the sadism of our oligarchical monsters. Epstein simply followed the logic and morality of neoliberalism, where government has been hallowed out so that a new order, epitomized by an apex predator like Epstein, could emerge.
Since at least Reagan, US elites have financialized the economy, blowing giant asset bubbles, crushing workers and destroying the middle class, while Americans have been distracted and diverted with identity politics. A bi-partisan elite collaborating with the wealthy, offshored and outsourced US manufacturing. This increased profits by financializing the economy: you could have the profits without the production and without dealing with unions. American elites, basically looted the productive economy, while destroying any countervailing worker power. In exchange they destroyed their empire, because the real basis of the American empire was industry and technology rather than financial flimflammery. Offshoring and outsourcing made American elites filthy rich but it set the stage for Trump and the acceleration of American fascism.
Epstein simply took full advantage of the depravity of our feral elite, but in the process he has forced us to confront the monsters who rule us.
Update: It been obvious for a while that Epstein was an Israeli agent running a Mossad honeypot operation to blackmail US politicians, economists and businessmen. In the latest FBI report documents of Epstein files, we learn that “Trump has been compromised by Israel” and “Kushner is the real brains” behind the presidency.”
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.
camelotkidd 